The Politics of Aesthetic Pleasure: Schiller’s Theory of Aesthetic Education

David C. Durst

Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education must be perceived as a direct response to the problems afflicting European society in the late eighteenth century. Against the historical backdrop of a destructive, dialectical devel­opment of civilization[i] provoking the progressive alienation of man, it has often been asserted that Schiller proposed a novel strategy of aesthetic edu­cation to foster the renewed reconciliation of man in modern society. In contrast to such a conciliatory reading, I will attempt to outline a more critical, functionalist approach to Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education.[ii] On the one hand it will be argued that the ultimate grounds for Schiller’s critique are to be sought less in the inhumane than in the dysfunctional na­ture of the strategies of abstract morality and legality structuring European society at the end of the eighteenth century; on the other hand, Schiller’s support of the aesthetic education as an alternative response to the ills of modern society will be interpreted as a strategy seeking less the normative reconciliation than the more functional integration of individuals into the totality of the modern State. By showing in what way Schiller’s strategy of aesthetic education may allow for the more effective subjugation of the in­dividual in modern society, that is, by revealing how it may serve as an ef­fective “surrogate” to “secure legality” where other existing strategies fail, my intent is to problemize this aesthetization of modern man.[iii]

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller outlines the his­torical causes for the increasing alienation of man effecting social instability in modern life. And here we find Schiller unequivocal in his critique of modern society. It is not some evil attribute inherent in human nature which has led to the socio-political problems of modern society, but in­stead-in the spirit of Rousseau-modern societal institutions which have destroyed the harmonious bond of body and soul in man. In his critical discussion of the dialectical development of European civilization, Schiller identifies three different general spheres in which modern societal forces have destroyed the natural concord between the individual with the com­munity: politics, the political economy, and culture.

In the political sector, the modern bureaucratic State, symbolically de­scribed as a “ingenious clockwork”-a term taken from Kant’s Critique of Judgment (220, §65)-, has become so instrumentally rationalized that, according to Schiller, it “remains forever a stranger to its citizens; at no point does it ever make contact with their feelings” (AL 99-101). Instead of reflecting the immediate desires and customs of the people, the laws of this “increasingly complex machinery” function over against the will of the people as a for­eign and hostile force (AL 101). As a result, the enforcement of such hos­tile laws and bureaucratic measures designed to order the lives of its citizens is instead perceived by these very citizens as coercive. Rather than promote creative development of individuals in society, the modern State instead “destroys the concrete life of the individual in order that the abstract idea of the whole may drag out its sorry existence” (AL 101). The rise of such a bureaucratic apparatus does not lead to the productive integration of indi­viduals within the modern State, but instead promotes the very opposite; namely, the repressive marginalization of individuals and consequent “dis-integration” of the “positive society (as has long been the fate of most European states) ... into a state of primitive morality in which public authority has become but one party more, to be hated and circumvented” (AL 101).

In the economic sphere Schiller insightfully documents the detrimental effects of early capitalist development on modern man. The present age, increasingly dominated by the logic of instrumental reason, is one in which for Schiller “material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage” (AL 89). Not only does the striving for individual, factious, egoistic advantage in the form of profit destroy the sensus communis of modern man[iv]; because “enjoyment is divorced from labor, the means from the end, the effort from the re­ward” it also leads to the general alienation of man from his own creative capacities (AL 100). The increasing division of labor in modernity only further “absolves the individual citizen from developing extensively” and thus reduces man to a mere “fragment of the whole in which man himself develops into nothing but a fragment” (AL 100).

Lastly, in the realm of culture Schiller witnessed the rise of further societal forces which destroy the harmonious union of man with himself and with others in society. Not without its questionable legitimacy, Schiller laments the rise of integral aspects of a modern civil society in which the identity of the “State and the church,” the unity of the “laws and customs” traditionally governing the lives of the people are irretrievably broken (AL 100). For Schiller, this emancipation of a civil society from the State, i.e., a realm of autonomous human action independent of the direct control of State, does not lead automatically to the prospering of a creative commu­nity of universal individual freedom; instead, the modern, “mechanical col­lectivity,” “indifferent to character,” often engenders a destabilizing situa­tion of cultural caprice in which “any amount of obscure thinking is con­doned as long as it is accompanied by a spirit of order and law-abiding be­havior” (AL 100). The developments of science with its “more exact modes of thought” and growing inner differentiation between disciplines-despite the unquestionable increase in man’s ability to control nature for human ends-has contributed further to the severing of “the inner unity of human nature,” and thereby allowed for a “disastrous conflict to set man’s harmonious powers at variance”(AL 99).

