Abstract
and reasonable principle, indifferent to human passions and material needs, do violence to the very humanity they would set free. Schil ler's remedy for revolution is an aesthetic education that includes both playing with existing materials and appreciating the artworks that issue from it, because play exercises our human faculties in ways that embrace antagonism and contain it. To be moved by an aesthetically pleasing effect is to acknowledge, for a moment or for as long as the experience lasts, a success in wrestling material into new forms, repairing the damage that flesh and spirit do to one another. At precarious peace in the world, an artist or an admirer?both count as active citizens for Schiller, though real fans play at being artists?achieves freedom and invites others to share and to cultivate the experience. And, since wrestling with matter and circumstance takes discipline and training, Schiller offers his series of letters as encouragement and advice to develop the Spieltrieb.
Highlights
The connection between the eroded room for political debate and a play starved00education is worth worrying about again,0if0worry leads to ways beyond the crisis
I confess to a preference for risk and invite 0you to consider joining Schiller and company as advocates for an aesthetic education that promotes making art, appreciating it, by developing an innate drive to play, the Spieltrieb that Schiller identified and named as man’s faculty for turning conflict into beautiful works of art
Play is the instinct for freedom and for art, the drive that can harmonize man’s two other mutually murderous instincts, transforming the conflict between 0Passion and 0Reason into aesthetic pleasure
Summary
Even before Schiller recoiled at the relentless Formtrieb that drove the French Revolution to barbaric excess, Kant had worried about the arrogance of pure reason, “the officious pretensions of understanding.” 12 In response, he demonstrated that understanding is restrained by ideas that have no a priori grounding in nature, and that, in order to complete its own task of cognition, understanding needs to exercise judgment,[13] a faculty that depends on free and disinterested contemplation.
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