ABSTRACT
As Ian Hunter shows in his book Culture and Government, the Schillerian ideal of aesthetic education is by no means dead, even if it may be so in its nineteenth-century, romantic form (Hunter 1988). The aesthetic sphere itself-the world of literature and the arts-is generally held up as the best place to learn a certain kind of enlightenment; a matter less of thinking of the aesthetic as a regulatory ideal so much as claiming it as the privileged site of certain kinds of enlightening moral experience. If the model of such aesthetic education is rarely these days that of the “well-rounded person”, the bottom-line remains that good habits of subjectivity are best learned in relation to studiousness within the aesthetic field itself.
