After a long pause of struggling to read books (I read a lot online), I was inspired to pick up "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" again this morning. I should perhaps have read it again from the beginning, but candidly I couldn't face it! I find some very interesting nuggets and some genuine humour, but it's slow going nonetheless. That said, this morning in the 14th letter, I read this interesting idea:
"The sense impulse wants to be determined, to receive its object; the form impulse wants to determine for itself, to produce its object; so the play impulse will endeavour to receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce as the sense aspires to receive"
This is the first real mention of the play impulse, and I really like the way the idea is presented. To recap, broadly the sense impulse relates to the emotional/sensory needs of humans, Tathos as it were, and the form impulse is the urge to make sense of the world, to reason, Tomgos as it were. Schiller has positioned the goal of humanity to balance these two impulses. He positions play (which he later frames as the quest for beauty) as being the unifying impulse, essentially positioning it as a drive to seek out things that appeal to meaning in the world, but make things that appeal to the worldly senses. At least, that's how I understand it. I like the idea (again subject to the filter of my poor understanding) that art is the beauty we see in the world, and the beauty we seek to create in response. Where beauty is something that balances our sensory needs and our intellectual needs.
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