Notes on the Aesthetic Motive and Multicultural Education

Many reasons have been given for attending to the artistic traditions of alien cultures. One of these has emphasized that in coming to terms with the arts of culturally different societies we not only discover something novel but also come to have a better understanding of our own assumptions about the relations of art and culture. As the British aesthetician Harold Osborne has aptly put it: 'The best and perhaps the only sure way of bringing to light and revivifying ... [our] fossilized assumptions, and of destroying their power to cramp and confine, is by subjecting ourselves to the shock of contact with a very alien tradition' [1]. But in order for exposure to an alien artistic tradition to have this bracing and revivifying effect, the shock must not leave one completely stunned and baffled. If a foreign culture allows no point of contact with the familiar, if no cognitive bridges can be fashioned to approach it, then there is not much hope of learning from it. This need to examine the new and the alien in terms of the common and familiar explains the apparently engrained human habit of searching for unity amidst diversity. This mental habit prompts us to ask, What shall we take to be the common or unifying thread that runs through tangible and important cultural differences? Once more, we may take Osborne as our text. He holds 'that [it is] the aesthetic motive [that] has been operative throughout history to control the making and appraisal of those artifacts which we now regard as works of art even though it has been latent and unconscious' [1, p. 11]. This awakening consciousness, gradual understanding, and, in modern times, conceptualizing of the human aesthetic impulse becomes the leading and organizing idea in Osborne's history of aesthetics and art theory. I suggest that we take this notion of the presence of an aesthetic motive in making, as well as in appraising, as the common theme for multicultural aesthetic education. It permits us to assume that whatever practical, social, or religious functions a cultural artifact from an alien society may have performed, or now performs, that artifact also performs an aesthetic function: being informed by the (unconscious or conscious) aesthetic motive of its creator, the artifact is designed to evoke and sustain the aesthetic interest of percipients. The educational significance of adopting the idea of a universal aesthetic function lies in the fact that such an idea licenses the use of the same approach to all cultural artifacts, regardless of origin. Thus we need not be deterred by those who claim that