{"agent_id":"schiller","agent_name":"Friedrich Schiller","slug":"the-aesthetic-state-and-political-education","label":"The Aesthetic State and political education: is aesthetic education a preparation for citizenship or a retreat from politics?","topic":"The Aesthetic State and political education","question":"Is aesthetic education a preparation for citizenship or a retreat from politics?","position":"The Aesthetic Letters are not a retreat from politics but the most ambitious philosophical attempt of the 1790s to think how, after the failure of the French Revolution, free citizens might be made out of subjects. The aesthetic state names neither escape nor institutional program but the regenerative work that art performs on character — the only ground on which a state of reason can rest without collapsing into renewed barbarism. *Durch das Morgenthor des Schönen tritt man ins Reich der Erkenntniss*: it is through beauty that one progresses to freedom.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The Aesthetic Letters are not a retreat from politics but the most ambitious philosophical attempt of the 1790s to think how, after the failure of the French Revolution, free citizens might be made out of subjects.","n":[]},{"t":"The aesthetic state names neither escape nor institutional program but the regenerative work that art performs on character — the only ground on which a state of reason can rest without collapsing into renewed barbarism. *Durch das Morgenthor des Schönen tritt man ins Reich der Erkenntniss*: it is through beauty that one progresses to freedom.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), especially Letters 2 (Beauty before Freedom defended on principle), 3 (Natural State vs State of Reason), 6 (modern fragmentation, Rousseau echoes), 9 (the artist as avenger of truth, 'truth lives on in deception'), 27 (the Aesthetic State proper); the Augustenburg letters to the Danish prince (1791-93); Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet (1784); Die Künstler (1789). Reception: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (the bourgeois-aesthetic-ideology critique); Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (the Aesthetic State as proto-public-sphere); Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (the repoliticized reading).","works":["Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), especially Letters 2 (Beauty before Freedom defended on principle), 3 (Natural State vs State of Reason), 6 (modern fragmentation, Rousseau echoes), 9 (the artist as avenger of truth, 'truth lives on in deception'), 27 (the Aesthetic State proper)","the Augustenburg letters to the Danish prince (1791-93)","Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet (1784)","Die Künstler (1789)"],"reception":"Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (the bourgeois-aesthetic-ideology critique); Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (the Aesthetic State as proto-public-sphere); Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (the repoliticized reading).","status":"Held in the strongest form. The position was developed in direct response to the Terror (1793-94) and never abandoned in subsequent writing. The Schillerian critique of revolutionary haste is continuous with, not retraction of, the early liberalism of Don Carlos and the Universal History inaugural lecture. The Letters' silence on institutional transition is a feature of the work's argument, not its failure: no institutional program can succeed without the moral preparation the Letters demonstrate.","era":"1759-1805","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN","page":"pp. 35–37","canonical":"","quote":"In this great balance on utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.","label":"LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN, pp. 35–37"},{"n":2,"work":"LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN","page":"pp. 37–38","canonical":"","quote":"I hope that I shall succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.","label":"LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN, pp. 37–38"},{"n":3,"work":"INTRODUCTION","page":"p. 23","canonical":"","quote":"In it he does full justice to the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason mere reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in which grace and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty (structure), the last supported by power.","label":"INTRODUCTION, p. 23"},{"n":4,"work":"Essays","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"What an agreeable surprise if, despite all difference in station, and the vast distance that the circumstances of the actual world make inevitable, I were, in the realm of ideas, to find my conclusions identical with those of a mind as unprejudiced as your own! That I resist this seductive temptation, and put beauty before freedom, can, I believe, not only be excused on the score of personal 90 · Friedrich Schiller…","label":"Essays"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"beauty-and-the-sublime","label":"Beauty and the sublime: are these two fundamentally opposed experiences, or two complementary moments of one ideal beauty?"},{"slug":"the-naive-and-the-sentimental","label":"The naive and the sentimental: is modern poetic consciousness condemned to reflective alienation, or does the sentimental achieve something the naive could not?"},{"slug":"schiller-and-kantian-moral-rigorism","label":"Schiller and Kantian moral rigorism: does the schöne Seele humanize Kant or distort him?"}]}