  Schiller presents the problem to be solved by aesthetic education in several ways, but primarily as a political rather than a moral problem. In his Sixth Letter, he offers an influential diagnosis of alienation or fragmentation as the characteristic problem of modernity: “we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of people, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.” (Aesthetic Education, p. 33). Although this is a problem for human flourishing generally, and might therefore be considered a moral rather than specifically political problem, Schiller’s diagnosis of the source of this problem gives a prominent role to a specifically political cause. Schiller claims that the complex machinery of the state necessitates the separation of ranks and occupations, rather than claiming, as a Marxist diagnosis of alienation would, that a separation of ranks and occupations that has its source in the conditions of production necessitates the complex machinery of the state. In another famous passage, Schiller presents the problem as that of effecting the transition from a less just to a more just state without killing the patient in the operation: