Aesthetics and Education

Abstract

There is wisdom, as well as mischief, in Croce's apothegm: Art is everybody it to be.' Apart from reassuring those whose anxieties are best eased to the sidelines of serious discourse, it serves as a reminder of the limitations, as well as the opportunities of definition. These inestimable values, however, may be offset by such simplicity, that does as any aphorism should, and may not be refuted by argument, but only outwitted. Croce himself, to be sure, devoted much of his most significant work to consideration of the difficulties therein implied and overborne. And it is to such opening, rather than closure of investigation that we must look for its deepest meanings and sovereign relevance. For, it is in questioning what everybody knows that all aesthetic inquiry, as all philosophy, begins. Indeed, that the universally known, insofar as it is unexamined, is something less than true knowledge, is of the essence of the intelligent ignorance to which Socratic humanists have always aspired as the apogee of wisdom. And as what everybody knows of beauty, as well as goodness and truth, has somehow been learned, and, most probably, somehow taught, the enterprise of examining meaning and validity is ineluctably committed to scrutiny of the prevailing, most sacred values of a society, and the forms and agencies for their propagation. Even in their most closely focused, rigorously limited topical analyses, aesthetic studies are elements in a larger ferment of critical thought, rising to challenge all that is known, in tem-