In various writings on aesthetics in the 1790s,[v] Schiller schematically reduces the factors leading to immoral egoism and social separatism of the late eighteenth century to the general antagonism between reason and hu­man nature. In this violent bifurcation of reason and nature, as he argues, either the overwhelming power of factious desires of man or the failing power of morality to actually structure human action toward collective goals predominates:

All immorality appears to be derived from the collision of the good with the pleasing or, what is the same, from the collision of human desires with reason and on the one hand has its source in the strength of the sensuous drives and on the other hand in the weakness of the power of moral will. (MNS 782)

These two extreme poles of immorality manifest in the conflict of na­ture and practical reason, i.e., the strength of the sensuous inclinations and the weakness of the moral will, are for Schiller not mere philosophical con­structs. He finds them reflected directly in the two most pronounced forms of human “depravity” pervasively manifest in the class structures of Euro­pean society in the late eighteenth century: namely, in the savagery of the lower classes and in the barbarity of the enlightened classes. “Among the lower and more numerous classes,” Schiller asserts, “we are confronted with crude, lawless instincts, unleashed with the loosening of the bonds of civil order, and hastening with the ungovernable fury of their animal satisfac­tions” (AL 96). Man’s simple character leads in modernity to “selfishness” and “violence,” and, as such, “aims at the destruction of society rather than at its preservation” (AL 92). At the same time, the morality prevailing in the cultivated classes of modern Europe has done little to reconcile humanity. When it is time to translate their lofty moral ideals into concrete moral ac­tion, these cultivated classes of modern society are no better than the other, less educated classes. Instead of real virtue, the pretentious moral values of the rising bourgeoisie and other “refined classes” lead to the “repugnant spectacle of lethargy” and “barbarianism” (AL 95). The “enlightenment of the mind” has lacked a moral power, the “ennobling influence on feeling and character” it promised, and instead has tended to exacerbate the prob­lem by “bolstering up depravity”: “In the very bosom of the most exqui­sitely developed social life egotism has founded its system, and without ever acquiring therefrom a heart that is truly sociable, we suffer all the conta­gions and afflictions of society” (AL 96). In sum, “the child of nature, when he breaks loose, turns into a madman; the creature of civilization into a knave” (AL 96).

The dilemma Schiller diagnoses here may be defined in more general terms as the fragmentation of human action. Fragmentation may be de­fined as a situation in which the normative purpose of human action structuring the stabile functioning of the societal totality no longer per­meates the whole intellectual and material being of an individual. Normative goals do not extend into the very depths of an individual’s desires; instead, they remain foreign, repressive and, thus, ultimately inef­fective in controlling human behavior. In consequence, the fragmented in­dividual persists in this state of “bifurcation” (Entzweiung) in which dark de­sires conflict with the (moral) laws of practical reason. The ultimate source of societal ills, however, lies less in the tragically torn nature (Zerrissenheit) of man subject to the alienating societal forces of modernity; by carefully tracing the socio-political consequences of the repressively marginalized in­dividuals, Schiller realized clearly that the coercive strategies of moral and legal control of man lead not only to the unjustifiable alienation of in­dividuals from the (moral) laws of the community but, more importantly, to the political perpetuation of menacingly irrational desires harboring behind the “dead letter” of such laws (AL 96). What Schiller finds so disturbing is, then, less the repressive nature of such coercive strategies per se than the continued existence of the “wild,” “anarchical,” “egoistic” desires of mod­ern man. For it is such deviant desires that lead to the fragmentation of hu­man action which in forms of social separatism subvert the stability of so­ciety.[vi] Against the backdrop of the rising political economy, the coercive economies of abstract morality and legality have contributed little to the elimination of the crisis of political contingency in modernity. Indeed, such fundamentally dysfunctional strategies only further exacerbate the frag­mentation of the individual from society, which for Schiller finds its epit­ome analogously represented in the uncontrollable paroxysms of the mad­man (MNS 789). It was the disquieting threat of such paroxysmal attacks of the Other of reason in modern man that ultimately inspired Schiller to ar­ticulate his alternative strategy of aesthetic education.

In his Kallias oder über die Schönheit (Kallias or On Beauty), a compilation of letters written in the winter of 1793 to his friend Gottfried Körner, Schiller formulates a poignant critique of the moral philosophy of Kant which of­fers valuable insights into the underlying motives for his strategy of aes­thetic education. In his problematization of morality, Schiller proceeds from the Kantian opposition between practical reason and human nature. He adopts this rigid dualistic position, however, only in order to transcend it in the notion of “moral beauty” (moralischer Schönheit) (K 404). In accor­dance with the law of causality founded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, scientific experience of the phenomenal world reduces nature to a me­chanically determined being objectively lacking all inner purposiveness, self-organizing and spontaneously autonomous power. In order for the indi­vidual to effect morally autonomous action in the phenomenal world of human experience, practical reason must thus exert causality over the inner nature of man. In the practical philosophy of Kant this relationship is termed the “causality of freedom” (Groundwork 114). The causal influence of practical reason over the material will involves a dual process: on the one hand, abstraction from all material interests subjecting an individual being passively to the deterministic laws of the phenomenal world (negative freedom) and, on the other hand, the spontaneous construction of the maxim of human action in strict accordance with the moral law (positive freedom) (114f.). With the “help of the causality” (Schiller) of practical reason, the individual is to determine his/her action for the realization of any empirically contingent interest but-in independence of the deterministic laws of the phenomenal world-solely for the sake of the moral law itself. Yet due to their categorically determined difference, practical reason commands actions expressly in “practical conflict” (Kant) with or, as Schiller states, “against the interest of the senses” (K 406). Against the background of this ultimate alterity of in­terests, the causality of freedom involves “self-coercion” (Selbst-Zwang), i.e., the coercive sup­pression of one’s own, contingent material desires. Such coercive relation­ships constitute what Schiller characterizes as “heteronomy in the appear­ance” (Heteronomie in der Erscheinung) (K 404). The heteronomy of moral action rests in the fact that the determining and determined forces in man do not form an all-inclusive totality, an immediate identity of inter­est. Instead, an antagonistic relationship of mutually exclusive interests between practical reason and human nature predominates which leaves the individual in a debilitating state of inner bifurcation (Entzweiung) and frag­mentation from the community.

The notion of heteronomy is of vital importance in the aesthetics of Schiller, for it constitutes the counterpart to his notion of beauty. In the Kallias Letters, Schiller defines beauty as “freedom in the appearance” (Frei­heit in der Erscheinung) (K 404). Freedom here is not to be confused with a capricious independence from all rules, for “every beautiful product must subject itself to rules. ... The beautiful product may and must even be or­dered by rules (regelmäßig)” (K 402). The specificum of the beautiful object is manifest instead in the fact that it simply “appears free of rules” (regelfrei erscheint). An object appears to be free of rules, according to Schiller, “as soon as we no longer either find or are even occasioned to search for the ground of the same (the object) outside of it (the object)” (K 402). The beautiful object appears as if it were the immanent cause of itself.

In contradistinction to beauty, heteronomy is manifest clearly wherever an empirical object, including of course the material will of an individual, is not only not free of rules-for no beautiful object is free of rules-but does not even appear as if it were free of them. Thus, the heteronomous being is and appears to be determined by a “foreign” and “external” force which is “different, independent and accidental” over against this phenomenal object (K 411). Heteronomy in the appearance therefore exists where we find the form of the object only “under the presupposition of a notion (Begriff), whereas every notion implies “something external to the object,” “announces itself as coercion (Zwang) and carries with it hetero­nomy for the object” (K 402f.).

Moral beauty is characterized by Schiller also as a human action deter­mined by rules. Like the beautiful object, however, the morally beautiful act appears as if it were free of all such coercive rules. According to Schiller, “a moral action is a beautiful action when it looks like a self-resulting effect of nature” (K 407). Such an act is paradigmatically given when an individ­ual-“unbidden and without seeking counsel with himself, even though he must bear the costs”-“has forgotten himself completely and ‘fulfils his duty with an ease as if the instincts have had acted out of him’” (K 407). Such a deceptive impression predominates because “no noticed influence of a purpose” is overtly manifest in the actions of the self-forgetting individual (K 402). Although silently securing the moral integration of the individual into the community, the purposive notion (Zweckbegriff) structuring human action is not noticeably present. Thus the morally beautiful act can be per­ceived as if it were an act of complete natural self-determination, in which cause and effect, rule and nature, duty and desire are no longer set in an overtly antagonistic relationship of heterogeneity. The material desires of man now appear as if they naturally and willingly fulfil the command of practical reason. In this way, Schiller can make the important claim that in the morally beautiful act the moral “duty has become nature”-or at least in semblance (AW 468). And because in this intimate relationship between duty and desire of the “semblance of freedom” (Schein der Freiheit) a feeling of pleasure is aroused by the moral practice itself, we do not even sense the need to disclose the actual heteronomous law of causality behind such acts (K 410).

