Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man - Softcover

In his own time a significant dramatist and poet, a friend and correspondent of his contemporary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Frederich Schiller (1759—1805) is celebrated today primarily as a philosopher. Indeed, he did not organize and finish the Letters for publication until the last decade of his life. The spark for that burst of activity was the failure of the French Revolution to bring freedom and peace after the successful revolution in America. His choice of the term AESTHETICS, rather than PHILOSOPHY was based on his belief that an appreciation for and understanding of the nature of beauty was essential to the philosophical mind. These LETTERS ONĘSTHETIC CULTURE, without the aid of anything which the most sceptical could designate as superstition, trace out and attempt to sanction for us a system of morality, in which the sublimest feelings of the Stoic and the Christian are represented but as stages in our progress to the pinnacle of true human grandeur; and man, isolated on this fragment of the universe, encompassed with the boundless desolate Unknown, at war with Fate, without help or the hope of help, is confidently called upon to rise into a calm cloudless height of internal activity and peace, and be, what he has fondly named himself, the god of this lower world. When such are the results, who would not make an effort for the steps by which they are attained? — THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER, by Thomas Carlyle