Education and Spring on my mind...

Of course, no one with enough annoyance at her own lack of eloquent language could write anything worth reading after reading Ian’s blog. Yet, my mind is drifting to summer projects and spring cleaning that has been pushed back until my 20 pg. paper is completed, and if I don’t write this blog now, then I may never do it.

This class has been (oh crap I’m getting sentimental. Excuse any Pregnancy-hormone influenced emotions) the best class I’ve taken in college. I had no idea that such a small group of people with the right teacher and right texts could lead me to think about things I usually push aside. I’m usually taking classes about how to trick students into being interested in the texts that I’m supposedly going to force down their throats. But that’s a gripe I have against the depressive perspectives people take against students. Yet it fits, and the reason it fits is because I was always the text book answer student who became dazed and confused when presented with an assignment that combined educational information and creativity. How could they expect such a thing out of me? When given the chance to be creative at home (my mom is a craft junky) I was able to make anything available to me from small sculptures to a stained glass replica of the Beauty and the Beast rose… but together I was stumped. And this class commanded it from me again, to think not just to reiterate what was already said. It was fun and at first really scary for me. But through this experience, I have grown as a future teacher. This class has taught me to question what I took for the right answer in education and to stop just trying to get through classes or maybe even life without growing as my own person. My husband is a questioner, and sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but he doesn’t take for granted social rules of conduct, but instead asks why I feel the need to do something until it comes down to the fact that I am and always have been a people pleaser. I will do things just because of the fear that if I don’t please people then- well of course the world will come crashing down around me. I still see value in community, and yes, I still struggle with my comfort level being thrown out the window when I question things like grades, High school Diplomas, mandatory schooling, and Maine Learning Results. But at least I know that I’m taking the time now to question those things, and if I end up settling for how the school system works today, then it won’t be for a lack of thinking about it.

My reading of Pragmatist Philosophy has influenced the way I look at teaching in many ways. I have more room to grow in that part of my life than I realized. I look at my daughter and I can see the start of her stubborn personality shining through in everything she does, and I worry that without the love for growing and the love for intellectual pursuits, her stubbornness will prevent her from changing and questioning. But with the knowledge of how that has affected my life and my career, I hope to teach her as well as my students in a way that is always open to new ideas and new loves.

So I didn’t say Pragmatism and Poetry enough in this little reflection, but it’s there. William Stafford says poetry is “anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of attention.” And right now philosophies of education and lesson plans are my poetry.

Lepidoptera

Once again I feel as though I've come further but that nothing is any more than it was before. How to say– ? I just mean that I'm still rather lost, my head feels wet and green, the land is like the sea, I circle around the light, a windblown seed in the aural canal, displaced equilibrium.

A fragment from Chris Marker's Sans soleil that has stayed in my head:

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its inner lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

Some time ago, thinking of someone, I felt a sense of what it is to grow old– I felt that it is simply the accumulation of sensations. In my head I felt my past, pieces of my past, fragments of miscellaneous remembered sensations: a moment of looking at the wet green face of a mountain, dark descending, a purple dusk, speaking on a dirt path with a girl I knew, sitting on a levy at dusk looking at graffiti, the beds I’ve slept in, the classrooms in which I’ve whiled time away, music, and so on; I felt these in my head and limbs. And I had the thought that one’s lining (head, limbs, blood) slowly thickens and lengthens, that this is what it is. Trees bend, rains fall, and each time I feel more rain, more bend. One sees things more clearly but not by much. This is okay, this is what it is.

I don’t know about that philosophy and poetry thing. It makes me tired. I make up some laws, some halflaws, open my hand, hold it in front of me–the abstraction flutters out, I touch its wings, it falls slowly, pulled about by currents of air, to the ground. (I’m thinking of Nabokov, lepidopterist, bender of wings into words, namegiver.) The divide is impossible to name and easily transgressed.

Pragmatism. I like it but I haven’t read enough of it. And it isn’t the right word. Every movement is an expedient, provisional, experimental, and that's okay.

Gender. I bend in and out of genders. The divide is impossible to name and easily transgressed, especially in San Francisco.

I very much like Stevens. I don’t like Stein. I love Frost. I have to research Howe some more. And everyone should read Joyce, Nabokov, and Carson please.

Reading. I do that sometimes. I move through things or they move through me or we move together or something. Sometimes I look at things more closely and they come a little clearer. But there are divides everywhere that are impossible to transgress because I am me and nothing else. The desire to transgress them is what I have and it’s the best I’ve got. Desire which lifts the wings into the hermeneutic motion. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to grasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). That’s from Pale Fire.

Sometimes I really dislike saying things. I open my hands and they fly away from me. I don’t really remember what else we talked about. Maybe someone remind me and I'll write a little more later? Right now I’m pretty hungry. I want some bread, some freshbaked bread. A dark bread, maybe limpa.

We’ve had some really great discussions and I thank you all, especially, of course, Professor Case. Have good summers.

