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Play drive


Friedrich Schiller developed the concept of the play drive, a conjoining through contradiction of man's experience of the infinite and finite, freedom and time, sense and reason, life and form. The object of the play drive is the living form, and in contemplation of the beautiful it allows man to become most human. To understand how he comes to this conclusion, it is important to trace the origins of life and form, as a function of the two drives that the play drive mediates: the form drive and the sense drive. These two drives are themselves functions of man's person and condition, which Schiller initially describes in terms of the absolute and time.

In Friedrich Schiller's thought, the sense and the form drive arise out of man's existence as a "person", which endures, and man's "condition", the determining attributes that change. The person is described as unchangeable and eternal, and endures change. "We pass from rest to activity, from passion to indifference, from agreement to contradiction; but we remain, and what proceeds directly from us remains too". This personhood is grounded in itself, and not in the contradictory state of condition. Schiller argues that because man is finite, condition and person have to be separate, and cannot be grounded in each other. If they were, either change would persist or the person would change. "And so we would, in the first place, have the idea of absolute being grounded upon itself, that is to say freedom". Therefore, person is grounded in itself, and this grounding is responsible for man's idea of freedom. Freedom, defined as an absolute being grounded in itself.

Unlike the person, condition, according to Schiller, cannot be grounded in itself. It is already established that condition cannot be grounded in person, and must therefore proceed from something else. This "proceeding" grounds the condition in contingency, which is man's experience of time. "For man is not just a person situated in a particular condition. Every condition, however, every determinate existence, has its origins in time; and so man, as a phenomenal being, must also have a beginning, although the pure intelligence within him is eternal". Man receives reality that is outside of him, as something changing within time. This changing perception is accompanied by the eternal "I" – the person – which organizes the change and variety into a unity. "The reality which the supreme intelligence creates out of itself, man has first to receive, and he does in fact receive it, by way of perception, as something existing outside of him in space, and as something changing within him in time". The perfect man, according to Schiller, would be a constant unity amongst constant change. These seemingly contradictory forces of freedom through person and time through condition, manifest themselves in man as the form and the sense drive. These drives, and consequently man's experience of freedom and time, are mediated by the play drive.


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