irony and singularity, ashgate, 2005. chapter 2. aesthetic education or aesthetic ideology? schiller...

Chapter 2

Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology? Schiller and de Man

In spite of the question mark placed above aesthetic education by Kant’s account of judgement, production and reception, the aestheticization of education, famously returns in the post-Kantian world in a ‘series of letters’ by Friedrich Schiller proposing a radical reconfiguration of both subjectivity and objectivity based upon a particular reading of the Critique of Judgement. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of Schiller’s humanist project on 19th and 20th Century thought, just as it would be futile to deny his spectacular fall from grace with the increasing ascendancy of antihumanism in all its late 20th and early 21st Century variants. One way of tracing this decline would be through a reading of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization followed by Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. And yet in the latter, in an essay entitled Kant and Schiller, after a comprehensive deconstruction of Schillerian aesthetics, de Man makes the following quite extraordinary statement.

Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller and not from Kant. And if you ever try to do something in the other direction and you touch on it you’ll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure, wherever you are, that your tenure is very well established, and that the institution for which you work has a very well-established reputation. Then you can take some risks without really taking many risks. 1

What is, perhaps, even more extraordinary than the statement itself is the fact that, during the published ‘discussion’ that immediately follows this lecture, the gathered academics (whether content Schillerians or well-established tenure-track faculty) utterly fail to take up the pedagogical challenge thrust, quite brutally, in their faces by de Man. Indeed, it is both laughable and depressing to witness here the spectacle of a highly sophisticated philosophical and exegetical debate being conducted seemingly oblivious to the insult at the very heart of the paper under discussion. What is more, it is a double insult, one directed at those on both sides of the intellectual divide marked out throughout the essay.

1 de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 142.

18 Irony and Singularity

On the side of Schiller (the majority), are to be found, according to de Man, those who retreat from the ‘critical incisiveness’2 of Kant’s account of the aesthetic. His own terminology is strong and direct, Schillerian thought constitutes a ‘regression’, an attempt (obviously very successful) to ‘domesticate’ the threatening ‘occurrence’ of Kantian aesthetics in the name of a ‘unifying category’ and exemplary model of education and the state that represents a betrayal of Kant, all the worse for being in his name. At its climax, de Man’s lecture is downright abusive, accusing Schiller and, by implication, the assembled epigoni, of ‘a total lack, an amazing, naïve, childish lack of transcendental concern…an amazing lack of philosophical concern.’3 The fact that the ensuing discussion did not react to this accusation speaks volumes on the current state of aesthetic education. On the side of Kant (the minority), are to be found those who are well enough ‘embedded’ (to use the current political terminology) in the educational establishment to be able to play at taking risks without really taking any at all, an engaging piece of self-irony on de Man’s part. What exactly these risks are, however, (whether real or merely academic) is not made clear by de Man who, while signalling this ‘other direction’, is himself content to dramatize this unknown ‘it’ waiting to happen as little more than a threatening absence within the all-too-familiar forum of academic exchange. Indeed, it is precisely here, in the hegemonic dialogism of the university, that we witness the absence of this absence in the blithe reception of de Man’s provocative and insulting remarks. In a gesture that reverses Marcuse, the pedagogical challenge posed by de Man requires the de-realization, rather than the realization of Schiller’s utopian vision of aesthetic education. Instead of inscribing the aesthetic within the chiasmic, tropological thinking that dominates, indeed, constitutes educational discourse, thus repeating Schiller’s own ‘reinscription’4 of Kant after the latter had ‘interrupted, disrupted, disarticulated’ that same project, the ‘other’ pedagogical direction would represent a de-inscription, an erasure, that would seek to wipe clean the atemporal, ahistorical space between the ‘event’ of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and now. To reiterate: for de Man, as already seen in the previous chapter, nothing has happened since Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Schillerian regression and domestication are not aesthetic events, a fact that effectively denies Kantian aesthetics a history. Instead of a history there is only the ‘reception’ of Kantian aesthetics, understood by de Man as a recurring ‘relapse’ of the performativity of the third Critique back into the tropological system, one finding its perfect articulation in the triadic structure of Schillerian aesthetic education. To the extent that tropological systems, into which the aesthetic endlessly collapses, are ‘masterable’,5 they are able to ground a history of aesthetic education promoting a teaching capable of, indeed intent upon, holding still the disruptive

2 Ibid., p.130.3 Ibid., p.141.4 Ibid., p.134.5 Ibid., p.144.

Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology? 19

movement of the aesthetic itself. In de Man’s view this amounts to a removal of the philosophical from aesthetics for the sake of the ‘masses’ and the state.

Philosophy isn’t taught in an aesthetic education, Kant is not taught. Schiller would be taught, because it is a popularization…of philosophy. As such the aesthetic belongs to the masses. It belongs…to culture, and as such, it belongs to the state…and it justifies the state.6

To go in the ‘other direction’, towards a genuinely philosophical aesthetics, to take that ‘risk’ is de Man’s challenge not only to those present at his lecture but to all who sense the need for another pedagogy outside the domesticity of state education. Here we ‘touch on’ what needs to be touched if that which is waiting to happen (to us) has any chance of happening. But what should be done? And what will happen?

What Should be Done? What Happens?

One certainty is that there are no certainties here; but, having said that, there is something to be gained from using de Man’s language as an initial guide, especially as his terminology is careful to avoid any suggestion that the aesthetic might be taken possession of, grasped or held firm. Instead, and to reiterate, he speaks of ‘touching on’ something, something that has always already happened, and which, outside of its reception, continues to happen, incessantly and irreversibly. This happening, this ‘occurrence’, this ‘event’ of the aesthetic, while linked here to the performative as opposed to the tropological is, as he correctly recognizes, not in opposition to anything at all. It is, rather, a certain transition from one regime to another, an infinite movement that always retains an irreducible difference (and distance) from the polarity that configures but nevertheless fails to overdetermine it. As de Man argues emphatically during his ‘discussion’ of Kant and Schiller, this transition is dialectical, an infinite motion that disturbs and ultimately sacrifices its own tranquillity to the ‘labour of the negative.’7 To touch on this dialectic, one that in its infinition is quite different to Hegel’s, is to touch upon something risky indeed, but what does it mean to touch upon this? Again, it might prove instructive to use de Man’s own actions as a guide given that, thanks no doubt to his considerable eminence as a scholar, and the consequent security of his employment arrangements, he is in an excellent position to take the (risk-free) ‘risks’ he speaks of. What does he do? On the face of it, he offers yet one more reading of Kant’s aesthetics. It is undeniably a masterful account, offering some brilliant and fascinating insights into the disruptive complexity of Kant’s thinking-through of the aesthetic, but it is, ultimately, just another reading delivered in lecture form, from notes, to his peers and students within the (Schillerian) State university

6 Ibid., p. 154.7 Ibid., p. 157.


system. Clearly, de Man touches on something in Kant, something important, but what happens? What exactly is being ‘risked’ here? Is anything being disrupted or has de Man’s own polarization of the Kantian and the Schillerian resulted in himself ‘relapsing’ into the very tropological system he is seeking to think outside of? There does not appear to be any location for de Man’s own much-celebrated mastery outside of the ‘masterable’ tropological systems he continues to inhabit. Witness also how comfortable his respondents are and how willingly they enter into the reassuring forms of debate, forms in place to allow a collective exhibition of mastery or counter-mastery in spite of, to return to the beginning, the insult that remains unaddressed, and is, perhaps, unadressable within this particular forum. In short, nothing has happened, nothing has continued to happen and will continue not to happen until a way is found to address the real critical challenge of Kant’s particular dialectic. A fist-fight would have been better, a knock-down bloody brawl spilling out into the street beyond the university boundaries, disrupting and disturbing the orderly procession of the non-academics outside with the ugly (but sublime) spectacle of pure intellectual violence. Instead we are left with a ‘discussion’, one that leaves everything as it is. So what should have happened when de Man confronted his audience with their ‘amazing philosophical naivety’? Or, at the very least, what could happen to so jeopardize the tenure of those courageous enough to touch on this other direction? Amongst all these uncertainties one thing is certain, the risk de Man speaks of is a professional rather than a philosophical or theoretical risk. It is about having and keeping a job rather than doing one, security of employment is the crucial issue here. Losing one’s job is what could happen. Considering this for a moment, it is clear that the ‘return to Kant’ suggested by de Man is not in fact likely to bring the institution down on the heads of those courageous enough to step outside of their Schillerian domesticity (if that were the case the current book would be out of the question!). Such a ‘return’ has, if anything, proved to be something of a hallmark of much contemporary thought becoming, as a consequence, a mainstay of university education, invigorating rather than jeopardizing current pedagogy. But it is precisely here that the problem lies, the ‘risk’. It is de Man’s problem, but it is also Kant’s problem, one that we all, as teachers, inherit but leave unaddressed. It is the problem of this book, not because it demands a different mode of teaching, a disruption, a dislocation, and a consequent re-evaluation, but because it denies teaching, it renders teaching, to quote Blanchot, ‘truly impracticable’:8 that is the risk: redundancy. The ‘return to Kant’ returns us not only to the interruption of the aesthetic but, in a more concrete way, it returns us to a critical interruption of aesthetic education, one that has already been witnessed in the last chapter within the analytic of the beautiful and which is implicit throughout de Man’s sustained engagement with the Kantian sublime. Indeed, to go further still, the Critique of Judgement, as de Man is keen to demonstrate, can in no way be seen

8 Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 6.


unproblematically as the unification of the first two Critiques, on the contrary, its critical power is dis-integrative rather than integrative, it is, as has been emphasized thus far, a work of dis-location, one that removes the aesthetic from the false sites that would claim it: the object, the ‘mind’, self/other, reception/production. In so doing it threatens rather than ‘completes’ the whole structure of the critical philosophy by opening up an ‘aesthetic dimension’ that is emphatically not a utopian liberatory space, as Herbert Marcuse would have it (one that does promise a certain aesthetico-political resolution) but is, rather, a ‘territory’ of infinite transition that is neither autonomous (claimed by Kantians and Marcuse) nor heteronomous, (claimed by non/anti-Kantians) but the necessary movement between these terms, a movement that is incessant, irresolvable and infinite. The possibility of aesthetic education will itself, then, depend upon either the success with which it can resist the above dis-integration or initiate its own pedagogical rhythm capable of incessantly moving out beyond its own measure, a form of discontinuous self-overflowing to be considered below. As is well known, the first two Critiques are concerned with drawing boundaries, identifying horizons and imposing limits on the epistemological and ethical domains. Demarcation is the central thrust of this, still the most familiar, version of Kant. The third Critique is, however, rather different. While it is true that Kant is rigorous in his delimitation of aesthetic judgement throughout the aesthetic part of the overall text, it is clear, nevertheless, that this is a peculiar kind of delimitation, one that fastidiously marks out a terrain that is doubly (beautifully and sublimely) unable to contain its contents in the face of what Levinas would call infinity:

The relation with infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. Its very infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing.9

The self-overflowing of Kant’s aesthetics, what might be called the infinition of the Critique of Judgement, where thinking consistently out-thinks itself, is identified by de Man as a form of critical ‘motion’ that perpetually disrupts the dubious stability of ideological systems, ‘…a motion whose cause resides…within itself, within the substance of its own being’.10 The essence of transcendental thinking, this movement, within the specific context of an aesthetic realm housing judgements without external legitimating concepts, is driven by the motor of reflection itself (‘reflective judgements’) with a purposeless purpose analogous to the artwork’s own end-less structure. Such reflective movement, as de Man observes, quickly ‘saturates’ the tropological field leaving a ‘residue’ or excess that resists (and thus demands) the ideological re-inscription of Schillerian aesthetic education. In his account this can be most clearly seen in Kant’s ‘unaccountable’ transition from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime:

9 Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infiinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, p. 25.10 de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 72.


