The Art of Dewey's Pedagogy

(A&P) 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.

Coetzee's Project

(E&A) A commonplace yet accurate slogan associated with the effort to draw sympathetic attention to our basic moral obligations to nonhuman others has been "animal rights are human rights" (because, obviously enough, humans are animals). In a recent editorial, Nobel prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee offers an intriguing twist on that idea: "The animal rights campaign remains a human project." He writes:

"The campaign of human beings for animal rights is curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in which animals do not know what is wrong - they do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that humans do.

Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals, the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to end."

Bell's Formula

(A&P) Here's the best I could do with Bell, taking into account his (viciously circular?) characterization of aesthetic emotion and significant form and objectivist account of the latter.

Art (Bell) = IapEAo/SF, where

I = intention
a = artist
p = produce
EAo = aesthetic emotion in an observer (who could be the artist him/herself)
SF = significant form

Suggestions welcome!

Freud's Formula

(A&P) Here's my latest attempt at constructing a formula for Freud's theory of art:

Art (Freud) = Iacw + (cw)p +F, where

I = intention
a = artist
c = communicate
w = wish
p = pleasant
F = form

Tolstoy's Formula

(A&P) Just by way of review, here's the formula we constructed for Tolstoy's theory of art:

A (Tolstoy) = I-sub a-sub c-sub e + F + C-sub o-sub e.

Or, in slightly more readable form without subscripts:

A(T) = Iace + F + Coe, where

I = intentionality
a = artist
c = communication
e= emotion
F = form
o = observer

What do you think Freud's formula will look like?

Earthlings R Us

(E&A) Take a deep breath, a bowl of sauteed tofu and rice, and watch Earthlings, a remarkable full-length documentary on the human use and abuse of nonhuman animals. (Thanks to the blogger-owner of The Intangible Made Tangible for this valuable link.)