Negotiating Aesthetics and Culture

Abstract

Aesthetics as a discourse is fraught with structural ambivalence. But, many of the tensions rooted in the philosophical discipline have metamorphosed into tenets of aesthetic education. The concepts with which scholars violently wrestle in academic arenas, classroom teachers and teaching artists embrace as central to their work with young people. Aesthetic education is recognized as set apart from other modes of teaching and learning by its central focus on interweaving knowledge, intuition, and experience in core subjects of study, through the manipulation of various artistic media, including those pertaining to visual arts, musical forms, language arts, and kinesthetic explorations, like dance or theatre (Eisner, 2002; Greene, 2001). Immanuel Kant theorized aesthetic assessment as disinterested valuation of a universal bent, existing just outside of one’s merely cognitive and merely intuitive faculties. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1952) originally published in 1790, posits that human assessments fall into two distinct categories, reflective and determinant (determinative). Aesthetic evaluation is reflective in nature, a process that affords individuals the opportunity to personally rectify any number of unknowns. Beyond the nomination of reflection as a criterion for aesthetic response, Kant’s articulations on the subject are highly praised, and widely contested, making his theories of aesthetics (addressed with brevity and simplicity here) fodder for over two centuries of polemics. In particular, three areas of discord within the field of aesthetics resound as specifically relevant to aesthetic education—the relationship of cognition to intuition, negotiations of sensus particularis in light of sensus communis, and the hegemonic implications of a dominant cultural aesthetic.