Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic education: harmonize feeling and thinking

Abstract

This article the current state of Schiller's Philosophical Letters as a critique of the education imparted by the culture of his time after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror which, in its eagerness to cause the fragmentation of the faculties of humans, sensitivity and understanding, gave rise to savagery and barbarism. Facing this reality, this shows how Schiller proposed an aesthetic education aiming at forming human character. It is here where an approach emerges which proposes the need to step back from the physical state and into the aesthetic state, where the coercion that feeling and thinking exercise on humans is nullified by the reflection on beauty and art, which enables a reciprocal action between them and ultimately causes them to harmonize. The concept of aesthetic state is also highlighted as it enables the restoration of the humanity and freedom of mankind while also being a means to access moral, didactic and political ends. Even today, Schiller's thinking on the need to educate individuals aesthetically and morally in order to achieve a political transformation of the state still echoes because the latter will initially not produce free citizens.