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Arts & Letters

Creating the Beautiful Society

Francis Akpata explains how Schiller saw art as a path to utopia.

The Athenian soldier and statesman Themistocles (523-458 BC) once said, “I cannot fiddle but I can build a great state out of a little city.” How do we build, better than a great state, a beautiful society?

When one hears the term ‘beautiful society’ it may conjure images of a well-designed city, highly educated people dressed in elegant garments, or somewhere people glamorously affirm their higher social status. This was not, however, the vision of the German Romantic philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805). Friedrich Schiller’s beautiful society is one where humanity has progressed from a state where people are primarily motivated by their natural needs – he calls this the sensuous will – to a higher state where their primary incentive is the moral will – that is, where citizens behave in a harmonious, unified manner out of a natural inclination. More specifically, in the beautiful society, people no longer experience the conflict between the sensuous will and the moral will.

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