since Socrates, Greece has begun a major cultural transformation from exploring nature to thinking about people. If we say that the wise men and philosophers in the pre-Socrates period paid empirical attention to aesthetics and education, aesthetics and education received Socrates' rational attention and serious care because of the transformation to thinking about humanistic value and pursuing the meaning of life. Hegel once said, "In Socrates, I also found that man is a measure, but this is a thinking person. If this is expressed in an objective way, it is true and good" [1]. In Socrates' view, rationality is the fundamental stipulation of human being, 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 achieve. 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 the discovery and revelation of universal goodness is good deeds. Therefore, Socrates has repeatedly taught people that the meaning of life lies in good deeds and continuous moral improvement. 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 insists that goodness is beauty, and beauty must be good. Mastering beauty, like mastering knowledge, requires education and training. Only in education can people realize the truth about beauty, master the knowledge about beauty and realize the greatest beauty-kindness.
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 founded the Academie Academy, and he was the principal and teacher himself. The purpose of his creation of the Academy is to cultivate 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 and discover ideas. Plato believes that the discovery of ideas is a kind of aesthetic supreme experience of "spiritual attachment" and "ecstasy" The unity of wisdom and happiness is one of the characteristics of the best. His famous Kratylos regarded music education as the only education that can affect the soul. Through music education, the soul can be baptized by beauty and promoted. People with good music education can keenly judge the beauty and ugliness of all works of art and natural construction. In his later years' Law, he collected his life-long wisdom and experience to discuss the relationship between emotion and good deeds, claiming that the idea of good must 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 actually becomes the intermediary from good to good. In the memory of many people, 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 expel artists, and even scolded artists for being immoral, depraved and ugly. In fact, there are two kinds of art in Plato's mind. One is the ideal art, which is the beacon of the soul, the insight of the idea and the blessing of the soul. Another kind of 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't educate people aesthetically, and it can't help to build a spiritual utopia. Of course, this will be categorically rejected and severely criticized by Plato.
Aristotle values education and art as much as his teacher Plato. He founded the Luangke Academy, and later generations recognized him as a professional teacher and scholar. Aristotle believes that physical education helps to cultivate the courage and physique of young people, while art education improves people's artistic appreciation and their "noble sentiments" and 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 theory of imitation. Aristotle pointed out that the origin of art from imitation has two points: first, people have the nature of imitation, and second, people can get pleasure in 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 world outward; Inward, people feel satisfied with the affirmation of the existence value of life and have a sense of pleasure. Here, Aristotle linked life, knowledge and pleasure in the educational framework for the first time, so that education and aesthetics were not only confirmed on the level of human rationality and goodness like his predecessors, but also found the significance of responsibility and education on the level of human life existence. If we examine Aristotle's theory of tragedy 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 tragic poet's fear and pity caused by imitation is the foundation of tragedy that can attract the audience. 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 tragic characters' "negligence" will inevitably lead to the sadness and pity of similar audiences, arouse their memories, experiences and reflections on their own lives, and finally 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 sins. Tragedy makes people "purify", which undoubtedly means that people can get through the tunnel of artistic tragedy and life tragedy by appreciating tragedy, so that artistic experience can move towards life experience and experience, thus reflecting life, accepting shock and lessons, and thus achieving 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 the Roman era, established a complete standard of classical literature. When laying down rules for literary functions, he emphasized "entertaining through education". On the one hand, "entertaining" keeps the great tradition that art must have social education function advocated by Plato and Aristotle since Socrates, on the other hand, it also shows his desire to correct the Greek's bias of attaching too much importance to the educational function of art and to achieve a 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, due to 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 has never exceeded the Greek interpretation.
