  In contrast to Kant, Schiller understands beauty to be a property of the object itself. It is the property, possessed by both living beings and works of art, of appearing to be free when in fact they are not. As Schiller puts it in the “Kallias” letters, beauty is “freedom in appearance, autonomy in appearance” (Schiller, 151). Schiller insists that freedom itself is something “noumenal” (to use Kant’s terminology) and so can never actually manifest itself in the realm of the senses. We can never see freedom at work in, or embodied in, the world of space and time. In the case of beautiful objects, therefore—whether they are the products of nature or human imagination—“it is all that matters [ … ] that the object appears as free, not that it really is so” (Schiller, 151).