Schillers Idea of Aesthetic State
Subramaniam Chandran
Vinayaka Missions University, Salem
s.chandran@rediffmail.com
Abstract: Man must pass through the aesthetic condition
from the merely physical in order to reach the rational or
moral, Schiller says. Schiller developed aesthetics to
perfect all the works of arts of man and for the
construction of true political freedom. He expanded
aesthetics into a comprehensive system of diverse
intellectual faculties, incorporating Kants notion of
judgment together with the elements derived from
Rousseau. Schillers deepest concern is not with law or
reason or morality in themselves, but with human
freedom through an aesthetic approach.
Keywords: aesthetics, freedom, rationality, state of nature
I. INTRODUCTION
Man must pass through the aesthetic condition from the
merely physical in order to reach the rational or moral,
Schiller says. Schiller developed aesthetics to perfect all
the works of arts of man and for the construction of true
political freedom. He expanded aesthetics into a
comprehensive system of diverse intellectual faculties,
incorporating Kants notion of judgment together with the
elements derived from Rousseau.[1] Schillers deepest
concern is not with law or reason or morality in
themselves, but with human freedom through an aesthetic
approach.[2]
II. CONCEPT OF AESTHETICS
Aesthetics concerns with the creation and appreciation
of beauty embedded in art. Most of the philosophers
treated aesthetics to qualify the art. But very few realized
the significance of aesthetics to harmonize the human
nature and to put the society in right order. Numerous
interpretations exist to highlight the concept of aesthetics.
The very problem of the definition of aesthetics is to feel
the essence and not to be conceived. Definition derived
the sources both from the quality of subject and the
appearance of object. The very meaning of aesthetics tries
to bridge the dualism of subject and object. The means to
negate the dualism is beauty. In Platos Phaedrus and
Symposium, and beautiful thing suggests the realm of
eternal values. However Plato condemned art because of
its appeal to the sense and the imitation of what is
unworthy.[3]
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Kant held that the artistic beauty is not beautiful thing,
but the beautiful representation of a thing and a
combination of intelligence and imagination. Kants
suggestion was that beautiful form has the appeal it does
have as the occasion for the harmonious play of mans
imaginative capacities apart from desire; that is, free of
any practical, biological or personal interest.[4] For Hegel,
beauty is the presentation of reality in sensuous form.
Reality as the concrete idea, has three stages, namely, art,
religion and philosophy and is grasped only by reason.[5]
Alexander Baumgarten established the term in its modern
usage; the change in meaning from pertaining to the
senses to pertaining to beauty and art is of far deeper
significance. Darwin put forth the materialistic
interpretation that physical beauty is a factor that helps in
sexual selection and, thereby, in the propagation of the
species and thus beauty has a definite biological
purpose.[6] Freud considered art as the fulfillment of the
repressed sexual desire, and the artist is between the
dreamer and the neurotic.
In terms of Indian tradition, especially the Advaita, the
aesthetic experience has a spiritual significance. Speaking
with the language of aesthetics, the content of this
experience, namely Brahman is the real beauty and the
realization of Brahman alone ensures perfect and lasting
beatitude. The Jivanmukta experiences the unity of nature,
which is beauty not as an object apart from himself, but as
from his own self.[7] It embraces sublimity, grace,
harmony, melody, proportion, order, fitness and unity.
Schiller extended the realm of significance of aesthetics
and applied to society. He strongly believed that the
political problem can be solved only through the aesthetic
approach, for that, the aesthetic education is the means.
III. FREDERICH SCHILLER
Frederich Schiller (1759-1805) was a German poet,
playwright, physician and aesthetic philosopher. After the
basic education in Wurttemberg, he took up the study of
law, though he has desired to prepare for the church, but
later changed to medicine. In 1780, he was stationed in
Stuttgart as a regimental surgeon. In the Duchy of
Wurttemberg, he observed the tyranny and extravagance
of contemporary princes. His early writings derived
inspiration from his own personal contact with the
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despotic monarch, the influence of the new revolutionary
literary movement of Sturn and Drang which attacked the
rigid restraints of classic formalism.[8]
While still a student, he turned from the religious and
sentimental effusions of his early youth and began to
write plays, one of which Die Rauber was published in
1781. The performance of the play without the permission
of the Duke resulted military arresting of Schiller. In 1782,
Schiller fled from his native and Dalberg, the manager of
the Mannheim theatre appointed him as a theatre poet
putting him under a contract. Dalberg did not renew the
contract and Schiller distressed by financial need and by
unhappy love-affair. Later Schiller was associated with
Gottbried Korner for more than two years in Leipzig and
Dresden.
