SCHILLER AND THE POLITICAL PROMISE OF AESTHETIC EDUCA-TION

Abstract

This paper investigates how philosopher Friedrich Schiller's theory of beauty presents a new kind of freedom, with the aesthetic state of mind, that holds political promise. Schiller defended that, when contemplating beauty, no aptitude dominates the subject, who reaches a state of suspension, active and passive at the same time: the aesthetic state. Both his legislations, sensibility and reason, harmonize. Jacques Rancière argued, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, that Schiller's aesthetic education can be an alternative to the idea of political revolution, as it configures a new experience of the sensible where everyone is equal. As Rancière pointed out, there is, in the experience of the aesthetic game, the revocation of the dominion that reason established over sensibility, such as that undertaken by the oppressor over the oppressed. This regime of autonomy in the form of the experience of the sensible goes beyond the aesthetic to the political, from beauty to freedom.