In contrast to the morally beautiful act, the rigid moral act in no way even appears as if it were instinctually desired. The coercive exclusion of sensuous impulses by the moral law is for all overtly apparent to witness. As a result, the stark alterity of the internalized instance of the pure moral will of the individual over against his material counterpart is conspicuously re­vealed. The rigidly moral individual is and appears to be subject to an inner, yet foreign force which establishes a blatantly apparent form of coercive “domination over desires” (AW 478).

Because beauty demands the subtle suppression of any overt apparent­ness of repressive relationships, according to Schiller, our aesthetic eye is deeply “insulted” by the coercive heteronomy of moral action (K 415). Pure morality is without doubt “dignified,” even “sublime,” but in no way beauti­ful (AW 433). Indeed, the heteronomous relationship between moral reason and human nature proves to be for Schiller “something embarrassing,” aesthetically even hideous or “repulsive” (eklig) (K 407f.). The coercive char­acter of Kantian morality forces us to face openly the inner antagonism in modern man which precludes the possibility of human beauty: “Under its rigid discipline sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) appears suppressed, and the inner re­sistance is revealed from without by coercion. Such a constitution of the human spirit cannot be advantageous for beauty” (AW 462). Against this background, the aesthetically incensed Schiller asserts that man now no longer “wants to see coercion anywhere, not even when reason itself exer­cises it” (K 407). Instead, asserting a new aesthetic maxim of modernity, Schiller demands that in moral action:

our sensuous nature must appear free, even though in re­ality it is not and it must have the look (Anschein) as if nature is merely carrying out the contract of our impulses, while it submits itself, in exact opposition to the impulses, under the domination of the pure will. (K 407)

It may be argued that the critique leveled here against Kantian morality does not just reflect an intrinsically aesthetic interest, such as a refined sense of beauty in modernity; Schiller’s critique is also permeated by an other, politically more relevant, imperative immediately bound up with the aesthetic one. The aesthetic maxim of modernity quietly harbors a political demand. When the individual attempts to act in strict accordance with the moral law, the sensuous manifold-as we saw-must be coercively sup­pressed (unterdruckt). For it is these very sensuous desires of man which constitute for Schiller “the inner enemy,” indeed the “strongest adversary with which man must struggle in his moral actions” (MNS 784). In order to keep these dangerous “desires at a distance and to silence the emphatically speaking instinct,” the moral will of man therefore must marginalize coer­cively such impulses (AW 461). This demands from the moral will, accord­ing to Schiller, “noticeable violence (merkliche Gewalt) and huge exertion,” for human nature “resists obstinately and energetically” this coercive, moral force (AW 461). And yet it is nothing other than this bitter, openly apparent struggle of the moral will of the individual with his very own natural im­pulses which constitutes the very precondition for the heteronomy which Schiller found so aesthetically displeasing. In effect we thus find that the het­eronomy in the appearance reflects nothing other than the stark insubordination of man’s material desires against a form of practical reason which has fundamentally failed to achieve the uninhibited and inconspicuous integration human nature into the moral order. The repulsive nature of Kantian morality reveals itself now no longer as simply an aesthetic blemish but instead as a modality of the dysfunctional strategy of morality which is incapable of completely integrating the con­tingent material desires of man into a coherent field of political domina­tion; a political determinant has been silently smuggled into Schiller’s world of aesthetic semblance. Accordingly, one defines an action as morally beautiful if the na­ture of man unresistingly adheres to the coercive demands of practical rea­son. The aesthetically displeasing, on the other hand, presents itself as what provokes the hideous heteronomy of the will; namely, the politically inef­fective economy of repressive power manifest in Kantian moral reason which is ultimately not able to efficiently eliminate the subversive character and dysfunctional resistance of the “anarchical” desires and “blind force of the affections” of modern man (MNS 785). As long as heteronomy reigns over beauty one must assume that the natural desires of man still has “power to oppose” the moral imperatives of practical reason (AW 465). In the end, aesthetic displeasure symbolically reflects nothing other than the politically displeasing fact that the power of desires disrupting modern society is not yet broken. What lies behind the aesthetic condemnation of hideous het­eronomy reveals itself to be but the ineffectivity of the strategy of morality to deal decisively with the political imperative of modernity; namely, to liquidate the subversive insubordination of deviant desires in the human body/nature and, therewith, overcome the fragmentation of human action.

