Aesthetic Experience and Politics in Kant, Schiller, and Rancière

In this thesis, I will trace out the approaches of Kant, Schiller, and Rancière to the connection between aesthetics—and especially aesthetic experience—and politics. I will show how each builds upon and/or leads to the other in their accounts, and I will show how each successive thinker makes the connection between aesthetics and politics closer and more explicit. I will focus in particular on their approaches to freedom and equality. In the first chapter, I will examine Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment. I will highlight the relationship it has to freedom, and I will draw upon some of his political philosophy and Arendt’s interpretation of his work to show that, although Kant does not explicitly link aesthetics and politics in the third Critique, the role of the public in this account reveals a political dimension to aesthetic judgment. In the second chapter, I will look at Schiller’s account of the relationship between aesthetic education, human development, and the state. I will explain that his account of the connection between beauty and freedom is explicitly linked to the problem of political change (especially within the context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution), and I will show that his attention to class divisions means that his account also relates to political equality. In the final chapter, I will examine Rancière’s account of aesthetics and politics, which not only links aesthetics and politics but makes them inseparable. I will explain his politics of aesthetics and aesthetics of politics, showing how his account challenges and builds on those of Kant and Schiller and makes equality a principal political value through the emphasis on democratic political action. I will conclude by explaining the various ways that these thinkers show that aesthetics and aesthetic experience are connected to the public, freedom, and equality.