…the relationship between them, between the mathematical and the dynamic, is a discontinuity. It is not a dialectic, it is not a progression or a regression, but it is a transformation of trope into power, which is not itself a tropological movement, and which cannot be accounted for by means of a tropological model. You cannot account for the change from trope into performative, you cannot account for the change from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime in Kant…11

The inability to account for the transition to the dynamic sublime, or, indeed, the dynamism of the transition itself, signals a pedagogical limit that has to be seriously addressed if aesthetic education is to continue to account for the aesthetic. As de Man demonstrates, more or less conclusively, Schiller’s re-inscription of the discontinuous duality of the Kantian sublime into the pragmatics of fear and tranquillity, while pedagogically efficacious, actually, and ultimately, produces an absolute idealism incapable of sustaining an aesthetic education of any substance. The same can be said for Schiller’s pragmatics of humanism which, in the Aesthetic Education of Man, at a crucial moment, allows (or compels) him to introduce the concept of ‘humanity’ as a modality of ‘closure’ in the face of the disturbing ontological openness of his own psychological model of the drives, struggling, as it is, with sense and form understood as absolute, undialectical difference. Observing this, de Man is able to augment further the critical sub-plot or counter-theme that has been identified in his remarks to the gathered academics. He writes:

Humanity, which then has to be itself the composite of those drives, is then equated with a balanced relationship between necessity and freedom, which Schiller calls free play, and which then becomes the determining principle of the human…hence the need, which follows, for a free and humanistic…education, which is called an aesthetic education, and which is still the basis of our liberal system of humanistic education.12

He says ‘our’ but he means ‘your’ system of education, you, the gathered Schillerians responsible for closing down the aesthetic in the name of a transcendent ideal of the human illegitimately suspended above and out of reach of the critical force of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic. At stake here is the status of the dialectic within Kant and Schiller and, as a consequence, the question of the hegemony (or not) of dialectical pedagogy within aesthetic education.

Schiller: Dialectical or Chiasmic?

As already mentioned, the issue of the dialectic is immediately raised in the ‘discussion’ of ‘Kant and Schiller’ when M. H. Abrams objects to de Man’s reading of Schiller as an utterly non-dialectical thinker; this is a curious exchange for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is noteworthy, and perhaps surprising that de Man’s turn (or return) to Kant is not driven by an appetite for deconstruction (in

11 Ibid., p. 137.12 Ibid., p. 150.


spite of his close links to Derrida) but by a desire to ‘touch upon’ a certain dialectic. Not, to be sure, the triadic dialectic of Hegel, which, as he rightly observes, is weak in Kant, but, rather, the open and infinite negativity of transcendental thought itself, something closer, perhaps, to Adorno’s ‘negative dialectic’ or ‘logic of disintegration’ encapsulated in the following:

…such dialectics is no longer reconcilable with Hegel. Its motion does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead, it is suspicious of all identity. Its logic is one of disintegration: of a disintegration of the prepared and objectified form of the concepts which the cognitive subject faces, primarily and directly.13

It is clearly the manner in which it risks disintegrating the whole ‘critical’ Kantian edifice that attracts de Man to the Critique of Judgement and which draws him repeatedly in his later writings to the ‘analytic of the sublime’ therein. However, the ‘labour of the negative’ identified by de Man as working through the third Critique, while having considerable deconstructive force, differs from deconstruction precisely because of its negativity. As Derrida never tires of saying, deconstruction is affirmative, deconstruction says ‘yes’, thus transforming contradiction into contradistinction, dialectics into difference/différance. Given the important presence of Nietzsche’s affirmative thought within his own, as well as his well-known proximity to Derrida, it is somewhat surprising to discover such a powerful presence of negation in de Man’s reading of Kant and Schiller, a presence, he claims, not to be found in Schiller and thus, by implication, not to be found in the thought and the pedagogical practice of those around him at the time of speaking. Aesthetic education, then, hegemonic education (if de Man is to be believed) is non-dialectical; on the contrary––dialectics again!––it is, a static binarity that illegitimately imports spurious notions of the human, humanity and humanism as a way of short-circuiting rather than dialectically working through the aporias of Kant’s disintegrative and dislocating aesthetics: such is the claim. It is a claim that is immediately invalidated by the ensuing ‘discussion’ which is more or less dialectical from beginning to end, commencing with Abrams’ attempt to negate de Man’s attempt to negate the familiar dialectical reading of Schiller from Hegel to Marcuse. There is a complex confusion here that needs to be disentangled. To begin with, de Man, although persuasively chronicling the retreat and closure of education in the face of disruption, dislocation and disintegration, incorrectly equates this with a retreat from dialectics and the labour of negation. Even the most cursory glance at virtually any academic text or any academic journal will confirm that the spirit of negation continues to dominate research culture and, thus, the state education system that supports, sustains and, indeed, demands it. Above and beyond all subject specifics, to be educated is to be trained in the art of critique, critical analysis, critical reading, of ‘falsification’, contradiction and counter-claim: the art

13 Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: The Seabury Press, 1973, p. 144.


of negation. Far from disrupting or dislocating education, such a dialectic, as any academic conference will confirm, is the very life-blood not only of research culture but of teaching and learning strategies throughout state education where, as will be shown in more detail below, the negative force of the question always takes precedence over the affirmative certitude of the answer. This, of course, is a different dialectic to the one considered by de Man, it is a dialectic locked into the quest for ‘recognition’ and (same thing) identity, where the powers of negation are the yardstick of mastery, and mastery is achieved at the expense of the other and Otherness (that which cannot be mastered). It is a dialectic that, in spite of the surface annihilation and the agonistic spectacle so alluring for the scholar, digests all of this negativity as sustenance for an unspoken but assumed totality, the absolute body of the state and the teaching body subsumed within it. While it is undeniable that this dialectic is closer to Hegel than to Kant, it is a dialectic nonetheless and one driven by the negative. In his Schillerization of education de Man misses it, a curious oversight, and yet something he shares with his peers who, while willing to argue about dialectics, are less willing (or able) to reflect on the dialectical negativity of their own thought and subsequent practice. This collective repression of the dialectic is significant because it can be seen to be responsible for hindering or, indeed, blocking the emergence of a different discussion, one concerned not with pitting dialectics against non-dialectics but, rather, reflecting upon a crucial differential within dialectics itself. Before turning to this, a word on Schiller. As already discussed, Abrams is quick to defend Schiller’s dialectical credentials in the face of de Man’s tropological reading. Cognisant of Hegel’s own admiration for Schiller he comments:

…when you look at the aspect of movement, constant motion—nothing stands still—I don’t find that in Fichte…Well, I find that motion in Schiller. So when they emphasize the mobility of the Hegelian system…There I think the Aesthetic Letters are closer than either of the others [Kant and Fichte].14

The question is whether this ‘movement’ is dialectical or not. Paul de Man claims that it is not, it is, rather, ‘chiasmic’, a dialectically unproductive ‘reversibility’ locked into an oscillatory rhythm of crossing and re-crossing the space and times of absolute difference. This latter temporal point is particularly powerful; he writes:

The sensory drive, which is the giving in to an immediate appeal of the moment, therefore has the singularity of the moment that excludes everything else from it; whereas the desire for form, the drive for form, which aspires to a generality or to an absolute, to a law, has a temporal structure which wants to encompass as large an area as possible…Therefore those two drives would appear to be totally incompatible.15

14 de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 158-9.15 Ibid., pp. 147-8.


Total incompatibility and dialectics do not go together, so in this instance Abrams is wrong; but, as will be argued below, he is not completely wrong, his mistake is his location of the dialectic within Schiller’s aesthetics and his failure to distinguish between two different dialectics, one inoperative, as de Man rightly claims, but the other operative, albeit within the political domain that (very significantly) is left unaddressed throughout; this will also be returned to, but to remain within the parameters of the current debate for the moment, it is Schiller himself who offers the clearest confirmation of de Man’s reading as, of course, he should:

…it seems to follow that there must be a state midway between matter and form, passivity and activity, and that it is into this middle state that beauty transports us….But, on the other hand, nothing is more absurd and contradictory than such an idea, since the distance between matter and form, passivity and activity, feeling and thought, is infinite, and there exists nothing that can conceivably mediate between them.16

So, Paul de Man is right, but he is not completely right for the same reason; that is to say, like Abrams, he considers Schiller’s aesthetics locally rather than globally, textually rather than inter-textually, literally rather than politically. What is more, both Abrams and de Man are wrong about Kant, but they are wrong in different ways, the former in denying the dialectical in Kant altogether, the latter in misunderstanding the third Critique as the ‘labour of the negative’ rather than the affirmation of affirmation as will be described below. To attempt such a reading of Kant demands the conception of a positive rather a negative dialectics, that is to say, a positivity wedded to affirmation rather than to positivism as in Marcuse’s account in Reason and Revolution.

Affirmative Dialectics

Kant’s dialectic has already been described as disintegrative, as a reflective movement that infinitely overflows itself, thus shunning the attractions of all false ends. That is to say, Kant’s aesthetic philosophy is radically non-teleological (finality without ends), as is Adorno’s, introduced above as a more familiar model of such a non-triadic dialectic. However, while the movement of these two different dialectics (Kant’s and Adorno’s) are comparable there is nevertheless a crucial difference concerning, what might be called, the motor of this movement. Clearly, Adorno, although removing absolute identity from his ‘logic of disintegration’, continues to follow Hegel to the extent that his dialectic is driven by negation. The ‘motion’ detected in Kant however, is, contrary to de Man’s conviction, positive rather than negative, it represents an affirmation of difference rather than the deferral of affirmation more typical of dialectical systems, Adorno’s included. Indeed, as has been discussed in the last chapter, the cornerstone of the

16 Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 123.


third Critique is a notion of the aesthetic judgement of taste that can only retain its necessary purity to the extent that it is understood as an infinite transition from heteronomy to autonomy. Not only does this mean that beauty and sublimity are absent from all objectivity—no thing is beautiful or sublime—but there can be no external authority, no other judgement or judge granted the power to legislate or legitimate my singular aesthetic assertion. ‘Feelings’ alone, whether of pleasure (beauty) or pleasure mixed with pain (sublimity), are the necessary prerequisite for the subjective certitude (rather than objective certainty) required to make an aesthetic judgement. As Kant observes, no amount of fishing around among the aesthetic judgements of others will lend our own singular judgement any weight whatsoever, just as, conversely, no amount of contrary judgements can dissuade the ‘young poet’ from his own felt convictions, no matter how misguided, an issue that will be returned to below. In this regard, there is no question of aesthetic judgement being part of a negative dialectic where affirmation must always await the ‘negation of the negation’, and where positivity is reduced to a by-product of the dialectical process of contradiction. A pure aesthetic judgement must be, as Kant insists, an ‘assert[ion] without qualification.’17

This is not to say, of course, that such singularity is solipsistic, on the contrary, aesthetic judgement must take account of the other if it is to achieve the universality and universal communicability demanded by Kant in matters of taste, thus separating it from the merely agreeable. But such a universality is not dialectically worked, so to speak, as is Hegel’s, but assumed a priori. In other words, to use Kant’s own vocabulary, the universal agreement of others in matters of aesthetic taste is not a postulate that can be underpinned by examples of agreement, but is, rather, imputed ‘…as an instance of the rule in respect of which it [the judgement of taste] looks for confirmation, not from concepts, but from the concurrence of others.’18 Aesthetic judgement does not work to achieve universal agreement, it assumes it from the outset, indeed, it demands it. As such, any engagement in negative dialectics is not only irrelevant but dangerous in that it introduces heteronomy into aesthetics in the shape of the other, whose otherness figures as a contradictory force to be negated rather than a concurrent force to be affirmed. To reiterate, aesthetic judgement ‘looks for confirmation’ not contradiction, it is a positive rather than a negative act delivered in a manner that precludes disputation from the outset ushering in, as it would, a regime of dependency quite alien to an autonomous aesthetics. This means that the movement de Man finds so threatening in Kant’s aesthetics, a movement described by Kant as the infinite ‘transition’ typical of aesthetic judgement, is indeed the infinition of transcendental thought itself, but, and this is the crucial point, it is not a negative movement. Gilles Deleuze has a firmer grasp of the Kantian spirit when he writes:

17 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 95.18 Ibid., p. 56.


