A Study on the Direction of Tea Aesthetics Education : Focusing on Educational Categories Based on Tea Experience

Abstract

This study sought to present a philosophical foundation and categorical basis for tea aesthetics education by examining the limitations of object-centered aesthetics and classical cognitivism, with a focus on the convergence between aesthetic experience and embodied cognition. Tea experience is understood as both a reflective and an embodied experience. Drawing on Maturana and Varela’s cognitive biology, this study views tea experience as a process in which meaning emerges though a structural coupling between the organism and its environment. Through the framework of 4E (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended) cognition, the tea experience is further explained as an integrated embodied experience involving the body, environment, tools, and action. To interpret the formation of cognition and the transformation of one’s mode of being from an educational perspective, this study reinterprets Drake’s Know, Do, Be (KDB) model as the educational categories of Gong-In-Gi. Gong refers to the conditions through which experience and cognition arise; In refers to the acting subject who forms practical cognition through interaction with the environment; and Gi refers to the cyclical transformation of one’s mode of being. In this respect, tea aesthetics education can be understood as an educational practice that enables learners to reflect on the conditions of their sensations and judgments and to recognize tea experience as a dependent-arising phenomenon.