Reconsidering Aesthetic and Religious Experience: A Companion View

Abstract

Bennett Reimer completed and defended his dissertation, Common Dimensions of Aesthetic and Religious Experience,' in 1963 and was awarded the Doctor of Education degree in Music Education from the University of Illinois. This work proved to be not only courageous, for there was nothing in the music education literature of the time to prepare the profession for a discussion of the issues Reimer addressed, but also prophetic in the way it grounded, propelled, and even predicted Reimer's scholarly agenda in the decades that followed its publication. The rooting of his dissertation in the writings of John Dewey, Susanne Langer, Leonard Meyer, Paul Tillich, and Karl Jung was enormously influential on much of his subsequent writing in music education philosophy. One need not have read all of Reimer's published works to see the imprint of this dissertation throughout his later writings. In fact, given the powerful influence of his famous book on the philosophy of music education2 and the fact that it too was grounded similarly in the writings of most of these same thinkers, it seems fair to suggest that Reimer's dissertation has shaped, at least indirectly, the philosophical conversations of the music education profession for the last thirty years. Reimer was not the first to examine the apparent intersections between religious and aesthetic experience, of course. For centuries, theologians, philosophers, aestheticians, and ministers have pondered the overlaps that seem to exist between these two profound ways of knowing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine most expressions of religious experience, religious ritual, and personal religious reflection absent the pervasive infusion of rich aesthetic and artistic content.