Sensitivity Training

Abstract

ERICA FRETWELL is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP, 2020). Her current research tracks the nineteenth-century literary and craft practices from which the concept of haptic mediation emerged. Aesthetic education is a labile term that variously denotes art appreciation, fostering the imagination, and the cultivation of taste. But we tend to overlook an elemental definition: learning to perceive. This meaning indexes the aesthesis that underwrites European aesthetic philosophy, first defined by Alexander Baumgarten as the “scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (“science of sensitive knowing”; qtd. in Davey), or the study of intuitive knowledge arrived at through the senses. This “sensitive knowing,” Friedrich Schiller posited in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), has a civilizing function— hence aesthetic education is a liberal project of spiritual cultivation that has the potential to engender the moral freedom necessary for a self-governing community of taste. In this Schillerian vein, the early-twentieth-century educator Maria Montessori wrote, “The sensory education which prepares for the accurate perception of all the differential details in the qualities of things . . . helps us to collect from the external world the material for the imagination” and thereby renovate society (Advanced Montessori Method 248). One way to understand aesthetic education, then, is as sensitivity training: as learning to differentiate “details in the qualities of things” through the micro-operations of perception. At the granular level of sensory experience—distinguishing periwinkle from purple, or velvet from satin—sensitivity training takes part in the broader imperative of aesthetic education to realize sensus communis, a community organized around shared judgments or sensing in common, by “negotiat[ing] the tension between democratic autonomy and cultural authority,” in Jesse Raber’s words (15). While Schiller’s philosophy is a useful reminder of aesthetic education’s basis in sensitivity training, it is eighteenthand nineteenthcentury literacy training that discloses what sensitivity training looked like in practice. Literacy is typically considered a technical skill, a