(A&P) The Art of Dewey's Pedagogy

My pedagogical assumptions owe much to the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. In the aesthetic/artistic arena, Dewey parses "an experience" as a consequence of wresting from the relatively inchoate and undifferentiated flow of experience a finite temporal span (one with a clear beginning and ending) imbued with a certain degree of significance or meaning (so that the cessation -- the ending -- has the character of a consummation). In like fashion, a successful learning experience is one born of those deliberate efforts to cull an educational experience from conscious life generally.

Consider this summary from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The roots of aesthetic experience lie, Dewey argues, in commonplace experience, in the consummatory experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human life. There is no legitimacy to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few. Whenever there is a coalesence into an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present circumstances, life then takes on an aesthetic quality--what Dewey called having "an experience." Nor is the creative work of the artist, in its broad parameters, unique. The process of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative development of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of experience that affords immediate satisfaction, the process found in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human activity. What distinguishes artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as the rationalizing aim of the activity itself, and the ability of the artist to achieve this aim by marshalling and refining the massive resources of human life, meanings, and values.

It seems to follow as well that "intelligent and creative human activity" in the educational arena can and should include Dewey's aesthetic emphasis on immediate satisfaction. That is, along with its obvious utilitarian virtues, learning can and should be enjoyed for its own sake.

Syllogisms for Simpletons

Dear Judge MuKasey:

1. If waterboarding is torture, then it is unconstitutional
2. Waterboarding is torture.
3. Therefore, waterboarding is unconstitutional.

And by the way,

4. All torture is morally repugnant.
5. Waterboarding is torture.
6. Therefore, waterboarding is morally repugnant.

Finally, just in case you harbor a simple-minded utilitarian defense of torture

7. All torture is ineffective.
8. Waterboarding is torture.
9. Therefore, waterboarding is ineffective.

(PE & IH) Waterboarding, Then and Now

Michael MuKasey, Bush's candidate to replace Alberto "torture" Gonzales, claims not to know much about waterboarding, only that (in a disingenuous and obscene effort to hide behind a conditional assertion) "if it is a form of torture, then it is unconstitutional." Challenged by Congress to clarify his position on the antecedent, he could only reply, "I'm sorry."

But we all know better, and have for some time. Waterboarding (explicitly endorsed by "just a dunk in the water" Cheney) is obviously torture. It was torture during the Spanish Inquisition. It was torture when the Japanese were convicted of using this technique on American POWs during WWII. Nothing's changed but the face (more familiar now) of the torturers.

(PE & IH) Bush, God, and WW III

Scott Ritter, at his best:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/22/4736/

An excerpt:

"The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival."

(IH & PE) Telltale Telcoms

Bush is asking Congress to extend retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who assisted -- prior to 9/11, it turns out -- his administration's warrantless wiretapping schemes, all the while insisting that no laws were broken. Why, then, the rush to secure immunity?

The answer is obvious. US criminal statute (just one of many applicable laws) 18 U. S. C. 2702 reads in part:

"...a provider of remote computing service or electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service... to any governmental entity."

(AP) Insignificant Form?

Bell's account of significant form is viciously circular. He claims that all and only those objects with significant form are art. But what makes some forms (combinations of lines, shapes, and colors) significant? Here's Bell's answer:

1. We know significant form by its effect on us: it evokes (in the ideal observer), a “peculiar” aesthetic emotion. Yet,

2. We know these aesthetic emotions only as those triggered by our observation of significant form.

Unfortunately, Bell’s tight little circle brings us no closer to an appreciation of the difference between significant and insignificant (artless) form. We might decide on Bellian grounds to leave significant form undefined (or defined only in terms of an equally ill-defined and “peculiar” aesthetic emotional reaction). But then his central thesis that all and only those objects with significant form are art reduces to one of two apparently insignificant claims:

All and only those objects with some unknown property are art.

Or

All and only those objects that evoke some unknown aesthetic emotional reaction are art

(IH & PE) To Disappear the Disappearers

"We have nothing left to say to the Mubarak regime. The torture practiced in Egypt is the torture we employ for our own ends. The cries that rise up from these fetid cells in Egypt condemn not only the Mubarak dictatorship but the moral rot that has beset the American state."

Chris Hedges, on US support for Egypt's dictatorship, the US policy of extraordinary rendition, and torture.

(http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/15/4538/)

(AP) Freud's Formula

After our two (productive) class discussions of the matter, here's my latest attempt to capture Freud's approach to art:

Art (Freud) = [Ep (Da)]PccPrF

where,

E=express
p=pleasurable
D=desire
a=artist
P=past
cc=childhood creativity
Pr=present
F=future

Vegetarianism and Global Warming

(PE/IH) Curiously absent from recent (mainstream) discussions of global warming is any mention of our self-destructive addiction to meat and other nonhuman animal products.

Intensive methods of animal agriculture now produce more than 20% of all greenhouse gases attributable to human activity (in the form of both CO2 and non-CO2 emissions, with the latter having an even more severe impact on the world's climate). Sociologist Dan Brook sums up the situation this way:

Vegetarianism is literally about life and death -- for each of us individually and for all of us together. Eating animals simultaneously contributes to a multitude of tragedies: the animals' suffering and death; the ill-health and early death of people; the unsustainable overuse of oil, water, land, topsoil, grain, labor and other vital resources; environmental destruction, including deforestation, species extinction, mono-cropping and global warming; the legitimacy of force and violence; the mis-allocation of capital, skills, land and other assets; vast inefficiencies in the economy; tremendous waste; massive inequalities in the world; the continuation of world hunger and mass starvation; the transmission and spread of dangerous diseases; and moral failure in so-called civilized societies. Vegetarianism is an antidote to all of these unnecessary tragedies.

The editors of World Watch concluded in the July/August 2004 edition that "the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future -- deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease." Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: "Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there's milk and meat."

Global warming may be the most serious global social problem threatening life on Earth. We need to fight global warming on the governmental and corporate levels, and we also need to fight global warming on the everyday and personal levels. Now we need to fight global warming -- with our forks.