*

        According to Schiller, the rise of civilization fragmented the individual. At the time of the Greeks, sense and intellect had not yet split into separate--and opposing--domains. With the moderns, "the human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals--but as fragments." Schiller blames this fragmentation on "the increase of empirical knowledge, and the more exact modes of thought, [which] made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and . . . necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations."
        Schiller postulates that we are impelled by two opposing forces: 1) the sensuous drive (Stofftrieb); 2) the formal drive (Formtrieb). The sensuous drive "proceeds from the physical existence of man." Essentially it is characterized by change: "this drive demands that there shall be change, that time shall have a content." This is the drive that keeps man tied to phenomenal existence: "Man in this state is nothing but a unit of quantity, an occupied moment of time--or rather, he is not at all, for his personality is suspended as long as he is ruled by sensation, and swept along by the flux of time."
        The formal drive "proceeds from the absolute existence of man." This is the force of unity in the self. It is "that drive which insists on affirming the personality," and its quest is for "the abstract, eternal, and absolute." This drive "gives laws--laws for every judgement, where it is a question of knowledge, laws for every will, where it is a question of action."
        These drives are united and transcended in the play drive (Spieltrieb). This drive is "directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity."
        Man is only fully human when he plays, and he plays with beauty: "the agreeable, the good, the perfect, with these man is merely in earnest; but with beauty he plays." The aesthetic state--as with Kant--is separate from issues of sensual pleasure or intellectual morality. beauty "accomplishes no particular purpose, neither intellectual nor moral." The aesthetic does, however, possess great power: it heals--at least temporarily--those who have lost their "humanity . . . with every determinate condition [they] . . . enter" by restoring their humanity--helping them transcend their externally determined condition-- "through the life of the aesthetic."
        No "purely aesthetic effect" is ever found, but a work of art can be "a high approximation" of the "ideal of aesthetic purity." The closer the various art forms come to this ideal, the more they resemble one another in their effect on the human psyche. In truly successful art, the contents--no matter how noble--are not the point: the form is that from which "true aesthetic freedom can be looked for."
        Schiller takes a nice swipe (200 years early) at late-20th-century critics who judge the whole by parts; this is:
        "evidence of a lack of form in him who judges [the art object]. If he is . . . used to apprehending either exclusively with the intellect or exclusively with the senses, he will, even in the case of the most successfully realized whole, attend only to the parts, and in the presence of the most beauteous form respond only to the matter. Receptive only to the raw material, he has first to destroy the aesthetic organization of a work before he can take pleasure in it, and laboriously scratch away until he has uncovered all those individual details which the master, with infinite skill, had caused to disappear in the harmony of the whole. The interest he takes in it is quite simply either a moral or a material interest; but what precisely it ought to be, namely aesthetic, that it certainly is not."
        Aesthetic contemplation in the realm of the play-drive prepares man to "assert his independence in the face of nature as phenomenon." This echoes the effect of the Kantian dynamic sublime which helps us to become "conscious that we are superior to nature."