In an earlier post I mentioned that I was reading Byung-Chul Han’s The disappearance of rituals. In that collection of essays he mentioned Freidrich Schiller’s writings. In fact, I do not recall what of his writing he mentioned. Suffice it to say that however he made mention of his writings compelled me to acquire Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. This is the Schiller who wrote the “Ode to Joy” as made famous in Beethoven’s 9th symphony finale. Another motivation includes my general interest in reading essays by poets. One excellent example is Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude (this one also overlaps with another interest in non-factual/narrative histories — basically the best of all worlds). Poets offer Truths. I’m not able to penetrate poems. Essays are not impenetrable.

So I decided to struggle through this 200-year-old collection of letters about how Art can save the world. By the poet who wrote the Ode to Joy. It’s not easy. And today, at lunch, I had finally arrived at the 9th letter, in which the poet finally gets to his thesis.

Having earlier noted that the “artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion”, addressing himself to a “young friend of truth and beauty”, Schiller momentously wrote:

Guide the world upon which you act towards the good, and the calm rhythm of time will bring about its fulfilment. You have given the world such guidance if your teaching raises its thoughts to the necessary and the eternal; if by action or example, you transform the necessary and eternal into an object of its impulses. The edifice of delusion and capriciousness will fall, it has to fall, it has already fallen as soon as you are certain that it is tending towards this; but this tendency must be within man’s inner self, and not merely in his external appearance. Raise up victorious truth in the modest calm of your soul, project it in beauty so that not only thought pays homage to it, but sense might lovingly grasp its appearance. And so that you might not find yourself receiving from reality the model that you should be lending it, do not consort with its dubious company until you are assured that your heart is at one with the ideal. Live with your century, but do not be its creature; serve your contemporaries, but give them what they need, not what they praise. Without having shared their guilt, share with them with noble resignation their punishments, and bend freely under the yoke that they can hardly carry, but can hardly do without. Through the steadfast courage with which you spurn their fortune you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you take on their suffering. Think them how they should be when called upon to influence them, but think what they are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek their applause from their honour, but calculate their happiness according to their unworthiness; your own nobility will awake their own, and here their unworthiness will not ruin your purpose. The gravity of your principles will scare them off, but they will be able to bear them in play; their taste is purer than their heart, and here you have to grasp the timid fugitive. Their principles you will attack in vain, their acts condemn to no effect; but you can try your creative hand on their leisure. Chase from their pleasures all caprice, frivolity and coarseness; so will you imperceptibly banish them from their actions, and finally from their convictions. Wherever you find them, surround them with refined, great, inspirational forms, encircle them with symbols of excellence, until appearance conquers reality, and art nature.

Postscript

I do believe Oscar Wilde may have been proud:

Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

  • Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying