Property and Politics in Schiller's Theory of Aesthetic Education

Abstract

IN Letter XXVI of his treatise Ueber die iisthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Brie/en Schiller refers to man's 'absolutes Eigenthumsrecht' in regard to aesthetic semblance, by which he means that art is independent of the claims and limitations of nature, that once semblance is loosed from substance man may dispose of it as he sees fit. Schiller wants to indicate that in aesthetic experience man prepares for his own moral freedom from the constraints of nature. The metaphor of ownership also suggests that aesthetic experience is no rarefied, other-worldly inspiration but rather something that arise~, like material property, in the course of man's interaction with nature. Hence this figurative right is not simply postulated; Schiller conceives a vindication of it which recalls the kind of explanation of actual property given, for example, in John Locke's Second Treatise. According to Locke, whatsoever a man 'removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property'.2 Analogously, aesthetic semblance may be said to 'belong' to man because it is man who distinguishes 'den Schein von der Wirklichkeit, die Form von dem Karper' (400). Semblance is something which has been removed from nature by the mental labour of man: 'Der Schein der Dinge ist des Menschen Werk' (399). Therefore it is, in a manner of speaking, his undisputed property. In the Asthetische Briefe considered as a whole there exists between the 'o\vnership' of aesthetic semblance and the ownership of tangible goods a closer relation than the metaphorical transference th3;t operates here. I want to investigate the connection that is implied between these modes of property, and in doing so question the view that the education Schiller envisaged ..'was designed to make men all men willing and active participants in the political community, but without forfeiting their inalienable right to the full development of their unique and unrepeatable individuality'. 3 Schiller is undoubtedly concerned in this treatise with the education of citizens with a view to securing a just political order not in spite of, but precisely by means