“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” by Friedrich Schiller (translated by Keith Tribe)

Schiller felt that aesthetic appreciation led to an increase in moral behavior. In his view, living during the time of the French Revolution, he existed in a degenerate age. “Culture of the capacity for feeling is the more urgent need at this time, not merely because it will enable better insight into life, but because it prompts the improvement of such insight itself.” The artist had certain responsibilities. “Live with your century, but do not be its creature; serve your contemporaries, but give them what they need, not what they praise…. Chase from their pleasures all caprice, frivolity, and coarseness; so will you imperceptibly banish them from their actions, and finally from their convictions. Wherever you find them, surround them with refined, great, inspirational forms, encircle them with symbols of excellence, until appearance conquers reality, and art nature.”

Idealism, as philosophized by Kant, was the spirit of the day. Schiller combined these views with a practicality of living within the objective world. “Beauty conceived in reality in no way belies the concept we have already formed of it in speculation; only that, here in reality, it has much less freedom…. The man presented to beauty by experience is material already spoiled and recalcitrant, who robs it of so much of its ideal perfection when mixing it with his individual character…. It is man who transfers to beauty the imperfection of his individuality.” He next defines the aesthetic. “The soul thus moves from sensation to thought through an intermediate disposition in which sense and reason are both active…. If the condition of sensuous determination is called the physical, while the condition of rational determination is called the logical and moral, then this condition of real and active determinability has to be called the aesthetic.” However, aesthetics has its limits, “Beauty provides no single result for either intellect or will; it follows neither one single intellectual aim, nor any one moral purpose; it discovers not one truth, does not help us fulfill any special duty.”

Form, not the subject matter, is the purpose of true art. “The sublimity of a work of art can only consist in its close approximation to that ideal of aesthetic purity…. The work of the artist must overcome not only the limitations that the specific character of his art involves, but also those presented by the particular material with which he works. In a genuinely fine work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything; for it is form alone that has an impact on the whole man, while content affects only his individual powers. However exalted and comprehensive the content may be, it always has a limiting effect on the mind, and true aesthetic freedom is to be expected only from the form. This is the real artistic secret of the master, that he erases material with form.” In the end, it is the view of the subjective individual and not the object in actuality that can inform art “Only insofar as appearance is sincere (expressly abjuring all claim to reality), and only insofar as it is autonomous (renouncing all support from reality), is appearance aesthetic…. It is incidentally not at all necessary that the thing in which we discover beautiful appearance is without reality, if only our judgment of this thing takes no account of this reality.”