 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Aesthetics and Civilizing Education: A Perspective of Practical Phenomenology
YUAN Zushe
Full-Text PDF
XML 84 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2025.06.003
Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China
Within the horizon of the history of ideas, the relationship between aesthetics and civilizing education has always been a core issue in the evolution of human civilization. Traditional aesthetics regards the aesthetic as “pure sensory pleasure” or “the manifestation of abstract ideas”, while simplifying civilizing education to “the transmission of knowledge” or “moral discipline”, splitting them into a dual opposition between “sensory experience” and “rational cultivation”. Based on practical phenomenology as a methodological foundation, this paper attempts to reveal the ontological connection between aesthetics and civilizing education through etymological research and classical text analysis. It argues that properly understood and defined, the aesthetic is essentially the authentic psychosomatic integration of a real subject endowed with free will with the world in free and conscious objective activities. The core of civilizing education, on the other hand, is the historical generation of a holistic way of human life. The two are unified in the process of “the manifestation of meaning in bodily practice”. The core and purpose of the interpretive logic of practical phenomenology is to emphasize the principle of “returning to practice itself”, and in the three dimensions of “the corporeality of aesthetic experience”, “the situationality of the educational process”, and “the practicality of civilizational evolution”, to reactivate the authentic value of the aesthetic for civilizing education. Aesthetics is not the “ornament” of civilizing education, but its “ontological foundation”. The ultimate goal of civilizing education is “the realization of the free and comprehensive development of human beings through aesthetic practice”.
aesthetics, civilizing education, practical phenomenology
YUAN Zushe. (2025). Aesthetics and Civilizing Education: A Perspective of Practical Phenomenology. Philosophy Study, Nov.-Dec. 2025, Vol. 15, No. 6, 364-368.
Aristotle. (1984). The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Aristotle. (2002). Nicomachean ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baumgarten, A. G. (1983). Aesthetica. Oakland: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Free Press.
Gadamer, H. G. (1975). Truth and method. New York: Continuum.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Herder, J. G. (1968). Selected writings on aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1975). Early writings. London: Penguin Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge.
Rousseau, J. J. (1979). Emile. London: Penguin Classics.
Scheler, M. (1973). Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of values. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Spencer, H. (1902). Education: Intellectual, moral, and physical. London: D. Appleton & Co.
Thoreau, H. D. (1989). Walden. London: Penguin Classics.
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Xu, S. (2013). Shuowen Jiezi. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.
Yanagi, S. (2014). The beauty of everyday things. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press.