Kant is the first philosopher who understood critique as having to be total and positive as critique. Total because ‘nothing must escape it’; positive, affirmative, because it can not restrict the power of knowing without releasing other previously neglected powers.19

Following Deleuze, it might be said that, as far as aesthetics is concerned, the third Critique’s central theme is ‘enjoyment’ (pleasure and delight) rather than labour, the ‘labour of the negative’, ‘and who says there is more thought in labour than in enjoyment?’20 Quite so, but the question remains, even if Kant’s aesthetic thought is positive and affirmative, is it nevertheless dialectical? This raises an interesting question: is it possible to conceive of an affirmative or positive dialectics? Can the enjoyment of the positive rather than the labour of the negative produce a dialectics? Putting the negative out of play for the moment (if this is possible), it is the critical ‘motion’ or movement of Kant’s aesthetics that is seen to indicate the presence of a dialectic for de Man, but it is the nature of this movement that needs closer consideration at this juncture. What is certain is that it is ‘reflective judgement’, as Kant understands it, that accounts for the movement here, its compulsion to ‘ascend from the particular in nature to the universal’ without the guidance of a given principle. This ascent is the infinite ‘transition’ that Kant speaks of, where the ‘territory’ between singularity and universality is crossed and re-crossed in search of an a concept of beauty or sublimity that, however, remains absent. Rather than a lack however, it is precisely this absence that ensures that the autonomy of aesthetic judgement is that it cannot derive its certitude from any external source or authority and thus must be self-legislative: ‘the reflective judgement can only give as a law from and to itself.’21 This being the case, it is difficult to see how a dialectic can develop within a terrain that excludes the other as the agent of heteronomy, thus removing the counter force necessary for a properly dialectical engagement to begin. It is thanks to this that M. H. Abrams’ denial of a specifically Kantian dialectic needs to be taken seriously and considered carefully. But to accept this would be to ignore a noteworthy difference between the unproductive reversibility in Schiller and the very much more productive oscillatory movement in Kant, one that might be described as hermeneutical if one considers his second ‘maxim of human understanding’, so important for the third Critique, and its requirement, as already discussed, that we ‘think from the standpoint of everyone else’. Productivity is here considered with reference to the mind or mentality of the one who, in judging, ‘enlarges’ his/her thought; Kant writes:

As to the second maxim…we have quite got into the way of calling a man narrow (narrow, as opposed to being of enlarged mind) whose talents fall short of what is required for employment upon work of any magnitude (especially that involving intensity). But the question here is not one of the faculty of cognition, but of the mental

19 Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London: Athlone Press, 1983, p. 89 (my emphasis).20 Ibid., p. 20.21 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 19.


habit of making a final use of it. This, however small the range and degree to which man’s endowments extend, still indicates a man of enlarged mind: if he detaches from the subjective personal conditions of his judgement, which cramps the mind of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgement from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others).22

This is a deeply problematical statement that goes to the heart of, what might be called, the predicament or, indeed, the aporia of aesthetic education. The maxim in question invites a liberation from the self-heteronomy of subjective narrowness through a movement towards the other. At the same time, however, it is the cramped minds of ‘so many’ of these others which itself demands the desire for mental ‘enlargement’ in the thought of the aesthetic judge. An initial question then becomes that of how is it possible to make a distinction between an otherness that is narrow and cramped and one that is enlarged? Taking up the standpoint of an other who has not escaped the narrowness of mind typical of the majority will contribute nothing to the production of an aesthetic culture that has universal assent and communicability. Consequently, it is crucial for a proper understanding of Kant’s aesthetics to separate his notion of universality from the collective. In essence, Kant understands the ‘universal standpoint’ of the other as a singularity, albeit of a very specific kind. To explain; the movement from singularity to universality demanded of aesthetic judgement by Kant, one conducted under the aegis of an imputed ‘sensus communis’, has nothing to do with actual intersubjectivity, as it shares nothing with interactionism or dialogics. As de Man correctly observes, Kant’s philosophy is not an account of the human or human behaviour but is, rather, strictly epistemological. He writes:

…Kant was dealing with a strictly philosophical, epistemological problem, which he chose to state for reasons of his own in interpersonal, dramatic terms, thus telling dramatically and interpersonally something which was purely epistemological and which had nothing to do with the pragmata of the relationship between human beings.23

Removing the human effectively removes the negativity of negative dialectics in that the ‘standpoint of the other’ now refers not to the aesthetic judgement of the other man or woman and the dubious power of contradiction they wield as the collective but, rather, to an exemplary otherness that separates itself from the ‘cramped’ minds of ‘the they’ (Heidegger) as a singularity capable of teaching by example. In her consideration of political and aesthetic judgement in Kant, Hannah Arendt correctly identifies the crucial link between exemplification (so important in Kant’s aesthetics), generality and particularity:

22 Ibid., p. 152-3.23 de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 143.


…(‘example comes from eximere, ‘to single out some particular’). This exemplar is and remains a particular that in its very particularity reveals the generality that otherwise could not be defined.24

In effect, then, the motion or dynamic of ‘reflective judgement’, the ‘ascent’ from singularity to universality, is not a movement that can be traced from individuality to collectivity, but is, rather, a transition from one singularity to another, across a ‘territory’ that, as will be argued, is configured positively rather than negatively. This raises the question: can the process of exemplification itself be understood as a positive dialectics? What would a positive dialectics be? The problem at the outset is to think a mode of engagement that is driven by a pattern of affirmation rather than negation, of difference, or what Kant calls in the plural, ‘contraries’ rather than ‘contradictions.’25 Certainly, the aesthetic realm is striking in the way in which it is able to manage difference without, thereby, embracing a regime of contradiction and negation. There can be no negation in art because there are no concepts available to verify the truth or falsity of aesthetic judgements or the artwork produced as a consequence of these judgements. Art can be bad but it cannot be wrong, it can be unsuccessful but not fallacious, indeed, art can be self-contradictory and yet not open to contradiction. It is poor rather than false judgement that blights the art world thus fuelling (one would hope) the demand for education, without however offering any guidance as to what form this might take. It is evident that poor aesthetic judgement is misguided rather than erroneous. Misguidance comes from the other in two forms; as an ally that attracts concurrence, or as an opponent that demands contradiction. In neither case does the necessary concatenation of affirmation and exemplification become productive either aesthetically or pedagogically. In both instances the singular aesthetic judge is drawn into the collective, a transition that destroys the aesthetic by illegitimately introducing heteronomy into it. Looked at in turn, the aesthetic judge does not require allies but, rather, examples of exemplary aesthetic production that can be affirmed as universally valid rather than collectively agreeable. This means that the ‘concurrence of others’ necessary to confirm aesthetic judgement is not sought in the ever-proliferating and infinitely fickle predilections of the ‘narrow’ and ‘cramped’ collective who remain installed in their particularity, but within the exemplary singularity of an aesthetic ‘model’ that carries within it its own infinite: the infinite trace of the endless transition from singularity to universality left only by those of ‘enlarged mind’. In this respect it is the minority rather than the majority who are responsible for the Kantian concepts of universality and ‘common sense’ (sensus communis), the minority of other judges of taste co-presented with each solitary judgement. As Ronald Beiner, speaking of Arendt, writes very much in the same spirit:

24 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 77.25 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 209.


The more she reflected on the faculty of judgement, the more inclined she was to regard it as the prerogative of the solitary (though public-spirited) contemplator as opposed to the actor (whose activity is necessarily nonsolitary). One acts with others; one judges by oneself (even though one does so by making present in one’s imagination those who are absent). In judging, as understood by Arendt, one weighs the possible judgements of an imagined other, not the actual judgements of real interlocutors.26

As is clear once again, turning now to the second question of the other as opponent, if there is a dialectic in Kant (and here Arendt is the most Kantian of philosophers) it is not to be found in the all-too-familiar disputes between actual interlocutors, driven, no doubt, by desires that forever ruin the aesthetic, academic journals are full of these. Kant could not be clearer on this point:

I stop my ears: I do not want to hear any reasons or any arguing about the matter. I would prefer to suppose that those rules of the critics were at fault, or at least have no application, than to allow my judgement to be determined by a priori proofs.27

If, as Kant insists, the aesthetic judge ‘cannot be talked into’ making a particular judgement in the absence of the necessary immediacy of feeling, then this removes from his aesthetics all dialogics, rhetoric and dialectics. It is for this reason that the ‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgement’ in the third Critique must concern itself with the dialectic (or antinomy) of critical principles and emphatically not the dialectic of taste itself, a strategy that will be returned to below when a certain dialectical exteriority will be considered in Schiller’s text. Kant writes: ‘…the conflict of judgements of taste does not form a dialectic of taste—for no one is proposing to make his own judgement into a universal rule’.28 On the face of it this would seem to be a conclusive refutation of Paul de Man’s dialectical reading but, again, there may be a way of salvaging some kind of dialectic here albeit of a peculiar kind. In spite of the imputed consensus validating judgements of taste, aesthetic education is only thinkable in the face of the failure of actual judgements to coincide absolutely with the exemplary models made available by the ‘imagined other’, understood here, in no matter how mediated a way, as a teacher. The difference, however, between each individual judgement of taste and the co-presented (imagined) exemplary model of aesthetic judgement does not ground a dispute but instead initiates a process of ‘contention’ that, while capable of being oppositional, is nevertheless affirmative rather than negative. Contentiousness is never intent on negating the opposition but, rather, on goading it, on challenging the other to match the, in this case, exemplary nature of an aesthetic judgement with one that is actually comparable. To echo for a moment de Man’s earlier observations on the irresolvable temporal structure in Schiller’s aesthetics, the contentiousness of the aesthetic domain opens up a particular duration that allows time for one judgement to ‘follow’ in an active and productive mode of imitation

26 Beiner, Ronald. ‘Hannah Arendt on Judging’, in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982, p. 92. 27 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 140.28 Ibid., p. 204.


that is typical of Kant. Indeed, far from being the complacent acceptance of the universal, judgements of taste should always carry within them a certain inertia that signals a prior resistance that, while being felt at one time as absolute, at another arrives at a moment where singular and universal affirmation achieve a concurrence that is also felt, albeit, perhaps, with a different intensity. In this regard, Kant’s example (as promised) of the young poet illustrates perfectly the positive dialectic of singularity and universality:

Hence it is that a youthful poet refuses to allow himself to be dissuaded from the conviction that his poem is beautiful, either by the judgement of the public or his friends. And even if he lends them an ear, he does so, not because he has now come to a different judgement, but because, though the whole public, at least as far as his work is concerned, should have a false taste, he still, in his desire for recognition, finds good reason to accommodate himself to the popular error (against his own judgement). It is only in aftertime, when his judgement has been sharpened by exercise, that of his own free will and accord he deserts his former judgements.29

As is clear, the disingenuousness of the young poet disarms the actual dialectic within the public realm of friends and enemies while, nevertheless, allowing the subterranean work of a different dialectic to continue. Kant’s ‘aftertime’ here speaks of a necessary delay where, through experience, the artist autonomously brings his/her aesthetic judgements into agreement with an alterity that is imagined rather than real. The demand that each aesthetic judgement carries within it the imputation of an imagined agreement splits the productive and the receptive aesthetic act into two, thus initiating a dialectic that does not labour under the yoke of the negative but, on the contrary, enacts what might be called a pluralization of affirmation. That is to say, the artist (in this case the ‘youthful poet’) always produces work with a conviction that, in spite of its felt necessity, carries within it an exemplary model that, thanks to its simultaneous affirmation, introduces a particular disturbance and, thus, a necessary dynamism into the productive act that helps to explain the infinity and infinition of aesthetic practice. Thus the contentiousness of aesthetic judgement is here identified as the dialectic of its own particular form, regardless of the secondary and all-too-familiar dialectic caught up in the pointless wrangle with collective ‘narrowness’. And while it is true that dialectics is normally conceived of in terms of difference and contradiction, understood inter-subjectively, here is proposed a dialectical model that works within the very singularity of judgement itself, a model that recognizes the fractured nature of singularity, and understands this as being a consequence, not of opposition, but of an ever-present contention, or contentiousness, goading the judging self to take account of and, over time, act upon the demands of the imagined exemplary self that is itself demanded a priori by aesthetic judgement; such is the complexity and aporia of aesthetic judgement and education. If this can be accepted as a dialectic—as a positive dialectic—then something of Paul de Man’s account of Kant’s third Critique can and should be embraced, just as part of it (the negative part) must be spurned if an aesthetic model of education, capable of 29 Ibid., p. 137 (my emphasis).


liberating itself from the all-too-laborious labour of the negative, is ever (per impossible) to emerge.

