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When, in the 1790s, Schiller, having distanced himself from Goethe for all kinds of personal reasons renewed an intimate friendship with him, he wrote his famous -- and sadly too little appreciated – ‘’Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man’’. Schiller wrote these letters under the influence of how Goethe worked, thought, and viewed the world. In those letters, which are about aesthetic education, we find a strange sentence: "Only when we play are we fully human, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word." With that sentence, Schiller wanted to point out how ordinary life essentially chains us into a kind of slavery, how the average person, forced to live under the yoke of necessity, suffers under the burden of outer life. In general, people are free to follow their own impulses only when engaged in artistic activities, when creating and enjoying art, or when behaving like children at play, acting only in accordance with their own impulses. What Schiller describes in his aesthetic letters is a beautiful and genuine conception of what it is to be human. - From 0880105275