And it's spring. The tree out my window is starting to green. They called him Huizkol, that means Looks Good in Spring.

Read some Frost, Plato!

"We must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State."


Plato suggests that by allowing poetry into the state, emotions would be the new rulers of the state, or as he puts it, "pleasure and pain" However, pragmatists like Pierce look at poetry as a vehicle of thought, not an unecessary outpouring of emotion. Plato's state would not come completely unhinged were he to allow poets in, because if we are looking at poetry as a vehicle of thought, then it is simply another way at getting at universal truths, and maxims to live by, which is what I thought Plato was all about :)

Go on Now Get! (Leah)

What motivates a person to break a law? The driving force behind a great deal of human action is emotion. James took this into account when he wrote habit, and encouraged to use emotions to create action. Poets take this into account, they play with our emotions. They create meaning with emotions.

As those who analyze literature we pick apart author’s intent. We try to see what they are telling us, what they want us to do with the information they give us. This means that we assume that author wants us to do something with what they give us.

In this was poets are creators, makers of action, not imitators as Plato says.

Besides, it’s a little irrelevant, you can’t kick out the people you don’t want. Poets give a way to release emotion; to acknowledge emotion and give it a function. Poets allow us to deal with what we normally wouldn’t be able to. That includes those you don’t want in your society.

Plato, Nietzsche, Potsherds...(Kevin)

It might be best to state from the outset that I do not think Plato was wrong in banishing poets from his republic. My grounds for making such an astounding claim are founded on my belief that I do not think any reasonable poet would want anything to do with a society that failed to recognize the importance of her discipline. Moreover, I think Plato’s fault lie not in the fact that he chose to banish poets from the civic sphere of societal regulation, but in his conclusion that poets are invidious because they are unfit to assume positions in government. We Pragmatists view the application of such all-nothing value judgments to participants of certain categories or projects of existence as symptomatic of an antiquated tradition in Western Metaphysics that holds truth to be grounded in an absolute foundation from which are derived certain ideals as “ “timeless virtues,” and “the right way.” Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have sought to establish such a right way. Nietzsche claimed to go “beyond good and evil,” but all he actually did was turn Plato on his head by asserting that it is the poets who should be the kings of society and the philosophers who should be banished. He was just as rational as Plato in assuming that certain forms of conduct and thought are always better than others; and by asserting that the creator trumps the thinker, he assumes a foundation upon which such a conjecture can be based. In the end, he remains as much an heir to Plato as all of the other philosophers whom Alfred North Whitehead claimed had merely written footnotes to the broad-headed Athenian. I do not think it is until the twentieth century that we have succeeded in jumping over the long shadow Plato cast.
A bold assertion no doubt. To begin backing it up, I would like refer first to some points made in a brilliant essay by Soren Kierkegaard entitled “Of the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” In the essay, Kierkegaard argues that it is inappropriate to apply the categories of a genius to those of a religious prophet, as the former is judged on criteria of cleverness, while the latter defies aesthetic criticism altogether. No one is persuaded of the actuality of a religious truth by evaluating it on its aesthetic merits. And if they are, one has to wonder if it is truly appropriate to call the truth religious in this case, just because it deals with the teachings presented in a the form of a sacred text. It seems to me possible that a person might believe in the religious truth of a poem, as she might the aesthetic truth of a sacred text. This is precisely what William James was getting at in “The Will to Believe,” when he asserted that believing in the Mahdi was not a live-option to most of the audience members attending his lecture in that Cambridge lecture hall. Perhaps the teachings of the Mahdi did appeal to some of his audience members more than those of Christianity on an aesthetic level, but it is very unlikely that the poetry of the Koran could move one of them in the same way that a passage from one of the Gospels could on the transcendent level. Not because the latter is intrinsically truer it terms of its authenticity from divine authority; rather, because the habits and society of a typical 19th century New Englander instilled in him sensibilities that prepared him for transcendental truth through Christ rather than the Mahdi. One cannot compare St. Paul to Shakespeare because the writings of Shakespeare belong to the aesthetic sphere of existence and those of St. Paul to the transcendental sphere. A person may say she does not care for Macbeth because it lacks pathos in comparison with Hamlet, but she cannot say she objects to the teachings of St. Paul because they are not as witty as those of John the Baptist. What we are dealing with in these cases is the word of God, not the wisdom of poets. One can choose to accept or deny the teaching in either case, but not for the same reasons. Kierkegaard argues that we commit a great injustice whenever we apply the criteria of one category of existence to judge the work of another. I agree with him, and I think this is where both Nietzsche and Plato went too far. I think Plato was right to say that poets should not be politicians; not because poets are bad influences on the citizens of a society, but because poets are not trained in the laws and customs of societal regulation. I think Nietzsche was right when he said that it is through poetry, adventure, and creation that we will find our personal truths, not philosophy; not because philosophy is useless, but because pre-conceived systems of thought fail to take into account the unique needs and desires of every individual and the irreducible richness of every moment of her lived experience. So while I may want my friends to be Nietzcheans, I want my civic leaders to be Platonists.
Richard Rorty draws this distinction between public and private philosophies in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Without having read the book, I still find the distinction useful, as I feel it is not until we reach Rorty that we truly break with the whole tradition of the “metaphysics of presence,” not because Rorty presents the best critique, but because he goes beyond criticism by showing his readers how, pragmatically, are ideas may be used as instruments for achieving the goals of our specific, temporal and finite projects. In this respect, we do not shelf Platonism, we merely recognize Plato’s ideas and categories as another instrument in our intellectual toolbox that maybe utilized when a certain problem presents itself to be solved through irony, recollection, allegories, or the theories of cosmology. What does get shelved from Plato for good is the notion that the reason why we are successful in achieving our projects--or campaigns as Rorty liked to refer to them—results from our operational theories and truths corresponding to eternal archetypes. Pragmatists agree with Karl Popper’s claim that absolute truths result in authorities who interpret, dictate and guard their sacred powers. Truths only become corrupt or immoral in comparison with absolute values that are unconditionally just and good. Pragmatists think that much of the non-sensical violence and arbitrary scorn that exists in the world today might be diminished if people stopped looking to justify their truths through the value judgments prescribed by their absolute authorities, and acknowledged the validity of all truths as being just in so far as they provide each person with the tools to live a life rich with meaning, love, and happiness. That is why Pragmatists are in favor of secularization of religion and the separation of church and state. We feel applying divine law to the civic sphere is another instance of misapplying the categories of existence which can only result in the unhappy consequences of prejudice and violence. It is true, we Pragmatists betray ourselves; we do believe in one absolute truth--the right of every human to live a dignified life—but we do not think we need to appeal to any authority to justify its veracity.

