Gregory Pappas – Dewey’s Ethics – Democracy as Experience [Part I]
“Just as he objected to the ‘museum conception of art’ that isolates the arts from lived experience, Dewey warned against separating morality from relationships…”
“…moral life is a process of creating or transforming value, and not merely of accepting and living by given or former values.”
“As Dewey says, ‘It is not experience which is experienced, but nature – stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on.’ My valuing experience of an act of injustice as wrong is about value that I find in the same world where I also find plants and stones. To dismiss the importance of valuing in inquiry because it is merely subjective or a mere psychological reaction is to assume a dualism or to presuppose the supremacy of the theoretical standpoint in revealing what is real.”
“Dewey used science and art as metaphors to understand moral deliberation. This served the purpose of highlighting the continuity between morality and other modes of experience, and it provided a description of moral deliberation as an experimental, emotional, and imaginative process.”
“When experienced, the frightening noise is as real as the eventual knowledge-experience of the cause of the noise. ‘Empirically that noise is fearsome, it really is, not merely phenomenally or subjectively so. That is what it is as experienced as being.’ [quoting Dewey] Insofar as the eventual experience is not misleading it is more true, but this does not make it more real. Similarly moral problems are not experienced as internal or subjective. insofar as a a situation is experienced as morally problematic then it really is problematic. this situation might be transformed into one in which there is no longer a problem, but the second, transformed situation is no more real than the first one.”
[quoting Todd Lekan] “the pragmatist approach maintains that morality is more analogous to non-moral practical skills and arts like medicine, cookery, and baseball than has been acknowledged by most of the tradition of moral philosophy.”
“..the pragmatist is concerned with knowledge only insofar as it is a means to enhance our lived present experience.”
“Dewey’s work…affirms the potential of ordinary experience (concrete life) to be the source of amelioration, admiration, and inspiration. His metaphysics reminds philosophers that the tangled, complex, gross, macroscopic, and crude things we find in everyday life are real, for example, vagueness, ugliness, fantasies, headaches, illusions, spark plugs, a conversation with a friend, parties, diseases, stones, food, tragedy, a conflict with a roommate, a joke, playing backgammon with friends, measles, and marbles. His aesthetics is a philosophical reintegration of the aesthetic with everyday life that is, in effect, a celebration of lived experience…his ethics is an affirmation of morality as experience.”
Ramón Gallegos – Holistic Education
“If a nation, through its schools, its child-welfare policies, and its competitiveness, fails to nurture self-knowledge, emotional health, and democratic values, then ultimately economic success will be undermined by a moral collapse of society.”
“Holistic education is both secular and religious education in the true and original sense of these concepts. The problem arises when secularism is interpreted in scientistic terms and religion is interpreted in dogmatic terms. In scientism any non-scientific knowledge is rejected as false or inappropriate in an educational setting. So when a child asks ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What is death?’ the false secularism or scientism disregards the questions due to their lack of academic or scientific context…these are the questions that encourage the child to learn…These fundamental questions are the real teachers…”
“Holistic intelligence acknowledges the limitations of thought…It is a creative process that has more in common with wisdom than with knowledge. It is the ability to make distinctions and in that way recognize responsible action. It is unconditionally connected to human values. Indeed, it is not possible to separate intelligence from love, compassion, liberty, gratitude, respect, humility, solidarity, friendship, and honesty.. Intelligence is an unfolding of one’s comprehension of the value of all life and of all human beings. A scientist working for war or a politician who destroys thousands of lives is not intelligent. They may be astute, efficient, and skillful, but they are stupid: They do not know themselves.”
“We must shift from a vision of intelligence, as a basically neutral cognitive ability, to a holistic vision of intelligence a an ability that nurtures the human spirit and enables a person’s full realization. Intelligence and love of life in this vision go hand in hand.”
“…one cannot become a full person simply through cognitive development and analytical processes.”
“…the crisis of today is not one of technology or machines. It is a crisis in relations between human beings. It is a crisis in our sense of meaning.”
