Schiller Seminar: On Aesthetic Education

I feel the need to try and discuss the three hour seminar I participated in with 16 fellow St. John's "Great Book Program" alumni.

Here is a link to the readings:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/schiller-education.html


This is going to be more of a quick and dirty post, than something of crafted eloquence.

And I plan to try and come back to this during today and tomorrow, to edit but mostly to add.

Schiller was friends with Hegel, Goethe, and I suppose other great thinkers among his contemporaries.

He starts off this collection of letters by saying that he will attempt to follow Kant's principles.

In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of these researches you should be reminded of any special school of philosophy, ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles. No; your liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon which I build will be furnished by your own sentiments; your own unfettered thought will dictate the laws according to which we have to proceed.

With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of Kant's system, philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am confident of proving, have never done so. If stripped of their technical shape, they will appear as the verdict of reason pronounced from time immemorial by common consent, and as facts of the moral instinct which nature, in her wisdom, has given to man in order to serve as guide and teacher until his enlightened intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical shape which renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art. Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognize itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox?


The above is an excerpt from the beginning of the first letter, where he mentions Kant.

I am going to try and describe briefly what I see as problems in what Schiller wrote.

1.) He stereotypes the "primitive rough barbarian" in manner that in no way matches my impression of people like the Piranha in the Brazilian rain forests, or the Australian Aborigine, or the Chukshi reindeer herders above the arctic circle.

2.) Schiller seems to expect some kind of law or principle, like Descarte's method, that will enable everyone to enjoy aesthetics in the proper fashion.
I see the nature of art, whether painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, drama, music or cinema, as constantly changing in a manner which defies some kind of heuristic formulaic method or definition.

...
One person in the seminar mentioned mysticism and the mystical, so, someone else objected "I don't understand what you mean by 'mystical'".

I felt like saying to him that I can easily cite any number of things that we would all recognize as mystical, e.g., that passage in the Gita, 'I am the sacrifice the ghee (clarified butter), the offering, and I am the priest who offers, and I am the fire who consumes." Certainly, we see this as mysticism, and we recognize it as very similar to Christ's Eucharistic "mystical supper", "Eat of this all of you, this is my body... drink of this all of you, this is my blood." And I am reminded of J.D. Salinger's "Teddy" (in Nine Short Stories), where the prodigy child, guru in a previous birth, says, "I watched my little sister drinking milk, and suddenly I saw God pouring God into God." We may not be able to define mysticism or the mystical, but we certainly know it when we see or hear it.

There was one particularly brilliant man in the seminar, from class of the late 1940s, Van Doren, who truly amazes me. But I tried to make one point, and I feel he really did my point an injustice.

I tried to argue that, in every age, there is some reclusive person, such as an Emily Dickenson, or some rebellious iconoclastic person, such as James Joyce, or Picasso, or just some self-taught unknown, like Walt Whitman, who does something in poetry or music or painting or literature, which has never been done before. And, future generations come to admire what has been done, and consider it a form of ground-breaking art, which REDEFINES previous notions of poetry or literature or painting.

I pointed out that James Joyce simply wanted to do Finnegans Wake, and didn't give a hoot whether anyone approved of it. He just wanted to do it.

Van Doren remarked that no one should WANT to do such a thing, since it is just a vast collection of anagrams and puzzles in every sentence. Well, I feel that he is missing the point. James Joyce wanted to do it, and exercised his artistic freedom to do it, and didn't really care what posterity thought (although I am sure he felt that it was something with merit.) Suppose I objected to Picasso and said, "Well, who wants a woman with three breasts. I like my women with two breasts." Well, Picasso did what he wanted to do, and now it is part of art history, and furthermore, if anyone ELSE tried to do it, they would simple be labeled as a Picasso imitator. Same thing with James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. No one else can ever attempt what Joyce did without being seen as an imitator of Joyce. Now I am told that Joyce is first to employ a stream of concsiousness in fiction. Well, that can conceivable be employed by future writers, without smacking of Joyce.

...
Here is another person who annoyed me in seminar, by missing the point.


I brought up Amy Chua who wrote 'World on Fire'. Chua observes that America had several hundred years to evolve through conditions and experiences that gradually made America capable of constitutional democracy. One cannot simply march into some alien culture, which has not had some centuries of heritage and conditioning, plop down a constitution, candidates, and voting booths, and say "today you will have free elections and hence forward be a democracy."

My point is that, as with forms of government, so with forms of art and literature, one cant simply plop down a poem or painting or symphony or piano concerto, and say, "this is good art. this is beautiful." There must be a history and tradition of conditioning.

Well, this fellow sitting next to me pipes up and says
"Well, I don't think democracy has been successful."
DAMMIT, that is not the point. The point is not whether
democracy, or Finnegans Wake, or three-breasted two faced
women, or Mahler symphonies have BEEN SUCCESSES
or FAILURES. The point is that a people becomes
prepared and conditioned for certain cultural events
through centuries or millennia of tradition and
conditioning. You cannot just dream up some quadratic
formula for art of beauty, and plop it in the midst of education, and expect that it will work for all aesthetic situations for all times to some, in all places.

Here is another thing that irritated me:

Towards the end, I pointed out that, if you offer the world something like PBS educational television, with Nova, Masterpiece Theater, Bill Moyers, etc., it will be watched by only a small minority, while the vast majority will spend endless hours watching Judge Judy type shows and Jerry Springer type shows, which are not only petty and crude, but endlessly repeat the same sordid topics over and over. So one fellow pipes up and says , "Oh, you see PBS as 'The Beautiful':" Well, no that has nothing to do with my point. My point is simply that even if Schiller or Kant or anyone else could come up with the perfect aesthetic education, and formula for truth and beauty, the majority of mankind and future generations would care less. They would choose to wallow in what is commonplace, and they would read the "New York Post", with all its corny punny headlines. They would not read The New York Times, or The Atlantic Monthly.


Here is another quote from the beginning of Shiller's first letter:

Like the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art. Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognize itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox?


...
Now, regarding that phrase "the torture of art", I brought up in seminar the point that Kierkegaard makes, about how the artist is like that bronze bull of Phaleros, which was a furnace inside, to torture prisoners, but had all sorts of intricate convoluted pipes, so that the screams of the victims were transmuted into an eerie kind of music. Kierkegaard says that the artist transforms inner sufferings and torment into beauty.

I think Kierkegaard's image or metaphor is very pertinent to the modern artist/writer, but is not emphasized by Schiller.