Estética e Política nas Cartas de Friedrich Schiller

Abstract

The purpose of our research is to analyze the combination of the elements of aesthetics and the elements that are proper to morals or politics, as this is done by Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on aesthetics, translated in Brazil, in a more recent version as: The Aesthetic education of man in a series of letters. In order to realize our intention, we will initially make an exhibition trying to show how we can recognize in the philosophical tradition the concern with this type of theme, which makes us go back to the Greeks. In this way, it is with the tragedyographers that we recognize the association of tragedy with polis, in a horizon that links art and politics as the founder of the moral formation of the Greek man, later promoting, in the Letters of Schiller, the debate about the condition of our knowledge in the field of aesthetics and morals. As we can see, when analyzing the question of compatibility or complementarity between the domains of art and moral (political), from the perspective of the author of the Letters, proposing that the reciprocity between the two impulses - the sensitive and the rational, is unified in the man. We will notice that this possibility is what makes Schiller propose the primacy of aesthetic education for a moral formation with a view to the most natural politics, or without leaps, of humanity. According to Schiller, it is up to aesthetic culture to promote the ennoblement of character, since the attempts of reason alone do not present such satisfactory results for modern man. What causes the formation of the aesthetic state, through which we can find the idea of perfect humanity - as it was once present among the Greeks. In such a way, the educated man, aesthetically, manages to overcome the condition of his nature, by the demand of reason, but without completely losing sight of it, since it only gives way to the moral law, as a kind of game between these two domains. Beauty as freedom in the phenomenon is what sustains and shows that morality is a symbol of good - according to nature - freedom. It is in this sense that the Schiller Letters are founded on the idea that beauty seeks to promote the agreement between reason and the sensitive, unified in man, and makes them a complete being, like their mixed nature. Thus, Schiller establishes a moral education for man initiated by the freedom of art, hence serving the political purpose.