It would undoubtedly have been difficult to find a better book to finish first in this new year, that would honourably follow Kierkegaard’s works on love which opened the end of last year, than these Letters on aesthetic education by Friedrich Schiller.

Herein, Schiller endeavours to describe being-human through an attempt at the reconciliation of various opposing qualities and activities of the human constitution. Which is exactly what my thesis for literature is about. And which is exactly the dynamic I intuited to be found in early German romanticism throughout my minor readings in/on that movement.

It’s both eerie, and thoroughly reassuring, that all my reading projects seem to come together in an answer to my own fundamental question I have articulated ever since I started studying philosophy and literature, and had since before; what is that which makes us human?

I’m looking forward to scrutinising this for my upcoming thesis in literature, and see where the process, alongside my inevitable personal reading and further development, will bring me afterwards, and in pursuit of my (final) thesis in philosophy.