Since Socrates, Greece has begun a major cultural transformation from exploring nature to thinking about people. If the wise men and philosophers in the pre-Socrates period paid empirical attention to aesthetics and education, then aesthetics and education got Socrates' rational attention and serious care because of the change to thinking about humanistic values and pursuing the meaning of life. Hegel once said, "In Socrates, I also found that man is a measure, but he is a thoughtful man. If this is expressed in an objective way, it is really good "[1]. In Socrates' view, rationality is the fundamental stipulation of human beings, so the pursuit of truth becomes the ultimate goal of human existence. The main way to achieve the ultimate goal of life is kindness, which needs education and aesthetics to cultivate and realize. First of all, only when a person treats the world and himself rationally can he have correct actions and find the truth in correct actions. The deepest truth is universal goodness, and it is good to discover and reveal universal goodness. So Socrates has repeatedly taught people that the meaning of life lies in doing good and constantly improving morality. In this way, education is very important. Good deeds can be cultivated and trained through education, because all truth is knowledge and truth can be mastered through knowledge. Education is the basic way and process of learning, mastering and applying knowledge. Secondly, in Socrates' view, the standard to measure beauty is goodness. He insisted that goodness is beauty, and beauty must be goodness. Mastering beauty, like mastering knowledge, requires education and training. Only in education can people realize the truth of beauty, master the knowledge of beauty and realize the greatest beauty and goodness.
Among the great thinkers in Greece and Rome, Plato's exposition on aesthetics and education is the most full, extensive and influential. In 387 BC, Plato established the Academie, and he was the principal and teacher himself. The purpose of his founding academy is to train ideal state rulers and managers through philosophy education, mathematics education and art education. Plato has lofty feelings for aesthetics and art, and always regards aesthetics and art as the process and way to see the truth clearly and discover ideas. Plato believes that the discovery of ideas is a supreme aesthetic experience, a unity of "spiritual attachment" and "ecstasy", and wisdom and happiness are one of the best characteristics. His famous Kratylos regards music education as the only education that can affect the soul. Through music education, the soul can be baptized and promoted by beauty. People with a good music education can keenly judge the beauty and ugliness of all works of art and natural architecture. In the Law in his later years, he collected his life's wisdom and experience, discussed the relationship between emotion and good deeds, and advocated that the idea of good can only be transformed into good behavior with the help of ideas and pain. Art can make people really understand the connotation and function of happiness and pain. In this way, art has actually become an intermediary from good to good. In many people's memory, it seems that Plato denies art, despises aesthetic education and attaches importance to philosophy and mathematics education. Indeed, Plato said that art is imitation of imitation, mirror of mirror, lacking truth. He also threatened to fire artists and even called them immoral, depraved and ugly. In fact, Plato had two kinds of art in his mind. One is the ideal art, the beacon of the soul, the insight of thought and the blessing of the soul. The other art is the realistic art he faces. Plato always despised the popular art at that time, accusing them of blasphemy, irrationality and moral corruption. Obviously, this kind of art can not educate people aesthetically, nor can it help to establish a spiritual utopia. Of course, this will be categorically rejected and severely criticized by Plato.
