Article

Reinterpreting Reimer’s Experience-Based Philosophy of Music Education through Arendt’s Late-Modern Conception of Humanistic Education: Natality, World, and Reflective Judgment

Author

Minhyung Park

Information

pp. 139~164 / 2026 Vol.55 No.1

Abstract

This study reinterprets Bennett Reimer’s experience‑based philosophy of music education through Hannah Arendt’s humanistic political aesthetics—particularly her concepts of natality, world, and reflective judgmen —to clarify how individual meaning and community can be reconciled. Using Reimer’s third edition as the primary object of analysis, the paper reconstructs an experience‑based philosophy on the basis of concepts drawn from Arendt’s works by means of a literature‑based philosophical analysis. The findings are as follows. First, in Reimer, creativity can be understood as a new beginning open to all and becomes differentiated by musical roles such as composition, performance, improvisation, and listening. Second, music functions as a world that adds specialness to human experience through sound and can be understood as an in‑between that both relates and separates people, supplying a common point of reference. Third, reflective judgment—through the good ear, role‑specific creativities, and ethical dispositions internal to music-making—refines private feeling into a public form with exemplary validity. The study thus constructively proposes a world‑centered, non‑instrumental mode of cohesion and separation as a route complementary to praxial philosophy of music education. Accordingly, it offers lesson‑design criteria for pre‑political school contexts that train sensus communis, enlarged mentality, and communicability in music education.

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