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aesthetic sphere is based on the autonomy of human subjectivity itself.
This is particularly emphasized in Schiller s account of an aesthetic
education. For Schiller, because aesthetic works are expressions of hu-
man subjectivity, they provide a medium, a place of contemplation,
the aesthetic sphere, through which all human beings can seek the
freedom that art embodies and achieves through its reconciliations of
objective and subjective, and universal and particular. In this sense,
the aesthetic sphere itself stands as a symbol of the reconciliation that
could or should also obtain in the everyday world. In contrast to
Adorno s aesthetic theory, for Schiller, the aesthetic sphere is thus
essentially and inseparably connected to the human world through the
element of human subjectivity.
But Schiller does stress the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere from the
demands of the mundane world. This is another way in which the
aesthetic sphere re ects the logic of the symbol. As we saw, the symbol
can only be representative (stand for) if it is also autonomous (stands
apart) to some degree. In the same way, the aesthetic sphere is only able
to function as a symbol of the reconciliation of subject and object for the
mundane world as long as the aesthetic sphere retains some degree of
separation from the mundane world.
Among the theorists of aesthetic statism, this logic of being both
crucially guiding and also somewhat removed is particularly expressed
in Arnold s account of the relationship between culture and society.
Against his critics who condemn the value of culture by questioning its
immediate impact on the pressing political issues of the day, Arnold
turns the issue on its head. Culture is to be valued precisely because it is
removed from the world of immediate decision making. Because culture
is outside of the immediate causal nexus of the world, it allows for the
cultivation of a perspective that can be more complete than one formed
for the sake of a particular pragmatic purpose. This more complete
perspective will in time in uence the very categories of the everyday
world.
This logic is taken to its most extreme degree in Adorno, for whom
Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
the philosophical and political value of the aesthetic work resides in its
objective otherness. For Adorno, this objective otherness allows the
artwork to escape from the totalizing web of reason of the administered
world. But as Wellmer s critique points up and as I will discuss in the
nal chapter, it also creates the problem of how such radically auton-
omous works can be a means of guidance to the mass of humanity
caught in the web of totalizing reason.
Schiller s aesthetic state
As I have noted, many critics have cast the shadow of twentieth-century
German National Socialism back into the previous centuries when they
have assessed German political philosophy. This is particularly true of
Schiller, whose idea of the aesthetic state has been charged with laying
the groundwork for twentieth-century German fascism either directly,
by presenting a totalizing political ideology under the guise of the
aesthetic, or indirectly, by promoting an escapist aesthetic ideology of
politics among German intellectuals that thus blinded them to the signs
of danger in the world of Realpolitik. A version of this rst kind of
criticism is evident in Paul de Man s essay Aesthetic Formalization:
Kleist s Über das Marionettentheater, in which de Man criticizes Schiller
for promoting an ideology of the aesthetic behind which hides a
principle of formalization rigorous enough to produce its own codes and
systems of inscription which functions as a restrictive coercion that
allows only for the reproduction of its own system, at the exclusion of all
others. To the familiar shadow of Nazi totalitarianism, de Man thus
adds the specter of linguistic totalization. But he does not discuss the
speci cs of Schiller s project in the Aesthetic Letters in this essay, and,
furthermore, the terms by which de Man de nes the danger of Schiller s
work are general enough to indite any attempt at systematic philosophy.
De Man discusses Schiller more directly and extensively in the tran-
scribed lecture Kant and Schiller, in which he charges Schiller with
having psychologized and thus having distorted the philosophical pro-
ject of Kant. The bulk of the lecture remains at a very abstract level of
theoretical critique, but de Man does brie y argue that the Aesthetic
Letters are the origin of cultural nationalism because it is the basis of
concepts such as culture, and the thought that it is possible to move
from individual works of art to a collective, massive notion of art, which
Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
would be, for example, one of national characteristics, and which would
be the culture of a nation, of a general, social dimension called cul-
tural (Aesthetic Ideology, ). But, once again, de Man does not substan-
tiate this argument by referring to the speci cs of the Aesthetic Letters. He
concludes the lecture with a passage from Joseph Goebbels that com-
pares the statesman to an artist who forms his people as a work of art.
While admitting that the Goebbels quote is a grievous misreading of
Schiller s aesthetic state, de Man goes on to add that the principle of
this misreading does not essentially di er from the misreading which
Schiller in icted on his own predecessor namely, Kant ( ). In
contrast to this view, in this chapter I will indicate the very ways in
which Schiller carried on the central goals of Kant s liberalism. But
beyond the inaccuracy of de Man s point, I must also censure the
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