Schiller and Company, or How Habermas Incites Us to Play you. Your story matters

and reasonable principle, indifferent to human passions and material needs, do violence to the very humanity they would set free. Schil ler's remedy for revolution is an aesthetic education that includes both playing with existing materials and appreciating the artworks that issue from it, because play exercises our human faculties in ways that embrace antagonism and contain it. To be moved by an aesthetically pleasing effect is to acknowledge, for a moment or for as long as the experience lasts, a success in wrestling material into new forms, repairing the damage that flesh and spirit do to one another. At precarious peace in the world, an artist or an admirer?both count as active citizens for Schiller, though real fans play at being artists?achieves freedom and invites others to share and to cultivate the experience. And, since wrestling with matter and circumstance takes discipline and training, Schiller offers his series of letters as encouragement and advice to develop the Spieltrieb.


How Habermas Incites Us to Play
Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) is worth re-reading today from the troubled fronts of politics and pedagogy. 1 While our government claims to defend democracy by waging war abroad and creating immigration crises at home, we might remember Schiller's concern about the French Revolution running headstrong behind reason into "barbarism" as it toppled one state in its enthusiasm for another. Specters of that abstract and unfeeling reason are also driving our public schools toward quantitative measurement of student achievement and the self-destructive elimination of arts and interpretation. Public education, so earnestly bent on practical results that it squeezes out room and resources for play and the arts in order to add another math class or a prep session, hopes to raise scores on standardized tests. Ironically for educators and tragically for children, the sacrifice of play and arts on an altar of correctness has actually kept the scores down, because the tests measure more than data retrieval; they also gauge the students' freer critical faculty, which depends on the exercise of imagination that Schiller called play. Schools are failing our children, in part at least, through indifference or excessive caution about creativity.
Surely the connection between the eroded room for political debate and a play starved education is worth worrying about again, if worry leads conversations today with his enduring, almost eerily contemporary, invitation to loosen up and to play.

LET'S LOOSEN UP
Our humanity depends on it he was sure, because playfulness for 0 Schiller is no frivolous pastime. Play is the instinct for freedom and for art, the drive that can harmonize man's two other mutually murderous instincts, transforming the conflict between Passion and Reason into aesthetic Schiller anticipates objections to his defense of the freedom achieved through play and the arts as a value that trumps even political rationality. Perhaps the young reader to whom he addresses these letters would prefer "a loftier theme than that of art," which probably seemed "unseasonable in Competing against each other, they would tear tormented man into lifeless pieces.
Kant offered his Third Critique on aesthetic judgment as a bridge between pure and practical reason because "there is a great gulf fixed" between the realm of the supersensible and that of sensible nature. 8 He managed to connect the two thanks to the faculty of judgment which works in both registers of reason to keep them in check: "A critique of pure reason, i.e., of our faculty of judging on a priori principles, would be incomplete if the critical examination of judgment, which is a faculty of knowledge, and as such lays claim to independent principles, were not dealt with separately." 9 Not that judgment can be separated from reason, to which it is annexed in the process of reasoning, but that it needs to be considered separately as a rather strange moment for philosophy, a kind of pause in order to test the direction of understanding or of subjective interest in the form of desire or morality. Judgment can do its work of stimulating reflective checks on reason because judgment has no a priori principles. It responds impartially to stimuli, without measuring the response against preexisting models or concepts. he demonstrated not only that understanding is restrained by ideas that have no a priori grounding in nature, but also that, in order to complete its own task of cognition, understanding needs to exercise judgment, 13 a faculty that depends on free and disinterested contemplation. Kant followed the consequences of disinterested pleasure with quiet dignity to ground a peaceful coexistence between knowing and feeling in the dependence of each on the judgment that we hone through aesthetic appreciation. Arendt  For Schiller, the tortuous process of making art dissolves the contradiction between time and timelessness, even for skeptics who can be moved by beauty when they would not be budged by argument.  Play assumes risks through uncharted moves that depend on freedom and therefore demand it, moves that anticipate failures as cues for abandoning some experiments and constructing new ones. Play also admits to living in the shadow-life of mere appearances, to being blatantly counterfactual. When critics accuse Mockus of thinking counterfactually, he agrees with them, but adds with almost impish self-evidence that it is impossible to think of change without appealing to counterfactual flights of imagination. The equivalent term in Schiller for counterfactual thinking is "appearance" [Schein], and he defends it at length against both "extreme stupidity and extreme intelligence." The one has no imagination, and the other refuses anything but ideal truth. They cannot or will not think outside the box of reality and consequently forfeit the freedom that appearance can exercise.

READY?
Schiller's Letters can gird the reader with sound arguments against zealots and skeptics alike. The book is not so much a training manual for young artists as a coaching aid to help them keep up the effort in face of discouragement. Kant may have imagined that his arguments depended only on clarity of thought and expression rather than on sentimental persuasion, though the redundancy and insistence of several arguments hint at some nervousness as to how they will be received.-. But Schiller is both frank and eloquent about his challenge to charm and to win skeptics over to art, so firm is his faith in humanity's deep sensitivity to beauty even when reason fails.
The letters are seductive if persistent, and by the last one only philistines refuse the invitation to play. 4 Schiller AE "But the state is an organisation which fashions itself through itself and for itself, and for this reason it can only be realised when the parts have been accorded to the idea of the whole. The state serves the purpose of a representative, both to pure ideal and to objective humanity, in the breast of its citizens, accordingly it will have to observe the same relation to its citizens in which they are placed to it, and it will only respect their subjective humanity in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective existence. If the internal man is one with himself, he will be able to rescue his peculiarity, even in the greatest generalisation of his conduct, and the state will only become the exponent of his fine instinct, the clearer formula of his internal legislation. But if the subjective man is in conflict with the objective and contradicts him in the character of the people, so that only the oppression of the former can give the victory to the latter, then the state will take up the severe aspect of the law against the citizen, and in order not to fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a hostile individuality, without any compromise. [Letter iv] 11 Kant, quoted in Arendt, Lectures, p 64.