– Ramón Gallegos in Holistic Education: Pedagogy of Universal Love
Notes taken in real time – ORD layover
Luck breaking on all sides
Sunglasses hanging from your shirt
Wedding in St Simons Island
IT geeks
Sales reps
Road warriors of all stripes
All the beauty of wine
Piano soundtrack to throngs trudging from gate to gate
Hearty laugher has learned to never let them buy her drinks
They can only talk business, trade war stories
The subtle blush of her smile
She shields herself while eating chicken salad
Financial analyst
He’s kind of desperate, in sales
“Small world”
Old guard woman engaging the young looker
From the east side of Cleveland
Party girls to one side, heavy and earnest
Silent suits on either side of me
Custom phone enclosures, a flea market aesthetic
“I always cross my fingers that I get upgraded”
He tries so hard but if ever ham fisted described someone he would be it
Again the piano asserts its presence
6oz malbec is so terribly sad shifting to stand earnestly by the Amsterdam lovely
HMS host Fernando has multiply pierced ear with several diamonds
Pale leg exposed between tights and Tom’s shoes
“Oh you’re a delight”
Gold purse tattooed wrist
The faux elegance of black shirts and black pants
“I want to have my last hurrah in Vegas”
Lady sliding in vomit grabs plenty of attention
They just can’t help fawning over her –
the Cleveland beauty, not the vomit disaster
On my way out I urge her to ignore the marriage cynics, to gamble everything, to have her heart broken or find enduring joy
My lack of a wedding band gave her pause but she thanked me for my optimism…
Wendell Berry – Imagination – Affection
Another powerful talk by Wendell Berry:
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
Claire Needell Hollander – Dazzling Words
We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.
Public Intellectual
What stands in the way of scholars respecting the public enough to address it and to contribute their best thinking to the broader world? Well, scholars do. So long as institutions of higher education sustain the system that punishes those who aim their work to broader audiences and rewards intellectuals only when they speak in the private code of a subdiscipline, then what are you going to get? You get scholars who speak in code to the brotherhood, instead of public intellectuals.
I’d rather be a public intellectual. It seems more honest, more ethical, more true to the life of the mind than does adding another line to my CV for an article that will only be distributed to a few hundred places and read by even fewer.
Steven Fesmire – Moral Imagination
“Central to Dewey’s approach is that ethics is understood as the art of helping people to live richer, more responsive, and more emotionally engaged lives.”
“…the central goal of education is nurturance of a child’s social curiosity into a communicative democratic faith.”
“Sequestering art and the aesthetic from everyday reflection, far from celebrating imagination, is a recipe for moral sterility, fragmentation, and alienation. Imagination cannot be democratic when it is ‘flat and toneless and lifeless,’ it has historically turned to radically individual pursuits, or to promotion of authoritarian control.”
[quoting Dewey] “Conversion into doctrinal teachings of the imaginative relations of life with which great moral artists have dowered humanity has been the great cause of their ossification into harsh dogmas; illuminating insight into the relations and goods of life has been lost, and an arbitrary code or precepts and rules substituted.”
“The moral production is not a dress rehearsal for a ready-made play, as it appears to be in many rule theories. Dewey’s moral stage is atypical. Scenes are actively co-authored with others and with a precarious environment. The acting is improvisational, the performances open-ended. The drama is experimental, not scripted.”
“What is most at stake in moral life is not some quantifiable pleasure or pain, but ‘what kind of person one is to become’ and what kind of world is to develop.”
“As a capacity to engage the present with an eye to what is not immediately at hand, imagination is more than a niche for fictional embellishment, as when someone has an ‘over-active imagination’ or is ‘imagining things.’ Nor is it the exclusive possession of fine artists. It is integrated with everyday life and learning.”
“Reason is embodied, evolving, and practical, and as such it is subject to physical, conceptual, and historical constraints. Further, reasoning is contingent upon perspectives and is characterized by an educated aesthetic response that can emerge from trust in a situation’s potentialities.”
[quoting Peirce] “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”
“…pragmatist ethics urges that moral reflection must begin where all genuine inquiry begins: in media res, with tangle of lived experience. Dewey in particular argued that moral deliberation is not disembodied cerebration…but is a form of engaged inquiry touched off by an uncertain situation.”
