Introduction In Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller responds to his patron the Duke of Augustenburg, in his

second letter Schiller defends the case for the primacy of aesthetics in light of recent political events. Schiller is writing these letter in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, his solution to the political problem is through freedom, but for man to be free he must experience the harmonizing effect of the aesthetic experience. Schiller asserts that when we behold objects of beauty we are not necessary concerned with understanding them i.e. we do not experience the sublime through contemplation of the characteristics of an object. The contemplation of aesthetics is governed by what Schiller refers to as the instinct of play. The play instinct synthesizes our sensuous nature with our rationality and by doing so we eliminate the separation between our desires and our duties. Thus for Schiller the good is the beautiful, and through the aesthetic experience it is possible through rationality to educate our sensuous nature. This belief in the redemptive power of aesthetic autonomy finds its utmost expression in the Romantic movement that Schiller helped usher in. Schillers insistence on turning from reality and to re create the world anew lies at the heart of Romanticism. (Romantic 417) Historian Isaiah Berlin maintains that in the history of Western political thought Romanticism has been responsible for the greatest turning point in societys conceptual framework, ...romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth. A cultural movement based in the aesthetic process has fundamentally changed our society and the way we think of ourselves. The evidence for the power of art to influence individuals and societies is well founded, not as compelling is the correlation between the aesthetic experience and moral autonomy. The Birth of the Aesthetic and Emergence of Romanticism Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power. Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it, it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world. (Letters 20) Now from this source issue for man two opposite exigencies, the two fundamental laws of sensuous-rational nature. The first has for its object absolute reality; it must make a world of what is only form, manifest all that in it is only a force. The second law has for its object absolute formality; it must destroy in him

all that is only world, and carry out harmony in all changes. In other terms, he must manifest all that is internal, and give form to all that is external. (Letters 20) The sensuous instinct wishes to be determined, it wishes to receive an object; the formal instinct wishes to determine itself, it wishes to produce an object. Therefore the instinct of play will endeavor to receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce as it aspires to receive. (Letters 25) But this very technical shape which renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art (Aes 2) That which I before said of moral experience can be applied with greater truth to the manifestation of "the beautiful." (Aes 2) Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and promulgating it; it is for the energy of the will and the ardour of feeling to carry it out. To issue victoriously from her contest with force, truth herself must first become a force, and turn one of the instincts of man into her champion in the empire of phaenomena. For instincts are the only motive forces in the material world. (Aes 15) the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight, and issue triumphant from the abyss. (Aes 32) Could not truth and duty, one or the other, in themselves and by themselves, find access to the sensuous man? To this I reply: Not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary (Aes 43) he opens a way for himself from vulgar reality to aesthetic reality, and from the ordinary feelings of life to the perception of the beautiful. (Aes 51) The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua (for Keats and his readers, the world's greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn.

John Keats, the embodies this popular notion of romanticism. He was lonely, passionate

Thesis: Beauty is Truth, The lasts line to Ode to A Grecian Urn the aesthetic experience as Schiller envision it, that the

Schiller believes in the power of art to transform peoples lives. Through art we are capable of harmonizing our reason with our feelings. When our reason informs our passions and are not in conflict we behave morally because of duties become our desires. The purpose of art is not only to give us an experience of the aesthetic for its own sake we behave morally because we are not conflicted about our passions and our duties. feeling By doing our desires The harmonizing maThe purpose of art is to harmonize our desires with out duties. By making our synthesize our desire with our duty, so that we are in harmony with ourselves and the world around us. -The purpose of art is to put man in an aesthetic state, that freedom can only be achieved through the harmony that art produces ; WIKI Consequently education will always appear deficient when the moral feeling can only be maintained with the sacrifice of what is natural; and a political administration will always be very imperfect when it is only able to bring about unity by suppressing variety. The state ought not only to respect the objective and generic but also the subjective and specific in individuals; and while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate the kingdom of appearance, the external world of matter. (Aes 6)

between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state. (Aes 32 Letter 18) matter and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is eternal and cannot be mediated in any way. How can we remove this contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The former is immediately certain through experience, the other through the reason. (Aes 33) But because both conditions remain eternally opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one, and no trace of separation remains in the whole.

