Aesthetic education is the tradition that treats the cultivation of perception and feeling, and above all the sense of beauty, as the ground of moral and civic life; in the line that runs from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury through Goethe and the Humboldt brothers, it also produced the relational way of seeing nature from which ecology grew.
Overview
This page carries the intellectual history behind Bildung. It follows the account Jonathan Rowson gives in his 2021 essay for Perspectiva’s Realisation Festival, which in turn draws, with permission, on Mark Vernon’s essay on the Third Earl in The Idler (No. 71, March to April 2020). Where the record adds to or qualifies Rowson’s account, the page says so.
The story turns on a disagreement between a tutor and his pupil. John Locke taught that what we know comes through the senses. His pupil, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 to 1713), held that perception itself is formed, and that beauty is how a mind comes to see the order in things. Locke’s view shaped modern science and economics. Shaftesbury’s was largely ignored in Britain, crossed to continental Europe, and there fed both the idea of Bildung and the founders of the life sciences.
For the BioConomy, the lineage matters because it joins two things the wiki needs together: the formation of persons and a science that treats nature as a web of relationships. Both come from the same root.
Locke and the mechanical view
Rowson describes Locke’s empiricism as the source of a habit that runs through public life today: the demand for evidence gathered by the senses, and a view of the world as a network of causes and effects. On this view the purpose of knowledge is control. Science becomes a form of power, and nature becomes a resource to be probed and used. Rowson credits the approach with real value and argues it has also produced a mechanical experience of life.
Shaftesbury’s alternative
Beauty as a way of knowing
Shaftesbury rejected the reduction. In Rowson’s account he found his foundation in the aesthetic: beauty is what enables us to see laws and patterns in the first place, and it is at work inside them. Nature is elegant and ordered, and science would fail if it were otherwise. “Harmony is Harmony by Nature,” Shaftesbury wrote. Human intelligence is a conscious expression of the intelligence that surrounds it, so a person’s genius and nature’s genius share a common origin. Science, on this view, is a means of learning to relate to nature.
The moral sense
Shaftesbury also held that human beings have a moral sense, an inner compass that can tell right from wrong, and that this sense is itself an aspect of beauty. Rowson notes that the idea reached Adam Smith, whose moral philosophy took up the moral sense. The task is to cultivate this compass. A fanatical or narrow mind leads a narrow life; a person who learns to see the world expansively is more likely to choose well and to enjoy life. “‘Tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and Resolution which must compleat the real Philosopher,” Shaftesbury wrote.
Inner and outer formation
Rowson credits Shaftesbury as the first to stress inner Bildung, the formation of a person’s perception, emotion, thinking and valuing, and to see that its quality shows up in outer Bildung, the systems and structures of a society. Rowson also names Jan Amos Comenius (1592 to 1670) as the tradition’s earlier forebear, for his view that learning is part of nature’s formative process and that a healthy society makes that process its axis.
The continental crossing
Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt
Rowson writes that Shaftesbury’s aesthetic sense of nature went to continental Europe and shaped Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. Both studied nature through imagination as well as measurement, looking for harmonies, resonances, sympathies and symmetries. Rowson’s summary is that “Humboldt gave birth to ecology” and that Goethe developed perceptions that Darwin later built into the theory of evolution.
The record supports the first claim in a qualified form. The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 [IC]. Humboldt’s study of nature as an interconnected whole, in which climate, plants, animals and human activity shape one another, is widely credited as a founding influence on ecological thinking [IC]. The specific link between Goethe and Darwin is Rowson’s claim and is not examined here [TBV].
Schiller names the tradition
The phrase “aesthetic education” comes from Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), a series of letters arguing that political freedom depends on the aesthetic formation of the people who are to exercise it [IC]. Rowson does not discuss Schiller. The wiki adds him because his letters gave the tradition its name and because their argument, that freedom must be formed before it can be governed, is the same argument Bildung makes about the BioConomy.
Wilhelm von Humboldt and Bildung
Alexander’s elder brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 to 1835), carried the formative side of the tradition into institutions. As a Prussian education reformer he shaped the model of the research university that bears his name and treated education as lifelong human development, wider than training in skills [IC]. The two brothers hold the two halves of the inheritance: Wilhelm the formation of persons, Alexander a relational science of the living world.
Imagination and the collective imaginary
Rowson extends the argument to the present. Beauty evokes imagination, and imagination is needed to see what a viable future might look and feel like. He argues that capitalism has become a defining feature of the collective imaginary, and that shared streams of social media imagery make individual imaginations less individuated and more collectivized, so the renewing power of personal imagination risks being absorbed. He points to Cynthia Bourgeault’s notion of “imaginal causality,” a source of change deeper than ideas, values or habits, and suggests that reaching it requires people to gather differently. His festival was one attempt.
Shaftesbury’s advice for troubled times, in Rowson’s paraphrase, was to seek the inner liberty that cannot be taken away, “the freedom enjoyed by the sun when it rises and the bird when it flies,” and to trust what beautifies life.
Why it matters to the BioConomy
The following is the wiki’s reading.
The BioConomy rests on a claim that value lies in what a living place retains and regenerates. That claim depends on people perceiving the place as a whole: the water held in its soil, the return of its species, the condition of its catchment after rain. Locke’s inheritance trains people to see a place as a stock of resources to be measured and drawn down. Shaftesbury’s inheritance trains them to see it as kin, with an order they belong to and can learn from. The wiki’s ecological science, from Water Retention Landscapes to the biotic pump, descends from the second way of seeing.
A related argument appears in Participation and Conformity, where every measurement is a selection made for a purpose and the living place is primary. Aesthetic education is the formation that lets a person hold both: the gauge for what it can do, and the place for what it is.
Related
- Bildung
- Bildung (glossary)
- Participation and Conformity
- Structures of Consciousness
- Water Retention Landscapes
- Imaginal Cells
- Adam Smith
- The Comenius to Schmidt Chain
Sources
- Rowson, J. (2021). What’s the Point of The Realisation Festival? Perspectiva
- Rowson, J. (2019). Bildung in the 21st Century. CUSP Essay Series No. 9
Provenance
Written 30 October 2026 in the BioConomy project from pages 5 to 6 and 14 to 16 of Jonathan Rowson’s What’s the Point of The Realisation Festival? (Perspectiva, 2021), which Michael Haupt supplied, with the lineage moved here from Bildung at his direction. Rowson’s section on the Third Earl borrows from Mark Vernon’s essay in The Idler (No. 71, 2020), which was not consulted directly. The qualification of Rowson’s ecology claim (Haeckel’s coinage, Humboldt as founding influence), the Schiller section and the Wilhelm von Humboldt section are additions from the public record. The closing section is the wiki’s reading. The page is documented-framework because it reports Rowson’s account of the tradition.