Friedrich Schiller, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
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.123
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.Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays
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.Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays
The third Introduction • · xi condition, on the other hand, unites in a "beautiful" bond grace and dignity, predilection and obligation, and-ideally-law and freedom. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man this third condition is characterized as an "aesthetic condition" on an individual level and as an "aesthetic state" on a political level.Essays
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.