In the face of the crisis-ridden fragmentation of human action in modernity, Schiller deliberates two different strategic responses to reassert social stability: either one can attempt to “strengthen the party of reason and the power of the good will in such a way that no sensuous temptation could overwhelm him; or one must break the power of sensuous tempta­tion so that even a weaker reason and a weaker moral will still may be supe­rior to them” (MNS 783). Yet due to his disbelief in the possibilities for the direct moral self-betterment of man-regardless how disciplined the ethical practices of self may be-the forces compelling Schiller to forsake the latter strategy were never really questioned. Indeed, “it would be the most frivolous embarrassment to trust the most important aspects of our societal world to our untrustworthy virtue,” for-as Schiller sees it-“the world or­der could dissolve and all the unifying fabric (Bande) of society be torn asunder before we become earnest with our moral principles” (MNS 788). Instead we must openly “admit-despite all conviction of the necessity and possibility of pure virtue-how contingent its (morality’s) real exercise is and how little we may build upon the foundation of our better moral prin­ciples” (MNS 788). In consequence of such moral resignation, Schiller is moved to draw the following conclusion: “the more accidental and contin­gent our moral values are, the more necessary it is to take precautionary measures for legality” (MNS 789). Indeed, one must view such precaution­ary measures necessary to secure the legal integrity of society as a duty, for

like the madman, who suspects his approaching paroxysm, removes all knives and voluntarily offers himself to bonds in order to avoid being responsible in his healthy state for the crimes of his disturbed mind, so too are we obliged to bind ourselves to the aesthetic laws so that in the periods of their domination our passions do not harm the physical order. (MNS 789)

According to Schiller, no modern State can ever feel secure in granting citi­zens a realm of liberal freedom until the individual of “wild libertinism” is transformed into one of culture. For “as long as natural man still makes a lawless misuse of his license, one can scarcely run the risk of letting him glimpse his liberty” (AL 105). Instead, the political axiom of the strategy of aesthetic education is that one does not bless the individual with a measure of “liberality” in retaining the right of autonomous “choice” until he al­ready-without any real choice[vii]-obediently “executes the orders of the spirit” in a mere “semblance of voluntariness” (Schein von Freiwilligkeit)(AW 477). Otherwise, “when it allies itself with forces still in ferment, and re­inforces an already too powerful nature,” “the gift of liberal principles be­comes a betrayal of society as a whole” (AL 105).

In order to more effectively secure conformity to the laws of the mod­ern State, according to Schiller one must redirect societal forces away from sole concentration on strict moral practices of the self towards a more im­mediate confrontation with their intransigent Other, i.e., the capricious power of man’s sensuous nature. Not the strengthening of modern man’s will to consciously struggle with the sensuous self in accordance with uni­versal moral principles then, but instead the direct “development of man’s capacity for feeling is the more urgent need of our age” (AL 107). And, in­deed, it is exactly this desideratum of modernity which the strategy of aesthetic education promises to fulfil:

It is here in the indifferent sphere of physical life that man must make a start upon his moral life; here while he (man) is still passive, already start to manifest his autonomy, and while still within the limitations of sense begin to make some show of rational freedom. The law of his will he must apply even to his inclination; he must, if you will permit me the expression, slip[viii] the war against matter into the very territory of matter itself, so that he may be spared having to fight this dread foe on the sacred soil of free­dom. He must learn to desire more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely. This is brought about by means of aesthetic education, which subjects to laws of beauty all those spheres of human behavior in which neither natural laws, not yet rational laws are binding upon human caprice and which in the form it gives to outer life, already opens up the inner. (AL 156)

What Schiller is promoting here is nothing less than a radical paradigm change in the way societal forces harness human nature. In order to pro­mote the more effective re-integration of man into modern society, Schiller looks neither to a direct moral or even to a political revolution of the laws coercively controlling human body/nature, but conversely to “a total revo­lution of man’s whole way of feeling” by the aesthetic education of man (AL 171). For ultimately “all improvement in the political sphere” is said to proceed from the aesthetic “ennobling of the character” of modern man (AL 107).[ix] Indeed, if the political problems of fragmentation and strife in modern society are ever to be solved, according to Schiller, “he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom” (AL 90). Yet despite all eulo­gistic claims concerning the renewed freedom of man to be made possible by “aesthetic culture,” upon closer analysis it may be argued that the essen­tial directive of the strategy of aesthetic education lies less in promoting the possibility of any normatively acceptable reconciliation of individual autonomy with the demands of the totality of societal forces than in its capacity to more effectively integrate a subjugated individual into the total­ity of the state apparatus. In the end, the fundamental “achievement” (Ver­dienst) of aesthetic education rests in more effectively “serving, in accor­dance with the effect if not with the inner value of virtue, as a surrogate of true virtue and to secure legality where nothing is to be hoped for from morality” (die Legalität da zu sichern, wo die Moralität nicht zu hoffen ist) (NMS 789).

