to be human is to play

I led a seminar for my local St. John's College alumni association chapter this past weekend, on the first sixteen of Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. I'll skip the book review, except to say that it is very difficult to understand but rewards careful study. Here are some quotes, I promise more when we do the seminar next month on the remaining letters:

It is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.

Every individual human being carries within himself an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life's task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of his ideal.

Thus do we see the spirit of the age wavering between perversity and brutality, and it is only through an equilibrium of evils that it is still sometimes kept within bounds.

Freedom in its first tentative ventures always comes in the guise of an enemy.

The way to the head must be opened through the heart.

For whole centuries thinkers and artists will do their best to submerge truth and beauty in the depths of a degraded humanity; it is they themselves who are drowned there, while truth and beauty, with their own indestructible vitality, struggle triumphantly to the surface.

Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.

As soon as reason utters the pronouncement: let humanity exist, it has by that very pronouncement also promulgated the law: let there be beauty.

It is play and play alone which of all man's states and conditions is the one that makes him whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once.

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.

The Greeks ... transferred to Olympus what was meant to be realized on earth.

The highest ideal of beauty is, therefore, to be sought in the most perfect possible union and equilibrium of reality and form.