Season One: On beauty

Diotima tells Socrates that the fourth step involves recognizing the beauty of law and order - the beauty of the kosmos. This leads directly to the tricky territory of beauty and politics.

But Dalia suggests thinking about this slightly differently. What if the focus wasn’t on political parties and their propaganda, but on the most foundational aspect of a society: education? Education is a civic right and duty. It plays an essential role in voting and decision making in democracies. But how is education connected to beauty? And how exactly does this challenge us to think differently about the relation between beauty and politics?

In this episode, Dalia and Simon discuss Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity to think about a path not taken, an idea not realised, and not understood - the idea of aesthetic education.

Dalia and Simon strongly disagree about the success of aesthetic education.

An affordable edition of Schiller’s Letters can be found through Dover. A bilingual edition can be found here.