Abstract

Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics targets an education of the whole person, sense-wise and rationality-wise. Developing a culture of beauty, respecting the morality of the individual, but always striving towards a politically well-formed community. Freedom—of action, of aesthetics, of political freedom—is a key concept for Schiller, that profoundly shaped his thinking, poetry, and work. Schiller’s aesthetics emerged early with his playwriting and around 1791 from his intensive study of Kant’s aesthetics but also of other philosophies such as Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. He created a transcendental poetology based on an active determinability—concerned with absolute freedom and openness in the aesthetic state of the play of all forces, and not merely with the spontaneity of reason.