Is Schiller a revolutionary thinker? On Spieltrieb, harmony and class struggle

In Schiller, the promise of equal and fraternal humanity becomes the exact opposite of a void saying. As a starting point, there is the impassable reference to the “aesthetic education of man”. Through the idea of pacification and neutralization proper to the experience of beauty, his Letters are above all an intriguing manifesto that develops the paradox of an autonomous and oblivious art which is also a new form of existence, a different way of inhabiting together the sensible world. In the first place, what allows Schiller to see art as liberated form of life and thus as instrument for social reform seems clear. Manifestly, his recurrent call for beauty aims at bringing together two rebellious antagonistic characters of man, thoroughly described in the treatise: morality and sensitivity, civilization and nature, form and matter, the sense drive and the form drive. But a severe difficulty originates here: why does the play drive do more than simply unifying those two opposite instincts within man as an individual, but first and foremost put an end to the war among social groups themselves? Why, to arrive at a solution in the political realm, does the road of aesthetics must be pursued? It remains unclear whether Schiller intended to condemn the excess of the French revolution and abandoned politics by withdrawing in the illusory world of art, or whether his treatise is on the contrary political in its very nature, aesthetics thus being means for the noble task of overcoming warfare. The aim of the paper is to deal with these issues. It is argued that the notion of Spieltrieb offered Schiller a powerful tool for thinking equality and for abolishing social distinctions. Nonetheless, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man do not simply describe a form of reconciliation due to softening and socializing character of art. Aesthetics do not only bring peace, but also the sword: since beauty breaks with the longstanding division of those who are destined to obey (zahleichern Klassen) and those who are destined to rule (zivilisierten Klassen), it radically denies any kind of domination and hence creates a tension within the normal functioning of the community. Rather than comprehending the play drive as unquestionable state of harmony or as sheer improvement of our customs, it is claimed that the advent of peaceful coexistence through art is grounded in its capacity to radically neutralize the common division of society. Moreover, pacification of men through free play ultimately has nothing of a quiet contemplation where the subject serenely enjoys the form, but is also considered by Schiller as a state of tension putting equality within inequality, so that the subject is in the grip of conflict between the normal partitioning of society and what comes as its exception, namely the experience of the beautiful appearance. It is hence not a coincidence if a contemporary thinker such as Jacques Rancière found in Schiller the promise of emancipatory politics, announcing a revolution which is deeper than any overthrow of the state.