The concept of grace has for better or worse disappeared from our daily experience and aesthetic as well as educational vocabulary. This paper presents briefly Friedrich Schiller’s analysis in Über Anmut und Würde of grace as an expression of an internal morality, i.e. the notion of a beautiful soul found in classical bourgeois Bildung. We then turn to Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater, which challenges Schiller’s humanism by a provocative presentation of grace as mechanical perfection. The second part of (...) the paper examines the bearing and actuality of Kleist’s text from examples pertaining to athletics/sports, drawing critically on Simon Chritchly’s What We Think about When We Think about Football. The aim is a consideration of where and how grace manifests itself and seems to be something inexplicable and ‘extra’, a gift of the gods or of nature, as it still exists even if it is not easily put into words. (shrink)

Artiklen præsenterer i første del det pædagogiske stof fra Platons Staten og Lovene, som Rousseau har læst og fundet inspiration i. Der plæderes for, at Rousseau optager og transponerer såvel principper som konkrete overvejelser uanset den forskelige historiske kontekst og de dermed sammenhængende forskellige udformninger og mål for opdragelsen. I anden del diskuteres Rousseaus ’platonisme’ i mere overordnet filosofisk sammenhæng, og der argumenteres for, at Rousseaus utraditionelle, pædagogisk-filosofiske Platon-læsning dels kan ses at fremdrage underbelyste centrale tematikker i Platons filosofi, dels (...) understreger deres stadige aktualitet. (shrink)