An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

with many. Given the nature of modern divided labor, it is very difficult to

see how this experience might be transformed.

Second, Schiller’s fantasy of Greek life leads him to identify art–particu-

larly art as manifested in Greek sculpture and epic, now to be taken up by us

as a model, in relation to modern needs–as the proper instrument of the

transformation of experience and the achievement of meaningfulness.

We must be at liberty to restore by means of a higher Art this wholeness in our

nature which Art has destroyed...Humanity has lost its dignity, but Art has

rescued and preserved it in significant stone; Truth lives on in the midst of

deception, and from the copy the original will once again be restored.^40

This too may be a fantasy. Schiller is himself all too aware of the depth of the

rather remarkable antagonism between people in a century in the process of

civilizing itself. Because this antagonism is radical and is based on the internal

form of the mind, it establishes a breach among people much worse than the

occasional conflict of interests could ever produce. It is an antagonism that

robs the artist and poet of any hope of pleasing and touching people generally,

which remains, after all, his task.^41

If there is deep and standing rather than occasional conflict of interest,

arising out of divided social roles, and if the artist has no hope of pleasing

universally, then perhaps art cannot do its job, and perhaps fully significant

action and selfhood are not quite possible.

Yet Schiller’s fantasy about art nonetheless continues to be felt by many

people in modern culture, though almost surely not by everyone. Though

earlier cultures were perhaps more unified in certain respects than modern

western culture, this fantasy may nonetheless have been distinctly felt by

those who in those cultures devoted themselves to painting, drama, lyric,

epic, or dance. They were surely aware of themselves as doing something

quite different from what many or most people did in the courses of eco-

nomic and social life. The idea or hope or fantasy that in and through artistic

activity one might achieve fully significant action and selfhood–achieve a

kind of restoration and wholeness of sensation, meaning, and activity in the

face of present dividing antagonisms–has deep sociopsychological roots,

(^40) Ibid., sixth letter, p. 45; ninth letter, p. 52.
(^41) Schiller,“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”p. 249.
16 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art