Freedom through Beauty (interview question #15)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
Earlier we considered Schiller’s anthropological thesis that beauty gave birth to humanity. What did Schiller mean when he said that it is only through beauty that we arrive at freedom?
This brings us into contact with some of Schiller’s most important philosophical ideas. Schiller argued that human beings are divided between two fundamental drives: the ‘sense drive’, which binds us to our instincts, desires, and embodiment, and the ‘form drive’, which draws us toward reason, abstraction, logic, and law. Left unresolved, this division produces either savagery (domination by instinct) or barbarism (domination by reason). What mediates these drives is what Schiller calls the ‘play drive’, and it is through aesthetic experience – through beauty – that this play drive becomes active.
In beauty, we are both sensuous and rational, both embodied and free. Schiller asserted that it is in that aesthetic state of consciousness that we become fully human. This solution to the divided human condition is not a regression to instinct, nor a domination by reason, but a harmonious balance achieved through the play drive – through aesthetic experience. Beauty, he wrote, is the ‘form of freedom’, in the sense that free individuals have achieved a balance between the sense drive and the form drive, in the same way that a beautiful work of art has achieved balance between form and content.
I sympathise with this Schillerian idea that aesthetic experience remains our best, and perhaps our only, path to reconciling our divided nature. Human existence is torn between these two poles: nature and reason, impulse and law, body and mind, emotion and logic. To become fully human, we need to resolve or harmonise this tension. Beauty may have separated us from nature, but it is also through beauty – through art, through the experience of the wild, through the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility – that we can begin to restore a kind of harmony within ourselves.
So beauty is both our creator and our redeemer. It gave birth to us by awakening self-consciousness and freedom. And it offers us, still, the possibility of becoming fully human – not by returning to a lost unity (although that is one way to look at things), but by consciously harmonising the divided elements of our nature. In that sense, homo aestheticus names not only what we are, but what we are still in the process of becoming.
So yes, Schiller is pivotal to my understanding of aesthetics and politics. Modernity tends to treat beauty as subjective decoration or luxury – something secondary to economics, technology, or politics. Schiller overturns that hierarchy completely. For him, beauty is formative. It shapes the human being itself. The sense and form drives are held in proper balance by the play drive.
That is why Schiller famously declared that ‘man only plays when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’ By ‘play’, he does not mean meaningless frivolity. He means creative, non-instrumental activity undertaken freely for its own sake. Art becomes crucial because it allows human beings to experience freedom sensuously rather than merely conceptualise it abstractly.
This is what he implies when he says that ‘through beauty we arrive at freedom.’ Beauty educates desire. It refines sensibility. It trains us to move beyond crude appetite and mechanical obedience without repressing our embodied nature. The beautiful soul, in Schiller’s sense, is someone whose inclinations and ethical life have become harmonised rather than violently divided.