For Schiller it is important that reason informs feeling. He juxtaposes thinking with feeling. Thinking is autonmomous in the sense that one is in control of ones reason, feeling has a negative power. Beauty provides the transition as it stimulates thinking to follow rational laws independent of sensibility. According to letter XIX the will mediates between sense and reason. It is the will that balances both drives so one does not become predominant over the other. The unity of opposites. In letter XXII Schiller considers the effect of art and its ability to produce the aesthetic condition The first fear to rob beauty of its freedom by a too strict dissection, the others fear to destroy the distinctness of the conception by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect that the freedom in which they very properly place the essence of beauty is not lawlessness, but harmony of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal necessity. (Aes 33) Does such a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? It must be in every finely harmonised soul; but as a fact, only in select circles, like the pure ideal of the church and state - in circles where manners are not formed by the empty imitations of the foreign, but by the very beauty of nature; where man passes through all sorts of complications in all simplicity and innocence, neither forced to trench on another's freedom to preserve his own, nor to show grace at the cost of dignity. (Aes 59) Our sensuous nature must be modified

liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon which I build will be furnished by your own sentiments; your own unfettered thought will dictate the laws according to which we have to proceed. (letter 1 page 1) Prerequiste of personal autonomy, from Kant Schiller believes in the transformative power of art. As the artist plays he synthesizes the medium with the idea, because of the necessity of a medium, the idea. ( ) This ability to take a step back, to be an iconoclast, to embark in his play with a tone of levity to it, it is not so bound or enframed, or at least the enframing is based more in the poetic than its utility. According to Schiller not only will this process have a beneficial effect on the artist as a way of realigning his pathological behaviour, but that the process of play will make society (better) or more moral. Schiller as an ushering in of the romantic period, with the romantic genius alone with his muse, his canvas, pounding his piano, tearing his hair out, drowning himself, usually because in the end they didnt get the girl. Anais Nin critiques this view of the romantic saying that it was a mission, that it

was practically fated to fall in to despair. And yet Schiller still believes in the power of the rational, and yet he sees the connection with the material. The therapeutic effect of art. those rockers with their skinny arms, and glum looks and their faces. (Pavement) the spectator experiences the free play of the aesthetic in front of the free appearance enjoys an autonomy of a very special kind The epigraph to the series of letters is from Jean-Jacques Rousseaus novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hlose (1761), which says: 'If it is reason which makes man, it is feeling which guides him.' Feeling may guide him

Schillers conception of the transformative power of art Human nature consists of two realms. That which persists and that which changes (sounds a bit like Aristotle trying to reconcile Platonism with the changing world around him). The human personality persists. The conditions or circumstances of the personality change. The intelligence of the self is eternal, the conditions of a personality are determined by time. By the succession of a persons perception he may lead to an awareness of his eternal self. The self and its condition are distinct in finite being but are unified in absolute being. The unchanging self is not determined by time, but time is determined by the unchanging self. The human condition is unified by absolute being Absolute Being physical coexists with moral necessity. (Aesthetics 5) Humanity has two tasks: trying to bring the necessity within themselves to reality, the second is to subject the reality outside themselves to the law of necessity. These are determined by two opposing forces, the sensual drive, and the rational drive. The sensual drive is toward physical reality, while the rational drive is toward formal reality. There is a reciprosity between the personality and the condition ie. the more autonomy transferred to the personality, the less that the personality is subject to changing forces in the world. The more that the personality is subject to changing forces in the world, the less autonomous the personality. Aesthetic activity is derived from a unity of personality and condition (reference), in that there must be a reality belonging to the personality if he or she has self-determining activity,

