perceptions versus opinions

Imagine a reality in which four burners have four peppers....

From Clifford Geertz's "In Search of North Africa" published in the New York Review of Books 16, no 7 (April 1971)


Physicists, novelists, logicians and art historians have recognized for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of images of it that we ourselves have fashioned.  In the social sciences this is just now coming to be understood, and then only imperfectly.  The contribution of the investigator not only to the description and analysis of an object of study but to its very creation still tends to be obscured by the sort of mentality which regards the Human Relations Area Files, the Gallup Poll, and the US Census as repositories of recorded truths waiting merely to be discovered.  In the arts, the unimplicated observer has been reduced to a minor convention; in the sciences to an unreachable limiting case.  But in most sociology, anthropology, and political science he lives on, masquerading as a real person, performing a possible act.

Part of the reason for this failure, on the part of investigators otherwise only too self-conscious, to reflect on the way in which they first construct the objects they then inspect is that the issue has generally confused with the not unimportant but rather less profound one of bias.  Concealing private prejudices in public language is certainly an affliction of social scientific research; for some people, that, in fact, is its vocation.

But beyond the tired debates about "value neutrality" and the pious unmasking of other people's parti pris is the more disturbing question which the unreliable narrator raised for fiction, the complementarity principle for physics, and Rashomon for common sense:  if what we see is to a considerable degree a reflex of the devices we use to render it visible, how do we choose among devices?  Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird are twelve too many for someone who still believes that facts are born not made, and that differences of perception reduce to differences of opinion.

Marx reminder

Another idea to save for a particular purpose later.

Yesterday I heard a story on the NPR program "All Things Considered" titled How To Win Doctors And Influence Prescriptions.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130730104 he point of view on the story was from Pharmaceutical representatives who had left the industry; they shared the pratice of asking doctors to speak about treatments using their name brand drugs, the fees they paid them, and the return on their investments.  They noted the common practice of tracking prescription practices to monitor their returns.  The doctors felt that they were acting as educators and were not aware of any changes in their prescription practices.

I connected this idea to a bit McDermott wrote about Marx.  I'm not very familar with Marx, but it was suggested that like Dewey, he felt that "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being (institutional involvement) that determines their consciousness."

Aggressively self-conscious

This week was a challenging one for me in many respects, I had a lot on my mind about future pursuits in higher education, but more relevantly I felt very detached from my students in the classroom.  As the week started, I found my attitude was bitter and apathetic, I felt I was leading students through bland and tired lessons, that they were not invested in them (nor was I), and that I didn’t really care.   Behavior “management” became quite an issue.  By Wednesday I felt I hit the bottom, with the most “challenging” students challenging my poor teaching attitude the most.  It was a bit of a call to wake up.

I think a number of factors played into these experiences, some of them were beyond my control, but certainly approaching the week with an over confident opinion about how I teach after six years fed into a detached teaching experience, which experience has shown me I should have seen coming.  Then I read in McDermott’s Essay The Gamble For Experience, which summarizes Dewey’s educational philosophy, that the human organism is “Aggressively self-conscious” (p.415) He is referring to the way in which human beings transact with nature, being aware of space and the qualities of this transaction, and that is essentially what Maxine Green calls being “wide-awake.” 

This made me think of Dewey’s view from Art as Experience that experiences, when we are awake to them, are aesthetic events.  To live an aesthetic life, one full of qualities (quality) is to begin with being aggressively self conscious.  The unaesthetic stems from detachment; which creeps up on educators (and students) from many angles.  The trick is waking up from the detachment, and though it isn’t pleasant, it may come from bottoming out.   

relations in a relational world

We all "experience".   But the beginning of a fuller reflective experience often comes through a transacted relationship.

My model for this is friendship.  And the picture is of my best friend.   A quality of transacted experience that we've managed, through thick and through thin and much "transformation" of various kinds, to sustain for 40 years this come this Saturday.

This picture was taken at Northeast Harbor, Maine where I met Kurt on about mile 12 of his successful marathon run last Sunday.  The course went by the beautiful Asticou Azelea gardens and Grace waited there while I met Kurt across the street.  It was a very special morning when many strands of things we all love came together in time and place.  

Other pictures of the gardens and where we were staying:

Sunday, October 17: Northeast Harbor, Maine

So I think I've learned a lot about making intimate connections through shared experiences and feel I'm doing good if I can facilitate that kind of shared experience transaction more widely with others.

I'm happy that you and Kurt have been into each others blogs....and Kurt today expressed a desire that perhaps the three of us and perhaps others might get together down your way for some version of the much discussed "metaphysical club".     From the two blogs it's fairly clear we would have a lot to share and to debate as well.