– Steven Fesmire in John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics
Nel Noddings – Caring
“The one-caring, then, is not bored with ordinary life…the one-caring finds new delight in breakfast, in welcoming home her wanderers, in feeding the cat who purrs against her ankle, in noticing the twilight. She does not ask, ‘Is this all there is?,’ but wishes in hearty affirmation that what-is might go on and on…Now one may ask just how the celebration of everyday life contributes to the maintenance of the ethical ideal. First, of course, as we have seen, such celebration turns the one-caring in wonder and appreciation to the source of her ethicality. It is for the most part in ordinary situations that we meet others for whom we shall care and who care for us. Second, celebration of ordinary life requires and is likely to enhance receptivity. The magic of daily life may be missed by one who constantly seeks adventure and ‘something new.’ Celebration of daily experience provides opportunities for engrossment, for complete involvement in living”
“It is not necessary that I, a concrete moral agent, actually attain my ideal – surely, I shall fail repeatedly – but the ideal itself must be attainable in the actual world. It must be possible for a finite human being to attain it, and we should be able to describe the attainment. The attainment must be actually possible; that is, if I am faithful and energetic and fortunate, I should be able to attain in my actual relations with actual persons. I should not be diverted into abstraction and the endless solution of hypothetical problems.”
“…moral problems not as intellectual problems to be solved by abstract reasoning but as concrete human problems to be lived and to be solved in living.”
“The father might sacrifice his own child in fulfilling a principle; the mother might sacrifice any principle to preserve her child.”
“If rational-objective thinking is to be put in the service of caring, we must at right moments turn it away from the abstract toward which it tends and back to the concrete. At times we must suspend it in favor of subjective thinking and reflection, allowing time and space for seeing and feeling. The rational-objective mode must continually be re-established and redirected from a fresh base of commitment. Otherwise, we find ourselves deeply, perhaps inextricably, enmeshed in procedures that somehow only serve themselves; our thoughts are separated, completely detached, from the original objects of caring.”
“In part, our approaches to creativity and care are induced by the dominating insistency on objective evaluation. How can we emphasize the receptivity that is at the core of both when we have no way of measuring it? Here we may ultimately decide that some things in life, and in education, must be undertaken and sustained by faith and not by objective evaluation.”
“There are times when we must stop thinking in order to make sensible connections with the object field. Neither the joy nor the receptivity of which we have been talking is passive; both are active but not manipulative, not assimilative. They do not strive to impose structure, but they open all channels to perceive it. They represent an opening-up and a taking-in.”
– Nel Noddings in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education
Douglas Sloan – Insight-Imagination
“An education in which skills, narrow intellect, and information have no connection with insight, imagination, feeling, beauty, conscience, and wonder and that systematically evades all engagement with the great, central issues and problems of human life, is a wasteland.”
“…an exquisitely stupid cleverness adept at taking the world apart with no grasp of what it is doing, nor apparent concern.”
“An adequate conception of education, an education of imagination, will always strive for that way of knowing which springs from the participation of the person as a total, willing, feeling, valuing, thinking being- a way of knowing that leads to the wisdom in living that makes personal life truly possible and worthy. It will have as its prime purpose, as its ground and aim, the complete, harmonious realization of the full capacities and potential of the individual as a whole person. Any conception of education that arises from some other or lesser concern or that fastens on a partial or isolated aspect of the total person will finally abort, delivering only fragments of persons and figments in place of reality. And by its nature, such a lesser education cannot avoid serving purposes that will be basically nonhuman and ultimately inhuman.”
[quoting David Bohm] “…insight is not restricted to great scientific discoveries or to artistic creations, but rather it is of critical importance in everything we do, especially in the affairs of ordinary life.”
“Rather than the sense of self indweling and sustained by a living and meaningful world in which the boundaries between self and world, self and other, are not sharp but flow and merge into one another, the modern experience has been increasingly that of a self separated sharply from other selves, and detached from nature, standing as a self-enclosed subject over against nature as object.” [the critical academic expert is exemplary]
“…chronological snobbery and temporal provincialism that so constrict the modern mind set.”
