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Aesthetics, the process through which humans make judgments of beauty, shapes the culture within which people express themselves artistically. In Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture, all three writers explore the origins of subjective aesthetic culture and its relationship to society, and, particularly, politics. Culture, and, in turn, the aesthetic process, creates the societal whole which eventually takes the form of the state. …

…argue that subjectivity is necessary to an aesthetic culture, which influences the society at large, displaying Enlightenment-era influences. Tylor, however, rejects the political and aesthetic "individual" so valued in Enlightenment thought, and so rejects the importance of subjectivity. Works Cited Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967. Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture (Vol. I): The Origins of Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1958.