A famous song about RE-lations is by Charles ives.  You have to listen for the the mention of Charlie's "relations" in Texas in this song:

Charles Ives on "relations"

I have performed this a few times....not as well as this recording however.

In a human life, limited and somewhat ephemeral, to share and connect is the greatest luxury gift we can give ourselves.   It's not exactly free and has it does have costs and tolls.  But they are not necessarily expressed in cash....

some relational thoughts

magical view on the climb up Mt. Cadillac

You might want to take a look at what Kurt and I have written in his blog recently.   I themes there it bear "relation" or "connections" to themes you brought up in your McDermott posting.

http://www.runninganddoing.org

Such thoughts could also be applied to the “performance” of rock climbing I think.  I'm simply trying to provoke thinking now about the quality of certain experiences and then how we understand them—give them voice, word, picture—and then use the aesthetic dimensions of this work/play in acts of communication (which are common the teaching and any situation of facilitation or leadership).

I took along McDermott.....  but didn’t get to post or comment in more depth on your posting to our blog.  But hopefully given what I wrote above?   And what I wrote to Kurt this morning (if you take a look) will bear some relation to what we’re doing and something that McDermott fully appreciates in both James and Dewey.

My interest is in more fully examining specific, concrete instances of “experiences had” and how they in-form larger spheres of experience in which we want to exercise a certain qualities of experience perhaps best expressed as in-fluence”.


Allan

reminders from "A Relational World"

Recently I read the essay A Relational World by John McDermott where he discusses the implications on global culture derived from the work of John Dewey and William James.   The essay reminded me of the nudge Barry Lopez gave me from his essay Landscape and Narrative.  Lopez writes “One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it – like that between the sparrow and the twig.” This thought nudged me to Wittgenstein, who through a series of passages in Philosophical Investigations deconstructs the classic idea of an essence, (Plato’s chair in the sky) and replaces it with a family of relations.   McDermott cites James, who in 1909 (before Wittgenstein) wrote “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything.  The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.  Something always escapes.  ‘ever not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness.”  McDermott summarizes James by saying “things, events hang together by relations, in a network which in the long run is empirically vague, no matter what proximate clarity we may attain.  Nothing can be fully understood by itself, for every experience we have reaches, potentially, every other perceivable aspect of reality.”

Later, speaking of Dewey, McDermott writes “Dewey also knew that the enemies of such growth (liberated individuals’ growth) were not simply errant or bad persons but more often the very way in which we construct our social, political, and educational institutions.” Citing Dewey he writes “To fill our heads like a scrap book, with this and that item as a done-for thing, is not to think… To consider the bearing of occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think.”

I think Dewey is implying that our institutions, such as public education, are rooted in Plato’s “Chair in the sky,” not as such relational processes that James, Wittgenstein, and Lopez speak of.  Witness the dominant approach to curricula of public education where working through a program towards standardized goals (such as a reading program) is considered foundational.   In such programs the anomaly, the vague student, are considered “statistically irrelevant.”  But, at the risk of stating an absolute, those students will always appear in any programmed form of learning.  It would be an anomaly if any program actually worked for every student.  Programming teaching experiences seems to me, to remove teachers from the lived moments with their students, they are not acting in the performative actual moment, but rather they are acting out someone else's theoretical approach.

every picture tells a story

Every picture tells a story.   And pictures may serve as re-minders if we care to hear and listen to their story.

Joel and Laken, September 25, 2010

Pond Broom River, Sandwich, NH

What's most interesting to me is not "fixing" a moment with an image.  But rather the story of a picture is in the reading of it.   Reading the picture above for me is about grasping a quality of transaction that seems worth endless exploration and inquiry.   The picture is a re-minder of something that's significant and (for me) has broader implications than the two humans we know.    So, how we read is very much the issue.   How we learn to see.  

Thoreau wrote that it is not enough to see.  The object is to become a seer.   And I guess that means seeing beyond the image.   The image is a bit of a "stand-for" something that both is and isn't greater than what we see above.   

assembling reminders

If philosophy is assembling reminders for a particular purpose?   Then many things may re-mind us in our investigations.

One thing is clear after reflection....that reflections come to us in many ways.  













To respect the vague, ruffled surface of the a pond is to reflect on the reality of a particular

A particular day.  A day with a blue sky after the leaves had begun to fall.

  

Welcome

Just getting things started here.  I would like to use this blog to voice some ideas and observations relating to education and philosophy and to discuss them with Allan.  I'm assuming the threads in the blog could be starting points for more formal writing in the graduate programs at PSU, but we'll see how it works out.  Later it may serve as a bit of a journal of my experiences as a music educator in the public schools.  I'll be working on the design a bit over the next few days.