[and this especially on the academically ‘gifted’] “Those who display the requisite intellectual skills are singled out as special for their proficiency in the use of an aspect of mind that has no intrinsic relationship to the art of living well as persons…Most have been ill equipped by their education to live well as persons, to find delight in friendship and love, in the joys of sound and touch and color…”
– Douglas Sloan in Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World
Mark Edmundson – Hungry Hearts
I had a childhood friend named Paul Rizzo. Paul had a hungry heart. He wanted to see everything, know everything, read everything, go everywhere. He had what you might call an associative mind, and he surely didn’t cold-cock his SATs. But he did want to learn. He went to some colleges; he took some courses. But I don’t think he ever got the quality of education he deserved. That kind of schooling was too often reserved for kids who aced their boards and charmed their teachers and were elected presidents of the Climbers Club by unanimous acclaim.
Paul is still out there, driving a cab, writing fiction, reading what he can and trying to figure it all out. He sees himself as an Everyman type, but not without aspirations of an intellectual and even spiritual sort. Not long ago he used the phrase “Hamlet with a coffee to go” in a note to me and that describes Paul pretty well. The Boss would probably like him, maybe even enough to slip him into a song. Hungry hearts – smart or slow, rich or poor – still deserve a place in the class.
Francis Bacon – Book Learning
“This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the Schoolmen: who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors…as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges…did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books…as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit. ” – Francis Bacon on book learning
Miranda Lambert – Ephemerality
Me and Charlie boy used to go walking
Sittin in the woods behind my house
When bein’ lovers meant a stolen kiss
And holding hands with nobody else around
Charlie said he wanted to get married
But we were only ten so we’d have to wait
He said we’d never let our love run dry
Like so many do these days
So we treat our love like a firefly
Like it only gets to shine for a little while
Catch it in a mason jar
With holes in the top
And run like hell to show it off
Oh promises we made when we’d go walkin
That’s just me and Charlie talking
Charlie always said he’d like to leave here
So he turned 18 and left our sleepy town
Letters came and went and I kept waiting
For Charlie to come back
And bring the life he’d found
Funny how time and distance change you
The road you take
Don’t always lead you home
You can start a love with good intentions
And you look up and it’s gone
So you treat your love like a firefly
Like it only gets to shine for a little while
Catch it in a mason jar
With holes in the top
And run like hell to show it off
Oh promises we made when we’d go walkin’
That’s just me and Charlie talking
Now and then I sometimes think of Charlie
How we thought we knew it all back then
Now I’d give anything to feel love
From a child’s heart again
So you treat your love like a firefly
Like it only gets to shine for a little while
Catch it in a mason jar
With holes in the top
And run like hell to show it off
Oh promises we made when we’d go walkin
That’s just me and Charlie
Me and Charlie talking
– Miranda Lambert “Me and Charlie Talking”
Gregory Sholette – Curator’s Disease – Edward Tiryakian – Existential Phenomenology
On one level, I love Sholette’s book Dark Matter, but at a much deeper level I find it infuriating. While it does hint at a profound re-evaluation of art/politics and at shedding light on “dark matter” it ultimately treats dark matter with curator’s disease…that is it serves as a vague intellectual theme used to illustrate a preordained vision- in this case the rather conventional celebration of the heroic artistic avant garde – rather than as a radical foil to academic triumphalism. Stephen Wright and Alexander Koch are doing much less conventional work addressing so called “dark matter.” Having said that, I’m still thankful the book exists and talks intelligently about some great folks.
Coincidentally, while revisiting Sholette, I discovered this quote from Edward Tiryakian describing existential phenomenology in Stanford Lyman’s A Sociology of the Absurd (1970):
“…[it] seeks to elucidate the existential nature of social structures by uncovering the surface institutional phenomena of the everyday, accepted world; by probing the subterranean, non-institutional social depths concealed from public gaze, by interpreting the dialectic between the institutional and non-institutional.”
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