Global Dialectics

So far the discussion has explicitly concerned itself with what might be called the interior dialectic of Kant’s aesthetics while also, implicitly, retaining throughout an exterior dialectic that places this thought in a contradictory relationship with a pedagogical hegemony descended from the figure of Schiller—such is the trajectory of de Man’s reading of Kant and Schiller in his ‘Kant and Schiller’. In essence, he sets up a dialectic between a Kantian dialectics and a Schillerian non-dialectics which, being itself a dialectic, speaks from within a dialectical pedagogy that, contra de Man, is being presented here as hegemonic. This is a complex situation but one that demands a careful re-reading of Schiller in order to establish why his notion of aesthetic education is precisely not the pedagogical regime within which the academic community practises and why we are not (or why it would be so difficult to be) Schillerians. Whether intended or not, de Man’s deconstruction of Schiller represents a serious challenge to what has been (Marcuse, Jameson, Habermas) and which, perhaps, continues to be a certain ‘radical’ reading of The Aesthetic Education of Man. As Constantin Behler is still able to claim in his 1995 book on Schiller, the ‘dialectical approach’ of theorists such as Peter Burger ‘still dominates scholarship’.30 But, as already suggested, there can be identified two different dialectics here, one interior, one exterior, local and global respectively. Clearly both are operative in most ‘radical’ readings, as can be traced from the perceived triangular dialectic of the drives (sense, form and play) to the positing and dialectical actualization of a utopian ‘state of aesthetic semblance’ at the end of Schiller’s text. Be that as it may, the intention in the reading offered here is to consider the possibility that these two dialectics can not only be separated but also that one, the interior dialectic, can and should (following de Man) be denied while at the same time the other, the exterior dialectic, can nevertheless still be affirmed as part of a wider challenge to the current (very un-Schillerian) pedagogical hegemony. Affirming Schiller’s dialectical credentials, Frederic Jameson makes the following important observation:

…Schiller’s thinking is dialectical to the degree to which in it phenomena are defined against each other—against their situation, their surroundings, the impulses they are designed to overcome.31

30 Behler, Constantin. Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism, Bern: Peter Lang, 1995, p. 38.31 Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974, pp. 95-6.


Both dialectics are at work here, but instead of emphasizing (with Jameson) the perceived dialectic within Schiller’s thought, it is, rather, the ‘situation’ and the ‘surroundings’ of this thought that will be of primary interest. In other words, Jameson, unlike Abrams, opens his dialectical reading out onto a political domain that recognizes the fundamental contradictions between one system of thought and another, where the predominance of one within a given ‘situation’ is that which must be worked against by the other. This acts as a useful reminder that any acceptance of Paul de Man’s non-dialectical reading of Schiller, does not in itself preclude the identification of another dialectic labouring against that which surrounds it. Paul de Man fails to identify or consider this because he insists that the ‘situation’ is already Schillerian, thus leaving it nothing to work against. Jameson, on the other hand, is more sensitive to the difference between what he perceives to be the potential radicalism of Schiller’s dialectics and what he sees as the non, or (better) anti-dialectical stasis of the given ‘situation’, one that would resist such movement in the name of reified specialisms that effectively freeze the individual into just one fragment of a unity that is both lost, and yet anticipated. In this regard Jameson identifies an important dialectic that is missing in de Man’s account, as it is in the ‘Discussion’ that, on the face of it, is so occupied by the dialectic. Formally, then, Jameson’s reading of Schiller will here be embraced, but with one significant difference; its polarity will be reversed. The suggestion being made then is that Schiller’s aesthetic thought is indeed dialectical to the degree that it can be seen to contradict the dominant structure of thought that surrounds it. It is ‘against its situation’ (rather than itself), but the situation in question here, the educational and pedagogical situation, is a dialectical one, held together as a totality by the labour of the negative, the spirit of contradiction and the ever-present desire to (using Levinas’ vocabulary) reduce otherness to the same; the ultimate ambition (if not actuality) of all dialectics. The chiasmic movement of Schiller’s thought, perfectly described by Paul de Man, is far from dominant, and we are far from being, as academics, Schillerian players within a Schillerian educational theatre.

Question and Answer

The argument, contra de Man and Jameson, that the education system, research culture and current pedagogy are in reality fundamentally dialectical in nature will follow. To begin with, education, at the most fundamental level and in spite of its insatiable will-to-knowledge and truth, promotes what Gadamer sees as the ‘openness’ of the question above the closure of the answer. In this view, which traces ‘authentic’ pedagogy back to the thought of Plato rooted in the anti-rhetorical dialogues of Socrates, there is a fundamentally conversational aspect to education which, by channelling all knowledge claims through the ‘indeterminacy’ of the question, accounts for the oscillatory and sublatory movement typical of dialectics. Here knowledge is by no means a static telos but is, rather, that which emerges in the space opened by the questioner between the question and the


answer. This space is not owned by the individual interlocutors but is, instead, perceived to be a more ontologically substantial theatre of unconcealment (to use the appropriate Heideggerian terminology), one that has allowed the promotion of a certain concept of ‘education’ above what might be called the empty infinity of mere ‘learning’. Learning is the consumption of answers while education is the production of questions; this, in a nutshell, is the essence of such a dialogical hermeneutics of education, one that has come to play a very powerful role within contemporary pedagogy: it is difficult to argue against the principle of dialogue. Gadamer, in his own well-known promotion of the question above the answer reminds us that it is the art of questioning that is the truly difficult art, while the dubious skill of the answerer/respondent is a lesser talent repeatedly exposed by Socrates during the course of his dialogues. Thus, the primary ‘difficulty’ of education has long revolved around the development of a student’s critical faculties in the face of a wall of persuasive answers each striving to suspend their questionability. Looked at positively; the result is a dynamic and generous educational arena of openness, frankness, curiosity and flexibility, where a climate of reflexivity and provisionality reigns, and where an institutionalized version of Cartesian doubt ensures that the rhetorical force of assertion and the intuitive affirmation of aesthetic experience lose their compelling allure. Looked at less positively; the status of the question (and the questioner) needs to be studied very carefully. For Gadamer, the ‘genuine’ question as opposed to the ‘slanted question’32 is conceived of as a positive ‘art of strengthening’33 the questionable statement/answer of the other by drawing it into the openness of its possibility, the ‘open’ of truth’s unconcealment that, as already indicated, is owned by neither interlocuters. Questioning is here conceived of (somewhat idealistically) as an act that is unconcerned with dialectical argumentation or annihilation but is, rather, motivated dialogically to enable the thought of the other to move into this unowned openness through the dialectical movement of thinking itself. Having said that, however, Gadamer must accept that the question (like the answer) can never be truly open, enclosed, as it is, within a particular horizon that strives to fuse with the horizon of the other; an admirable but dubious telos:

The openness of a question is not boundless. It is limited by the horizon of the question. A question that lacks this horizon is, so to speak, floating. It becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy is concretized in a specific ‘this or that.’ In other words, the question has to be posed. Posing a question implies openness but also limitation. It implies the explicit establishing of presuppositions, in terms of which can be seen what still remains open.34

The problem here, of course, is that the horizon of the questioner is itself in need of ‘strengthening’ thereby throwing this dialectical ‘art of thinking’ into an 32 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, London: Sheed and Ward, 1989, p. 364.33 Ibid., p. 367.34 Ibid., p. 363.


infinite regress of questionability that is, to say the least, pedagogically problematical. Gadamer fails to give this due consideration because he roots his understanding of dialectics in the Socratic dialogues which assume an inequality of question and answer as evidenced in the obvious power differential between Socrates and his interlocutors. That is to say, Socrates’ questions are not understood as needing the same ‘strengthening’ as are his respondents’ answers. What is witnessed here is less a ‘fusion of horizons’ than an assumed hierarchy of horizons masquerading as an apparent equality thanks to the ruses of Socratic irony. What is more, while it is true that the ‘explicit establishing of presuppositions’ or ‘prejudices’ (to use Gadamer’s usual terminology) allows the orientation of the question to be recognized and accounted for pedagogically, the more fundamental horizon of questionability itself is merely assumed, indeed, asserted as precisely the answer to the problem of authentic thinking, a prioritization of the answer rather than the question that itself goes unquestioned. In certain respects this does indeed describe very well the dialectics of education, but seen less idealistically, the promotion of the question above the answer results in what Nietzsche, in the Untimely Meditations, calls a ‘dangerous mood of irony’, where argumentation, negation and the will-to-power are dressed up in the clothes of dialogue, collaboration and enabling. The integration of mastery, mockery and the common conversational touch are at the heart of Socratic irony. Gadamer dwells on the strength of the other’s answer, but Socratic irony operates most effectively in the presence of weakness and fallibility rather than genuine strength. While it is true that Socrates often appears to assist the other in the development of their fallacious arguments this is only to bring the inherent weakness to its full strength, so to speak, in order for his irony to gain some real purchase for the entertainment of his all-too-knowing listeners and readers. This is not a very attractive model, proposing, as it does, a certain pedagogical duplicity and dishonesty, legitimated in the name of an assumed ‘ignorance’ that, in practice, fronts an obvious mastery protected from the corrosive negativity of its own irony. There is as little self-irony in the Socratic dialogues as there is in the dialogical hermeneutics of Gadamer; it is this that is particularly unattractive. Instead, the ironization of the other is pre-eminent, as the means by which the otherness of other—his or her difference and ‘weakness’—is reclaimed by the necessary recognition of explicit prejudice, thus allowing the ‘openness’ of unconcealment to remain itself. Such a one-dimensional irony, so devoted to the pseudo-openness or idealization of the question, creates an all-too-familiar academic culture of intrigue and suspicion, to make it sound more interesting than it is. The inevitable fallibility of the other here becomes the productive motor generating and fuelling a regime of critical reading, interrogation, intervention and ‘falsification’ that, on the face of it, welcomes the other with open arms but which, as they say in certain regions of southern France, never joins hands behind the back, never genuinely embraces the other as other. Indeed, it is the alterity of the other that is the first casualty of the ‘logic of question and answer’, as Gadamer calls it, not least because the answer demanded by the interrogative mode of the question quite literally forces silent


affirmation into sound, closure into disclosure, concealment into unconcealment; forces the other into the open, the owned into the unowned, difference into the same. And this force is anything but singular, on the contrary, the ‘horizon’ of the question, which allows it to be posed and gives it direction, rather than being a static vantage point onto the ‘open’, in practice congeals into dynamic factions, camps, positions and orthodoxies populated by a collectivity of like-minded questioners intent upon terrorizing the singular, even, on occasions, in the name of singularity: ‘Nietzscheans’, ‘Foucauldians’, ‘Derridians’, ‘Deleuzians’: little self-irony here. Within such a dialectical/dialogical regime mere answers are considered facile when compared with the difficulty of asking questions, the real test of intellectual prowess:

Among the greatest insights that Plato’s account of Socrates affords us is that, contrary to the general opinion, it is more difficult to ask questions than to answer them.35

But is this true? (And, even if it were, why should difficulty be promoted above facility?) Gadamer’s claim here must be understood within the context of a distinction he makes between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ dialogue,36 where it is the desire for insight rather than mere rightness that problematizes the art of questioning, thus making it difficult. Where power displaces knowledge questioning becomes easier because, in reality, the questioner is primarily interested in weakening rather than ‘strengthening’ the answers of the other, thereby devaluing the dialogical encounter. Here we witness, to pre-empt the discussion in chapter four, what Franz Rosenzweig calls the ‘hearing of the eye’ rather than the ear, where interlocutors watch rather than listen to each other, looking for the moment when they can make their intervention, looking for any sign of weakness or uncertainty in the other, intent on drawing all eyes towards themselves as the asker of ‘difficult’ questions:

… here we are concerned with a kind of hearing quite different from that required in dialogue. For in the course of a dialogue he who happens to be listening also speaks, and he does not speak merely when he is actually uttering words, not even mainly when he is uttering words, but just as much when through his eager attention, through the assent or dissent expressed in his glances, he conjures words to the lips of the current speaker. Here it is not this hearing of the eye which is meant, but the true hearing of the ear.37

Gadamer is quite right, this (the dialogue of the eye) is not authentic dialogue, nor is it confined to the ancient rhetorical games of the sophists. On the contrary, it remains rife within the academic world, all too often blighting the admirable (but hopelessly idealized) hegemonic model of autonomous academic exchange and open debate. Given that a whole dialectical regime of critique and intellectual

35 Ibid., p. 362.36 Ibid., p. 363.37 Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo, New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 309.


dispute has been constructed on this ‘inauthentic’ model, we do indeed find ourselves in a culture of the question but, unhappily, one that is ‘easy’ rather than ‘difficult’ and which all too often opens out onto a polemical spectacle rather than the desired unconcealment of truth. ‘Authentic’ dialogue (the dialogue of the ear) is different; here the question must render things genuinely questionable and conviction must allow itself to be hollowed out by indeterminacy, doubt and, ultimately, (Socratic) ignorance. To search for truth rather than mere corroboration is, for Gadamer, of a different order of difficulty, one where the dynamic of the question, its dialectical essence, propels the questioner into a project of absolute risk where rhetorical virtuosity must on occasions be sacrificed to the epistemological, and ontological, openness of infinite questioning:

The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument. On the contrary, it is possible that someone practicing the art of dialectic—i.e. the art of questioning and of seeking truth—comes off worse in the argument in the eyes of those listening to it. As the art of asking questions, dialectic proves its value because only the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning, which involves being able to preserve his orientation toward openness. The art of questioning is the art of questioning ever further—i.e. the art of thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.38

Whatever doubts one might have about the degree to which such an ‘authentic’ dialogical model might be realizable pedagogically (Socrates, of course, refused to consider himself a teacher), this is undoubtedly a more attractive proposition than its ‘inauthentic’ counterpart. But either way the central point being pursued here, to re-iterate, is that the success or failure of educational policy, its aspirations and ideals are measured against a particular dialectics that pursues a telos of (academic) community through a dialogical or conversational logic driven by the question. The questioner can question ‘ever further’ but, apparently, the community founded by the question is not itself open to question. As Gadamer concludes:

To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.39

Is it true, then, that within such a community the ‘authentic’ question is more difficult than the answer? Is negation more difficult than affirmation, doubt more difficult than certitude, contradiction more difficult than concurrence? Is it true that the risks here associated with the dialectical movement of the question are more difficult to face than the static security and givenness of the answer? Is infinite action and fearless dynamism more difficult than patient waiting and immovable attention? Is openness more difficult than closure?

