For about six weeks or more I slowly pushed through Friedrich Schiller's On The Aesthetic Education Of Man.
It took me quite a while because it is a challenging book. I found it very difficult. His writing style is not clear. His terminology is not consistent. And his organization is not apparent.
So, no, I don't understand it! Sometimes you read stuff slowly and you still don't read it so well.
Something about beauty as a emergent property or composite factor.
Something about the play impulse as the proper way to mediate between man's sensuous and rational sides.
Something about three distinct phases through which both man and society must pass if they are to be free.
Something about the appreciation of beauty as the prerequisite to freedom.
Who knows.
I gotta skim him at some point and see what else I can learn from him.
He struck me as remarkably similar to Clausewitz, which is excellent, because Clausewitz probably read him.
Means I'm not crazy in the connections I'm making.
And it turns out that Peter Paret, who some have called Clausewitz's leading biographer, claims that the relationship between Schiller and Clausewitz deserves more attention.
I'll try to figure it out.
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