Aristotle attaches as much importance to education and art as his teacher Plato. He founded Langya Academy, and later generations recognized him as a professional teacher and scholar. Aristotle believes that physical education helps to cultivate young people's courage and physique, while art education improves people's artistic appreciation ability and "noble sentiment", which has the nature of leisure. Aristotle said in Politics that the leisure life realized by art education is the most natural and free purpose and realm of human life. It can be seen that Schiller's "game theory" has appeared in Aristotle's theoretical system. For Aristotle, people are most familiar with his imitation theory. Aristotle pointed out that art originates from imitation in two aspects: one is that people have the nature of imitation, and the other is that people can get pleasure from imitation. Imitation is essentially a kind of training, training and education, and it is a practical multi-educational process. The educational process of imitation comes from human nature and the innate impulse of life. It is in this life process that people gain knowledge about the external world; Inward, people are satisfied with the affirmation of the existence value of life and have a sense of pleasure. Here, Aristotle linked life, knowledge and happiness in the educational framework for the first time, which not only proved education and aesthetics on the level of human rationality and kindness like his predecessors, but also found the significance of responsibility and education on the level of human life existence. If we examine Aristotle's tragic theory in Poetics from this angle, we will realize that Aristotle's understanding of tragedy contains the implication of aesthetic education. In Poetics, Aristotle believes that the fear and pity of tragic poets caused by imitation are the basis for tragedy to attract audiences. In Aristotle's view, tragic characters are not perfect heroes, nor villains with many crimes, but ordinary people like most mortals. The terrible consequences caused by the "negligence" of tragic characters will inevitably lead to the sadness and pity of similar audiences, arouse their memories, experiences and reflections on their own lives, and eventually lead to "purification". This process is both an aesthetic process and a typical educational process. The ancient Greek etymology of "Katharsis" originally meant to get rid of sin. Tragedy makes people "purify", which undoubtedly means that people can get through the tunnel of artistic tragedy and life tragedy by appreciating tragedy, and make artistic experience move towards life experience, so as to reflect on life, accept shock and lessons, and thus achieve the purpose of spiritual promotion and moral purification. It can be said that Aristotle's tragedy theory is another version of aesthetic education theory.
Horace, a theorist in Roman times, established a complete set of classical literature standards. When defining the function of literature, he emphasized "entertaining". On the one hand, "entertaining" maintains the great tradition that Plato and Aristotle advocated that art must have social education function since Socrates, on the other hand, it also shows that he hopes to correct the prejudice that Greeks attach too much importance to art education function and realize the balance between aesthetics and education in the artistic process. It is this kind of effort that "entertaining" has become the basic spirit of classical literature and art. After Horace, because of the hegemony of Christianity, aesthetics and education became vassals of theology, and the research on the relationship between aesthetics and education was basically cancelled. In the three hundred years of Renaissance and neoclassicism, people's understanding of aesthetics and education never exceeded the Greek explanation.
/kloc-in the 0/8th century, the Enlightenment centered on France swept across Europe. The Enlightenment took "equality, freedom and fraternity" as the slogan, advocated "rational spirit" and enlightened people with reason, nature and emotion. In this era of great social transformation and change, aesthetics and education have received unprecedented attention. Almost all French enlightenment thinkers have discussed aesthetics and education, among which Rousseau has the greatest influence and inspiration on Kant. Rousseau believes that compared with civilized people, people in primitive natural state are more sound and happier. People in the primitive state are equal, free and talented. Civilized people, however, are forced by civilized customs and social rules, losing not only equality and freedom, but also truthfulness and sincerity, affectation, hypocrisy and mediocrity. So enlightenment is not simply instilling rationality in people. More profoundly, enlightenment is to cultivate people's true feelings, wash people's secularity, make people truly return to the natural state of equality, freedom, truth and sincerity, and realize the return from civilized people to realistic people. In order to achieve this goal, Rousseau believes that emotional education is the key. Only through emotional education can we cultivate people's true and pure mind, natural and simple emotions and beautiful and practical personality, and human beings can return. For this reason, Rousseau wrote a series of works, such as On Science and Art, On the Origin and Foundation of Human Inequality, On New Arrow, Emile or On Education, and became a pioneer of Romantic Movement and Liberalism.
As can be seen from the above, from ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment in18th century, aesthetics and education have always been the concern of thinkers. Greek and Roman masters tried to establish the rational spirit and knowledge system of human beings through the interpretation of aesthetics and education, while the enlightenment thinkers in the18th century hoped to realize human remolding and social change in aesthetics and education. Although they haven't fully found the opportunity for the deep combination and unification of aesthetics and education, they have created theoretical background, thoughts and feelings for Kant to meet aesthetics and education, and laid a deep foundation.
