| Summary: | Hans-Georg Gadamer criticizes Friedrich Schiller for inaugurating a merely aesthetic disposition toward reality. Such an aesthetic disposition, on Gadamer's account, is overly subjective. It also robs one of a genuine encounter with beauty that contributes to one's understanding. In my view, Schiller's position is not reducible to Gadamer's critique of it. Indeed, following scholars like John Pizer and Nathan Ross, I affirm that Gadamer does not fully appreciate the practical, political, and theoretical aspects of Schiller's aesthetics. In the following, I focus on Schiller's political thought as it is developed in response to the French Revolution. In addition to contextualizing his political thought, I illuminate his account of the mediating play impulse, his conception of the beautiful, and his systematic understanding of freedom to argue that Schiller resists Gadamer's charge of aesthetic differentiation. By returning to Gadamer's critique, we can more fully appreciate Schiller's political invocation of the aesthetic domain.
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