Introduction

Abstract

“Beauty is the only possible expression of freedom in phenomena.”¹ Friedrich Schiller’s striking claim, advanced in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, expresses a quintessentially German idea of freedom. Schiller believed that being subjected to the laws of beauty in the aesthetic experience prepared the individual to move beyond the determinism of physical existence to autonomy and freedom. Through his aesthetic temper “the physical man is so far ennobled that the intellectual man now merely requires to be developed from him according to the laws of freedom.”² Freedom, like beauty, becomes possible through the authority and constraint of law. This association of freedom with authority had deep historical roots in German culture, and it shaped the way the artists and thinkers who came after Schiller approached the issues of freedom and beauty in their work.