Schiller and Company, or How Habermas Incites Us to Play

and reasonable principle, indifferent to human passions and material needs, do violence to the very humanity they would set free. Schil ler's remedy for revolution is an aesthetic education that includes both playing with existing materials and appreciating the artworks that issue from it, because play exercises our human faculties in ways that embrace antagonism and contain it. To be moved by an aesthetically pleasing effect is to acknowledge, for a moment or for as long as the experience lasts, a success in wrestling material into new forms, repairing the damage that flesh and spirit do to one another. At precarious peace in the world, an artist or an admirer?both count as active citizens for Schiller, though real fans play at being artists?achieves freedom and invites others to share and to cultivate the experience. And, since wrestling with matter and circumstance takes discipline and training, Schiller offers his series of letters as encouragement and advice to develop the Spieltrieb.