Die Rauber which defended the inalienable rights of man
prompted the French in 1792 to make him an honorary
citizen of the New French Republic. In Don Carlos (1787)
Schiller elucidated the two concepts of personal freedom
and political freedom. He left Dresden and resided in
Weimer until 1789 where he met Wieland and Herder.[9]
In the same year Schiller was appointed professor of
history at the University of Jena and next year he was
married to Charlotte Von Lengefeld. In 1796 he started a
periodical, Musenalmanach an annual in which many of his
shorter works were published. He also edited Die Horen,
a monthly magazine. The friendship of Korner had
stimulated in Schiller an interest in philosophy,
particularly in aesthetics. His idea of aesthetics was
expounded in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, a series of
letters written between 1793 and 1795 to the Danish Prince
Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and
Augustenburb. His later work On Nave and Sentimental
Poetry represented his most fully developed view of
aesthetics. In addition to his own plays he prepared stage
version of Shakespeares Macbeth and of Carlo Gozzis
Turandot and translated Racines Phedre. In all his writings,
the main theme is devotion to high ideals and moral and
spiritual freedom.
IV. SENSUOUSNESS AND REASON
Schiller begins with a proposition that man is a creature of
two worlds, urged in two opposite directions at once.. On
the one hand it is empirical, contingent and subjective and
on the other, free, necessary and objective.[10] The first
category will be determined by the sensuousness and the
reason determines the second. Man has to satisfy the
demands of both and somehow bring them into harmony
with one another. This harmony, Schiller believes, would
bring freedom. He argues that freedom itself is an
operation of Nature and not a work of man and can
therefore be promoted and hampered by natural means.
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The natural means is nothing but the emergence of the
aesthetic condition. In the ordinary consciousness, there is
always one-sided determination, that is, the sensuousness
reduces the reason and vice versa. But there should be a
middle disposition to overcome the one-sided
determination.
The aesthetic condition, Schiller feels, emerges when the
mind passes from sensation to thought through a middle
disposition in which both the sensuousness and the
reason are active.[11] At the same time they are mutually
destroying their determining power and through their
opposition producing negation. In this middle disposition
mans nature is considered neither physically nor morally
and yet is active in both ways. He warns that the
intellectual powers create abstract concepts, strengthen
the mind for every kind of resistance, harden it
proportionately and deprive the sensibility rather help
towards a greater spontaneity. For that very reason, the
one-sided determination finally leads inevitably to
exhaustion, since the material force cannot go without the
formative force, and the formative force cannot dispense
without the material force. When the sensuous
determination of the physical and the rational
determination of the logical and moral become
simultaneous, then man is a cipher in the absence of any
particular determination inside him.[12]
V. SENSE IMPULSE AND FORM IMPULSE
Schiller identifies two kinds of impulses, that is, sense
impulse and form impulse which force man to realize the
goal.[13] These impulses impose two contrary demands
upon mans sensuous-rational nature. The sense impulse
insists upon absolute reality by which turning everything
mere form into abstract and realize all his potentialities.
The form impulse insists upon absolute formality and
proceeds from the physical existence of man and is
concerned with setting him within the bounds of time and
turning him into matter. It is passive and receptive in
nature. Man in this condition is nothing but a unit of
magnitude and an occupied moment of time.
Consequently mans personality is extinguished so long as
sense perception governs him and time whirls him along
with itself.
