Buddhist Romanticism

them into conflict with one another. However, when their basic needs are
met, they turn to play: singing, dancing, telling stories. As they do so, they
find enjoyment in one another’s company.
If done carelessly, the exercise of the play drive can lead to dissolute
harm and further conflict. But if done with reflection, it can eventually lead
people to think in moral terms: how best to live together with one another
in fairness and harmony—fraternity, in the sense of the Revolution, or
wholeness writ large—so as to find more enjoyment together over the long
run.
What this means is that one’s sense of morality does not develop in
contradiction to one’s feelings and social drives, as it does in Kant’s theory.
Instead, the moral sense comes about as a result of one’s feelings and social
drives—when these are trained through a reflection on how one’s longterm
wellbeing depends on pursuing wholeness both within and without.
This is where aesthetic education comes in: training the play drive so
that it leads in a moral direction. Schiller’s own experience with statesponsored
education convinced him that governments were ill-equipped to
provide the sort of education that people needed in order to become free.
Ideally, governments would direct the economic order so that people were
not alienated from their labor—as when they had no control over the
objects they made—or from one another through unfair exploitation. At the
very least, governments should provide the economic conditions whereby
all members of society had their needs well enough met so that they had
time and leisure to enjoy the arts, such as the theater and books.
Once people were ready for the arts, though, it was the artist’s duty to
provide their aesthetic education. The purpose of this type of education was
to lead them to the “aesthetic condition”—a state of mind where they could
step back from the immediate concerns of their sense drives and
contemplate (1) the fact that they also had form drives, and (2) that they
were in a position to choose whether to bring their form drives and sense
drives into harmony. In other words, a true work of art should not preach
morality, for that would be tedious and self-defeating. Instead, it should
raise moral questions and get its audience to see their own lives as
involving moral issues. Then it was up to them to exercise their freedom of
choice to pursue the goal of harmonizing their various drives.
Schiller delineated two types of moral actions that can result when the
moral sense is developed: those performed with grace and those performed
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