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Different from the Greeks' understanding of education as the construction of human spiritual dimension and the enlightenment thinkers' understanding of education as a tool to transform people and society in the18th century, Kant regards education as a basic process for people to transcend nature and acquire the essence of freedom, and interprets education as a path for individuals to acquire moral universal forms and knowledge, so as to identify with groups and move towards society. Education is also the only way for human beings to finally realize the unity of sensibility and rationality, the coordination of physiology and psychology, and the harmony between nature and humanity.
In the view of critical philosophy, the essence of human existence in the form of life is freedom, which transcends all possibilities and realities. People always strive to get the existence that truly belongs to their own essential characteristics, and education is an important aspect of this effort. Education has a dual structure. On the one hand, man is the creator of education, on the other hand, education shapes man. Education is the creation of man's own life, which constantly constructs the essence of man's freedom and deconstructs man's inhuman components, thus realizing the reasonable coordination between nature, man and society. In this process, people constantly improve and become people. As Kant said: "Human beings are not guided by instinct, nor are they cultivated and taught by innate knowledge;" Man himself created everything. Produce your own food, build your own residence, your own external security and defense, all the joys that can make life pleasant, as well as your own knowledge, wisdom and even will-all these are completely your own products. " [2](P 1)
In the sense of species, people and animals belong to nature, and like all animals, the most common tendency of their lives lies in constantly demanding to determine and improve their own species attributes, which constitutes the consistency or similarity between human beings as species and ordinary animals. However, unlike other animals, the species attribute of human beings has the openness that other species do not have, and its relationship with nature presents great possibility characteristics, which leads to the fundamental difference in the way of life between human beings and other species. This difference makes the relationship between man and nature (the surrounding material world and human instinct) always very tense. Nature often becomes a threat and bondage to people, and people also feel strong oppression, so people need to break free from the bondage of nature. Breaking free from bondage is not to sever the connection with nature, but to unify the laws of nature with the transcendence of people's main activities, so that people can get the priority in nature. In Kant's view, perhaps education is the way to achieve this goal, because education is unnatural, but it can interfere with nature. It is in this intervention that nature can become human nature and become a part of human existence and development. Kant has repeatedly stressed that cultural activities such as knowledge, art, religion and even technology should not be regarded as activities to simply improve the quality of human intelligence, but should be the basic way to conform to and surpass nature. When people realize that education is the basic way to control the laws of nature and human instinct, nature becomes decisive for people. Human activities and people's explanation of their own activities are the real yardstick for human beings to adjust their own composition and guide their own behavior, and their existence and development in both material and spiritual aspects are creative. Because of this, people can not only create themselves, but also decide how to create themselves. Education stops people from developing themselves through biological evolution.
As far as individuals are concerned, the existence of life is inseparable from natural laws and species attributes. Individual people can't be divorced from nature and experience in their daily life, and they can't realize life liberation with the help of a whole relationship. In daily life, people's various attributes seem to be hidden behind individual existence. In order to make an individual's life have universal value in daily life, it can only be realized by surpassing non-daily life in lifestyle and purpose. This requires education. In Kant's view, any kind of education is the cultivation and training of people, and it is infused with moral content. Morality in Kant's mind is not a discipline established by people through rational reasoning or traditional customs, but a universal form with human purpose and freedom as the essence and self-discipline as the form. Through education, morality with people as its purpose and freedom as its essence becomes an individual's attitude, mission and lifestyle, a self-awareness of universal goodness in specific life situations, and a source for individuals living in different situations to find their own life meaning. It is the universal morality shown in the process of education that makes the educated enter the group and become a member of society, and the individual's life is diversified and open. It is at this level that Kant said that education "does not teach us how to be happy but how to deserve happiness" [2]( 15 1).