The form impulse proceeded from mans absolute
existence and from his rational nature strived to set him at
liberty, to bring harmony into the diversity of his
manifestation and to maintain certainty in every change of
circumstances,. It embraces the whole time series, and
annuls time and change. The tendencies of these two
impulses appear more contradictory one aiming at
mutation and the other at immutability. The sense
impulse indeed demands alteration, but not any change of
person and of principles. It shows the unchanging element
of sensation and feeling. The form impulse aims at unity
and persistence, but it does not require the condition to be
stabilized in sensation.
Here, Schiller brings the task of the culture. Culture
should secure the sense faculty against the encroachments
of freedom, and to secure the personality against the
power of sensation.[14] The former, it achieves by the
cultivation of the capacity for feeling; the latter by the
cultivation of the capacity for reason. Thus, the culture
consists of two things - first, providing the receptive
faculty with the most multifarious contacts with the
world, and as regards feeling, pushing passivity to the
fullest extent. Secondly, securing for the determining
faculty the fullest independence from the receptive, and as
regards reason, pushing active to its fullest extent. But he
anticipates the imbalance of culture and the inherent
maladjustment in human nature. Hence man can invert
this situation by laying upon the passive power forestalls
the form impulse by means of the material and turn the
receptive faculty into a determining one. Or he can assign
to the active power forestall the sense impulse by means
of the formal, and substitute the determining for the
receptive faculty. In the first case, man never becomes
himself, in the second he will never be other than himself.
Consequently, in both cases he is neither one nor the
other, and is therefore a non-entity. Both impulses
therefore require restriction. The sense impulse must be
kept by the personality and the form impulse by the
sensibility.
VI. PLAY IMPULSE
Schiller attempted to synthesize the two impulses by the
idea of play impulse.[15] It is the play of life itself, beyond
want and external compulsion, the manifestation of an
existence without fear and anxiety, and thus the
manifestation of freedom itself. He considered that the
essence of man is his refusal to accept his relation to the
world the schism between subject and object, man and
nature as permanent. And man tries to overcome this
dichotomy.[16] He combines these two impulses to
overcome the schism. The sense impulse requires
variation and time; but the form impulse requires the
extinction of time and no variation. When both the
impulses are combined, the play impulse would aim at
the extinction of time in time and the reconciliation of
becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity.
Both impulses compel the mind, the former through the
law of nature, the latter through the laws of reason.
He argues, The object of the sense impulse may be called
life, a concept which expresses all material being and all
that is immediately present in the senses. The form
impulse is called shape, a concept which includes all
formal qualities of thing and all their relations to the
intellectual faculties. Combining these two, the play
impulse can be called living shape, a concept which serves
to denote all aesthetic qualities of phenomena, perhaps
beauty, in the widest sense of the term.[17] Combining
the two, the aesthetic condition relates to the totality of
mans various powers, without being a specific object for
any single one of them. Through play time is itself tamed
and mastered, which allows man to achieve a sense of
totality.[18] This sense of totality is the negation of the line
between subject and object. All the other forms of
perception divide man, because they are exclusively based
either on the sensuous or on the intellectual part of his
being. Beauty, the sense of totality, for Schiller, is a
socially constructive principle. He adds, though need may
drive man into the society, and reason implant social
principles, beauty alone can confer a social character.[19]
VII. THE NATURAL STATE
Schiller viewed that the Enlightenment is progressive but
the development of civilization is regressive involving
continual loss of primeval and natural freedom. The
historical process is necessary and beneficial for humanity
but entailing alienation for the individual and culture
flourished with the decline of individual political
freedom.[20] The natural state, Schiller conceives, is an
outcome of need based on force and not on laws. In the
natural state, man artificially retraces his maturity, forms
for himself a state of nature, in idea which is not indeed
given him by experience. But it is the necessary result of
his rationality. This natural state is indeed opposed to the
moral man for whom mere conformity to law is new to
serve as law; but it is still quite inadequate for the physical
man, who gives himself laws early in order to come to
terms with force. But the physical man is actual, and the
moral man only problematical. When reason abolished the
natural state, it weighs the physical and actual man
against the problematical moral man. It ventures the very
existence of society for a merely possible ideal of society.
