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Since the 1950s, music educators have witnessed striking developments in the philosophical foundations of their profession. This chapter explores and interprets these developments and, in the process, to historically situate the concepts of praxialism in music education. The chapter accounts for developments within each decade since 1950 and shows that the primary philosophical perspectives of the last fifty years may be termed “utilitarian” and “aesthetic” and that a new praxial philosophy of music education has appeared in recent years. The evolution of music education as aesthetic education is discussed, along with alternative perspectives on music education, trends impacting the development of aesthetic education, and questions surrounding the aesthetic rationale for music in education. In the 1990s, three themes emerged as having strong connections with the past: the use of insights from cognitive psychology as bases for exploring the nature and meaning of musical behavior and music education; the need for increased attention to philosophy in teacher education programs; and continued emphasis on defining the relationship between music education philosophy and advocacy.

In his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, David Elliott offers a comprehensive challenge to traditional aesthetic philosophies of music education and an in-depth analysis of curriculum theory, daringly proposing to root music, and thus music education, in actual circumstances of musical praxis. His critique of the abstract, atomistic content and isolated skills of the conventional objectives-oriented and structure-of-the discipline approaches to music curriculum drew upon and thus reflected the most recent trends in curriculum theory in the early 1990s. This chapter examines the three dominant philosophical traditions that have had direct consequences for both general education and music education — idealism, realism, and neoscholasticism — and, in particular, for the current obsession of both with standards and for what in North America, at least, has been dubbed “music education as aesthetic education”. After mentioning certain aspects of these traditions that may have subtle echoes in Elliott's praxial philosophy, alternative philosophies of more recent vintage are considered.

Traditional accounts of Romanticism posit a shift in the hierarchy of genres involving a downgrading of didactic poetry and a revaluation of lyric. The chapter challenges this view, tracing the origins of the anti-didactic principle in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the concept of ‘pure poetry’, while also showing how Romantic writers make stronger claims than ever for the moral and political utility of literature, and for the role of the author as teacher, legislator, prophet, or healer. Despite its polemics against the ‘French school’ of Dryden and Pope, the Romantic period witnessed its own fashion for ‘moralizing in verse’, and didactic genres such as the georgic and the philosophical poem enjoyed a paradoxical revival. When Romantic writers denounced didactic writing they were not just quarrelling with neoclassicism but responding to tendencies within their own literary culture. Again, there are significant parallels with Germany, where notions of disinterestedness and aesthetic autonomy are complicated by new ideas about ‘aesthetic education’.

A theory of aesthetic value should help us to make sense of how our aesthetic commitments matter to us as members of collectives. Aesthetic policies endogenous to aesthetic practices are directly justified by the network theory. The chapter looks at what aesthetic reasons we have to adopt exogenous aesthetic policies. Many argue that aesthetic practices deserve public support because aesthetic goods are public goods. A case is made for an aesthetic opportunity principle: larger social groups have reason to foster the aesthetic opportunities available to their members. The principle is applied to arts education and to communication technologies subserving aesthetic exchanges. The chapter ends with a discussion of how aesthetic opportunity interacts with—and can potentially counteract—oppressive social structures.

This chapter examines Platonic education in Marius the Epicurean (1885)—that is, music and gymnastics, also known as paideia. As an apology for the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, Marius explains aesthetic education Platonically as an overcoming of scepticism brought about by the Heraclitean flux, which led to the establishment of Forms in Plato’s Cratylus as a way to save meaning in language. Much of Pater’s aesthetic education, therefore, is the recognition of form within matter, as beauty indicates reality. Marius has philosophical encounters with the historical Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius, and Lucian, engaging with, among other philosophies, Platonism and outgrowing Epicureanism. But it is more personal encounters that shape Marius, both literary and ultimately religious, as he is increasingly guided by his daimon or guardian spirit. When Marius sacrifices himself for the sake of friends his conversion to Christianity is obscured because the highest knowledge, Platonically, is first-person.

The chapter by Gordon Bearn begins by considering what Alfred North Whitehead called the “public dangers” inherent in the tendency of educational institutions to preserve the fixed ways and sometimes the errors of the past, a danger made worse, in Bearn's view, by the “professional” turn of higher education in recent times. This is a problem that cannot be laid exclusively at the door of, say, government or commerce, for among ourselves as educators there is the persistent inclination to enshrine our favorite abstractions and to force them upon our students or readers. A return to “great books” or a reaffirmation of “general education” cannot by themselves constitute any kind of solution to this problem. It is against this background that Bearn admires Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein but worries that the interpretation this yields, with the intermittent stability that it seeks, stands in the way of the aesthetic appreciation that is crucial to the education of grownups. This carries the surprising and disconcerting implication that Cavell's reading may contribute to a suppression of the aesthetic and, hence, frustrate the sensual schooling that Bearn advocates.

The Enlightenment uses all forms of publication to convey its message. Since one of these is literature, and since the new aesthetics of Kant and others has declared all art purpose-free, the question arises where the borderline runs between function and self-sufficiency—whether, at the practical extreme that Schiller treats, art can educate people towards a better politics after the human failings of the French Revolution. The chapter ends by attempting to reconcile the issue between means and ends.

Chapter 4 shows how Kunstreligion, the Religion of Art, came to be seen as a critical resource for the self-formation of mature humanity (Menschheit). Schiller, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt regarded art as having displaced Christianity’s role in ethical formation. Aesthetic education, they believed, would generate harmony among the opposing forces of the human spirit, effectively resist the instrumentalizing reduction of human persons, fit them for stable self-government, and preclude the revolutionary excesses of the French Revolution. The chapter argues that it was Humboldt’s understanding of Bildung, rather than Herder’s, that became institutionalized within the pedagogical and cultural institutions of later 19th-century bourgeois culture (the Bildungsbürgertum). Within this later context, Bildung came to be equated with a classical liberal education, regarded as a badge of bourgeois nobility and taken an excuse for political passivity. In the tumultuous atmosphere surrounding the French Revolution, however, it was not yet evident how easily liberal individualist Bildung could be politically domesticated.

