The Debt of Reason. The significance of Schiller's aesthetic education for life-long learning

Abstract

Bildung in the modern age could be understood as trusting in the ability of reason to 'humanize' life as a whole, an opportunity to assign a sense of freedom, and morality to it. Bildung is the redemption of the human from heteronomous and dominant forms. Whilst there is a debt of Reason, what it matures towards the sensible. In the "Letters on aesthetic education" Schiller proposes an aesthetic mediation between sensible and rational, the need to think of a third mediator between the two that he calls "aesthetic state" or "ästhetischer Spieltrieb”. This mediation anticipates the current connection between transformative learning and Bildung. With the utopian tenor of his project of harmonic regeneration of man, Schiller presents an alternative grounded in the awareness of the fracture produced in the history of humanity, thinking of the function of aesthetic education, argued in this contribution to crucial issues of lifelong learning.