In memory of Ezra Heymann and Yolanda Steffens, who taught me to walk through the spires of the labyrinth, from Kant to Hegel.
“The beautiful is the symbol of morality.”- I. Kant.
“For it is through beauty that one arrives at freedom.”- F. Schiller.
Schiller says, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, that “the charm of beauty lies in its mystery” and that, precisely for that reason, art is “the best part of our happiness”, because “it touches closely the moral nobility of the human condition”. Mystery to which, by the way, should not be interpreted as the prized object of a sect of occult magicians, as if it were the secret arcanum of a few “chosen ones”, enigmatic and unintelligible but, rather, in the classical sense of the μυστήριον, a word derived from μύστης or “initiated” and which designates the ceremonies - or customs - proper to the popular Greco-Roman republican religion, celebrated by virtue -vir- of the homeland, for to it, to the spirit of the people, they dedicated their lives entirely, without demanding any indemnity or individual benefit. A mystery is, then, he who works for an idea, for duty, without demanding anything in return, and only hopes to be able to live in the company of his gods and heroes in the Elysian Fields. This is the “mystery” to which Schiller refers in his essay on Äesthetische Erziehung.
Even more interesting is the inseparable relationship that the great German thinker establishes between ethics and aesthetics, following to a certain extent the Kantian critique of judgment. Indeed, for Kant the sine qua non of both ethical judgment and aesthetic judgment is freedom. But, what in Kant is an analogy of two distinct dimensions, in Schiller is transformed into the movement that makes possible the adequacy of an authentic “operative aesthetics” or of an “ethics of realization.” In him, ethics ceases to be the desideratum of the moral law to descend on the firm ground of the aesthetic fact, of the sensible, by virtue of free will, with which ethics and aesthetics come to transcend the rigid limits of abstract understanding, meticulously traced by Kant, to become human sensitive activity or, in the words of Benedetto Croce, “feat of freedom”. Good and Beauty are no longer mere abstract representations or simple exercises in scholastic rhetoric, but nothing less than the historical-concrete realization of a materially and spiritually free society. For Schiller, the most perfect, the most beautiful work of art that humanity can achieve is the conquest of “true political freedom”. So that “to solve the political problem in practice, it is necessary to take the path of the aesthetic, because freedom is reached through beauty”.
Even being part of nature, what distinguishes the human being from the rest of the natural entities, consists in his capacity to be able to decide voluntarily, of course, within certain and determined objective conditions. The human will is potentially a creation that cannot remain subjected to the state imposed by nature, because “it possesses the capacity to retrace, by means of reason, the steps that nature anticipated, to transform the work of iron constraint into the work of its free will and to turn physical necessity into moral necessity”. For this very reason, and as Schiller says, being art “the child of freedom”, it receives its laws “not from the impositions of matter but from the needs of the spirit”. In fact, sustained by spiritual needs, it has ended up being the great designer of human history, that “second nature”. At least it was until abstract understanding and mechanicism, proper to a merely instrumental rationality, decided to impose its absolute predominance over the spirit of society, impoverishing it, every time it made of “second nature” a “natural state”, thus bringing it back, with its “laws”, traced from “the book of nature”, the blind forces of that insufferable traffic circle of “nothing new under the sun”, transforming the free creative will into strict techné and thus provoking the latent threat of returned barbarism, which continually stalks civil life. Imperfect, Schiller warns, is a political constitution that “only by suppressing multiplicity does it succeed in establishing unity”.
It is not possible to go backwards, throwing overboard the technological and scientific development that has undoubtedly left, in the footsteps of its audacity, the work of reflective, abstract understanding. No one can fail to recognize the triumph of analysis, of scientific knowledge, of modern experimentation and specialization, all of which have their conceptual foundations, substantially, in Kant's thought. But Hegel was somewhat right to characterize him as the “Genghis Khan” of philosophy. By disregarding aesthetic education, by instrumentalizing it and concentrating exclusively on instruction in order to mass-produce technicians and specialists suitable for mass production, modern society - the legitimate heir of “transcendental analytics” - created an environment in which, on the one hand, morality became a bunch of unattainable “good principles”, reflected in “self-help” manuals and, in reality, alien to the dismembered social fabric; on the other, society, split in itself and turned into a gigantic assembly line - a clockwork mechanism, says Schiller - hides in its entrails - behind the monstrous mechanism - its most primitive, most violent and savage instincts: “the dead letter takes the place of the living intelligence, and an exercised memory is a more valuable guide than genius and sensibility.”.
Thus, “the abstract thinker is often cold-hearted, and the professional is often narrow-hearted, because his imagination, confined in the uniform circle of the specialty, cannot extend to other representative forms. When in man the particular faculties are isolated and arrogate to themselves the right to legislate for themselves, they fall into contradiction with the truth of things and force the instinct of profit, which with indolent frugality used to rest in external appearance, to penetrate into the depths of objects. The pure understanding usurps authority over the sensible world; the empirical understanding is concerned with subjecting the former to the conditions of experience”.
There is a need to amend the understanding once again, as Spinoza and, later, Hegel demanded at the time. The so-called “conflict of the faculties” has reached paroxysm. For this very reason, and on the foundations of a new Enmendatio, it is necessary to reconstruct the entire educational system, so that the urgent need for aesthetic education is recognized as never before, for the good of all humanity.
José Rafael Herrera
University Professor
