Schiller and the Aesthetic Education of Humanity

Friedrich Schiller published his Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters) in 1795, in the journal Die Horen, as a set of twenty-seven letters addressed to his patron Friedrich Christian, Duke of Augustenburg (who had supported Schiller financially after a severe illness in 1791). Written in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution (1789) and its descent into the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), the Letters respond to a pressing political and philosophical question: why had a revolution launched in the name of reason and human rights produced not moral and political freedom but violence and tyranny? Schiller's diagnosis, deeply indebted to Kant's critical philosophy which he had studied intensively in the early 1790s, is that political reform undertaken before the character of citizens has itself been properly formed is doomed to fail, because a people not yet capable of harmonizing its sensuous drives with its rational ones will misuse political freedom just as readily as it misused prior tyranny.