art as free action

Schiller believes that a person "alone of all beings the privilege of breaking the chain of necessity by his will" that is to say, by free action or art (in the broadest sense of the term).

Seeing as how Schiller was writing in the late 1700s I would agree with his statement to a certain degree. However in the context of contemporary art and the current of socio-political climate, Art has the ability to act only through will in the sense that a person is acting detached from "the Great Beast" of society. Free will, being a gift from God, must be returned- and through which our inclination to create is incorporated into our religious impulse to act upon the gift granted to us from supernatural origin.

Without a developed understanding of God, so with it goes goes an underdeveloped understanding of reality. In this way, our act of creation often aligns itself with 'free will' in the sense that it breaks the chain of necessity within the context of the world (material)- changing our relationship to things. Although creation and art does have the ability to transform our relationship to space (finite), it is less thought of as an act that can transform our relationship to eternity (G0d- infinite).

There are two important differentiations however in terms of art: Art as an act of creation in lieu of our free will and and Art as a biproduct of our free will.

Point being that our act of creation is not necessarily creation as God created ex nihlo (our of nothing), but rather something out of something. Just as we are extensions of God's creation, so our creation is really just an extension of God's extension and by disregarding this relationship we create a greater distance between humanity and our understnading of God- Furthering our subjection to a objective reality.

reify: to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing.