Schiller began writing the Epistle to Aesthetic Education in the summer of 1793 and published it in Horen in 1795. These briefs became the first programmatic documents of the aesthetic critique of modernity. Schiller used the concepts of Kant's philosophy to analyze the divisiond modernity within itself, and designed a set of aesthetic utopias that gave art a comprehensive socio-revolutionary effect. From this point of view, Schiller's work is already one step ahead of Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin, who have become close friends in Tübingen, in Frankfurt. Art should be able to replace religion and exert the power of unity, because art is seen as a "form der Mittei lung" that penetrates deep into the sexual relations between human subjects. Schiller understood art as a communicative rationality that would be realized in the "aesthetic kingdom" of the future.
In his second letter, Schiller asks whether it is anachronistic to let beauty take the lead before freedom, "for, today, the affairs of the moral world have a more immediate stake, and the state of affairs of the times urgently requires the philosophical spirit to explore the most perfect of all works of art, namely, the study of how to establish true political freedom."
The answer to Schiller's question is that art itself is the intermediary through enlightenment to achieve true political freedom. The process of indoctrination has nothing to do with the individual, but with the context of the collective life of the nation: "The wholeness of character can be found only in nations capable and qualified to transform the coercive state into a free state". If art is to be able to fulfill its historical mission of unifying the modernity of analysis, it must not cling to the individual, but must transform the forms of life in which the individual participates. Therefore, Schiller emphasized that art should exert the power of communication, empathy and solidarity, that is, to emphasize the "public character" of art (der Offentliche Charakter). Schiller's analysis of reality is that individual forces in the relations of modern life, if they are to separate and develop from each other, must come at the expense of their totality. In this way, the dispute between ancient and modern times has become the starting point for the critical self-confirmation of modernity. Ancient Greek poetry and art "although it also decomposed human nature, enlarged it and then dispersed it to the magnificent gods, but." It does not tear human nature into pieces, but mixes them in a variety of different ways, because each individual god does not lack a complete humanity. This is completely different from us modern people! In our case, the images of the genus are also enlarged and scattered among the individuals—but they are fragmented, not kaleidoscopic mixtures, so that the totality of the genus has to be asked one by one." Schiller criticized bourgeois society as a "system of egoism." His wording is reminiscent of the young Marx. Schiller argues that not only is the materialized economic process like an elaborate clock, disconnecting enjoyment from labor, means from ends, efforts from rewards; the independent state apparatus is also mechanically operating like clocks, making citizens aliens and incorporating them into the law of indifference by "dividing the hierarchy" as objects of domination. After criticizing alienated labor and bureaucratic politics, Schiller immediately turned to rationalized and over-specialized science, far from the problems of the everyday: "When the thinking spirit pursues indelible possessions in the conceptual world, it must become an alien in the world of the senses, losing matter for the sake of form. When the pragmatic spirit is closed in a monotonous circle of objects, and in this circle it is bound by formulas, it is bound to see the whole of freedom disappear before his eyes, and at the same time its scope becomes more and more impoverished. ...... Thus the abstract thinker often has an indifferent heart, for his task is to analyze impressions, and impressions touch the soul only as a whole; the pragmatic man often has a narrow heart, for their imagination is closed in the monotonous circle of his profession and cannot be extended to the ways of intention of others"
However, Schiller only saw this alienation as an inevitable side effect of the process of progress, and humanity could not get rid of it and stride forward. Schiller is as convinced of this as the critical philosophy of history. He even unreservedly uses the teleological framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy: "It is only because the various individual forces in the human body are isolated from each other and all delusionally legislate on their own that these separate forces fight against the truth of things." And to force the sense of commonality in external phenomena, which is usually stopped by laziness and complacency, to explore the depth of things." Like the spirit of work in the social realm, the spirit of thinking in the spiritual kingdom is also independent. Thus, two opposing types of legislation are formed in society and philosophy. This abstract opposition between perceptual and intellectual, material and formal impulses subjects the enlightened subject to a double coercion: the material compulsion of nature and the moral compulsion of freedom. The more the subject tries to control the outer nature and its inner nature without scruples, the more obvious these two coercions become. Thus, the spontaneous dynamic state and the rational ethical state are ultimately separated from each other; the two are identical only in the effect of suppressing empathy, for "the dynamic state can only make society possible, because it inhibits nature by nature; the ethical state can only make society (morally) necessary, because it subordinates the individual will to the universal will."