In Kant's view, education involves all aspects, from school textbooks to a series of familiar home furnishings, which all contain knowledge content and ways to enlighten our hearts and behaviors. Therefore, individuals should seek knowledge from life and acquire all knowledge including experience and ontology, theory and application. So that this knowledge can be transformed into the ability of independent thinking, independent choice and conscious action. This process is not only the process of human production, but also the process of continuous development of knowledge. Therefore, "critical philosophy" holds that, on the one hand, knowledge is the foundation of all cultures, and on the other hand, education constitutes the driving force for the development of knowledge. The expansion of knowledge is objectified into technology, and the development of technology will inevitably form moral-related behavior activities. Knowledge itself has no moral significance, but knowledge can achieve morality. Seeking knowledge makes individuals realize the qualitative difference between man and nature while mastering nature, and produces the consciousness of identifying with and surpassing nature, and this two-way seeking knowledge activity is the process of education and learning. We should not only set morality as the general purpose of individual survival, but also pay close attention to the specific process of this purpose, that is, the education and learning process of seeking knowledge. Only the purpose, without this actual concrete realization process, will only become an illusory abstract thought and an unexperienced utopia of consciousness, which will not play any functional role in the free realization of human beings and the liberation of the subject. Only in the process of education and learning can individuals transform this universal moral form with human purpose into concrete daily life behavior and perceptual experience, and freedom can become the way of individual existence and the purpose of individual existence. Generally speaking, the process of education and learning consists of two aspects: one is to cultivate a sound subjective cognitive ability through education and learning, to understand nature with intellectuality, to master the laws of nature, to establish their own knowledge structure, and finally to transform knowledge into technology, and to control nature through operating technology. Secondly, by studying the understanding and application of symbols, we can interpret and operate various artificial rules between groups and the surrounding world, thus placing individuals in this meaningful world and gaining the priority of existence and interpretation. Once the two aspects of education and learning are completed, the individual becomes a cultural person and the main body of society. Morality is no longer a means to deal with secular affairs according to ideals, but a process of constantly testing ideals and rebuilding society according to the realistic possibility of practical purposes. Therefore, education and learning enable individuals not only to have a moral survival model, but also to acquire new models and modify existing models in their life course. Education and learning are not only the mastery of new skills and rules of conduct, but also the generation of morality, meaning and expression. Therefore, strictly speaking, education and learning not only establish the reality for individuals to realize universal forms of existence. It also provides the possibility for everyone to rebuild from individual perfection to group society.
It is Kant's lifelong pursuit to think about the fate of human existence and development and find the way of human freedom and liberation. It is in this lifelong pursuit that Kant discovered the philosophical significance of education for everyone and established the ultimate mission of education. Education is to make people transcend nature, make individuals identify with groups, and make daily life conform to aesthetics on the road of universal significance.
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Before the birth of critical philosophy, people only considered the relationship between beauty, aesthetics and education in the spiritual dimension. Therefore, beauty, aesthetics and education always seem to be related and independent of each other. Kant reconstructed the relationship between beauty and aesthetics, holding that beauty is not an objective existence, and aesthetics is not an understanding and reflection of beauty. Both beauty and aesthetics originate from aesthetic ability, which develops both objectively and subjectively. Subjective category can not explain aesthetic ability, and objective category can not explain aesthetic ability. Aesthetic ability is the combination and transcendence of subjective and objective. Different from spiritual phenomenon, aesthetic ability, as the main ability, is cultivated through education. Only through education can the main ability be generated and developed. It can be said that education is the process of cultivating and developing subjective ability. It is on the interface of shaping and cultivating the subject's ability that Kant makes aesthetics and education meet in depth and regards art as an important process of realistic human freedom.