38 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 367.39 Ibid., p. 379.


Isn’t the real difficulty to think outside of this regime of difficulty, to think outside of the community of the question precisely because it is unquestionably a community? Isn’t the real difficulty to separate facility and facileness, and acknowledge the presence and proximity of a certain thought or manner of thinking and doing that does not bear the marks of negation’s labour, that is not dialectically worked or workable and that, in its very ‘worklessness’, to use Blanchot’s language again, is not open to question? Isn’t the real difficulty neither to prioritize the question nor the answer, but to separate them, thus allowing the answer to receive the attention that would otherwise pass through it in search of the question? Isn’t the real difficulty to think, instead, of the answer answering a need rather than a question, a need that, unlike the dialectical challenge demanding a response from outside, inhabits the answer, is present within it as a felt but inarticulate certitude? All of these questions implicitly mark a return to the thought of an aesthetic education that, like the artwork itself, is radically unresponsive to dialectical interrogation and the call of the community that promotes it above all else. These questions intend a break with the dialectical hermeneutics of art that would pass through the work in search of its dialogical/dialectical source, as does Gadamer here:

A work of art can only be understood if we assume its adequacy as an expression of the artistic idea. Here too we have to discover the question which it answers, if we are to understand it as an answer. This is, in fact, an axiom of all hermeneutics…40

Perhaps, but Paul Ricouer, the most non-dialogical of hermeneuts, chooses not to follow Gadamer here, proposing instead a mode of hermeneutical appropriation that attends to the text not as a response to a question but, rather as a mode of being, as a world that opens before the reader (understood in the widest sense) answering a need rather than a question, the need for a ‘new mode of being’.

I shall say that appropriation is the process by which the revelation of new modes of being—or, if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, new ‘forms of life’—gives the subject new capacities for knowing himself. If the reference of a text is the projection of a world, then it is not in the first instance the reader who projects himself. The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.41

There are a number of ways to read this, the most obvious being to fall back into the promotion of a hermeneutics of openness and unconcealment inherited from Heidegger by Gadamer and embraced in part by Ricouer. Echoing Kant’s notion of the ‘enlarged mind’ already discussed, the subversion of identity as a given substance, what Ricouer calls the ‘relinquishment of the subject’, is compensated for by a dialectical hermeneutics of ceaseless self-development that is infinitely productive in its manner of conflating the opening of openness and the

40 Ibid., p. 370.41 Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 192.


phenomenology of self-recognition—the unconcealment of identity. This is a very uplifting view of the aesthetic, one that is undoubtedly radical in its disruption of dialogics and the dislocation of the interlocutory positions that would make dialogue possible, but which, nevertheless, promises much more in return thanks to the ontological richness of the world that ‘opens before’ the text. Another, perhaps more difficult way of reading this, one that resists, in turn, Ricouer’s narratological hermeneutics and the ‘emplotment’ of the subject/reader in the non-dialogical opening of the ‘plot’ of the text, is to acknowledge a mode of being, an aesthetic mode of being, that is closed, or (better) that opens onto a certain mode of closure. In common not only with other hermeneutical approaches, but with all current modes of ‘reading’, Ricouer places an emphasis on the openness of the text and the manner in which the reader’s capacities are ‘broadened’ as the productivity of reading infinitely narrativizes the subject within the ‘world’ that opens before it. This other reading might concentrate instead on what can only be described as the intensely restrictive nature of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ (to use Marcuse’s terminology against him), confronting, against the grain, the dead dialectic of obligation and failure famously articulated in Beckett’s words:

The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express together with the obligation to express.42

A terminal moment perhaps, but one that, when stripped of its peculiarly post-humanist resignation, might, nevertheless, be heard as a distant echo of the aesthetic aporia at the heart of the most celebratory of aesthetic texts: Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man. It is precisely here that, in spite of the humanist rhetorical flourish that concludes the text (intellectual cowardice in de Man’s eyes), one finds, in fact, the most sustained reflection on the impossibility of the obligation placed upon the artist and the artwork as representatives (or victims!) of an aesthetic that demands throughout nothing less than the unification of sense and form, feeling and thought, the finite and the infinite.

Schiller’s World

To stay with Beckett’s words for a moment as a way back into Schiller’s text, the aporia of expression faced here—the impossible obligation—leads straight to the diremption of configuration and meaning identified by Hegel as the distinguishing mark and fatal flaw of all ‘romantic’ (modern) aesthetics. The consequent ‘death’ of art leaves modernism suspended in an aesthetic afterlife, Beckett speaks from within this living death—the wake of art. Having said that, Hegel’s stated admiration for Schiller’s work clearly recognizes the fact that the latter’s thought had already prepared the ground for his own speculative dialectic that is also intent

42 Beckett, Samuel. ‘Three Dialogues’, in, Disjecta, London: John Calder, 1983, p. 139.


upon thinking beyond the ‘unhappy’ dualism of modernity. The fundamental difference however, is that, contra Schiller, Hegel sees the aesthetic as itself complicit in this alienation of sense and form, indeed, it is precisely the aestheticization (and consequent ironization) of culture that for Hegel (like Habermas in recent times) represents one of the most serious barriers to the realization of cultural unity (a ‘communicative community’). Instead of offering a genuine dialectic that can work through the aesthetic then, Schiller, as an artist, is ultimately trapped within the aesthetic, demanding of it, as a consequence, a sublatory function and transcendent role that it is ultimately incapable of fulfilling. Thinking back to Ricoeur for a moment, what kind of ‘world’ opens up before Schiller’s text for the reader? What ‘mode of being’ is offered here to ‘broaden’ the mind of those who enter this ‘world’? The precise nature of ‘aesthetic education’ is dependent upon the answers to these crucial questions. As acknowledged at the outset, it is a chiasmic world activated incessantly by the crossing from one polarity to another, one temporality to another, one psychic region to another. It is a world of ceaseless oscillation, reciprocation and exchange, of relaxation and tension, passivity and activity and, finally, of ‘play’. For all of this movement however, de Man is quite correct, this is not a dialectical world, it does not offer a narrative which unfolds before the reader or before a reading that is able to open up the identity of that reader. It is, rather, (and I use the term advisedly and neutrally) a sophistical text that is essentially static and closed to the outside, thus taking on an exteriority of its own, one that is tragic rather than dialectical, a distinction dear to Nietzsche. These ideas are borrowed from Mario Untersteiner whose profound work on the sophists contains the following discussion of the same irreducible differences that continue to plague Schiller’s thought, here named the ‘two logoi in opposition’. Speaking of the sophist Protagoras, Untersteiner writes:

Protagoras, when once the existence of the ‘two logoi in opposition’ was discovered as inherent in all reality… translated this property possessed by the metaphysical world of dividing into contradictory pairs of opposites, making it a precept for argument…The argument has as its aim the revelation of the ‘logoi in opposition’ to be found in every abstract concept. This does not involve scepticism, but it does involve a tragedy for the intellect.43

If in this form of art [sophism] the irremediable conflicts of reality come to the surface, rending every veil of unity provided by metaphysics, the problem of knowledge is seen to be insoluble, or more accurately, tragic.44

The tragedy of the Aesthetic Education of Man is not then, as might be assumed, the critical, and justly famous vision of a fragmentary world which, through enforced specialization, reduces the individual to a fragment of an alien and alienated totality. This, the political dimension of the text that has so inspired

43 Untersteiner, Mario. The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freemann, Oxford: Blackwell, 1954, p. 35.44 Ibid., p. 12.


the ‘radical’ readings of Marcuse, Jameson, Burger and many others, is not tragic but, on the contrary, dialectically open and thus politically productive, a fact that can be traced through Hegel and Marx to the ‘radicals’ mentioned. There is a ‘world’ here, an openness than can be hermeneutically appropriated in Ricoeur’s sense. The real tragedy is an aesthetic one, and any notion of an aesthetic education to be had from this particular text must itself suffer the same tragedy if it is to have any genuine educative value. Needless to say, it is this that has precluded the rise of aesthetics as a pedagogical model even within art education itself let alone as a more general or universal educational principle as claimed by Paul de Man. Unlike scepticism, which is inherently negative and disengaged, tragedy is both positive and engaged, indeed, the tragedy of sophism is that it is an art incapable of disengaging itself, committed, as it is, to the promotion of all positions. The famous claim made by the sophist Gorgias that he could make the weaker argument into the stronger is not, as is commonly assumed, merely an admittance of the rhetorical virtuosity of sophistical debate but is, more seriously, the statement of a radically affirmative acceptance of difference, one that is capable of identifying strength in weakness and, what is more, willing to persuade others of this strength. The power of the sophist, while undoubtedly rhetorical, is by no means illusory, it is not conjured out of the air through linguistic trickery alone, but is, rather, empowered by the very real strengths of the positions embraced, albeit temporarily. Rhetoric is not empty talk, it is mobile talk, persuasive to the extent that others are encouraged to make the same transitions of thought and allow themselves to be enlightened as to the strengths of different or contrary positions: the ‘logoi in opposition’. As has been noted by a number of commentators, the Aesthetic Education of Man is itself marked by a finely crafted rhetorical style, one that Wilkinson and Willoughby (Schiller’s translators) compare at one point to a dance:

…we may think of a dance whose figures are executed, now by the whole ensemble, now by a single pair. And just as in such a dance it is, on the whole, the movements that engage us more than the individual performance of the several dancers, so in passages such as these, where Schiller is trying to show forth by means of his rhetoric the interstrife and interplay within the psyche, the terms are interchangeable in the sense that one couple can stand in for another as long as the measures of the dance prevail, and the rules of the language game are obeyed.45

To reiterate then, Schiller’s world is a world of movement, of rhetorical patterns and figures, but the tragedy of rhetoric and the tragedy of this rhetorical world is not its vacuity but, on the contrary, its fullness, its over-fullness. The excess of choices coupled with the inability to choose, the intense desire to have everything, a finite life, embedded in the real, determined by the senses and the sensual, coupled with a reverence for the infinite form of pure abstract thought and the sublimity of ethical freedom cut loose from the body, all of this results in a text over-stuffed with possibilities, a breathless, hyper-active text that is infinitely agile and yet goes nowhere.45 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. lxxi.


As is clear throughout, Schiller is trapped, he is a victim of his own desire, his willingness to affirm contraries and his fear of renunciation. He is ‘intoxicated with the universe’, as Thomas Mann describes it,46 before going on to consider the peculiar erraticness of his talent:

That great, strange man had to think everything out. It was not how he did it, to spin a work of art silently out of his inner self. Rather, he puts his hand boldly upon some great subject, observed it, turned it this way and that, looked at it and handled it in this way and that. He saw his subjects only from the outside, so to speak;…His talent was in this sense erratic—if the word is taken in the right sense. Proceeding as he did, he could never make up his mind that a subject was or was not a thing for him, could never really have done with his own work.47

Interestingly, Schiller’s world, or at least the ‘world’ that ‘opens before’ the text of the Aesthetic Education is not an aesthetic world as measured against the principles of his own aesthetic as it is presented in the same text. In fact, the bulk of this work has nothing whatsoever to do with aesthetic education precisely because it largely fails to present a substantial aesthetic that might have an immediately perceived educational value. This is not to say that there is no aesthetic in the Aesthetic Education but, rather, that it is absent; indeed, it is the absence around which the whole text is organized. The only sustained attempt by Schiller to configure this absence as artistic ‘play’, the most influential moment in the text, in fact only renders yet more emphatic the void at the heart of his aesthetics—so what exactly is ‘play’; and, to come to the crucial point, can it be taught, can it form the basis of an education?