From his critique of Kantian ethics Schiller gained decisive insight into the stark incapacity of the coercive economy of power in the strategy of abstract morality to functionally integrate the natural desires of the individ­ual into the socio-political totality of modernity. Against this background Schiller sought refuge in the realm of aesthetic semblance, though clearly with the intent to rise from this realm better armed to deal more decisively with the hideous heteronomy of modern man. In his Kallias Letters Schiller formulates a notion of moral beauty which, though not ultimately tran­scending the coercive relationship between practical reason and human de­sire, indeed promises to suppress any noticeable appearance of such hide­ous heteronomy on the political stage and thereby overcome its crisis-ridden consequences. Without renunciating in any way the factual validity of reason, Schiller’s strategy of aesthetic education promises to avoid any overtly antagonistic relationship between reason and human nature by in­scribing the purposive notion of practical reason into the nature/body of man in a way which makes it appear to all, including the individual himself, as if it were not there. Although the purposive rule of practical reason is in fact effectively present, due to its unnoticeable camouflage, its “hidden law­fulness” in the nature/body of man, it appears as if human action re­sults without such a coercive moral rule and without any heteronomous deter­mination (K 409; GSF 674). By hiding the strict lawfulness under the sem­blance of caprice the moral action of the individual attains the charm of beauty.[x]

In his important essay “Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten,” Schiller outlines the modus operandi of aesthetic education. While concentrating on this essay, I will not hesitate to refer to other writings on aesthetics from the 1790s by Schiller in order to problemize this strategy.[xi] In “Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten,” aesthetic education is inscribed more specifically in what I have referred to elsewhere-bor­rowing a term from Schiller himself-as the “discipline of taste” (Disziplin des Geschmacks), a practice designed to aestheticize the nature/body of mod­ern man.[xii] It is the disciplining of aesthetic taste in the modern individual that factually allows aesthetic education to “replace morality where it is lacking and relieve it where it is” still effectively present (MNS 784; AB 58). It plays the role of a flanking instance or a surrogate to morality in securing socially stable behavior where the pure moral will alone in the struggle with the revolting desires of man’s nature/body must continually capitulate. On behalf of the “law-giving power” of practical reason, the discipline of taste is to act as an “executive” (vollziehendes) organ which actualizes the will of political reason in the nature/body of the individual (AL 177; GSF 670, 684). This task is performed by means of what one could term the double operation of aesthetic taste, in which on the one hand “impulses are re­moved” which “inhibit” the power of political reason and on the other hand “awakens impulses which are beneficial for it” (MNS 787).

Analogous to the realm of morality, the practice of aesthetic education continues to regard as its “natural inner enemy” the nature/body of man which due to a “lack of discipline is wild from within” (MNS 783). Ac­cordingly, the first task in the aestheticization of modern man by the disci­pline of aesthetic taste is to “annihilate the resistance of impulse against the good” (MNS 783). The discipline of taste breaks the subversive power of human nature by “expelling from the mind all those material impulses and unrefined desires which often so stubbornly and vehemently resist the exer­cise of the good” (MNS 785). This initial annihilation is augmented by the cultivation of aesthetic laws (ästhetische Gesetze) of “temperance” (Mäßigung), “honor” (Ehre), “civility” (Anstand), and “good manners” (guten Tones), to which the individual is to subject himself (MNS 787; AB 66). By this “in­tervention of taste into the operation of the will” the individual learns to “renunciate the unsociable desires” of his hitherto “self-seeking” being (MNS 785). The individual thus begins to “find repulsive everything which is awkward, hard, which is violent” (MNS 784). In order to be safe from the “unrefined sensuality and the wildness” of his very own nature, the “coer­cion” inherent in these aesthetic laws, “which the civilized human being subjects himself to in the expression of his feelings,” allows for such a “de­gree of domination” that the “voice of reason”-even under the most ve­hement “storm of sensations”-does not lose its penetrating resonance in the halls of human desire and unrelentingly “sets a limit to the crude out­bursts of nature” in man (MNS 784).

