March 17, 2011
On the Aesthetic Education of Man

The following essay in regards to Friedrich Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

The prompt responded to when writing this essay is as follows: Rewrite Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” from your own cultural and historical perspective.  Be sure to refer to at least two of the works we have read as you make your own argument.

An Ode to Objectivity

 
Truly, the grievous assault and interminable violence which civilization has proceeded to wage against the individual spirit has revealed itself in most discrete form. We have arrived in the epoch where Schiller’s accusations have found themselves, in totality, respective realities and concrete examples for each and every of his seemingly abstract forewarning.  Nothing in his premises has been proven incorrect and quite contrarily, all of his arguments have found themselves eerily resonant echoes in the sadness and loneliness which I witness my fellow human beings tolerating in the modernity of our age.  With the manifestation of Schiller’s ideas in such real world daily encounters, I find myself vacillating between absolute despair in the intensity of his erudite depiction of our self-slavery, and feverish purpose in the privileged and liberated state of mind that has come to absorb my being solely by means of cohering with his plea for a revival of philosophical inquiry in such an adamant and earnest manner.  Yet, keeping in mind the dualistic nature of fright and empowerment that I have presently been consumed, this consideration of Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” will attempt to reinvigorate the ideal of Art by unveiling, likewise, the perfected mechanisms currently capable of fracturing the severely reduced Modern man while devising stratagem in which he may free himself from the “yoke which [he] finds as difficult to dispense with as to bear” (492).    

If Schiller may be received as tentative in stating that “[his era does not] seem to be going in favour of art,” (483) I will assert more boldly, as beneficiary of existing in his future, that this trend has revealed itself as an exponential force hellbent on subduing all under a fragmented comatose yielding any appreciation of thought on aesthetics nearly unattainable.  This boldness stems from several principles he has justified in his work.  The first observation, is that of the state, and the assertion that with increased complexity comes necessarily, specialization, and therefore valorization of increasingly divided, particular intelligence.  Within the last century, the globe has felt the immense power and insurmountable force to be harnessed through capitalism.  While accruing great wealth and presence on the global scale, the State has vetoed any claim to the humanity of its citizens.  In fact, capitalism itself has had a fundamental impact upon the construction of thought in our culture and its sheer dominance has led to an unquestioned acceptance of this alteration of thought.  In addition, the need of ‘Utility’ above all else is a requisite pretense in a society whose conditions for survival and success lay in the creation of material goods as efficiently as possible.  The second observation is that, utility coupled with the rapid growth of science, specifically technology, occupational fragmentation has consequently, increased at a similar rapidity.  What Schiller may not have predicted, however, is the infringement upon the leisure hours, technology has facilitated.  While his occupational fragmentation hypothesis has held true, an interesting fracturing of attention span in our ‘off-the-clock’ hours has appeared on the scene and coincidentally captured my attention.   With these two elements combined, no sanctuary remains for the pure and delicate appreciation of divine beauty.  With our priorities set in the production of material by the ambitions of the State, our entire processes of thought have been tainted with the obsession of commodity.  Such an obsession has had an obfuscatory effect on our need for beauty and truth, attainable only in the arts, “that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death” (Marx 653), not as he intends literally, but as a metaphorical starvation of the soul.  Technology has acted as a catalyst to this priority of production. In the following inquiry, it will be these two observations which will be fully explored:     

We live in an age where meaning is derived from the function of the goods we produce.  Hindered within circular reasoning, we are slave to producing goods as a means to afford consuming goods.  Against every natural instinct we have been told, not through reason, but brute force and repeatability, one can find salvation in the function of the products we accrue.  Of course, this is an illusion, merely a carrot on a stick which perpetuates the process.  The State is not to be blamed, as it is and will remain, an institution void of conscious. However, our naivety in trusting an institution to foster the best interests of its citizens remains less forgivable.  If we intellectuals are to reclaim the “aesthetic of the Ideal” (Schiller 482), we must understand that worker loses power as long as he continues to fund the system that, by means of consumption, he participates.  And in the participation, the more divided from his identity he becomes, handicapping him ever increasingly from justifying true worth in the objective world.  Karl Marx agrees with his sentiment in an Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844:

For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. (Marx 653) 

Thus, within this inner-world, we are impoverished.  Our only refuge being art and aesthetics to rescue us from this impoverished state.  Yet, the more impoverished our inner-world, the harder it becomes to be shrewed in discerning beauty.  We can see this degradation of discernment by judging what has been established commonly as artwork.

