Contemporary Culture and Aesthetic Education

In this paper I wish to focus on the importance of an education of our senses and body through sensorial elements for the improvement of our sensibility for situations and our faculty of judgement. This was the key focus of aesthetics in its classical form from antiquity until early 19th century when aesthetics was, to a large degree, a matter of aesthetic education and communication. Important
were arts and letters, which still are important but now very much on the defensive also because aesthetics often is a about criticism rather than about the sensorial and bodily aspect of cultural products. I suggest we can learn from the early generations within aesthetics not least from Kant when we keep in mind that his investigation of the aesthetic judgement was for the sake of judgement as such, thus for our ability to chose the right conduct of behaviour. The aesthetic judgement is a judgement about our relation to a specific cultural context and our acquisition of it comes from being acquainted with cultural products. Aesthetics is thus closely related to hermeneutics, to how we interpret specific situations we find ourselves in.