"On the Aesthetic Education of Man" by Schiller - interesting parallel with Tomgos and Tathos

 Slowly (I'm a slow reader at the best of times) making my way through the intro to "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" by Schiller, but already seeing surprising and interesting parallels with my own thinking. This is not to suggest I have reinvented Play Drive, but rather than it suggests I am on the right track, and that reading this book will be instructive.

In particular, in the introduction by the translator, Snell, he states:

In his theory of the two fundamental impulses, Schiller connects Man's sensuous nature with the material impulse, and his reason with the formal impulse. The former, which rules him as physical being, lays upon him the shackles of physical necessity, and seeks to make him (in Fichtean phrase) pure Object; the latter comes to his rescue from the Absolute, and is capable of leading him back to the Absolute. So Man is a creature of two worlds, urged in two opposite directions at once to the empirical, the contingent, the subjective on the one hand, and to the free, the necessary (the necessity of the autonomous moral law), the objectively valid on the other. He has to satisfy the demands of both capacities and somehow bring them into harmony with one another; and this he does through the aesthetic, which unites matter and form, sensuousness and reason. Not until he has achieved that harmony is he free; he is a slave so long as he obeys only one of the impulses. How he sets about this in actual practice, Schiller finds it difficult to say. Elsewhere in his writings he emphasizes the importance of the relaxation of Man's powers, especially when they have been one-sidedly employed, and claims that such relaxation is given in its purest form by aesthetic contemplation, which occupies the whole of his powers in the same way that play does; he stresses the opportunity afforded by art, and especially by tragedy, for the exercise of moral power; and he believes that art is capable of introducing that condition of contentment (if the word is not misleading; equipoise might express it better) which is conducive to his physical and spiritual well-being alike.

The two impulses correspond well to 'Tomgos' and 'Tathos', but that's perhaps to be expected, since they derive from the greek ideas of logos and pathos. What's more interesting is the idea that these ('sensuousness and reason') need to be balanced through the aesthetic. Doing so involves relaxing of the power, in my case, letting Tathos lead when my background and training to date is in logic. Ultimately the aim being balance, or rather equipoise, which corresponds somewhat to the 'null point'.

Of course, the aim here is 'moral living' and contentment, not art production, but I was nevertheless struck my the parallels, and I am intrigued to see what I might further learn.