Aesthetic Education for a Republican China

Speaker(s): Chenxin Jiang (Social Thought, University of Chicago)

Chenxin is a PhD student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation about the transcontinental conversation about aesthetics, religion, and cultural renewal made possible by the translation of philosophical canons between Germany and China in the early twentieth century. She is also a literary translator.
 
This paper, which is an excerpt from the third chapter of her dissertation, reconstructs scholar-revolutionary Cai Yuanpei’s idea of aesthetic education (and his Schillerian influences) and uses it to develop a new reading of his influential later proposal to “replace religion with aesthetic education.”