The present study focuses on the philosophical masterpiece of Friederich Schiller (1759-1805), On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which appeared originally in 1795 in the review "Die Horen".
The study opens with a brief historical introduction (which examines in particular the impact of Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, and Humboldt) and then proceeds to articulate an analysis of the project of aesthetic mediation between the sensible and the rational following two basic assumptions. The first is to avoid reducing Schiller's aesthetic thought to a critique of modern civilization or solely to the advancement of a utopia variously defined as historical, pedagogic, artistic, or political. The second is to foreground the relationship between Schiller and Kant, revising those interpretations, advanced also in recent years, that read Schiller's aesthetic univocally as an anticipation of Hegel. The present volume thus proposes a re-reading of all the key-elements of Vermittlung (from the impulse to play to the aesthetic state as an intermediate phase), interpreting them as responses to the great Kantian themes of the transcendental imagination and of the movement from the sensible to the suprasensible as discussed in the Critique of Judgement. The metaphysical deduction of the beautiful and of aesthetic experience, with subjective freedom as its starting point, is analyzed together with Schiller's attempt to provide an exclusively philosophical legitimation of any possible historical, artistic, and political mediation. The discussion of this transcendental journey is organized around four major issues: the differentiation between state and person, the doctrine of impulses, the original aesthetic state, and the relationship between subjectivity and appearance.
Approaching these issues as stages in the founding of an aesthetic mediation between the sensible and the rational, this volume proposes, among the many approaches possible, to re-read Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education as a crucial moment in the relationship between aesthetic reflection and the modern metaphysical tradition.