Professor Wilhelm Vosskamp (Univ. of Cologne) will lecture on “Schillers Utopie der aesthetischen Bildung.”
The basis of my talk will be Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man,” published in 1795. In the context of German discussions on “Bildung” (education, selfformation, selfperfection), I want to outline that the preconditions of Schiller’s aesthetics are his anthropology (this was first conceptualized in the dissertation on the “Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Man”) and a critique of modern societal differentiation. My main purpose is to elaborate the specific characteristics of “aesthetical education” and the role of a “state of beauty” in “select circles.”
-Professor Vosskamp