Play

In spite of the Aesthetic Education’s chiasmic form and the nervous oscillatory rhythm of Schiller’s entrapment within this non-dialectical structure, the rhetoric mobilized to present his aesthetic is dialectical and teleological in nature, the goal being to sublate the ‘material’ and ‘form drives’ in the higher unity of the famous ‘play-drive’. This rhetoric is significant and demands a moment’s attention. Schiller writes:

I am drawing ever nearer the goal to which I have been leading you by a not exactly encouraging path. If you will consent to follow me a few steps further along it, horizons all the wider will unfold and a pleasing prospect perhaps requite you for the labour of the journey.48

46 Mann, Thomas. Last Essays, trans, Richard and Clara Winston, London: Secker and Warburg, 1959, p. 11.47 Ibid., p. 88.48 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. 101.


Having cast himself in the role of leader/teacher Schiller leads the reader to the point where the text, a text so closed in upon itself, opens onto the prospect of ‘play’ as the manner in which the aesthetic becomes (at last) unconcealed. Aesthetic education is here presented as a journey, with the ‘awakening’ of the ‘play-drive’ as the pedagogical destination. The ‘world’ that ‘unfolds’ hermeneutically before this text suddenly opens here onto another ‘world’ outside of the text, outside of all texts and all hermeneutics. An ‘ideal’ world that has neither temporal or spatial actuality but only an aesthetic playfulness ‘directed towards annulling time within time’ and thus crushed into the momentary ecstasis of beauty that can never be sustained beyond the instant of its disappearance. It is true that by using the language of the ‘drives’, the ‘psyche’ and the ‘human’ Schiller establishes a rhetorical engagement with the actual that has certainly been persuasive for some as a model of self-development through art. Similarly, those more critical of his thought such as Gadamer have accused him of following Kant in the ‘subjectivization’ of the aesthetic and the concept of play.49

In fact, however, neither Kant nor Schiller arrive at a truly subjective aesthetics, not least because in their own ways they radically dis-integrate the very self and self-consciousness that such subjectivization assumes. As will be explained below, it is the absence of play that is crucial to an understanding of both Kant and Schiller’s aesthetic thought rather than any claimed subjectivization. But, of course, the very different ways in which play is absent will now need to be addressed. Notwithstanding the differences, one certainty is that from the outset Schiller is convinced that Kant is his philosophical guide and ally. As he confesses in the ‘First Letter’ of Aesthetic Education: ‘I shall not attempt to hide from you that it is for the most part Kantian principles on which the following theses will be based.’ Pre-eminent among these principles is the notion of ‘play’, lifted by Schiller directly (or so it might seem) from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, where the latter writes:

The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no definite concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Hence the mental state in this representation must be one of a feeling of the free play of the powers of representation in a given representation for a cognition in general…This state of free play of the cognitive faculties attending a representation by which an object is given must admit of universal communication.50

This should be compared with Schiller’s words on the subject:

…how can we speak of mere play, when we know that it is precisely play and play alone, which of all man’s states and conditions is the one which makes him whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once…True, we must not think of the various forms of play which are in vogue in actual life…but [of] the ideal of Beauty that is set up by

49 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 42 and 101.50 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 58.


Reason, an ideal play-drive, too, is enjoined upon man, which he must keep before his eyes in all his forms of play.51

Before looking more closely at the differences here between Kant and Schiller, one thing they do have in common is, contra Gadamer, their separation of subjectivity and play; Kant by placing it prior to the very cognition of subjectivity and objectivity, while at the same time grounding a particular notion of universality central to his aesthetics; Schiller by placing it between subjectivity and objectivity in a manner, to quote him, ‘fully justified by linguistic usage, which is wont to designate as “play” everything which is neither subjectively or objectively contingent’.52 As with his rather limited logic of question and answer, Gadamer’s crudely dualistic notion of ‘subjectivization’ fails to do justice to the more complex and aporetic notions of subjectivity and objectivity to be found, albeit differently, in Kant (especially) and Schiller. Comparing Kant and Schiller then, it is clear at the outset that, on the surface at least, the former is offering what might be crudely called a reception aesthetic and the latter an aesthetic of production. In spite of his famous suspension of aesthetic practice during the period of his ‘philosophical’ speculation, Schiller still writes very much as an ‘artist’. As seen in the previous chapter, Kant’s aesthetic is much richer than the reading offered here not least because of the place of reception and aesthetic judgement within production, but for the moment the perhaps more familiar take on Kant as a receptionist will suffice to grasp more firmly his notion of ‘free play’. What is more, it is possible to conceive of a very different model of reception, one that will emerge in the following. To begin with, it is important to understand why questions of priority are so important in the presentation of Kant’s particular notion of the aesthetic judgement of taste. Indeed, determining the priority of feeling pleasure and estimating the object is explicitly presented as the ‘key to the critique of taste’53 in that it is the fundamental means by which beauty is separated from the agreeable, and ‘free play’ distinguished from mere game playing and the dubious arts of the rhetorician.54 For Kant the subjective and singular feeling of pleasure must have priority over the aesthetic object that is given. The object, while agreeable to the senses, only possesses ‘private validity’ rather than the felt singular certitude which, counter-intuitively, is the more public sense; a very Kantian move. It is not, then, the object of pleasure that is crucial but the universal validity of this pleasure that is at the heart of aesthetic judgement, the communication of which sets in motion the dialectic of singularity and universality discussed in the last chapter. But if it is not the object, then neither is it (strictly speaking) the feeling of pleasure in itself that constitutes the originary moment here, for the obvious reason that the subject must receive pleasure from somewhere/thing prior to that pleasure: pleasure does not only take pleasure in itself. It is here that Kant positions his

51 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, pp. 106-7.52 Ibid., p. 103.53 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 57.54 Ibid., pp. 184-5.


notion of play, not as the ideal telos of aesthetic production and the subsequent aestheticization of culture and the State to be found in Schiller, but, rather, as the source of cognition in general, and of aesthetic experience and judgement in particular. To explain; play is the active, and essential, component in all subjective experience for Kant, conceiving, as he does, of human cognition as the putting into play of the synthetic imagination and the understanding in the service of determinant concepts that together make knowledge possible, while, at the same time, burying the very play that brought such knowledge into being and the pleasure that attends it. Knowledge displaces pleasure while, as Nietzsche and Foucault recognize, offering, necessarily, another form of pleasure, one satisfying the ‘will-to-truth’ to be sure, but, to repeat, forgetful of the play that produces it. Kant recognizes this when he writes:

It is true we no longer notice any decided pleasure in the comprehensibility of nature,…Still it is certain that the pleasure appeared in due course, and only by reason of the most ordinary experience being impossible without it, has it become gradually fused with simple cognition, and no longer arrests particular attention.55

The particularity of aesthetic experience, then, is precisely that this play is raised to the surface, felt and communicated through the judgement of taste. Indeed, the very act of judgement, to the extent that it imputes such pleasure to all, itself further augments that pleasure by establishing the communicative link between singularity and universality, albeit one that to re-iterate the earlier discussion, has nothing whatever to do with actual sociality or human interaction. This is not a sociology of art:

The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only in society. And if we admit that the impulse to society is natural to mankind, and that the suitability for and the propensity towards it, i.e., sociability, is a property essential to the requirements of man as a creature intended for society, and one that belongs to humanity, it is inevitable that we should look upon taste in the light of the faculty for estimating whatever enables us to communicate even our feeling to everyone else…This interest, indirectly attached to the beautiful by the inclination towards society, and, consequently, empirical, is, however, of no importance for us here. For that to which we have alone to look is what can have a bearing a priori, even though indirect, upon the judgement of taste.56

It is this, the a priori anti-humanism of aesthetic judgement, that demands the careful tracing back of the feeling of pleasure, not to the aesthetic object or to the empirical evidence of pleasure amongst those within any given social context, but, rather, to the cognitive structure and mental activity of the faculties that make any experience possible. By thus tracing aesthetic pleasure back to its dynamic source, Kant identifies the mutual activity of the imagination and the understanding as responsible for the necessary ‘feeling’ at the heart of aesthetic judgement. It is the

55 Ibid., pp. 27-8.56 Ibid., pp. 155-6.


peculiarity of this cognitive interplay within, the aesthetic dimension that needs to be grasped if aesthetic judgement is to be properly understood. As Kant describes it, within the non-aesthetic ‘determinant’ realm, the intuitions synthezised by the imagination are subsumed by the understanding under concepts, thus allowing judgement to resolve the interplay of the faculties, thereby stifling the experience of pure aesthetic pleasure, for the sake of knowledge and truth. Within the ‘reflective’ realm of the aesthetic, however, the central, and universal, demand for the recognition of beauty cannot be legislated conceptually (beauty not being a concept), resulting, instead, in the compelling but un-legislated activity of the imagination entering into free play with the understanding, here understood as a faculty of law (or law-like faculty) rather than the servant of the concept and the agent of its imposition. It is this dynamic mix of freedom and law, or lawfulness, in the absence of determinant concepts, that produces a ‘mutual quickening’ of the imagination and the understanding that creates the sensation of pleasure that founds the whole edifice of Kant’s aesthetic theory. The substance of this tortured paragraph is, perhaps, better said by Kant himself:

…since the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in the fact that it schematizes without a concept, the judgement of taste must be found upon a mere sensation of the mutually quickening activity of the imagination in its freedom, and of the understanding with its conformity to law. It must therefore rest upon a feeling that allows the object to be estimated by the finality of the representation (by which an object is given) for the furtherance of the cognitive faculties in their free play.57

As is clear from the above, Kant’s is indeed a reception aesthetics, but, contrary to the prevailing utilization of this terminology, the concept of reception should be referred to a particular sensitivity to the activity of the cognitive faculties rather than the empirical qualities of the received aesthetic object; an activity which, it should be noted, produces the aesthetic experience that, in turn, makes both the reception and the production of the artwork possible. It is tempting to romanticize, politicize or mystify this order of priority in aesthetic experience by either illegitimately confusing the freedom or free play of the imagination with human liberation and autonomy, a Schillerian move par excellence; or by attributing the sensation of a prior ‘quickening’ of the imagination to an external or transcendent force. Nietzsche shows signs of the latter when he describes, in Ecce Homo, the ‘inspiration’ that produced Zarathustra:

If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation—in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who

57Ibid., p. 143.


gives; like lightening, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice.58

Stripped of the characteristic intensity of Nietzsche’s late work, a (radicalized) Kantian aesthetic is still in evidence here, one that, to return to the earlier discussion for a moment, is better approached through a logic of the answer rather than a logic of the question as proposed by Gadamer. As is clear, aesthetic judgement, in Kant’s analysis, is by no means a response to a question but is, rather, the articulation (‘mouthpiece’) of a prior certainty, an answer that is emphatically not open to question, as Nietzsche expresses it above: ‘one accepts, one does not ask’. Thus, regardless of the language of freedom evident in this aesthetic, and even more so in Schiller’s appropriation of it, the initial moment of aesthetic experience, the reception of ‘free play’ as a felt pleasure, is, strictly speaking, heteronomous. As discussed in the last chapter, it is the transition from self to other that ‘enlarges’ the mind in that it ‘detaches [the judge] from the subjective personal conditions of his judgement’,59 only then allowing the consideration of autonomy, understood by Kant as ‘enlightenment’. Before turning again to Schiller and his notion of the ‘play-drive’, some final reflections (as promised) on the specific manner in which play is absent in Kant’s aesthetics. In spite of the fact that Kant’s notion of ‘free play’ is presented negatively as the imagination’s freedom-from the legislation of concepts, this is misleading and open to misinterpretation. There is no sense in which the imagination has liberated itself from the constraints of conceptual thought, as a Schillerian reading might suggest, on the contrary, as Kant describes it the ‘reflective judgement’ of taste, provoked by the certain pleasure associated with this play, is, in fact, ‘in need of a principle’; it goes in search of a law that it can impose upon itself in order to underwrite the universality that separates the aesthetic from the agreeable. It is for this reason that, as seen, the lawfulness of the understanding has a crucial role in the Kantian notion of ‘free play’, one that can be traced from its interplay with the imagination to the purposive purposelessness of the art object. Freedom, then, is here a neutral term that merely describes a certain cognitive dynamic that takes place outside of the determinant realm of conceptual knowledge. This, the aesthetic realm, is not inferior or superior (Schiller again), it is simply different, its role not being to negate rational laws but to affirm its own principles. By separating his notion of ‘free play’ from the play of both objective forms and subjective intentions Kant ends up with a somewhat unplayful playfulness that has little directly to do with the visual/aural pleasures of formalism (regardless of Clement Greenberg’s claims) or the celebration of ‘man the player’ (‘homo ludens’) as famously celebrated (in good Schillerian fashion) by Johan Huizinga in his book of the same name. In this respect Gadamer’s so-called desubjectivization of play is closer to Kant than he knows. By arguing, in effect, that play is neither in

58 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: Random House, 1968, p. 756.59 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 153.


the artist nor in the work but, rather, that it is they that are both in play, Gadamer, like Kant, identifies play as the a priori source of the aesthetic rather than its content or its telos, and his description of the infinite movement of this play has much in common with the latter’s dialectic. Gadamer’s use of ‘relaxation’ in the following is close to Kant’s ‘pleasure’.

