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62 | What is Aesthetics? Part I. Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-03 10:00:05
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2026-06
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Content

In this inaugural episode of our new series on aesthetics, we discuss Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. We begin with his assessment of the French Revolution and its perceived failure to deliver on its lofty republican ideals, focusing on his ascription of this failure to the fragmentation of the modern self and society. We then attempt to wrap our minds around Schiller’s proposed corrective: an ‘aesthetic education’ that mobilizes art and beauty toward the end of dialectically unifying sensuous life and Reason, nature and moral freedom, the ‘coarser’ class of ‘savages’ and the refined ‘barbarians’. We end, frankly, by trashing the current state of cultural production and fine art, caustically noting the contemporary shortage of Schillerian aesthetic education.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, eds. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (New York: Oxford University Press)

Jacques Rancière, "Schiller and the Aesthetic Promise," trans. Owen Glyn-Williams, in Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom, eds. María del Rosario Acosta López & Jeffrey L. Powell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018)

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

Micah Davis

I think there is a real conflict between the possibility of moral art that educates the soul and the idea of art for its own sake. I don't really think tension or ambiguity necessarily improve the moral force of a piece of argument. The ambiguity and purposelessness of art is overly exalted by the left, betraying our bourgeoise tastes. Famous, popular literature is often heavily didactic - Even very left wing art. Les Miserables is incredibly moralistic and moralizing and people adore it. Uncle Tom's Cabin famously inflamed the abolition movement and it was, to put it blandly, not subtle. If you read A Christmas Carol, Dickens takes a moment in the middle to reveal hunger and ignorance as the real villains of the story. One couldn't allege that our man, George Orwell, was focused on the art alone when he wrote Animal Farm. Are those things not art because they are have didactic natures? True, we've all read bad, boring propaganda even from our own side. But I think the moral shyness of left-leaning art is often a weakening element in its presentation. Harry Potter and The Hunger Games were both series with left-of-center politics (in fantastical garb, to be sure) and people still use them a moral lanterns into adulthood. Shouldn't we aim to have a similar effect with left wing cultural production?

Paul Bowman

In Theses on Feuerbach Marx counterposes praxis to what is translated in English as "contemplation", but in German is Anschauung - the same word Goethe, Kant, & Shiller used for "intuition" (again in translation). I think this is important when it comes to correcting the idea of art as "objects presented to us" or the idea that the "unification of being/consciousness" effected by art is primarily a reconciliation between cognition ("reason") and affect ("sensibility") _combined with_ an experience of "arrest". "Arrest" here, is the behavioural passivity of the onlooker, the spectator or contemplative subject. Obviously psychology as a discipline really emerges in the later 19th C, after Schiller, but the ABC trinity of Affect + Behaviour + Cognition is relevant here. Marx's insistence on the need to move from the contemplative (Anschauende) stance to that of praxis is key - the full unifying effect from hedonic experience (forget "art", a term with far too much elitist and market-value driven baggage) includes the behavioural engagement as well. We don't just listen to music, we dance to it. Watching a riot and actually participating in a riot are entirely different things in terms of the re-integration of the personality. Similarly making music, together with others, is much more developmental than merely paying for a ticket and going to a gig to watch others make it for you to passively contemplate. The transformative effect of hedonic praxis is its "de-arresting" potential. Production vs consumption, praxis vs anschauung. My second point is about the miserabilism of Kant's "it's not legitimate ethical behaviour unless it's accompanied by an affect of pain". Like Gil said, hilariously protestant/calvinist. But I think the battle lines between eudaimonia and hedone go back much further to the Stoics vs the Epicureans. The attitude of the Stoics that emotions, especially pleasure, were bad for you, clouded your judgement and should be repressed as much as possible, finds its reflection today in the miserabilist left, obsessed with "fighting the good fight" (masochistic self-valorisation through the misery of failing pathetically, yet again) and policing affect and behaviour in a neo-puritan fashion (H.L. Mencken's definition of "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy"). Yet, ironically, not so long ago, the left was defiantly Epicurean, dedicated to the liberation of desires, not their policing and repression. Negri signed off at the end of Empire by talking about the "irrepressible jou and lightness of being a communist". You'll search hard to find people with that vision of communism amongst today's tankie twitterati. So much for "Sous la pavée, la plage" and all that jazz. Stoicism and miserabilism seem to have lashed back in a big way.

Paul Bowman

Final point (hit return too early there), on the temporality thing. I think one of the contradictions of that 68 left, was that while campaigning for the Epicurean liberation of desires, against post-WW2 stoic repression, they also did lose the notion of focusing on "the next step" as Lukács framed it. D&G repeatedly quote George Jackson's aphorism of "Flee. But while fleeing, pick up a weapon". Which sounds radical, but leaves no clue what the next step after that should be. Rather we are left with Ranciere & co's focus on escape as the primary strategy, the ligne de fuite. The problem is if our liberatory horizon is based solely of some abstract notion of ligne de fuite, then all the state has to do is stroll along with some plumbers tape and seal up the occasional leaks. Lukács on the role of the next step: "Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality. If the proletariat fails to take this step the contradiction will remain unresolved and will be reproduced by the dialectical mechanics of history at a higher level, in an altered form and with increased intensity. It is in this that the objective necessity of history consists. The deed of the proletariat can never be more than to take the next step[60] in the process. "

Virgilio Urbina Lazardi

For a materialist account of why contemporary art and popular culture is mired in directionless, infantilizing nostalgia, see Brad Troemel’s video essays :)

Leo Nikolaidis

The feeling that we are stuck in the present with culture never changing is found in Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Even the point about music all being recycled ideas is in there. He's a more contemporary thinker that's deffo worth looking at for a series on aesthetics. Maybe his work has not crossed the pond much but it's big on the British left.

Zarahoopstra
>>106689511

I've found he's one of the few 21st century philosophers non academics on the street seem to know. I've had some great conversations about his music essays. And he's either really just tapping in to something people are independently realizing and/or being ripped off a lot by others without being cited (fairly suspect occasion on Open Source's 2/1 episode featuring Kyle Chayka)

Zarahoopstra

Top 10 episode for me so far (catching up on the catalog). Thanks for taking up this reading!