Introduction

These twenty-seven letters were first written to the Danish Prince of Augustenburg, who had given Schiller a pension during his illness. The French Revolution had by then sunk into the Terror, and Schiller asks why a revolution aimed at freedom should degenerate into violence. His answer is that before man can win political freedom he must become inwardly free, and the way to freedom lies through beauty. Man, he argues, has two drives: the sensuous drive, seeking change and life, and the formal drive, seeking permanence and law; only in the 'play drive' are they united: 'Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.' Beauty restores man to wholeness, and aesthetic education is the path to a complete humanity and to political freedom. A classic of German aesthetics, the book deeply influenced Hegel and Marx.