The way to enlightenment is more manifold, I want to say, if there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. So that sitting around a table, leaning back in the chairs with the front legs off the ground like dogs begging or playing, and the reading that at least here, at least almost always really does get done before the class and really gets discussed there, and even the occasional pieces of writing which we stress about out of all proportion to their actual difficulty and to the detriment of the real merit they ought to have as tools for clarifying thinking--there must be more to be meant by liberal education.
The music and labs and languages, of course, the extracurriculars, sports and games, dances, shows--these are all there, but the what you might call life experiences, work and travel and meeting people so different from you, I'm not sure these are possible there where the classes are happening, or if the structure of the classes is somehow inimical to them, rather than fostering them. Certainly there are no grades given for any of these sorts of learning experiences, but the results of them should show in a heartbeat, the difference between a cultivated person and a merely well-read one, or again a very hard-working one, one who has never had leisure to get taught in discussion-based classrooms or felt capable or interested to read a great book instead of relaxing by the TV or at the bar or finding fulfillment in their home and kids and possessions.
But if there is some value in liberal education in the sense of books, these are just the people who stand to gain; or if there is some value in the experiences themselves, it is the reading and discussion that should make it felt, expressed, understood somehow; and in turn, their voices in the discussion could testify to the world outside of the books so as to make those puny readers among us go out to learn and act in a more down-to-earth way. Which to incorporate into a curriculum would change the meaning somewhat of the word--would give the reading a more concrete direction in tension with its significance as contemplation, the end-in-itself side of things. But even this contains an outward aspect, as a candle is what it is, burning, yet casts its little light and heat, so that whatever is around it, if it is of a certain kind, aspires to catch the fire, reflects the illumination.
Anyone contemplative, it seems to me, who has not forgot their humanity, would also consider it well to try and share that experience, and sympathizing with the experience of others, nevertheless resolutely strive to draw them into the like contemplation, for themselves and for what they stand to discover and share thereby. Again, if this is something good in itself, they should naturally aspire to it, and if they can't or don't do it for themselves, there must be conditions in the way, chaining them to ignorance. And if those conditions yet make up their life, and whatever significance it has, we great readers would be equally ignorant not to investigate that, but to be content to read and discuss in our dwindling numbers, seeking forgotten potentialities of the human all alone. To philosophize and create something beautiful has to be in reach of anyone, if democracy is to be believed in for its part; but then actually thinking and making something beautiful must be done, if democracy is to be realized.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Doing books online
I had a cool idea yesterday [yesteryear] but now I'm not quite able to recall how it went, I think because it was more to do with the form of how to arrange all the other ideas than being exactly a new idea itself. The seduction of ideas like this is that they tend to look much better in imagination than they ever are likely to in reality, for all the hard work it will take to bring them there, conveniently left out in thought. But more or less it was a better website or online journal where the various stages of the school and concepts relating to it--the work-study network, the student work pages, soccer community groups, theoretical balderdash like this--were neatly filed away, while on the home screen great images of the people and places really engaged in the school were appearing and disappearing as you scrolled over the different things.
What is maybe salvageable from all this is just the importance of presentation when it comes to real things--blocks of text won't bring the people in--and the curiosity as to how it all does fit together. Even what all of it is, if you were to make a list. Who knows? To even begin to make those divisions implies a sense of the overall form. So much editing that would have to happen, just to extract the useful ideas from the babble of morning writings, or again leaving the manuscript in the form just as it is, and starting fresh from a totally different perspective--that of the marketer, the organizer, rather than the theorist. Like what Faith was saying, starting with workshops--summer classes like they have here at St. John's--or to the scale of Professor Olsen's rolling out a little online university incorporating all kinds of media as well as the standard discussion board style. Could that be at least a part of the new school? No one would take it seriously if they knew anything about the internet and we didn't.
For now is the great chance to read without much responsibility, but only responsible to read, where later it will be a chance pastime only; and there is some stress in knowing this, and rushing after knowing what it is these others knew in what they wrote. Dreaming again of huge correspondences, like libraries in structure, for online texts hyperlinked throughout to sources, allusions, posterior quotes and revisions of the facts. And yet also not sure this would be so helpful, whether there might not be something to be said for the hermetic approach to knowledge, at least metaphorically, as something that only takes on full powers in its sphere and privily, recondite not out of jealousy but of necessity for it to be what it is, not getting chewed over by too many mouths who need other sorts of knowledge anyhow, but proper for those only who would live on the words. If everyone can pronounce the words, still literacy is in moving among the meanings--no measure of literacy like this exists, but the conversation in person, a poor one for mass generalizations; but perhaps there is an analogy to centuries of conversations between people--a movement of cultural exchange on such a scale we could hardly follow it happening to judge. Still, on this theme of the life of the mind, there has to be some greater resources available online to explore, all rare texts and forgotten thinkers are again made accessible, so to bring some order to it, some culling and cultivation, could revive what is dynamic in the program, its return to classics for the purposes of forming human potential. Just to avoid getting complacent, when there is always so much more we could be doing here.
What is maybe salvageable from all this is just the importance of presentation when it comes to real things--blocks of text won't bring the people in--and the curiosity as to how it all does fit together. Even what all of it is, if you were to make a list. Who knows? To even begin to make those divisions implies a sense of the overall form. So much editing that would have to happen, just to extract the useful ideas from the babble of morning writings, or again leaving the manuscript in the form just as it is, and starting fresh from a totally different perspective--that of the marketer, the organizer, rather than the theorist. Like what Faith was saying, starting with workshops--summer classes like they have here at St. John's--or to the scale of Professor Olsen's rolling out a little online university incorporating all kinds of media as well as the standard discussion board style. Could that be at least a part of the new school? No one would take it seriously if they knew anything about the internet and we didn't.
