Sense of Community as a Value of Aesthetic Education in the European Tradition

This paper discusses the issue of the sense of community as a value of the aesthetic education theory. The topic refers to the still ongoing search for permanent references to the European cultural heritage. The author poses a question about how inspiring and permanent are the traditions of the European sense of community created by Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Read. They both proposed a visionary perspective of the “aesthetic state” or “saving the humankind through art”. They worked in different historical eras but they both made an attempt to overcome the unfavorable civilizational conditions of their times. They created a different but related category of describing the sense of community, i.e. the “I-We” co-dependency. This paper contains the analysis of their views with the emphasis on the variety of accents in the understanding of the sense of community. In the summary, the author discusses the relevance of their ideas.