Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller

About the book

This collection brings the Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man together with essays on the sublime, grace, dignity, poetry, and tragic art. Schiller asks how human beings might reconcile sensuous experience with rational and moral demands, giving aesthetic activity an important role in that difficult balance. His discussions of beauty are therefore connected to education and freedom rather than confined to judgments of taste. Other essays consider why suffering can move an audience, how artistic form relates to moral character, and what distinguishes different kinds of poetic imagination. The volume requires attention to philosophical distinctions, but its recurring questions remain concrete: what does art cultivate in us, and how might that cultivation affect the lives we share?

• Art and freedom
• Aesthetic education
• Reason and feeling

Why read it

Read it for an ambitious account of why artistic experience might matter to personal and political development.

English collection of aesthetical and philosophical essays