For now is the great chance to read without much responsibility, but only responsible to read, where later it will be a chance pastime only; and there is some stress in knowing this, and rushing after knowing what it is these others knew in what they wrote. Dreaming again of huge correspondences, like libraries in structure, for online texts hyperlinked throughout to sources, allusions, posterior quotes and revisions of the facts. And yet also not sure this would be so helpful, whether there might not be something to be said for the hermetic approach to knowledge, at least metaphorically, as something that only takes on full powers in its sphere and privily, recondite not out of jealousy but of necessity for it to be what it is, not getting chewed over by too many mouths who need other sorts of knowledge anyhow, but proper for those only who would live on the words. If everyone can pronounce the words, still literacy is in moving among the meanings--no measure of literacy like this exists, but the conversation in person, a poor one for mass generalizations; but perhaps there is an analogy to centuries of conversations between people--a movement of cultural exchange on such a scale we could hardly follow it happening to judge. Still, on this theme of the life of the mind, there has to be some greater resources available online to explore, all rare texts and forgotten thinkers are again made accessible, so to bring some order to it, some culling and cultivation, could revive what is dynamic in the program, its return to classics for the purposes of forming human potential. Just to avoid getting complacent, when there is always so much more we could be doing here.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Bird signs
What is the significance in the flight of a bird? Is it hungry, or fleeing danger, or going to sing? Somehow this movement in relation to a human audience takes on a more signal meaning, responds to a direct call for some indication of the gods' pleasure. It is a motif throughout the Greeks and in the fabulists (Lucretius, Calvino, Pullman, Crowley...) it gets reimagined for an athiest-materialist perspective.
Think of Iphigenia: the case where the bird-sign itself causes the wrath of the goddess, these innocents being killed for the memos of the father. This is merely one kind of sacrifice, though; practically every meal is preceded by another, and indeed everything we eat is alive until we come along with our belly. It just seems curious that of all the things we might investigate, the nature of signs and sacrifice, portents in the stars and the flight of birds have fallen under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, dismissed as superstition or crank studies. Whereas the ways in which we control and direct nature are the acceptable sciences, and look where this has got us. It has so degenerated the health of the world that we cannot help but notice what it is telling us--warning signs, melting ice, desertification.
So much for what not to do, that seems clear enough, and God speaks what we ought to do--when we have access to the good, the just, the right thing. Otherwise it all is so much Socratic perplexity, wonder without action. But along with this, there is the question of what to do with the wisdom revealed by God--there, in that word, is the western answer, it seems to me: to reveal, to publish it, sing praises, put infidels to the sword, and raise astonishing churches. On the other hand, with a sense of restraint, a caste culture, comes a more restricted approach to knowledge, mystery cults, allegorical interpretations by an elite of scribes, hermeticism--some things that can't even be written down, and must be transmitted from master to disciple, or still more, the transcendent experience, which cannot be communicated at all but direct from the God.
And there seems to be some truth to this way of going about things, too--and as Mr Grenke says, even with the most open course of study imaginable, even here a de facto hermeticism upholds in that you can hear some ideas and yet it is as if you never heard them, they just so do not fit with what you are prepared to understand--so that it is not the knowledge that is closed, somehow it is you. This in the context of Plato's statement, in the Meno or somewhere, about all truth having some resemblance as to its origin, so that by the illuminating apprehension of one truth, you are led or can trace that to all the rest. But still, it must be demanded over and over--where do you find that way of becoming open to it? Can you only rely, with Kierkegaard, on the God for this moment, or can you induce some beneficial perplexity, starting a chain of questioning whose links at last begin to aspire to at least one bona fide truth?
Think of Iphigenia: the case where the bird-sign itself causes the wrath of the goddess, these innocents being killed for the memos of the father. This is merely one kind of sacrifice, though; practically every meal is preceded by another, and indeed everything we eat is alive until we come along with our belly. It just seems curious that of all the things we might investigate, the nature of signs and sacrifice, portents in the stars and the flight of birds have fallen under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, dismissed as superstition or crank studies. Whereas the ways in which we control and direct nature are the acceptable sciences, and look where this has got us. It has so degenerated the health of the world that we cannot help but notice what it is telling us--warning signs, melting ice, desertification.
So much for what not to do, that seems clear enough, and God speaks what we ought to do--when we have access to the good, the just, the right thing. Otherwise it all is so much Socratic perplexity, wonder without action. But along with this, there is the question of what to do with the wisdom revealed by God--there, in that word, is the western answer, it seems to me: to reveal, to publish it, sing praises, put infidels to the sword, and raise astonishing churches. On the other hand, with a sense of restraint, a caste culture, comes a more restricted approach to knowledge, mystery cults, allegorical interpretations by an elite of scribes, hermeticism--some things that can't even be written down, and must be transmitted from master to disciple, or still more, the transcendent experience, which cannot be communicated at all but direct from the God.
And there seems to be some truth to this way of going about things, too--and as Mr Grenke says, even with the most open course of study imaginable, even here a de facto hermeticism upholds in that you can hear some ideas and yet it is as if you never heard them, they just so do not fit with what you are prepared to understand--so that it is not the knowledge that is closed, somehow it is you. This in the context of Plato's statement, in the Meno or somewhere, about all truth having some resemblance as to its origin, so that by the illuminating apprehension of one truth, you are led or can trace that to all the rest. But still, it must be demanded over and over--where do you find that way of becoming open to it? Can you only rely, with Kierkegaard, on the God for this moment, or can you induce some beneficial perplexity, starting a chain of questioning whose links at last begin to aspire to at least one bona fide truth?
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