It is part of play that the movement is not only without goal or purpose but without effort. It happens, as it were, by itself. The ease of play…is experienced subjectively as relaxation. The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence.60

As with Kant, then, it is play that initiates the aesthetic and not the player/artist/receiver who, to use a language more in tune with Gadamer’s Heideggerian leanings, are ontologically secondary, beings rather ‘Being’, existents rather than existence. Indeed, it is precisely the play of Being that provides the ontological horizon for Gadamer’s hermeneutical project as a whole and which, in spite of the similarities suggested, radically separates his notion of play from Kant’s. Taking our cue from Derrida, Gadamer offers an ontological hermeneutics of presence with the play of ‘aesthetic being’ as its source. The individual works of individual artists are addressed hermeneutically by individual interpreters who in entering the ‘world’ of the work open it out into its ‘continuity of meaning’ with the world and its ontological Being. All Being ‘plays’ and the question of Being in its aesthetic representation is, ultimately, the fundamental question that artworks exist to answer. The influence of the later Heidegger on Gadamer here is all too plain to see. Kant’s aesthetic is, as de Man made clear at the beginning of this chapter, disintegrative and discontinuous. Within the ‘reflective’ realm the artwork is not understood as an answer to a question but, rather, as an answer or (better) response to a need that raises rather than answers questions. Both the artist and the receiver, the producer and the reproducer, are compelled to find a manner of configuring and articulating the irrefutable feeling of pleasure and/or pain whether it be in an artwork or the judgement of taste, which, of course, cannot be separated—no judgement, no artwork! In both cases it is precisely the absence of both an ontological and an epistemological substrate that separates the artwork from the world and the aesthetic from the totality of Being. This is why Kant is so insistent that his investigation into the aesthetic is concerned neither with the formation or critique of a ‘culture of taste’61 nor with a ‘field of objects’,62 not even with a ‘peculiar realm of its own’,63 but rather with a ‘great gulf’64 that separates the realms of nature and freedom, a ‘territory’65 across which the infinite movement or

60 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 105.61 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 6.62 Ibid., p. 15.63 Ibid., p. 14.64 Ibid.65 Ibid., p. 13.


transition of aesthetic judgement can be traced. This territory does not have the ontological self-presence of Being but marks instead an ‘originary delay’, to use Derrida’s terminology, where aesthetic judgement is forever delivered in the absence of the free play that initiated its reflective movement. There is, in other words, an irreducible temporal gulf between the play of the productive imagination as it synthesizes intuitions in the absence of concepts, and the act of aesthetic judgement that re-produces and re-presents this in the judgement itself and in the object of judgement respectively. Aesthetic judgement is always too ‘late’ to coincide with its own playful source, it is inherently dis-located, and in spite of its certainty as ‘feeling’, it is this gap which raises rather than answers questions about the grounds for its universal claims and (most relevant here) the possibility or impossibility of teaching aesthetic judgement. The grounding presence of play within Gadamer’s aesthetic ontology allows a form of hermeneutical education to take place; he offers a teaching, indeed this is one of the main attractions of hermeneutics generally, it teaches you how to play and be played by the text. As already seen, Kant does not offer a teaching, indeed, he explicitly states that the third Critique is ‘not a doctrine’66 and thus, by implication, the thought of an aesthetic education of mankind, in Schiller’s sense, has no place in his critical project; this will be returned to after some final reflections on Schiller’s ‘play-drive’. It will be remembered that Kant sees the solution to the problem of priority in aesthetic judgement as the ‘key to the critique of taste’, and, as such, removes play from both the intentionality and the formal configuration of the artwork. Schiller uses similar language to describe the fundamental moment in his own aesthetics:

This precisely is the point on which the whole question of beauty must eventually turn. And if we succeed in solving this problem satisfactorily, we shall at the same time have found the thread which will guide us through the whole labyrinth of aesthetics.67

The ‘point’ here is not a priori, as with Kant, but between the poles of the chiasmus, in an ‘absurd’ space that sucks play into the movement of a mediation without a middle term; a different absence:

From this it seems to follow that there must be a state midway between matter and form, passivity and activity, and that it is into this middle state that beauty transports us….But…nothing is more absurd and contradictory than such an idea, since the distance between matter and form, passivity and activity, feeling and thought is infinite, and there exists nothing that can conceivably mediate between them.68

Quite so, but play is not a thing for Schiller it is a drive, one that compels ‘aesthetic man’ to produce, not just individual works of beauty but, ideally, an ‘aesthetic State’ that would sublate matter and form, the very ‘aesthetic culture’ that Kant declines. So, just as with the latter’s so-called reception aesthetics, 66 Ibid., p. 14.67 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. 123.68 Ibid.


Schiller’s production aesthetic is also more complex and more problematical than it might first appear, not least because the primary production is of the artist him/herself, a thought that is certainly in tension with the idea that the artist is driven by the ‘play drive’. A way out of this paradox is suggested by Schiller’s very un-Kantian distinction between what he calls ‘material play’ and ‘aesthetic play’ (the ‘play drive’ proper) where the free play of the imagination is considered to belong exclusively to mere ‘animal life’,69 while the (later) intervention of the mind, as ‘lawgiver’, effects a break with brute materiality and a ‘leap’,70 as Schiller expresses it, into the aesthetic. Kant, of course, would never separate freedom and law in this way, hence his notion of a ‘mutual quickening’ of the imagination and the understanding prior to aesthetic pleasure and judgement. Anyway, the problem that arises here is not merely an aesthetic one, it also raises serious pedagogical issues within the posited notion of aesthetic education. How does the non-artist make the necessary ‘leap’ into the aesthetic? How can play free itself once it is already in play; free itself from itself? And what impact does the negativity of such an education, the dominance of freedom-from, have on this aesthetic? The dubious logic of Rousseau’s enforced freedom echoes in Schiller’s conviction that, ultimately, in order to make an aesthetic State, one must first make ‘aesthetic man’,71 the player must be made to play differently, the drives must be made to drive autonomously, whatever that might mean, and aesthetic education must, first and foremost, produce the producer. Schiller expresses it thus:

In a word, there is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic.72

It is, therefore, one of the most important tasks of education to subject man to form even in his purely physical life, and to make him aesthetic in every domain over which beauty is capable of extending her sway…73

This is brought about by means of aesthetic education, which subjects to laws of beauty all those spheres of human behaviour in which neither natural laws, nor yet rational laws, are binding upon human caprice…74

Radically different from the Kantian ‘manner’ of teaching that, as seen, relies on the, very different, process of exemplification, Schiller is here much more forceful in his subjection of the real to the ideal in the name of play. Nevertheless, the question might still be asked, how is this subjection to take place, and, more to the point, who possesses the authority, legitimacy and, indeed the aesthetic substance necessary to ‘educate’ in this way?

69 Ibid., p. 209.70 Ibid.71 Ibid.72 Ibid., p. 161 (my emphasis).73 Ibid., p. 165 (my emphasis).74 Ibid., p. 169 (my emphasis).


These are not easy questions to answer, and, certainly, Schiller offers very few clues himself concerning the specifics of aesthetic education. One of the very rare attempts at some form of definitive statement: ‘To make beauty out of a multiplicity of beautiful objects is the task of aesthetic education’,75 is both unhelpful and tautological; what is more, it fails to address directly the question of genius or, at the very least, ‘natural talent’ which, although largely unspoken, informs Schiller’s aesthetic vision, just as it does Kant’s; albeit differently. What is certain is that the initial move from the ‘savagery’ of the ‘sense drive’ towards the freedom of the ‘play drive’ is not itself a free move but one determined by nature:

It must be a gift of nature; the favour of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first physical stage and lead the savage towards beauty.76

Aesthetic education can begin only after the uncultivated have already entered the aesthetic culture that will educate them. But the becoming of ‘aesthetic man’ is itself dependent on neither education nor culture but, rather, on the grace of a ‘kindly nature’77 which, given Schiller’s famous reflections on the ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ that surrounded him,78 is a gift bestowed on, if not an elite in the strict sense of the word, then certainly a tiny minority of artist/educators who must, like Schiller himself, devise artistic strategies that might facilitate, if not teach, the initial ‘leap’ into the aesthetic: but how? It is here, when confronted with genuine pedagogical issues, that Schiller’s ideal of aesthetic education betrays its real (one might say, hopeless) idealism, although, perhaps, not necessarily its poverty. Schiller speaks as an artist, but he can only speak to other artists, to those who have already entered into his society, and, once again, although he uses the language of the drives, his notion of aesthetic education is grounded in sociality rather than the concept of universality favoured by Kant. As a consequence, the a-priority of the ‘sensus communis’ in Kant is here shifted to an idealized social telos forever out of reach and thus more or less useless pedagogically. Compare the following to Kant’s earlier separation of the aesthetic and the social:

Though it may be his needs which drive man into society, and reason which implants within him the principles of social behaviour, beauty alone can confer upon him a social character. Taste alone brings harmony into society…only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all.79

This might sound Kantian, but it is not. By conceiving of the aesthetic as a force of socialization, harmonization and unification Schiller uproots it from its cognitive ground and re-deploys it as a socio-political, rather than a philosophical demand; this, remember, is his ‘philosophical naivety’. It is true, of course, that 75 Ibid., p. 113.76 Ibid., p. 191.77 Ibid., p. 173.78 Ibid., pp. 25-7.79 Ibid., p. 215.


Kant demands that the judgement of taste be capable of ‘universal communicability’, and he demands the agreement of others where such judgement is concerned, but these are purely philosophical demands which have nothing whatsoever to do with social interaction or with cultural hierarchies and the subjection of the other to the force of aesthetic freedom. The Kantian demand is not on the taste of the other or, for that matter, on the taste of the judge, but on the judgement of taste itself as a specific and unique form of communication that initiates reflection rather than achieving unification; the latter being a dubious goal in any case, and certainly one that has long lost any utopian aura it might have had. In the final analysis, and in spite of his liberal convictions, Schiller’s pedagogical model is somewhat suspect, dependent, as it is, on the social interaction of the artist (the ‘master’)80 and the non-artist as well as the necessity of altering the nature of ‘sensuous man’81 through the imposition of aesthetic form and the ‘modulation of the psyche’! Transformation rather than reflection being the goal ensures that the artist is cast in the role of ‘ideal man, the archetype of a human being’82 who, in ‘his’ ideality, encourages education to degenerate into a form of hopeless yearning that, consequently, leaves everything much as it is. Measured against the undoubted intensity and conviction of Schiller’s aesthetics, Kant’s rigorous account of the judgement of taste seems rather leaden by comparison. In particular, the former’s aestheticization of politics results in a dynamic and powerful vision of the artist/teacher that is, on the face of it, more attractive and compelling than the latter’s conception of the artist as ‘exemplar’. Be that as it may, it is precisely the lack of an adequate model of exemplification in Schiller’s aesthetic thought that robs it of the pedagogical substance necessary for an aesthetic education (as he intends it, at least) to take place. By dramatizing the aesthetic in terms of a ‘leap’ from the outside to the inside Schiller severs the all-important link between the sensuous and the aesthetic, between ‘man’ and ‘aesthetic man’, one that, in Kant, ensures the universality of taste and underpins the model of exemplification at the heart of his pedagogy. As discussed, in Kant’s view there is no method of teaching aesthetic judgement although there is an exemplary ‘manner’; in Schiller, by contrast, there is neither method nor manner but, that notwithstanding, there is a teaching, indeed, there is a manner, albeit one that, for Schiller (and de Man), is anything but exemplary. It is to this ‘other’ Schiller and this other teaching that we will now turn in conclusion as a way back to the reflections that began this chapter.

