The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aesthetic man as the concept of an ideal man contended by Johann Christoph von Friedrich Schiller who maintained the education of humanity through beauty. By combining nature and reason, he set up the o...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aesthetic man as the concept of an ideal man contended by Johann Christoph von Friedrich Schiller who maintained the education of humanity through beauty. By combining nature and reason, he set up the objective concept of beauty, called freedom In a phenomenon, In order to overcome the subjectivity of Kantian aesthetics, and firmly establish the objective principle of beauty, For Kant, freedom is granted only to the human being with practical reason, and is ground for a human being as an autonomous being, whereas in Schiller`s theory freedom is extended to include nature and objects. He dealt in particular with the beauty of man, including that of the beauty of spirit as well as that of appearance, as an aesthetic object. His stance on it is clearly shown in his theory of the sublime. Moreover, he classified basic impulse of man Into sensuous material impulse and rational form impulse to account for the ideal of humanity. He insisted that aspects of humanity were unified by the play impulse which was a product of the harmonious combination of the two impulses. The play impulse combines reality and formality, passivity and activity, and fortuity and necessity in harmony, and then enables the concept of humanity to be accomplished In other words, when rule by the play impulse, a human being becomes an aesthetic being that possesses a beautiful soul, and realize the entire freedom of humanity under the play impulse. Schiller found the model of an ideal man in ancient Greek. He thought that the ideal of humanity of harmony of sensibility and reason, which is just imposed on us as a destiny, was achieved in ancient Greek. While beauty is the symbol of the achieved destiny of man for us, for the Creek it was fact. The achieved destiny of man means the harmony of sensibility and reason, that is to say the embodiment of the true freedom of man as a being of matter and at the same time of spirit, and so, this embodiment just is what it means to be an aesthetic man. However, in Schiller`s thoughts, the destiny imposed on man is not something to be achieved through human experience, but is just the task of reason and the idea of humanity that man can never reach.