Educating for Virtuoso Living: Papers from the Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference

The present issue of Philosophy East and West presents a selection of papers from the Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference held at the East-West Center in Honolulu in 2005. The theme of the conference was education, and given the large number of fine papers presented, the selection for this issue was no easy task. The papers we present here address a common topic?the nature of moral education and the role of aesthetic experience in moral education and moral practice?though from very different perspectives, and it is because of this variety of approaches to this topic that we present the group of essays gathered in this volume. The link between ethics and aesthetics has been explored extensively in Chinese moral theory. We see this connection exploited in the Daodejing and developed systematically in the Confucian tradition, as Professors Olberding and Thompson each emphasize in their contributions to this issue. This connection has also been remarked upon in the Western tradition. Kant's critical philosophy introduces this line of thought, and it is developed systematically by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Schopenhauer argues that ethical and aesthetic experience has its roots in an immediate intuition of the world as it is in itself and reflects the deepest form of knowledge of reality. Nietzsche suggests that ethical reflection, if it is to be properly humanistic, can only be understood as a kind of aesthetic criticism of biog raphy. Wittgenstein, developing Schopenhauer's views in the Tractatus, argues that "ethics and aesthetics are one and the same." This idea is developed further in his "Lecture on Ethics," in which ethical experience, the "experience par excellence/' is characterized in terms of aesthetic wonder at the existence and beauty of the world, before being meta-characterized as ineffable. The line of thought we see developed by Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein focuses primarily on the transcendental dimension of values, and on the fact that when we engage in moral or aesthetic reflection, either in deliberation or in assess ment, we address ourselves directly to values that cannot be reduced to, and which transcend, empirical description. In such reflection, according to this view, we en counter ourselves and the world in a noumenal rather than a phenomenal aspect. Nietzsche, of course, stands outside this consensus in his rejection of transcendental ontology and of transcendental values. While he shares with Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein the view that aesthetic and ethical engagement is the deepest and most primordial form of human engagement with the world and with ourselves as