Art, Education, and Life-Issues

Abstract

This article's point of departure is a pair of theses of fundamental importance for aesthetics-or at least any aesthetic that I might find plausible. And the first is crucially concerned with matters of aesthetic One way of summarizing the article would be to say that it discusses the relationship between these two theses. One point of clarification at this stage: I wish to insist on the general importance of the questions to which these theses offer answers. That is to say, these seem to me questions that must be addressed by any aesthetic. When such questions remain unapproached, the resultant aesthetic will typically lapse into a subjectivism, with any reaction to a particular work of art being of equal validity with any other. Such a position renders impossible the idea of aesthetic education, as well as leaving no room for the kind of informed understanding we characteristically associate with art critics. So, some answer to such questions is required. I begin by introducing the first of the theses, which I shall call thesis A. If we ask what the arts have to offer, and in particular what they offer in education, the answer (made famous by David Best) is that the arts provide us with a kind of emotional education. And they do so because they allow conceptual change in respect of the concepts under which, or through which, the works of art are experienced. As a fairly simple case, let us adapt an example from Anthony Savile' by considering a boy who at age fifteen wants to be a milkman. Suppose further that this boy stays at school and hence does not become a milkman. This action may result in his forming new wants and desires in respect of his career; that is to say,