Kant encountered an unavoidable problem in explaining the relationship between man and the world. The relationship between man and the world stems from man's intelligence and rational ability in its initial theoretical composition, which is neither material existence nor pure subjective consciousness. Intellectual ability makes people become the subject of cognition, and cognition is naturally set as the objective object of experience, and people and the world form a cognitive relationship. Rational ability makes people become the subject of will, human social activities are regarded as the object of behavior, and human and the world constitute a practical relationship. The basic core of the ability to rationally construct practical relations is free will. Kant firmly believes that free will is the ultimate noumenon of human existence. Free will cannot be grasped through cognition, but can only be realized in human practice. Therefore, the relationship between man and the world is in two unrelated fields: cognition and practice. But people must be complete. There are indeed different fields and different ways of human existence, and the existence of different fields and different ways should be interrelated and interactive. Therefore, there must be some subjective ability, which is neither intellectual nor rational, but can unify these two abilities and make human cognitive activities and practical activities, experience world and ontology world related. Kant defines this subjective ability with intermediary function as judgment. Judgment is divided into aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. Aesthetic ability plays an irreplaceable role in intellectual ability and rational ability. Intellectual ability develops itself with a set of discipline logical framework. When heteropoly experience enters the intellectual, the logical framework of intellectual ability unifies heteropoly and constructs the cognitive result of the system-knowledge. Intellectual ability grasps the object by controlling the individual as a whole, which generally contains special. Human cognitive activity, which is composed of intellectual ability, is actually an analytical and comprehensive process mediated by logic, and is strictly limited in the empirical world. Once the cognitive activity goes beyond the empirical world, it will lead to the antinomy of cognition and the cognitive result will lose the truth. Rational ability is the main body of establishing concept principle, which provides moral and ethical rules based on freedom. Neither rational ability nor intellectual ability can be universal in particularity, but ontology is contained in phenomenon. On the contrary, the judgment between intellectual ability and rational ability can do this. "Generally speaking, judgment is a special ability to think under general conditions" [3](P 18). Aesthetics can't provide concepts like intellectual ability, nor can it produce concepts like rational ability, but it can realize the communication between phenomenon and ontology, cognition and practice in the special and universal, and find universal laws in special things. Aesthetics is the original source of beauty. When it looks for universal noumenon in individual phenomena, it first faces empirical phenomena, and aesthetic judgment must show rational noumenon through the construction of perceptual experience. Therefore, aesthetic judgment must exist before experience. Transcendentality is not a priori, and aesthetic judgment can only be unified with practice by returning to experience and judging experience. At the same time, it also means that in aesthetic judgment, particularity and phenomenon conform to the purpose of universality and ontology. These characteristics of aesthetic judgment become the reality of beauty through a series of main functions.
In Critique of Judgment, Kant called it "the creation of will activity based on rational art" [3](P 163). According to Kant's critical philosophy, rationality means perceptual and intellectual constraints in epistemology, and rationality is the essential stipulation of human ontology. Kant also called reason freedom. When freedom develops into an act with subjective rational ability, it is a will activity. Obviously, when Kant defined art as a will activity based on reason, he used the concept of reason on the ontological level. In this way, art exists in the form of free will. Free will activities are varied, such as faith, religion, morality, law and so on. The difference between art and other free will activities lies in that art "judges an object or its expression by the happiness and unhappiness of completely unrelated concepts" [3](P50), "is regarded as inevitable happiness independent of concepts" [3](P66), and "is the purpose form of an object, which is perceived on the object without the appearance of purpose" [3] (P8655). In other words, artistic activity is the process of market beauty in which the essence of beauty develops. The fundamental attribute of art is beauty, and the gene of beauty essence is freedom. Here, Kant reveals the trinity relationship between the essence of beauty, art and freedom, that is, freedom is the essence of beauty and the core of art, and the essence of beauty stipulates art, making it a special free activity. The essence of beauty actually exists in the aesthetic activities of art. As far as this trinity relationship is concerned, talking about the essence of art is to interpret the essence of beauty. Art generates things that have not been realized into things that have been realized, and creates limited things into infinite things. When people live in art, people get rid of the narrowness of grasping and possessing objects, transcend the physical attributes of objects, and directly present freedom in an intuitive way, which not only confirms the survival value of individuals, but also reflects the purpose and universal effectiveness of people as the foundation of world significance. And all this is the most true and profound understanding of the essence of beauty.
In Critique of Judgment, Kant made an in-depth study of all aspects of artistic activities from the perspective of the trinity of beauty, art and freedom.