When we turn to art we begin to see the true enigmatic and permeating property of commodity-driven mentality.  Art, as we traditionally think of it, has begun to blend and flirt with the dangerously saccharine consumerist mentality. Yes, aesthetics’ boundaries remain far more vast than the mortar and brick perimeters of galleries and museums, but in investigating the forefront of what is commonly accepted as ‘high art,’ I believe one can acquire a barometer indicative of overall health and sensibility of a society.   After stating about Athenian society, “poetry had not as yet coquetted with wit nor speculation prostituted itself with sophistry,” I am inclined to believe Schiller would also have added ‘nor art marketed itself as base materialism’ had he lived to see our epoch.  We witness such marketing in the emergence of artists such as Takashi Murakami and his self-declared opinion that “art and commerce will be blended” (Murakami).  Murakami essentially continues to build upon what Warhol pioneered but with a particularly ostentatious flare with acts such as designing handbags for Louis Vuitton.  The collaboration of Murakami with corporate fashion is profoundly disturbing.  I postulate Murakami to be an apt metaphor for the crisis of aesthetics in our modern epoch.  Ubiquity appears to be synonymous with the acceptance of its integrity to the undiscerning public.  Simply because of the pervasive nature of consumerism in our culture, the common masses are content to let the most sacred of temples of aesthetics become fettered within its domain.  Murakami postures himself as an artist yet violates the most important principles and fails to “create what they need,” but instead, “what they praise” (Schiller 492).   If the “tribunal of Pure Reason” (484) was being held in Schiller’s era, one might be correct in stating that the verdict is being executed in our own.  As we let these frail, substance-less images pass as a substitute for hitherto vessels to the sublime, we intellectuals have lost the tribunal.

After establishing the tribunal to be at an unfavorable end, the natural question must investigate what changes in our era within the last two centuries are responsible for such a ghastly result.  Schiller takes great effort to record the impact of increased complexity of the state.  The hypothesis that a myopic focus on specific types of intelligence produces the upshot of reduced gratification in the individual.  An aspect Schiller could not imagination, however, is with the domination of fragmentation in the workplace, a migration took place, and the theatre of war against free-thought moved to conquer the remaining leisure hours of the modern man.  No more distinguishably can this be observed in the acceleration of technology and the increased access to information.  By following the progression of the world wide web, heralded at first for being the great liberator of our era, one can truly observe the ingenuity with which common man can leverage his creations against himself.  Instead of pursuing the limitless fruits of intellectual knowledge to be reaped from the Internet, we have chosen to perfect means by which to inundate us with fragments of utterance.  To be social online in the twenty-first century means to be participant of a host of networking sites that seek to reduce opinions to status updates or worse yet, tweets – conditional upon being 140 characters or fewer.   And the delightful submission from which we take these insultingly blatant restrictions upon our thought!  It evokes Hegel’s notion of the master-slave dialect in Phenomenology of Spirit but with an interestingly modern fatality.  We pour ourselves into these conglomerate collective pools of thought for recognition of self and place as individual object in relation to the whole.  We become the submissive slave in eager expectation of experiencing visceral vulnerability in our predicament.  We do not, however, realize the truly devastating properties of the master we give our identity.  The cold, anonymity of the hive-mind cares not for the dissatisfaction and incompleteness of being the master, in fact, it cares for nothing at all.  It is an empty void, from which we hand over our terms of approval.  If our society is to have any claim to Aesthetics in this epoch, certainly, it will need to first rid itself of such an insidious ‘bondsman.’    I implore any person who could read Schiller’s text and not be convinced of its literal materialization in these social networking sites to state his or her rebuttal.       

Hopefully, I have established a portrait of the present, however apocalyptic and dismal, vivid enough to imbue direness in the rarefied few who possess sway in the public form.  As I document the “civilization which inflicted [these] wound[s] upon modern man” (486), I am fearful in coming across as too pessimistic, over-zealous, deliriously emphatic.  A risk, I suppose, only to be accepted as a casualty of earnestness.  For in staunchly rejecting accessibility via mind-numbing optimism, I display the spirit of the Ideal for which I campaign.