Edited by IMAI, Yasuo and WULF, Christoph, Concepts of Aesthetic Education : Japanese and European Perspectives

Naoko SAITO
2007 Educational Studies in Japan  
MUnchen: Waxmann MUnster, 2007 185 pp, SAITO, Naoko* This is a book on aesthetics and education-an "untimely meditation" intended to save aesthetics from its fa11 into aesthetization in an age of globalization and technology. In the Introduction this danger is encapsulated by Yasuo Imai and Christoph Wulf as the "de-materialisation and fragmentation of the human body" and where aesthetic experiences become "suffused with technology" tp. 9),i In the chapter by Manabu Sato, he writes ofthe way
more » ... t, in the discourse ofthe global market and a culture of accountability, "[t]he 1anguage of art is moribund in current educational refbi:m," with imagination in eclipse. The consequence is the virtual disappearance of authentic seliexpression (p. 28). Similarly Paul Standish points to the degeneration of the aesthetic in a "privitasation of feeling7' within the current of globlisation: "on the one hand, MacDonaldization and a sameness that extends around the word; on the other, the differentiation of markets, with subtle profiling of custorners, the artificial creation of desire, and individnalization of bubbles of satisfaction" (pp. 19, 22). If one of the fbremost tasks of this book is to reclaim the role of the aesthetic, especially in education, this is to be umdertaken against the background of this shared concern, peculiar to our age-a concem, as this book shows, that is plainly shared by those in Ja: pan and in Europe. Imai and Wulf clarify that the book "attempts to present an alternative that will rnake it possible to break out ofthis dilemma" (p. 13) namely the dilemma ofsustaining their "profoundly Schillerian" approach to the aesthetic, an approach that is inseparable from subjective feeling and sensuous experience, while at the same time resisting the "subjectified and psychologized aes-
doi:10.7571/esjkyoiku.2.125 fatcat:in6us53rtvfslafuuzhf6ejhde