Ästhetische Erziehung im Angesicht der ökologischen Krise

Abstract

This dissertation investigates why, despite broad awareness of the ecological crisis, well-founded reasons to protect our environment (Um-Welt) so rarely yield sustained action. It argues that the gap between “knowing what is right” and “doing what is right” reflects less a lack of argument than a deficit of character formation (Charakterbildung), and it makes the case for the centrality of aesthetic education – Bildung as self-formation and Erziehung as the pedagogical and public work of opening spaces in which reason(s) can take root and become second nature. In this key, the project advances aesthetic education (Erziehung) in the strong sense of Bildung: a practice with anthropological and political reach – including, but not reducible to, political anthropology—that frees attention, feeling, and judgment from pure instrumentality while remaining sufficiently oriented to guide action. Methodologically, the argument proceeds in three movements: diagnosis, normative reconstruction, and lived forms (Lebensformen/modes of existence). Chapter 1 reconstructs critical lines from Marx and the Frankfurt School – with Marcuse as a central figure – to Arendt’s republican register, foregrounding Marcuse’s articulation of an aesthetic dimension, read in conversation with Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, as an experiential counter-space to the Leistungsprinzip/performance principle that opens room for resonance beyond mere instrumentality. Two contemporary case readings – Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten and the satirical program Die Anstalt – are integrated as diagnostics of technocratic depoliticization and the thinning of the public space of appearance; they serve to ground, rather than illustrate, the theory. Chapter 2 turns to metaphysics and justification. Rather than positioning the dissertation against teleological “last foundations,” it shows why reliance on them is fragile under pluralist conditions and thus insufficient as a public basis for ecological transformation. From there, the thesis develops a pragmatic‑idealist orientation: relative universalities that can travel across contexts without dogma, anchored in practices of aesthetic Bildung/Erziehung. Chapter 3 revisits contractualist resources (Kant, Rawls, Pogge) for sustainability and intergenerational justice. The strength of contractualism lies in its capacity to ground the legitimacy of collectively binding rules; yet, by itself, it does not generate the motivational energies or the culturally legible meaning-spaces in which those rules can take root and be filled with life. Hence the pivot: justification requires a co-constitutive accompaniment; the one proposed in this dissertation is aesthetic education in the sense of Bildung – creating and sustaining spaces in which norms are at once reasonable and sensible, without sliding into social engineering. Chapter 4 provides the anthropological core of this project. Building on the account of Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension” given in Chapter 1, read in conversation with Schiller, it returns to Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education and unfolds the Spieltrieb as mediation between inclination and duty, repositioning Anmut (grace) as a primary ethical force – a schooling of desire, to desire more nobly, so that appeals to Würde (dignity) and to the sublime as governing ideals need not carry the normative burden. Rather than dignity as self-elevation or the sublime’s heroic pathos, the emphasis falls on graceful composure and poise that render reasons sensible, sustainable, and shareable. In dialogue with Schiller and Fichte, the chapter articulates the guiding figure of the “beautiful, loving soul” – not a moral template, but a relatively universalizable form of life, developed in dialogue with Latour’s modes of existence and Jaeggi’s account of Lebensformen in which recognition, charity (Nächstenliebe), and self-constraint take habitual shape. Bildung/Erziehung here means opening and holding educational spaces for learning and character formation in a liberal key – not by molding subjects to a preconceived image, and not as social engineering. Within the Frankfurt School, Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension functions as an experiential counter-space to the Leistungsprinzip – a resonance-space in which perception and desire can be reorganized against the grain of instrumentality. The emphasis is not on a slogan of refusal; it is on critical-creative imagination within forms of experience that loosen the apparent necessity of the present. To show how these forms of experience come into play – and their significance – the dissertation stages aesthetic exercises as laboratories of attention, pacing, and space-making rather than illustrations. In their intended order – Spazieren as an exercise in opening space; Stifter’s Nachsommer (the “sanfte Gesetz” as life-form); Hesse’s Siddhartha with a companion reading of Der Steppenwolf (letting go, love, and learning to laugh and dance); and Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (disturbance and stillness) – they compose a trajectory toward graceful composure and resonance. The sequence opens with the deliberate pace of Spazieren/walking; where pathos (Schiller’s Erleiden) surfaces, it is tested and gently tempered. The walking exercise treats space as practice – how pace, posture, and environment co-produce resonance-spaces rather than instrumental corridors. Across the set, the “beautiful, loving soul” appears as a problem-figure to be tested and disciplined – prone to sentimentality if unformed, yet, under aesthetic Bildung/Erziehung, capable of nobler desire (Anmut) eschewing the sublime’s rhetoric of heroism. Along the way, the exercises show how the formal choices that constitute these forms of experience are not an ornament but the means by which reasons gain practical grip – becoming sensible, sustainable, and shareable. These are sites where attention, affect, and judgment are retrained in real time, under constraints, without guarantees. This dissertation reframes aesthetic education as aesthetic Bildung/Erziehung for the ecological age – creating and sustaining resonance-spaces (including Spazieren/walking and Raumöffnung/space-making) in which reasons can take root and become second nature, thereby mediating between justification and motivation without paternalism or programmatic schemes. It also advances a concept of pragmatic idealism of relative universalities – treating the “beautiful, loving soul” not as a template but as a heuristic figure of formation (a revisable Bildungsfigur) – with public reach without reliance on foundational metaphysics, in dialogue with forms of life and modes of existence. Finally, it links institutional design to cultural ecologies of resonance: contractualist “playing fields” endure only when supported by spatial and pedagogical practices through which norms are felt as well as reasoned. What matters is not an abstract ideal of “better form,” but increased resonance-capacity – spaces freed, as far as possible, from instrumentalization while still sufficiently oriented to matter. This double movement constitutes a productive tension: we keep a goal in view and protect the non-instrumental character of the spaces that educate and form us toward it. Thus aesthetic Bildung/Erziehung functions throughout as the co-constitutive accompaniment to justification developed in Chapter 3. An extended coda (Ausklang) gathers the threads in two movements: a conclusio that rearticulates kalokagathia – the fitting-together of the good and the beautiful – through compassion and charity (Nächstenliebe) as a practiced stance for the age of ecological crisis; and an epilogue in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy’s Four Lectures for Children that takes up justice, beauty, love, and the idea of God in a public voice beyond the seminar room. Rather than adding new theses, the coda turns to forms and forums in which saying and doing re-enter relation – the public lecture, walking (Spazieren), acts of Raumöffnung/space-making, and small institutions that hold space – and it recasts Nächstenliebe as a practice of attention, proximity, and shared upkeep within such resonance-spaces. The final synthetic conclusion is simple to state and exacting to enact: reasons acquire reach when housed in aesthetic Bildung/Erziehung; contractualist “playing fields” endure when surrounded by cultural ecologies of resonance; and the “beautiful, loving soul” serves as a heuristic figure of formation – shaped and reshaped in our lived engagement with our common, socio-ecological world (Mit- und Um-Welt) – rather than a template. In this light, “Aesthetic Education” co-constitutively accompanies justification, and this dissertation ends with a commitment suited to the Anthropocene: arguments joined to forms of life and public practices in which they can breathe, take root, and move us to act in concert.