Immediately following this “purification of feelings” (Reinigung der Gefühle) is the second operation in the aestheticization of man (AB 23). In clear contrast to the dysfunctional strategy of abstract morality, the disci­pline of aesthetic taste does not stop at coercively controlling human nature by strict subjugation to the laws of reason (AB 66). Indeed, the decisive les­son Schiller learned in his critique of Kantian morality was the fact that practices of moral self-coercion alone can only exacerbate the fragmenta­tion of human action and thus only further undermine the stability of modern society. Thus, if one cannot completely subdue human nature through repressive strategies alone, one must then attempt to derive pro­ductive capital out of human nature by mobilizing its positive support for the imperatives of reason. And it is nothing other than this progressive superseding of the coercive economy of abstract morality in the productive economy of aestheticization which represents a decisive paradigm shift in the strategic appropriation of human nature in modernity. Instead of simply coercing nature, the discipline of aesthetic taste attempts to also “win over the sensual capacity ... for the pure activity and to subdue its resistance” by “transforming form into matter, by rapping ideas in sense intuitions and by affecting the passive energies with an operation of the active” (AB 51). In­stead of simply coercively subjecting human nature to rational repression, the discipline of aesthetic taste seeks to secure the active and friendly sup­port of human nature for the rules of reason by “changing the object of desires and exchanging crude feelings for more refined ones” (AB 64).[xiii] For it is without doubt “more advantageous,” as already clearly spelled out in Anmut und Würde (Grace and Dignity), “when the impulse is found on the side of duty,” when “pleasure and duty are brought into union,” for here the individual “obeys his reason with pleasure” and “without resistance” (AW 464). In the place of the subversive desires of man “more noble and gentle impulses” are to be “sown which are connect­ed with order, harmony and perfection” (MNS 785). Having cultivated such an “ennobled taste” the individual no longer simply volun­tarily renunciates claims to unrefined forms of desire, but moreover “sub­jects his desires with pleasure to reason” (GSF 689). The discipline of aesthet­ic taste mobilizes desires, activates the senses of man in order to strap them more effectively “in the end by means of hidden bonds to the unity” of political reason (Schiller, Sämtliche 1023).

The cunning logic of domination at work in this aesthetic subjugation of human nature/body is documented in the fact that all recognizable traces of repressive coercion factually applied in the first operation of an­nihilation are now to disappear behind the “lively and fiery applause” of the mobilized emotions of the aestheticized individual (AB 59; MNS 785). In order “to ban the feeling of coercion completely from the human mind,” as Schiller professes in a decisive passage taken from the Augustenburger Briefe (Augustenburg Letters) the aesthetic “pleasure must change places so quickly with the tension (of coercion) that the mind can hardly differentiate be­tween the two situations” (AB 52). The ruse of this aesthetic reason is ap­parent: By replacing the renunciation of wild desires immediately with the lure of aesthetic pleasure, by obscuring the sacrifice of crude sensuality with the aesthetic rapture (Entzücken) of beauty, and by concealing coercion and violence behind the cloak of aesthetic enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus) for the beautiful, the aestheticized individual loses sight of the tension-ridden traces of rational coercion (AB 61). It is this hidden heterogeneity that con­stitutes the subtle secret of the “beauty of play” in which the individual is pleasurably entwined (AW 463). Because he acts without moral delibera­tion and-at least in semblance-out of pure natural instinct, such an aestheticized individual, according to Schiller, even “does not himself know of the beauty of his action and it no longer occurs to him that he could act or feel differently” (AW 468). While all eyes gaze at the moral beauty of the individual as the aesthetic embodiment of political reason, the individual himself fulfils unknowingly this pleasurable, politically purposeful act. The aestheticized individual is thereby robbed by the lure of aesthetic pleasure of the capacity to critically recognize the coercive laws of reason governing his own behavior and consequently deliberate alternative plans of action. By aesthetically mobilizing the sensuous desires of the individual in the semblance of freedom, the being of this very individual thus is simultane­ously politically immobilized. The individual is blinded, subjugated by the Sirens on the island of aesthetic semblance: Yet, paradoxically, it is no longer the coercion of sensuous desires but instead that of a hidden reason which constitutes the mythical force the individual appears to be without power to resist.

The political capital Schiller expects to derive out of the discipline of aesthetic taste is indeed great. Due to the fact that the aestheticization of the human body on the one hand excludes all individual resistance and on the other hand makes the unconscious obedience to the dictates of reason an object of aesthetic pleasure, the whole political kinetic of rationally in­tegrated human action attains here a special dynamic. The traces of differ­ence between reason and human nature are effaced in a semblance of spontaneity; for without the hesitation of de-mobilizing deliberations the aestheticized individual either immediately fulfils the imperatives of reason or acts quickly to smother crude impulses in their incipient stage where the moral will is slow to respond (MNS 786).