Savagery, Barbarism and Play

In what ways does the Aesthetic Education of Man educate, and what exactly is its pedagogical manner? As already observed, Schiller rarely speaks directly of education and when he does it is never as a model to be followed, as with Kant, but

80 Ibid., p. 157.81 Ibid., p. 163.82 Ibid., p. 17.


as a goal to be achieved, it is for this reason that the pedagogical process of exemplification cannot get off the ground. Here is a typical example:

It is, after all, peculiar to man that he unites in his nature the highest and the lowest; and if his moral dignity depends on his distinguishing strictly between one and the other, his hope of joy and blessedness depends on a due and proper reconciliation of the opposites he has distinguished. An education which is to bring his dignity into harmony with his happiness will, therefore, have to see to it that those two principles are maintained in their utmost purity even while they are being most intimately fused.83

When measured against the dialectical ‘purity’ of this educational ideal, the real movement of Schiller’s aesthetic thought, that noted by de Man and Abrams (albeit differently), falls far short of its exemplar even though (it will be argued here) it is, in its impurity, exemplary in its own way. So, the dialectic ‘fails’ here, the labour of the negative is not able to work through to the ‘proper reconciliation of the opposites’, but is this a failure in name only, one calibrated against a utopian measure that has long been stripped of its credibility? Who any longer desires reconciliation, unity, harmony and purity? Who now could believe in ‘man’, let alone ‘aesthetic man’ or, indeed, the archetypical ‘ideal man’ that silently stands in judgement throughout the somewhat desperate oscillation and reciprocation of the Aesthetic Education? Paul de Man certainly doesn’t, which, no doubt, is why he is so contemptuous of Schiller’s importation of the ‘human’ as a principle of unification in the face of the disintegrative force of the Kantian aesthetics he (mis)appropriates. But, in fact, it is not only Kant but Schiller too who, in his own way, dislocates the artist and renders deeply aporetic any desired unification of subjectivity and objectivity both aesthetically and politically. To recall Jameson’s idea again, the dialectic of Schiller’s undialectical reciprocation of irreconcilable drives is an external one that contradicts its ‘surroundings’ and ‘situation’ rather than itself. As argued above, the ‘situation’ is dialectical, it asks questions, demands answers and, while dismissive of spurious humanist fantasies, nevertheless retains the ‘human’ to the extent that it can be negatively worked into the dialectical totality. Schiller’s humanistic idealism on the other hand, precisely because it is idealistic, actually offers a harsher aesthetic vision, one that, once stripped of its ideality, itself strips away the dialogical niceties of the dialectic, leaving, what might be described as, an existential void, one that, perhaps, offers more insight into the inhumanity of art and its irreducible difference from the world and itself. This might be considered in the light of Schiller’s introductory account of his three primary ‘drives’: the ‘sense-drive’, the ‘form-drive’ and the ‘play-drive’ discussed above. To begin by using Schiller’s own terminology, the ‘sense-drive’ is savage, and the ‘form-drive’ barbaric. Looked at in turn, it quickly becomes clear that both follow a logic that removes the ‘human’ from the aesthetic, leaving the aforementioned existential void that ‘play’ is left to fill. Savagery is, for Schiller, quantitative in nature, referring to a mode of existence that seeks maximum

83 Ibid., p. 173.


sensuous gratification in the now. The ‘sense-drive’ is not, strictly speaking, a ‘human’ drive at all but, rather, the suspension of ‘Personality’ for the duration of sensuous determination and the intense pleasure it brings. In an important footnote Schiller talks of a process of ‘self-loss’:

For this condition of self-loss under the dominion of feeling linguistic usage has the very appropriate expression: to be beside oneself, i.e., to be outside of one’s own self. Although this turn of phrase is only used when sensation is intensified into passion, and the condition becomes more marked by being prolonged, it can nevertheless be said that everyone is beside himself as long as he does nothing but feel.84

As Husserl in his phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness makes evident, what Schiller is here calling the personality acquires coherence and continuity thanks to an ongoing process of ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ which ensures that the temporal instant is always more than the finite ‘now’, to the degree that past and future are compressed into it as memory and expectation. Coincidentally, Husserl often uses the example of melody to illustrate the manner in which retention and protention allow the recognition of musical form in what are, in fact, finite instants of unconnected sound. Schiller’s desire for sensuous matter, understood by him as the ‘life’ of the aesthetic, shows a readiness to sacrifice the self in its temporal continuity. He also uses a musical analogy:

Since everything that exists in time exists as a succession, the very fact of something existing at all means that everything else is excluded. When we strike a note on an instrument, only this single note, of all those it is capable of emitting, is actually realized; when man is sensible of the present, the whole infinitude of his possible determinations is confined to this single mode of being. Wherever this [sense] drive functions exclusively, we inevitably find the highest degree of limitation. Man in this state is nothing but a quantity, an occupied moment of time…85

The ‘sense-drive’, then, aspires to a moment of absolute existence that in its exclusivity denies in advance any possibility of self-consciousness or intersubjectivity, thereby rendering the very concept of aesthetic education redundant from the outset. Savagery is prepared to sacrifice everything for sensuous pleasure, including the aesthetic, a fact that might help explain the tension between art and aesthetics. Be that as it may, this, the sensuous polarity of the dialectic or chiasmic trope (depending on who you follow) proves itself to be devoid of the humanity that Schiller’s aesthetic aspires to and thus requires the transcendence of material pleasure, a liberation promised by the rational abstraction of the ‘form-drive’. But, as will be seen, the ‘form-drive’ itself offers little comfort for those seeking human company. In a turn that would have pleased Nietzsche, Schiller acknowledges that, while the seat of reason, freedom and morality, the ‘form-drive’, as a drive is barbaric in its desire to impose the force of law on the fickleness of the senses and deny man

84 Ibid., p. 79.85 Ibid.


the pleasure of the moment in the name of a cruel and inhuman infinitude. What is more, and here one hears a pre-echo of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, it is the master of form, the dispenser of law, who is the more ‘contemptible’ because the more enslaved:

The savage despises Civilization, and acknowledges Nature as his sovereign mistress. The barbarian derides and dishonours Nature, but, more contemptible than the savage, as often as not continues to be the slave of his slave.86

As a drive, the form-drive’s desire is the absolute substantiation of the ‘person’ and the necessary annulment of nature as other. However, it is precisely the barbaric indifference of the form-drive to the material existence of the other that ultimately reduces the formalist, just like the sensualist, to a ‘non-entity’.87

If…the formal drive becomes receptive…if thought forestalls feeling and the Person supplants the world, then the Person ceases to be autonomous force and subject precisely to the extent that it forces its way into the place of the object…From the moment that man is only form, he ceases to have a form; the annulling of his Condition, consequently, involves that of his Person too.88

Before proceeding to the ‘play-drive’, the only means, for Schiller, of satisfactorily limiting the destructiveness of the other two drives, it is worth noting here the manner in which he himself as an artist is actively engaged throughout the text in what might be described as a self-reflexive struggle that, through the destructive dualism described, arrives at a productive moment. While the oscillation between sense and form, feeling and thought, practice and theory, the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’ might be identified as a peculiarity of Schiller’s own life as an artist, and famously so, this is not the main point here. Of more interest is the exemplary model of art practice that, unwittingly no doubt, presents aesthetic activity as the annihilation rather than the expression of the self, and which demonstrates only too clearly how both the form and the content of the work gain intensity and extensity at the expense of the ‘person’, of the artist. Strangely reminiscent of Blanchot, it is the ‘death’ of the artist which brings the work to life as a form of ‘worklessness’ that denies the negative labour and synthetic movement of the dialectic. In this regard, rather than seeing the irresolvability of the Schillerian chiasmus as a falling away from the dislocating dialectic of Kant’s aesthetics (as does de Man), it is also possible to read Schiller against himself, refuse the integrative idealism of the ‘play-drive’, and affirm instead the irreducible difference at the heart of aesthetic production, one that drives, to give one example, the whole of The Aesthetic Education of Man itself. Hegel rejects the aesthetic for precisely this reason, but, if there is to be an outside to the dialectic, one necessarily oblivious to the dialectic, then, in spite of the latter’s admiration for Schiller’s pre-dialectical thought, one might identify this outside in the ‘failure’ 86 Ibid., p. 21.87 Ibid., p. 89.88 Ibid., p. 91.


of The Aesthetic Education to resolve itself, thus resulting in a different aesthetic education than the one intended, but an education nonetheless. This, of course, is not the reading intended by Schiller or countenanced by his followers or commentators all of whom give primacy to the ‘play-drive’ as the emergence of the aesthetic proper. However, even here, the integrative role of play can be seen to carry within it a subterranean inhumanity that belies it humanistic visage. Adorno instinctively exposes the dubious underbelly of play in his Aesthetic Theory when he makes the following rather telling remarks:

Contrary to the Schillerian ideology, play is the result of an alliance between art and unfreedom. It carries a hostile, anti-artistic quality into art…Loyal to the bourgeoisie and in accord with the philosophy of his time, Schiller pronounced repression to be freedom…On analogy with the death instinct, play as a psychic phenomenon interprets obedience as happiness. From the outset play in art is discipline, reinforcing the taboo on expression…Whenever art becomes playful through and through, expression goes down the drain. Secretly play is in league with fate…89

Here again, then, reading against the grain allows an aesthetic model to emerge that is exemplary in its inhumanity, what Adorno calls the ‘horror’ of play, recognized by Beckett, but at work in all art, as Lyotard’s quotation of Apollinaire confirms: ‘more than anything artists are men who want to become inhuman’.90

Lyotard goes on to speak of an ‘infinitely secret’ inhumanity of which the ‘soul is hostage’, an inhumanity that needs an ‘outlet’. In common with Lyotard’s own work, the aesthetic is here understood as the primary means by which inhumanity, thought, it should be emphasized, in a neutral way, takes on form as a peculiarly ‘workless’ work, the work of fate. Stripped of its idealistic humanistic idealism, that which, as de Man sees it, has made it so palatable to subsequent generations of lily-livered academics ever-fearful of redundancy, Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man does indeed offer a form of aesthetic education, and one that is not cast out into the depths of a misty telos, forever unattainable, but, rather, one that is a priori and exemplary; closer to Kant, in fact, and certainly closer than the ‘Kantianism’ he intended. In a strange way this ‘other’ Aesthetic Education of Man is also utopian, but not in a form that would be recognized by Schiller himself or followers such as Marcuse. This ‘other’ reading would engage with the thought of a productive movement unconstrained by the integrative purposefulness of dialectics, one that is prepared to affirm the unravelling of the so-called utopianism of beautiful unity and self-identity for the sake of a notion of humanity too human for humanism: the utopianism implicit in Lyotard’s ‘what if?’

89 Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 438.90 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity, 1991, p. 2.


What if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman…what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?91

What if we accept the continuing necessity of aesthetic education, but contra Schiller, use such a concept of education to drive a wedge between humanism and utopianism? But then how does one reconcile education and the inhuman, pedagogy and fate? It is not easy to answer such questions, but if the fate of the artist is precisely to suffer fate, not through an expressionism that has become almost laughable, but through an incessant movement that expresses nothing except the desire to resist desire and the drive to forestall the drives, then aesthetic education, instead of attempting to ‘make man aesthetic’, would be better employed tracing this, the exemplary movement of aesthetic judgement and production. In spite of himself this is exactly what Schiller does; he charts the dynamic of an aesthetic that can be lived but not learnt, in a ‘manner’ that is educative still, but lost on those who insist upon reducing education to the teleological movement from question to answer. If this is Schiller’s ‘real’ teaching then we are certainly not all Schillerians now, any more than Schiller himself was.

91 Ibid.

irony and singularity, ashgate, 2005. chapter 2. aesthetic education or aesthetic ideology? schiller...

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