Play drive

It is a conjoining, through contradiction, of the human experience of the infinite and finite, of freedom and time, of sense and reason, and of life and form.

In Schiller's thought, the sense and the form drive arise out of a human being's existence as a "person", which endures, and their "condition", the determining attributes that change.

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".

These seemingly contradictory forces of freedom through person and time through condition, manifest themselves in humans as the form and the sense drive.

In their sensuous existence, human beings are set within the limits of time, within his condition, and becomes matter.

This drive is humanity's rational nature, their "absolute existence", and its goal is to give them freedom, so they can bring harmony to the variety of things in the world.

In order to not be just "world", people must exercise their form drive upon matter, and "give reality the predisposition he carries within him".

[6] While this seems like a perfected state, it is only a point on the path of a human being reaching their maximum potential.

"The more power and depth the personality achieves, and the more freedom reason attains, so much more world does man comprehend, and all the more form does he create outside of himself".

"Where both these aptitudes are conjoined, man will combine the greatest fullness of existence with the highest autonomy and freedom and instead of losing himself to the world, will rather draw the latter into himself in all its infinitude of phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason"[8] This "conjoining" of the two faculties, are actually a mediation by the third fundamental drive, the play drive.

To exist in this paradoxical state, would mean to have a "complete intuition of his human nature".

[9] Furthermore, "the object that afforded him this vision would become for him the symbol of his accomplished destiny"[9] and this would serve him as a finite embodiment of the infinite.

Schiller argues for the necessity of the interplay of the two objects in creation of a sculpture from a block of marble.

The highest ideal of beauty, therefore, to be sought in the most perfect possible union and equilibrium of reality and form".

[11] Therefore, in contemplation of the beautiful, people are exercising the play drive, and are fully human.