letters on aesthetic education of man: excerpt from the thrid letter

what separates man from nature is that "...he does not stop short at what nature herself made of him, but has the power of retracing by means of reason the steps she took on his behalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of elevating physical necessity into moral necessity."

Man (reason) came from nature (sensuous) [which came from God (moral)]: in the following excerpt from Schiller's third letter on the aesthetic education of man, he justifies man's destined reason as independent and free from its origins while personifying an almost accusatory character upon (sensuous) nature. The following is an important configuration of our transformation from a natural state into a moral one:

Out of the long slumber of the senses he awakens to consciousness and knows himself for a human being; he looks about him and finds himself--in the state. The force of his needs threw him into this situation before he was yet capable of exercising his freedom to choose it; compulsion organized it according to purely natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason. But with this state of compulsion, born of what nature destined him to be, and designed to this end alone, he neither could nor can rest content as a moral being. And woe to him if he could! With that same right, therefore, by virtue of which he is man, he withdraws from the dominion of blind necessity, even as in so many other respects he parts company from it by means of his freedom; even as, to take but one example, he obliterates by means of morality, and ennobles by means of beauty, the crude character imposed by physical need upon sexual love. And even thus does he, in his maturity, retrieve by means of a fiction the childhood of the race: he conceives, as ideas, a state of nature, a state not indeed given him by an experience, but a necessary result of what reason destined him to be; attributes to himself in this idealized natural state a purpose of which in his actual natural state he was entirely ignorant, and a power of free choice of which he was at that time wholly incapable; and now proceeds exactly as if he were starting from scratch, and were, from sheer insight and free resolve, exchanging a state of complete independence for a state of social contracts. However skillfully, and however firmly, blind caprice may have laid the foundations of her work, however arrogantly she may maintain it, and with whatever appearance of venerability she may surround it--man is fully entitled in the course of these operations to treat it all as though it had never happened. For the work of blind forces possesses no authority before which freedom need bow, and everything must accommodate itself to the highest end that reason now decrees in him as person. This is the origin and justification of any attempt on the part of a people grown to maturity to transform its natural state into a moral one.

yet, despite this transformation, "...physical man does in fact exist, whereas the existence of moral man is yet problematic. If then reason does away with the natural state (as she of necessity must if she would put her own in its place), she jeopardizes the physical man who actually exists for the sake of a moral man who is as yet problematic, risks the very existence of society for a merely hypothetical (even though morally necessary) ideal of society."

With this complex relationship in mind, man is both bound to his sensuous nature while constantly moving towards an inevitable moral character. It is necessary that this relationship is unavoidable and that man continue to fall back into the sensual or he would lack that which completes his human makeup. I am reminded here of man's sinful nature that pulls him toward repentance so that he might be lifted up (into what Schiller might refer to as the moral realm).