In the transition period, Schiller holds, the state must be
repaired while it is in motion and it needs some support
for the continuation of society. This support seeks to
dissociate caprice from the physical man and freedom
from the moral man. It has to make the former
conformable with law, the latter dependent on
impressions; and to remove the former somewhat create a
third character which might pave the way for a transition
from the realm of mere force to the rule of law.
VIII. THE MORAL STATE
In the establishment of moral state, Schiller adds, the
ethical law is valued upon as an active power, and
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freewill is drawn into the realm of causes where
everything coheres with strict necessity and stability.[21]
Thus he considered that mans earliest history was a
period of dependence, a mere product of nature; now in
the age of reason man has awakened out of his sensuous
slumber, only to find himself in the state. He holds that
the state should respect not merely the objective and
generic but also the subjective and specific character of its
individuals. The statesman-artist, Schiller wishes to call,
must approach his subjects with a quite different respect
which comprises both sensuousness and reason. When
reason introduces moral unity into physical society, it
must not injure the multiplicity in the moral structure of
society, there must be no rupture in its moral unity.
Totality of character must therefore be bound in a people,
that is, capable and worthy of exchanging the state of
need for the state of freedom. It is an imperfect state,
Schiller condemns, which achieves unity only by
destroying the multifarious character of nature; and it is a
sign of defective culture when man has to sacrifice his
natural to him moral character. The mechanical artist who
moulds a shapeless mass to suit his purpose, the
pedagogic and political artist treats man as an end in
himself; it is only because the whole serves the parts that
the part may defer to the whole.[22]
IX. THE AESTHETIC STATE
Schiller has sought a solution to two overlapping
problems: how to recapture the classical capacity for civic
virtue under condition of commercial civilization a
question suggested to him by his study of Rousseaus
Discourses and Adam Fergusons Essay on the History of
Civil Society and, how to bridge the gap between the
requirements of morality laid down by Kant, Hume and
Helvetives.[23]. Schiller identified the human existence
into three spheres, viz, the dynamic state, the ethical state
and the aesthetic state.[24] The quest here is for the
solution of a political problem the liberation of man
from inhuman existence. In the dynamic state of rights,
man encounters man as force and restricts his activity and
makes the society by curbing nature through nature. In
other words, man is near to Hobbesian state of nature. The
unlimited natural rights themselves create antagonism
and force.
In the ethical state of duties, man opposes man with the
majesty of law and fetters his will by subjecting the
individual to the general will. Man necessarily pledges his
individuality in the name of common interest. The duties
created by the ethical state are in no way embracing the
intention of man. Perhaps the general will is created by
the common consent, it need not satisfy the individual
will in the name of common good. The solution is to
transcend the situation and enter into the aesthetic state.
When Schiller speaks of an aesthetic state, it should be
noted, it is as a dimension of existence intermediate
between the dynamic state of powers in motion and the
ethical state of unconditional duties. The playful
involvement with beauty which constitutes this state
affects the life of the whole community.[25]
The aesthetic state, Schiller maintains, carries out the will
of the whole through the nature of the individual.
Everything in the aesthetic state, even the subservient
tool, is a free citizen having equal rights with the noblest
and the intellect, which forcibly moulds the passive
multitude to its design, must ask for its assent. He cites
the ancient Greeks as a people in whom nature and reason
were not divorced from each other; but even the Greeks
declined from their ideal of harmony, so that their
faculties no longer functioned as a while and on the
political plane as an artificial structure made up of lifeless
mechanical parts replaced what had hitherto existed as an
organic whole.[26] For Schiller, the ideal reconciliation
could not be achieved by a simple return to the Greeks.
He holds the idealization of the Greeks as
anachronistic.[27] The creation of aesthetic state can be
achieved only through aesthetic education and not by any
authority or the external forces, Schiller optimistically
anticipates.
The idealistic and aesthetic sublimations which prevail in
Schillers work do not vitiate its radical implications. Jung
warns that the rule of play impulse would bring about a
release of repression which would entail a depreciation of
the hitherto highest values a catastrophe of culture-
barbarism.[28] Marcuse draws the following implications
in the aesthetic dimension of Schiller: a) the
transformation of toil into play, and of repressive
productivity into display a transformation that must be
preceded by the conquest of want as the determining
factor of civilization; b) the self-sublimation of
sensuousness and the de-sublimation of reason in order to
reconcile the two basic antagonistic impulses; and c) the
conquest of time in so far as time is destructive of lasting
gratification. These elements are practically identical with
those of a reconciliation between pleasure principle and
reality principle.[29] But does a state of beauty in
appearance really exist, and where is it to be found?
Schiller answers, it exists in every finely tuned soul; as an
achievement we might perhaps find it, like the pure
church, on the pure Republic, only in a few select circles
where it is not the spiritless imitation of foreign manners
but peoples own lively nature that governs conduct,
where mankind passes through the most complex
situations with eager simplicity and tranquil innocence,
and has no need either to encroach upon another freedom
in order to assert his won, or to display gracefulness at the
cost of dignity.[30]
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X. CONCLUSION
Hegel pays a warm tribute to Schiller that his great service
is of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and
abstractness of thought, daring to transcend them by
intellectually apprehending the principles of unity and
reconciliation as truth, and realizing them in art. Schiller
ultimately believed that man can be in total only when he
perceives the beauty, since beauty is a means of
enlightenment, of transitory value and an end in itself. His
idea of aesthetic education remains a utopia like in Platos
Republic. Schillers idea of education is somehow different
in its presentation from both Platos Republic and
Rousseaus Emile. But there is a unity of realization of the
goal in Platos Good, Rousseaus Nature and Schillers
Beauty.
REFERENCES
23. Kettler, D. Herbert Marcuse: Alienation and
Negativity, in Crespigny and Minogue eds.
Contemporary Political Philosophers, New York: Dodd,
Meaud, 1975, 28-30.
24. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Translated
by Reginald Snell, London: Routledge, 1954, 137.
25. Kettler, D. Herbert Marcuse: Alienation and
Negativity, in Crespigny and Minogue eds.
Contemporary Political Philosophers, New York: Dodd,
Meaud, 1975, 29.
26. Miller, R.D. Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970, 109.
27. Hoffheimer, M. The Influence of Schillers Theory of
Nature on Hegels Philosophical Development, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 46: 2, 1985, 239.
28. Quoted in Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilization, London:
Routledge, 1954, 187.
29. Ibid, 193.
30. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Translated
by Reginald Snell, London: Routledge, 1954, 140.

1. Hoffheimer, M. The Influence of Schillers Theory of

Nature on Hegels Philosophical Development, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 46: 2, 1985, 237.
2. Miller, R.D. Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970, 106.
3. Plato, The Republic, translated by B. Jowett.
4. Tomlin, E.W.F. The Western Philosophers: An Introduction,
London: Hutchinson, 1968, 205-207.
5. Ibid, 230-231.
6. Darwin argues that the evolution of material precedes
the mind and the functions of the organism depend on
the physical arrangement which in turn is affected by
the movement.
7. Srinivasachari, P.N. The Philosophy of the Beautiful,
Madras: Thompson, 1942.
8. Storm and Stress was a cultural movement against the
prevalent French neo-classical aesthetics.
9. Along with Herder, Schiller tried to meet Goethe in
Weimer but he could not.
10. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Translated
by Reginald Snell, London: Routledge, 1954, 65.
11. Ibid, 98.
12. Ibid, 101-105.
13. Ibid, 65-78.
14. Ibid, 68.
15. Ibid, 70.
16. Hoffheimer, M. The Influence of Schillers Theory of
Nature on Hegels Philosophical Development, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 46: 2, 1985, 238.
17. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Translated
by Reginald Snell, London: Routledge, 1954, 76.
18. Jay, Martin, Marxism and Totality, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1984, 50-51.
19. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Translated
by Reginald Snell, London: Routledge, 1954, 138.
20. Ibid, 76.
21. Ibid, 28-32
22. Miller, R.D. Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970, 108.