Schiller treated aesthetic theory as the necessary path to political freedom

Evidence

That Modernism tends to involve precisely the kind of aesthetic withdrawal from reality described by Schmitt and Moretti can be shown by numerous examples: I shall give but two. One of Klimt’s greatest works is his ‘Beethoven Frieze’, painted for the 1902 exhibition at the Secession building in Vienna in honour of Max Klinger’s statue of the composer. Schorske contrasts the frieze with the grim view of politics in Klimt’s earlier ‘Jurisprudence’, which had offered ‘the frightening spectacle of the law as ruthless punishment, consuming its victims’. Now Klimt took as his theme Beethoven’s Ninth, but transformed the revolutionary Promethianism of the symphony, and of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ into ‘a manifestation of narcissistic regression and utopian bliss … Where politics had brought defeat and suffering, art provided escape and comfort.’ … For Klimt, the sentiment is not heroic but purely erotic. More remarkable still, the kiss and embrace takes place in a womb.’ Schorske calls the frieze Klimt’s ‘fullest statement of the ideal of art as a refuge from modern life. In “Beethoven”, the dreamer’s utopia, wholly abstracted from that life’s historical concreteness, is itself imprisonment in the womb, a fulfilment through regression.’ — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 216 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Aesthetic experience functions as political apprenticeship for future freedom.; Schiller’s utopian synthesis of naive and sentimental art remained mere costume drama; Modernism’s aesthetic withdrawal from reality was a retreat from politics — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 216

Broader Connections

• Aesthetic experience functions as political apprenticeship for future freedom. #corroborates (0.85)
• Modernism’s aesthetic withdrawal from reality was a retreat from politics #complicates (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 216
• Schiller’s utopian synthesis of naive and sentimental art remained mere costume drama #qualifies (0.75)