and there must also be a reality belonging to the world if the personality must be situated in a condition. The aesthetic education can produce an increased level of awareness and receptivity to the world. The aesthetic education also increases (the determining activity of the intellect) reference. The autonomy of the rational (is this what it means) The aesthetic impulse, or "play drive," combines passive and active forces, which can produce a unity of feeling and reason. The aesthetic condition is the balance between the rational and the sensuous drives. The goal is to synthesize these two desires, so what man truly comes to desire is morality and freedom derived from morality. While the sensual drive exerts a physical constraint, the rational drive exerts a moral constraint (does he use these words moral constraint). While the exclusion of freedom from the function of the sensual drive implies physical necessity, the exclusion of passivity from the function of the rational drive implies moral necessity.2 The goal of the sensual (or material) drive is physical reality, while the goal of the rational (or moral) drive is formal reality. The aesthetic ideal of beauty is thus defined by a unity of physical and formal reality. Beauty is an aesthetic unity of thought and feeling, of form and matter. The attainment of this unity enables humanity to realize his true nature (reference) human nature to be realized and fulfilled . Beauty (aesthetic unity) may lead to truth (or logical unity). When beauty is perceived, thought is unified with feeling. Freedom is attained when the sensual drive and rational drive are fully integrated, and when the individual can allow both drives to be fully expressed, without being constrained by them. Aesthetic freedom is achieved by a process of mediation between a passive state of feeling (or sensing) and an active state of thinking (or willing), by the "play drive" (Spieltrieb) which mediates between the "material drive" ( Stofftrieb) and the "formal drive" (Formtrieb), allowing both sides of human nature to be fully developed and unified. The "play drive" is an aesthetic impulse which allows the individual to transcend inner and outer constraint, and which enables the individual to experience physical and spiritual freedom.

Part 2: The Romantic: The Sublime Life of Aesthetics As an dramatist Schiller had the romantic notion that art should portray the inner depths and working s of the heart (245) Romanticism begins in Germany with Schiller and Goethe. helped usher in Romanticism, a reaction to the rationality of the enlightenment. Mans passions were seen as a hindrance, leading him into fear and superstition and astray from his moral obligations. "In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Keats will say exactly the same thing, more elegantly but more cryptically also: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--surely the most famous equation in English literature and precisely correct in suggesting the Newtonian origin of the unstated "proof." Many readers of Annals of the Fine Arts would probably have recognized the source of Keats's equation in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds because of their familiarity with Reynolds and because the whole technique of allusion (or even short quotation) was fundamental to the neoclassicism in which both Reynolds and his readers had been educated. "'Beauty is truth; truth, beauty'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Encapsulates Schillers conception of the aesthetic experience, not does it produce feelings of sublimity, but truth. Beauty does only produce feelings of the sublime

Isaiah Berlin: The Sense of Reality For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: "The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men's outlook in modern times." First, de Man seeks to deconstruct the privileged claims in Romanticism of symbol over allegory, and metaphor over metonymy. In his reading, because of the implication of self-identity and wholeness which is inherent in the Romantics' conception of metaphor, when this self-identity decomposes, so also does the means of overcoming the dualism between subject and object, which Romantic metaphor sought to transcend. In de Man's reading, to compensate for this inability, Romanticism constantly relies on allegory to attain the wholeness established by the totality of the symbol.

de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). The transformation of the self through the poetic Part 3: The Critique of the Romantic Makes you invent an illusion, to expect or demand something that is impossible, the way romantics did of life, and of relationships, and love . If youve read all the romantic poets at once, you remember they almost all wanted to die when they couldnt obtain their wish. This is the destructive aspect of romanticism. But there is a modern romanticism that is very sturdy. Very much based on what is possible, the belief that we can fulfill our dreams and fantasies. Nin gives the example of a house boat that she lived in and ended up writing her most important work. Nin sees a house boat in Brittany that had been dumped by a storm, her first thought or feeling is that she would like to live there, then she had a dream of living in a house boat. When she returns to Paris years later she sees a house boat for rent. Nin maintains that if she had not seen the house boat she might not have dreamt about it and would have not seen the advertisement or understood it. Nin rents the house boat and ends up doing a great deal of her work. This is the romanticism that Nin finds In addition, in his essay "The Resistance to Theory", which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, de Man uses the example of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic to argue that the use of linguistic sciences in literary theory and criticism (i.e. a structuralist approach) was able to harmonize the logical and grammatical dimension of literature, but only at the expense of effacing the rhetorical elements of texts which presented the greatest interpretive demands. He posits that the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading, thus the resistance to theory is theory itself. Or the resistance to theory is what constitutes the possibility and existence of theory. Taking up the example of the title of Keats' poem The Fall of Hyperion, de Man draws out an irreducible interpretive undecidability which bears strong affinities to the same term in Derrida's work and some similarity to the notion of incommensurability as developed by Jean-Franois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. De Man argues forcefully that the recurring motive of theoretical readings is to subsume these decisions under theoretical, futile generalizations, which are displaced in turn into harsh polemics about theory. Part 4: Alternatives to the Romantic

2002 Alex Scott (Wikipedia) BIBLIOGRAPHY Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters . Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.