Art & Creativity Quote by Friedrich Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher is quietly smuggling a radical expansion of “art” into the room. He doesn’t treat art as a boutique category of paintings, poems, and concert halls; he frames it as a total human practice that scales from the machinery of collective life (“the state”) down to the private cosmetics of experience (“the embellishment of sensuous existence”). That range is the point: art is not an optional ornament of culture but the connective tissue between political order and lived feeling.

The rhetoric is tellingly bureaucratic - “general and comprehensive,” “embraces everything connected with it,” “greatest” to “least.” For a theologian writing in the wake of Kant and amid early Romanticism, that administrative tone does a strategic job. It presents an ambitious philosophical claim as if it were simply accurate taxonomy. Schleiermacher’s implied target is any narrow moralizing view that relegates art to pleasure, distraction, or vice. By insisting that art reaches the state, he gives it civic stakes; by insisting it reaches sensual embellishment, he refuses to let “serious” culture sever itself from the body.

The subtext is also a defense of the dialogue form itself. A dialogue “embraces” rather than dictates; it can traverse institutions and intimacies without collapsing them into a single rule. In an era when modern disciplines were hardening - aesthetics here, politics there, theology elsewhere - Schleiermacher pushes back with a holistic map. Art becomes a way societies imagine themselves and a way individuals texture reality, bridging governance and desire. That’s less a compliment to art than a claim about power: whoever shapes form, shapes the conditions of meaning.