As the essence of beauty, artistic activities are different from human cognitive activities. As far as the subject is concerned, cognitive activities are based on the perceptual and intellectual abilities of the subject. Perceptual ability grasps the objective object and presents it as a phenomenon, while intellectual ability produces knowledge that conforms to the objective law of the object and reveals the truth of the existence of the object through the construction of the phenomenon. The core of cognitive activity is truth, and the rationality of subject existence is manifested in the accurate and true description and display of objective objects. The more the subject avoids the participation of emotion and imagination, the more fully the subjectivity in cognition is brought into play. Compared with cognitive activities, artistic activities, as the essential way of beauty, need emotion and imagination. The harmonious unity of emotion and imagination is the basic motive force to discover the beauty of things and create works of art. The truth of art is generated in the process of harmonious unity of subject's emotion and imagination, and promotes artists to engage in artistic creation. To what extent can artists mobilize their emotions and imagination to participate in the creative process, and to what extent can works of art show the true meaning of art and express the value of beauty. Cognitive activities and artistic activities are also intrinsically linked. Cognitive activities can be independent of artistic activities, and artistic activities are often inseparable from cognitive activities. Kant said: "The art of beauty needs a lot of scientific knowledge to achieve a high degree of perfection." [3](P 156) Education is a process of seeking knowledge, and an activity of transforming knowledge into knowledge and spreading it. Education can provide a lot of knowledge for the artistic creation of beauty, and cultivate the comprehensive cultivation and ability of artistic perception, artistic emotion, artistic inspiration, artistic imagination and artistic skills. It can be said that the educational process is often an artistic creation activity. The success of artistic activities depends on the effectiveness and success of previous educational activities.
Art is also different from practical activities. Although beauty and practice are based on freedom in essence, artistic creation and practical activities are based on a rational platform. However, art, as the essential way of beauty, is confined to the emotional world of human beings, wandering between this world and another world, expanding infinity in finiteness, generating rationality in sensibility and accommodating groups in individuals. Practice, on the other side of the world, is in a state of pure transcendence and realizes the essence of freedom with the transcendence of existence. When talking about the difference between art and practice, Kant also keenly discovered the difference between art and handicraft industry. In critical philosophy, handicraft industry is a part of daily life and has nothing to do with human practical activities, because practical activities belong to non-daily life. Between daily and non-daily, the artistic world seems to be very similar to handicrafts in experience, but it is completely different in essence. Although art appears in daily experience, it is based on non-daily rational freedom. Handicraft, on the other hand, takes daily life as its direct purpose, and its production process itself is unpleasant and arduous. Only when handicrafts are paid by exchange can the subject be happy. Different from aesthetic pleasure, this pleasure is utilitarian, limited, private and personal, and lacks universal and effective freedom. It is at this point that Kant thinks that art is more like a game, its meaning comes from the process itself rather than the result, and the pleasure it obtains is imaginary, non-utilitarian and non-physiological. Like a game, the truth of art occurs and appears in the process of art, and when the process ends, the truth will end. Only by entering a new aesthetic or creative process will it continue to appear in another way, which is also the mystery of the eternal truth of art. Here, artistic activities have profound humanistic education significance. Artistic activities can cultivate people's noble realm and exquisite lifestyle, so that people's lifestyle has both the basis of daily life and non-daily reality.
Aesthetic ability is the discovery of the source of beauty, aesthetics and art, which makes Kant truly reveal the internal relationship between aesthetics, art and education. Education cultivates and develops aesthetic ability and artistic accomplishment. Education is a hotbed for the growth of aesthetic and artistic abilities, and aesthetics and art themselves also play an important educational role in people. The process of aesthetics and art is the process of educating people. Kant truly unified aesthetics and education.
Kant showed the internal relationship between aesthetics and education at the philosophical level with the vision and method of "critical philosophy", pointing out that the essence of the encounter between aesthetics and education is the encounter between people and the way to realize human freedom and liberation. Kant did not discuss and explain more in this direction, and many of his views were not systematic and comprehensive enough. However, the open state of this theory has left Schiller and other descendants with a vast world to explore aesthetic education. Today, under the enlightenment of Kant, we are continuing this great exploration in the vast world of sound development and free liberation of mankind.