For this reason Schiller imagined the realization of reason as a revival of a destroyed sense of empathy; it could not be formed alone from either nature or freedom, but should appear only in the process of enlightenment. In order to put an end to the struggle of the legislature, the process of indoctrination must, on the one hand, free the material character from the arbitrariness of external nature and, on the other hand, free the moral character from free will. The intermediary of the process of enlightenment is art, because art produces an "einemittere Stimmung" (neutral state of mind), in which "the mind is neither material nor morally coerced, but acts in both ways". With the progress of reason, modernity became increasingly drawn into powerful systems of needs and abstract moral codes; yet art was able to give "a social character" to this fragmented wholeness, for art participated in both legislations: "Between the terrible kingdom of force and the divine kingdom of law, aesthetic creative activity unwittingly establishes a third kingdom, the kingdom of play and illusion." In this kingdom, the creative impulse of aesthetics removes the shackles of all relations and frees man from all things called coercion, whether material or moral."
For Hegel and Marx, and even for the entire Hegelian Marxist tradition up to Lukács and Marcuse, aesthetic utopias have always been the key to discussion. With this aesthetic utopia, Schiller understood art as the true embodiment of communicative rationality. Of course, Kant's Critique of Judgment also contributed to its entry into a contemplative idealism, but this idealism was not satisfied with the Kantian differentiation between intellectual and perceptual, free and inevitable, spiritual and natural, for it glimpsed in it the expression of a split in the relations of modern life. For Hegel and Schelling, the mediating capacity to reflect on judgment is only a bridge to an intellectual idea that should be agreed to absolute unity. Schiller, on the other hand, was relatively restrained, insisting on the limited meaning of aesthetic judgment in order to use it from the perspective of historical philosophy. Here, he quietly confuses Kant's concept of judgment with the traditional concept of judgment. The traditional concept of judgment never completely lost its connection with the political concept of empathy in the Aristotle tradition (until Hana Arendt). Thus Schiller was able to fundamentally regard art as a form of "mediation" and to expect it to "bring harmony to society": "All other forms of appearance divide society, for they are not entirely related to the private feelings of individual members, or to the private abilities of individual members, and therefore to the differences between people, and only the intermediary of beauty can unite society, because it is related to the common ground of all members."
Schiller then established the ideal form of intersubjectivity in the context of the two opposing opposites of intersubjectivity, namely individualization and popularity. The outlier loses its connection with society in its private way of life, and society becomes an objective object external to him; the superficial existence of the mixed-up crowd cannot find its self. Both such extreme forms of defamiliarization and fusion also pose a threat to wholeness. Schiller is more romantic about the balance between the two, arguing that a society united by aesthetics must produce a structure of interaction in which "every man talks quietly to himself only when he is in his own hut, and once he leaves the hut, talks to all men."
But schiller's purpose in establishing an aesthetic utopia was not to aestheticize the relations of life, but to revolutionize the fate of relations of communication. The Surrealists demanded the dissolution of art into life in their programs, and the Dadaists and their followers emphasized it provocatively; in contrast, Schiller insisted on self-discipline in pure illusions. He also hoped that the pleasures of aesthetic illusions would lead to a "radical revolution" in "the whole way of feeling." But as long as there is no support from reality, the illusion will always be a pure aesthetic illusion. Like Schiller, Marcuse later defined the relationship between art and revolution. Since society reproduces not only in man's consciousness, but also in his senses, the emancipation of consciousness must be based on the emancipation of the senses—the necessity of "abandoning compulsive closeness to the given objective world." Nevertheless, art still cannot fulfill the directives of the Surrealists, and art should not abandon its sublime character and turn to life: "Only in this case can we imagine the 'end of art', that is, people can no longer distinguish between true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. This may be the utter barbarism that leads to civilization at its extreme." Later Marcuse repeated Schiller's warning about the direct aestheticization of life: aesthetic illusion, as a unifying force, is limited to the case in which "man conscientiously inhibits himself in theory from affirming that the illusion is actual existence, and does not resort to illusion to give almanac in practice."
This warning was hidden in Schiller's early days that the realms of cultural value, such as science, morality, and art, all had their own inherent laws, which was later heavily promoted by Emil Lask and Weber. These areas seem to have been liberated, and they "take comfort in the absolute immunity they enjoy for themselves, free from human arbitrariness." Political legislators can close these areas, but it is impossible to rule in them." If we do not consider the characteristics of culture and try to break the container of aesthetic illusions, then its connotation is bound to be ambiguous—without the meaning of the sublime character and the scattered form, it will not be able to exert the power of liberation. For Schiller, the aestheticization of the living world is legitimate only when art acts as an intermediary, an intermediary, in which the scattered parts regroup into a harmonious whole and plays a catalytic role. Beauty and the social character of interest can only be expressed when art brings out under the open sky of empathy what has been divided in modern times— the inflated demand system, the bureaucratic state, abstract rational morality, and expertized science."