Modern education, focused on preparing individuals for functional life, increasingly forgets that a human being is not only reason but also a mode of sensing the world. Rational thinking, so carefully cultivated in school curricula, without an aesthetic dimension remains blind to meaning and deaf to the human. Yet it is precisely the capacity to perceive beauty, discern nuances, to contemplate, to suffer, and to admire that makes a person a moral being.
Aesthetic sensibility is a fundamental foundation of culture. Without it, the connection between perception and idea, between emotion and thought, disappears. Beauty is not merely an object of sight but a way of being in the world. In ancient pedagogy, aesthetics was not separated from ethics: that which is beautiful was understood as that which leads to the good. As Plotinus wrote (1990), “Rising above bodily beauty, the soul remembers its own beauty — and recognizes itself.”
Beauty not only adorns the world — it also structures it. There are forms of beauty that soothe: they provide harmony, bring peace, and restore the connection between the inner and the outer. Through such forms — whether it’s Bach’s cantata, Japanese ikebana, or the clarity of an ancient frieze — we return to ourselves and the world at the same time. This is the kind of aesthetics that helps the soul to align, to reconcile, to become rational.
But there is another kind of beauty — one that awakens and breaks through. It disturbs, pulls us away from the familiar, and makes us experience another’s suffering as our own. This is Shostakovich, this is Expressionism, this is Dostoevsky. Such aesthetics is not meant for comfort but for moral awakening: to step out of the narrative of ease and confront the other — as a challenge. Aristotle, already in the Poetics, argued that tragedy, through fear and compassion, produces catharsis — a cleansing of the emotions that contributes to the spiritual formation of the person. Through empathy with the heroes, through the inner work with ambivalent feelings and ideals, we develop the subtlety of moral judgment. This is something that cannot be taught directly — only through an encounter with the aesthetic.
Deep education arises where art is integrated into the educational process as an equal means of understanding the world. Poetry enters the realm of thought, shaping its rhythm and imagery.
Painting cultivates the ability for visual analysis and reveals the inner connections between time, space, and perception. Music structures sensory experience and allows one to live through form before it becomes content. Through encounters with art, a person undergoes an experience that cannot be conveyed otherwise: an untranslatable knowledge, a knowledge-experience where no distance exists between thought and feeling. This is not an external “aestheticization” of the curriculum, but a return to the very essence of education: to awaken the soul by expanding sensitivity.
As Matthew Lipman, the founder of philosophy for children, said, “to think is to live aesthetically.” Education without poetry cannot teach either compassion or attentiveness. And John Dewey asserted as early as the beginning of the 20th century that art is not an “addition” to knowledge, but a form of the “intellectual and emotional completion of experience.”
Aesthetic perception develops the ability to discern. It makes feelings precise, emotions expressible, and experience meaningful. Aesthetics elevates us to the universal because it demands relating oneself to something greater. Beauty makes love possible because it requires attention. And where there is attention, there is care. As Friedrich Schiller wrote in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), only through beauty can a person become free—because in it coercion disappears, leaving voluntary striving toward harmony.
(the extract from my book Decay Beneath the Mask of Progress – How to Escape the Matrix? Available on https://agalyamova.com/publications)