This chapter examines translation as a form of afterness. It first considers Odo Marquard’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic gestures, and in particular of the latter’s understanding of Friedrich Schiller. It explores how Marquard implicitly distances himself from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument that Heidegger’s “national aestheticism” is a formation of political involvement that is structured, even haunted, by an abiding attachment to techné and its myths. It also discusses the underlying politics in Heidegger’s concept of translation as Übersetzen, or “carrying across,” and the ways in which it is lodged at the core of Heidegger’s philosophy of language. It reads Heidegger’s ideas on translation in light of his 1936/1937 Freiburg seminar on Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind in order to understand how translation provides Heidegger with a privileged paradigm for conceptualizing the problematic relation between a so-called original and the translation commonly thought of as following it in a straightforward sense.

The ‘aesthetic’ referred to throughout Chapter 3 is not especially the aesthetics of art, but that of everyday experience, the shared world, and of nature. Section 3.1, following up some Coleridgean notes that relate ‘Ideas’ to ‘thoughts & enjoyments’, performs a Socratic elenchus on unreflective cognitive attitudes in aesthetic states to distinguish value in the experience from prejudice. Section 3.2 then explores Coleridge’s concern with the activity of ideas in everyday aesthetics and the aim of enlightening ‘our feelings’ so they ‘actualize our reason’ ‘with their vital warmth’, relating this to Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education. Section 3.3 introduces the author’s theory of inchoate contemplation that commences in aesthetically informed feelings, in local or national culture, as an initial and perhaps universal, non-intellectualist form of the intuition of ideas. This theory then helps to illuminate a Coleridgean ‘philosophy of life’ where everyday symbols and aesthetic practices reach ‘far higher and far inward’.

Misgivings concerning the value of beauty are widespread. Outside the academy, beauty is often regarded as frivolous, and public support for aesthetic activities is often justified by appeal to their economic and cultural spillover effects, rather than their inherent value. Arts scholars who regard perceptions of beauty as contributing to oppressive social formations have come to emphasize non-aesthetic values in art. Meanwhile, philosophy has been stuck for some time with a consensus that aesthetic values are hedonic values—an item’s aesthetic value is its power to produce finally valuable experiences. The trouble is that aesthetic hedonism plays into misgivings about the value of beauty. A plan is laid out for working towards the network theory of aesthetic value as an alternative to aesthetic hedonism.

The main argument for the network theory of aesthetic value is that it better explains the facts about aesthetic activity than does its rival, aesthetic hedonism. According to the network theory, an aesthetic value figures in a fact that lends weight to the proposition that it would be an aesthetic achievement for an agent to act. An aesthetic achievement is an act that succeeds out of aesthetic competence, so an agent has aesthetic reason to act just when they have reason to achieve by so acting. Agents with aesthetic reasons to act have reasons to act in coordination with one another when their coordination raises their chances of achieving. In acting, they rely upon and give rise to social formations. Aesthetic agency is scaffolded by aesthetic practices, which are social practices. A contrast is drawn with structuralist social theory.

This chapter argues that the modern novel in Germany, modeled on Pietist autobiographies and their languages of spiritual introspection, was positioned to take over the formative role played by scripture and devotional literature within Pietist circles. The Bildungsroman was conceived of as “secular scripture.” The chapter shows how Goethe and Schiller’s high hopes for the cultural and political possibilities inherent in the novel faltered in the face of key critical questions: how are audiences seeking entertainment and escape to be drawn instead into the project of aesthetic education? Who is the human author to claim the authority to form humanity? Where are exemplars to be found, when the aspiration is precisely to autonomy and individuality and authenticity? If the most sublime works of art can reach only cultural elites, where is the hope of broad cultural transformation?

Chapter 1, ‘Only with Beauty Man Shall Play. Goethe’s Production of Ion in Weimar (1802)’, proceeds from Goethe’s and Schiller’s responses to the French Revolution. While Goethe hailed the Bildung of the individual—that is, the development of his potential to the full—as the substitute for a revolution, Schiller believed that it was the aesthetic education of the individual that would finally result in a free state. The production of a Greek tragedy as an autonomous work of art that precluded the formation of empathy in the spectator (contrary to the domestic tragedy) was supposed to offer the spectator the possibility of aesthetic distance and thus enable him to acquire Bildung. To this end, Goethe developed a completely new aesthetics that the majority of spectators rejected—Ion turned out to be a flop.

This chapter investigates British socialism’s symbolic birth: Robert Owen’s unveiling of his plan for an entirely new social order in the summer of 1817. Although Owen has been canonized as a stalwart of the political left, his proposals baffled and enraged partisans across the ideological spectrum. Commentators had great difficulty deciding whether his “Plan” was radical or reactionary—or even if it was “political” at all. Using the vitriolic debates that consumed the Plan as a focal point (and drawing on contemporary commentators as varied as William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, and George Cruikshank), this chapter undertakes a revisionary interpretation of Owenite socialism that uncovers its latent aesthetic core. Owen and his followers have long been associated with utilitarian indifference, if not downright vulgarian insensitivity, to the arts. However, Owen’s very ambition to govern citizens without recourse to the state or the Church rests upon an aesthetic substratum. This chapter demonstrates that the curriculum Owen designed to produce human beings who would not require “politics” to produce consensus relies upon extensive training in the musical arts to inculcate the principle of universal harmony. The final part of this chapter locates the origins of British anti-socialist rhetoric at the juncture of Malthusian political economy and anti-Jacobin polemic.