ABSTRACT
The artistic critique of society that dominated Romanticism and brought about the autonomous trajectory in art spawned an offshoot idea which gradually became opposed to artistic autonomy: the practice of everyday life. Two important precedents set the stage for later developments: Schiller’s 1795 On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Schiller, greatly infl uenced by the writings of Kant and especially by The Critique of Judgement, designated the letters which comprise On the Aesthetic Education of Man as an elaboration and expansion of Kant’s humanist interest in Man as an end in himself. However, while remaining within the territory of Idealist philosophy, the work opened the door to different, non-Kantian aesthetics. The work not only mentioned the ‘political artist’ as an alternative to the craftsman and artist, but envisioned a role for aesthetics in delivering a solution to the fragmentation of society by creating a synthesis from the atomized elements of contemporary life. This resolution was described as an educative process in which the role of art is central.