in the 18th century, the French-centered Enlightenment swept across Europe. The Enlightenment took "equality, freedom and fraternity" as the slogan, advocated "rational spirit", and enlightened people with rationality, nature and emotion. In this huge era of social transformation and change, aesthetics and education have received unprecedented attention. Almost all French enlightenment thinkers have discussed aesthetics and education, among which Rousseau is the most influential and inspiring to Kant. Rousseau believes that compared with civilized people, people in the 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 manners and customs and social rules to lose not only equality and freedom, but also truth and sincerity, affectation, hypocrisy and mediocrity. Therefore, enlightenment is not simply to infuse people with rationality. In a more profound way, enlightenment is to cultivate people's true feelings, wash people's secularity, and make people truly return to the natural state of equality, freedom, truth and sincerity, and realize the return from civilized people to real 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 hearts, natural and simple emotions and beautiful and down-to-earth personalities, can human beings return. For this reason, Rousseau wrote a series of books and works, such as On Science and Art, On the Origin and Foundation of Human Inequality, On the New Ai Luo, Emile or On Education, which became the forerunner of Romantic Movement and Liberalism.
From the above, it can be seen that from ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment in the 18th 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 the 18th century hoped to realize the remolding of human beings and social changes in aesthetics and education. Although they haven't fully found the opportunity of deep combination and unification of aesthetics and education, they have created the theoretical background and thinking emotion for Kant to meet aesthetics and education, and laid a deep foundation.
II
Unlike the Greeks' understanding of education in the construction of human spiritual dimension, and the 18th century enlightenment thinkers' using education as a tool to reform people and society, 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 universal moral forms and knowledge, thus identifying with groups and moving 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.
According to "critical philosophy", the essence of human being in the form of life is freedom, which transcends all possibilities and reality. Man must always work hard to get the existence that truly belongs to his own essential characteristics, and education is an important aspect of this effort. Education has a dual structure. On the one hand, people are the creators of education, on the other hand, education shapes people. Education is the creation of man's own life, which constantly constructs the essence of man's freedom and deconstructs man's inhuman components, so as to realize the reasonable coordination among nature, man and society. In this process, people continue to improve and become human beings. As Kant said: "Human beings are not guided by instinct, or nurtured and taught by innate knowledge;" Human beings create everything by themselves. Producing his own food, building his own shelter, his own external security and defense, all the joys that can make life pleasant, as well as his knowledge and wisdom and even his will-all these are completely his own products. " [2](P1)
In the sense of species, both human beings and animals belong to nature, and like all animals, the most general 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 an open nature that other species do not have, and its relationship with nature presents great possibility characteristics, which leads to the fundamental difference between human beings and other species in their way of life. This difference makes people always have a very tense relationship with nature (the surrounding material world and human instinct). Nature often becomes a threat and bondage to people, and people also feel strongly oppressed, so people need to break free from the bondage of nature. Breaking away from bondage is not to sever the connection with nature, but to unify the laws of nature into the transcendence of human subject activities, so that people can get the priority of belonging to people in nature. In Kant's view, perhaps education is the way to achieve this goal, because education is unnatural, but it can intervene in nature. It is in this intervention that nature can become a 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 the control of the laws of nature and human instinct with education as the basic way, nature becomes decisive for people. Human activities and people's interpretation of their own activities are the real yardstick for human beings to adjust their self-composition and guide their own behavior, and human beings are creative in both physical and spiritual existence and development. Because of this, people can not only create themselves, but also decide how to create themselves. Education makes people stop developing themselves through biological evolution.
as far as individuals are concerned, the existence of life is inseparable from natural rules 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 some holistic relationship. Many kinds of attributes of people seem to be hidden behind individual existence in their daily life. In order to make the individual's life have universal value significance in daily life, it can only be achieved by surpassing non-daily life in both ways of life 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 precept established by people through rational inference or traditional customs, but a universal form with human purpose, freedom as the essence and self-discipline as the form. Through education, morality with people as its purpose and freedom as its essence has become an individual's attitude towards life, mission of existence and life style, a self-awareness of universal goodness in the concrete situation of life, and a source for individuals living in different situations to find their own meaning in life. It is the universal moral nature shown in the process of education that makes the educated people enter the group and become a member of society, and the individual's life is pluralistic and open. It is at this level that Kant said that education "does not teach us how to be happy, but how to be worthy of happiness as a scientific introduction" [2](151).
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 of enlightening our minds 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 generation, 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, on the other hand, teaching