Abstract

In 1791 Schiller had received a generous scholarship from Prince Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-Holstein Augustenburg and expressed his gratitude in a series of letters “On the Philosophy of the Beautiful” to the Prince. In 1794 these letters were lost in the fire of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen. Only six letters survived in transcripts and, together with the so-called Kalliasbriefe to Gottfried Körner (1793), formed the most important basis for the 27 letters newly written by Schiller, which appeared in 1795 under the title Über die ästhetische Erziehung, in a series of letters in the journal edited jointly by Schiller and Goethe, the Horen. In these letters, Schiller develops his aesthetic humanism and his theory of education and formation that emerges from it, which amounts to the “aesthetic freedom” of man, an inner freedom that comes about because man is emancipated from the coercion of both his sensual desires and reason to such an extent that a space of free self-determination is thereby opened up. With his thesis that man is only fully human where he plays, i.e. where he behaves aesthetically, Schiller has secured for himself a firm place in the history and systematics of the educational theory of New Humanism. (Cf. Koch, Lutz: Friedrich Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. In: Böhm, Winfried/Fuchs, Birgitta/Seichter, Sabine (eds.): Hauptwerke der Pädagogik. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 2011, p. 408.) The present contribution, which aims to elaborate, at least to some extent, the topicality of Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education, is guided by the thesis that the memory of the New Humanist discourse on education in general, and of Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education in particular, is able to break open the narrowing of the current discourse on education. This is the conclusion reached by Jürgen Stolzenberg and Lars-Thade Ulrichs, among others, in their preface to the volume they edited in 2010, Bildung als Kunst. In view of the current present, which, as is well known, sees itself as a “knowledge and information society”, according to the judgement of the two named authors, a calculation of losses must be made insofar as the “mere accumulation of knowledge and its application as quickly and as success-oriented as possible” gambles away important insights and gains of the tradition of the education movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which centre around an “emphatic concept” of aesthetic education.(Cf. Stolzenberg, Jürgen/Ulrichs, Lars-Thade (eds.): Bildung als Kunst. Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, Nietzsche. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2010, p. VI.) This concept is not one of those educational goods that can be disposed of without damage, even and especially in the digital age, especially since Schiller’s concept of an aesthetic education draws attention to an educational problem that, according to the thesis of this contribution, becomes considerably more acute under the dispositif of the digital. (This article is a revised version of a lecture given at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in January 2020. The title of the symposium was “Menschen_Bildung im Dispositiv des Digitalen.”) Already in his letter to Augustenburger of February 9, 1793, Schiller speaks of the “bold enterprise” of dealing with the principles of art on the basis of Kantian principles. The starting point for Schiller’s theoretical investigations is thus Kant’s Critique of Judgment, or more precisely the Analytics of the Beautiful, in which Kant, after examining theoretical and practical reason, had extended his critical program to the study of aesthetic judgment and established a theory of the main aesthetic phenomena of the beautiful and the sublime that was convincing to Schiller. Schiller formulates his project somewhat more concretely with regard to the subject of education in the Augustenburg letter of July 13, 1793, where he addresses the question of how beauty relates to “the human spirit in general” on the one hand and “to time” on the other. (Letter to Augustenburg, July 13, 1793, p. 134.) This names the moments at stake in Schiller’s aesthetic theory of education: first, the significance of aesthetics for the education of man, and second, the effect of an art conceived as autonomous in a modern society characterized by fragmentarization and alienation. The major theme of the Aesthetic Letters is the integrative achievement of aesthetics as stated by Schiller: in the single individual, the inner contradiction between sensuality and reason, inclination and duty, is removed to such an extent through aesthetic education and formation that the aesthetically founded inner freedom (the “aesthetic freedom”) facilitates the path to moral autonomy. From an aesthetically cultivated power of judgment (“taste”), Schiller expects not only a humanization of social forms of interaction and communication, but also the overcoming of the contradictions of a modernity alienated from itself.