Formal and Sensuous impulses: some considerations on Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic education

Abstract

This text is a reflective article. It argues that aesthetic education is a promissory path for promoting one of the most important educational objectives: comprehensive training. Starting from the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man written by the philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller, it is shown that there are two traits that can define the intellectual vocation of a man: the formal and the sensuous impulse. The first one gathers the human necessity for rationality: the vocation to find and build abstraction and regularity from the world, to merge with the universal. The second one, deals with the preference of people for finding emotions that fuel their sensibility and passion, to remain as singular beings. Having described the formal and sensuous impulses as the two qualities that holistically configure the human intellectual potentialities, we show that the appreciation of beauty, or as Shiller called it the living form – as it evenly nurtures both human impetus- fosters comprehensive training for people.