Under the first circumstance where “reason speaks and commands ac­tions of order, harmony and perfection, it not only finds no resistance but in contrast the liveliest assent from the side of impulse” (MNS 785). Not only is such a soul swayed “to taste more ennobled enjoyment in forms, to draw its pleasures from the source of reason without a struggle from the debased delights of matter, and to believe itself infinitely recompensed for all sacrifices of the external senses by the joys of the inner senses” (AB 64). Wherever reason makes the first move and is in danger of being over­whelmed by the stronger force of natural impulse, the aesthetic sense of man furthermore decides “in the favor of duty” (MNS 787). And because the “active and pure feeling for beauty” makes necessary “a smaller measure of moral energy of the will for the exercise of virtue” the discipline of aesthetic taste has, as Schiller can conclude, the “most happy influence” on the political effectivity of morality (MNS 781).

Under the second circumstance where the material desires of the aestheticized individual speak first, “they must endure a strict inspection by the sense of beauty” (MNS 785). In accordance with the temporally more immediately activated duty of beauty, the individual of “cultivated taste” will condemn by sense of feeling alone all those delinquent desires prior to them ever “coming before the moral forum, before the moral conscience” of man (AW 446; MNS 786). Because all such “crude and violent” desires instinctually “awaken abhorrence which nothing can overcome, in the mo­ment the impulse for self-preservation pursues something crude the mere aesthetic sense already rejects it” (MNS 786). In this aesthetic unity there is no longer any subversive temptation which could inhibit the political kinetic manifest in the immediate rational activity of the individual. For the “decision” (Entschluß), if this notion can still find its legitimate usage here, is already instinctively “handled in the forum of feelings, and the behavior of the human being,” as “morally indifferent” as it may be, is nevertheless per­fectly “legal” (MNS 786). Thus even if political interests represent “too weak of a bridle” for the lawful behavior of the individual of both the “common” and “cultivated” classes, one can at least depend on the political effectivity of the disciplined aesthetic taste of modern man to “guarantee the lawfulness of their behavior” (AB 66). And although this “aesthetic virtue” indeed can assure the individual “no value in the moral world,” it nevertheless makes “him useful for the physical world” by providing him at least with the capacity “to act even without a truly moral attitude in a way which a moral attitude would have ushered in with itself” (MNS 788). Therewith, we finally find ourselves in the position, according to Schiller,

to satisfy at least the physical world-order by the content of our actions, even if we should not be able to satisfy the moral world-order through the form of the same-at least to exercise as perfect instruments of natural purpose what we remain culpable for as imperfect persons of reason in order not to stand before both tribunals in disgrace. (MNS 788f.)

The fact that the discipline of aesthetic taste “is in the highest degree beneficial for the legality of our behavior” attains great weight in Schiller’s deliberations on the strategy of aesthetic education (MNS 787). And in the final analysis this can come as no real surprise, for from the very start Schiller was less interested in any futile fortification of the abstract moral conscience of the individual in his conscious struggle with the self than in the concrete annihilation of the deviant desires of man provoking the crisis-ridden fragmentation of human action in modernity. In the end, from the smallest moral loss Schiller can cunningly claim the largest political gain: for by the discipline of aesthetic taste the subversive desires of man are fi­nally broken and the modern individual is pleasurefully, yet unknowingly integrated into a stabile, aesthetic field of legal domination.

Notes

Abbreviated references are to the following works:

AB F. Schiller Friedrich Schiller: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Briefe an Augustenburger, Ankündigung der Horen.

AL F. Schiller Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

AW F. Schiller Anmut und Würde.

GSF F. Schiller “Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner For­men.”

K F. Schiller “Kallias oder über die Schönheit.”

MNS F. Schiller “Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten.”

Works Cited

Durst, David C. Zur politischen Ökonomie der Sittlichkeit bei Hegel und der ästhetischen Erziehung bei Schiller. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Gadamer, H. G. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. New York: Hafner, 1951.

---. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: Harper, 1964.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Rohrmoser, G. “Zum problem der ästhetischen Versöhnung. Schiller und Hegel.” Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung. Ed. J. Bolten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1984. 314-33.

Schiller, Friedrich. “Anmut und Würde.” Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958.

---. Friedrich Schiller: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Briefe an Augustenburger, Ankündigung der Horen. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1967.

---. “Kallias oder über die Schönheit.” Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958.

---. “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Friedrch Schiller, Essays. New York: Continuum, 1993.

---. “Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten.” Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958.

---. “Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner For­men.” Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958.

Tschierske, U. Vernunftkritik und ästhetische Subjektivität. Tübingen: 1988.