sense^32 orwhat is beyond exchangeorunburdeningorthe union of sense, need,
impulse, and action? How are such ends achievable through different kinds of
artistic formative activity? Why does the achievement of such ends matter?
Is their achievement genuinely a deep human interest? Can such achieve-
ments be accomplished in ways that admit of and even command wide,
perhaps universal, endorsement among attentive audiences? Or are they
always to some degree partial and parochial?
These questions and related ones have been central to the most fruitful
work in the philosophy of art. In treating them, the philosophy of art must
draw all at once on the philosophy of mind, social theory, metaphysics,
ethics, and the history and criticism of particular arts. Accounts of specific
artistic achievements in specific styles must be interwoven with accounts of
cultural developments, in order to show how specific achievements may
advance deep and general human interests. Nor does work in the philosophy
of art leave work in the philosophy of mind, social theory, metaphysics,
ethics, and criticism unaltered. Given that engagements with some specific
forms of art is a normal and significant human activity, theories of mind
should take account of the powers and interests that are embodied in these
engagements, just as the philosophy of art must take account of how human
powers and interests are engaged in other domains.Schiller on art, life, and modernity
Friedrich Schiller’s philosophy of art offers a particularly clear illustration of
the difficulties involved in addressing the problems of human powers and
interests in art and in other regions of life. Schiller notoriously contradicts
himself inLetters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He argues first that engage-
ment with artistic achievements is instrumental to the further ends of
political freedom and individual moral autonomy.“If we are to solve [the]
political problem [of freedom] in practice, [then] follow the path of aesthetics,
since it is through Beauty that we arrive at freedom.”^33 “There is no other(^32) On original sense as Kant and Wordsworth theorized about it, see Timothy Gould,“The
Audience of Originality: Kant and Wordsworth on the Reception of Genius,”inEssays in
Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (University of Chicago Press, 1982),
pp. 179–93.
(^33) Friedrich Schiller,On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Reginald
Snell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), second letter, p. 27.
12 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art