Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

the sublime and the beautiful—called by him the “energizing” and “melting”
types of beauty—both to gender attributes and to society’s control over individual
energy. He links energizing beauty to “savagery and hardness,” melting
beauty to “effeminacy and enervation.”
That is why in periods of vigor and exuberance we find true grandeur
of conception coupled with the gigantic and the extravagant, sublimity
of thought with the most frightening explosions of passion; and that is
why in epochs of discipline and form we find nature as often suppressed
as mastered, as often outraged as transcended . . . [E]nergy of feeling is
stifled along with violence of appetite, and that character too shares the
loss of power which should only overtake passion. 82
It is art, in Schiller’s view, that will make possible resolution of “the eternal
antagonism of the sexes”—the “simplest and clearest paradigm” of all the
psychological and social divisions experienced by modern humanity—and so
more generally of those divisions “in the complex whole of society, endeavoring
to reconcile the gentle with the violent in the moral world after the pattern of
the free union it there contrives between the strength of man and the gentleness
of woman.” 83
Such passages seek reconciliation and harmony, not the conquest of one principle
by another. In the Aesthetic State which represents Schiller’s ideal,
“a-social appetite,” the male principle, “must renounce its self-seeking” while
“the Agreeable, whose normal function is to seduce the senses, must cast toils of
Grace over the mind as well.” The terms in which he poses the problem, however,
taking for granted the contrast of “strength” and “gentleness,” spell the
impossibility of a solution. Schiller himself expected modern society to fail to
achieve personal and social harmony and therefore located the Aesthetic State
“only in some few chosen circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless
imitation of the manners and morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature
we have made our own.” 84 But “aesthetic education,” as Schiller conceived it,
could operate only within the self-divided social world it promised ideally to
reform, a bourgeois culture still caught in the toils of gender totemism. In this
culture, it was only by taking form in the activity of the heroic male that art
could claim to embody both the supposedly elemental, natural force of self-love
and the highest development of universal civilization.
82 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, p. 113.
83 Ibid., p. 213.
84 Ibid., pp. 217, 219.
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