I just want my poetry :-D Cassie

The basis of this section is that poetry influences people to act emotionally and when they are emotional then they aren’t making decisions rationally. It takes the idea that poetry is something we can use to willfully believe like Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction. And it certainly can’t be used to work through current ideas. And it certainly can’t be left to inspire emotion and thought. Poetry is meant to be enjoyed and of course it stirs emotion, but Plato argues that truth cannot be attained through emotion but only through rational processes. So this of course goes to the argument about what truth is and how we can attain it. My problem is why would we separate our emotions and our reasons? Aren’t emotions just more ways we seek meanings in our everyday lives? Are meanings truth? I understand for some people when it is extremely necessary, I think of many teens and- well many adults who need to learn how to separate their feelings with their decision making - but I would not ban poetry for those reasons. Even with poetry that inspires feelings that are negative, I think we can read it, feel the emotion, and then rationally talk or at the least think about it. This is a conversation that comes up with censorship in schools. Where as a manual on how to commit suicides should not be available to teens since it doesn’t just inspire suicidal thoughts, a poem about suicidal feelings or a suicide is okay to be used in a classroom- as long as reason accompanies the reading and people talk about the very human feelings expressed in the poem. Sometimes I just like to feel those emotions, but I really don’t think that hinders my ability to make decisions, but rather people started focusing on keeping their brains sharp done using brain teasers and such, reading poetry was also listed in those little magazine adds.

I can’t help but also add that the people I most admire in life for their grasp on life are the people who have a love of literature and who explore those human emotions on their way to pursuits of truth. The people who argue just on a rational basis annoy me- and those who argue on just an emotional basis irritate me as well.

Every human is an island

My argument is fairly old. I shall try to restate it quickly. I have for some time had a notion of the mind as working mostly (perhaps only) in synthesis. Kant wrote, I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination. This notion is at the root of one of my beliefs, of one of the few phrases that I have held on to: to be human is to be open to being a multitude. Among the many other things, this phrase means that the one moral path I always try to follow is that of empathy.

I read somewhere that Jonathan Swift once wrote that man is not a rational animal but an animal capable of reason. I agree. Law and the reason of mankind will never rule a human state because, as some of the pragmatists insist, pleasure and pain are the rulers of our kind and guide all human reason.

Fascism and monarchy may be conceived through empathy, but they have never been ruled with empathy. Constant world-embracing empathy is impossible, there are too many people, too many desires. Most people have not even a shred of empathy anyway. Most attempts at purification lead not to purity but to repression and blindness and condemnations and anger and strife. I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. One may strive for purity but must accept that purity is not something we are capable of and must admit one’s faults and work through them, not repress them. Catholicity, in the oldest sense of the word catholic, is what is needed. To be human is to be open to being a multitude. Wisdom is not purity. Wisdom is empathy, catholicity, the opening of one’s arms. Empathy means freedom, means that one may attempt to guide others if one wishes but ought not command.

A well-ordered human state is impossible. Human government is bound to failure. Government is only a multiplicity of human relationships and human relationships are always a sad sweet farce.

Poetry can multiply our vision, can give momentary stays against confusion, can make clearer our sight, can make us feel, can multiply us, can teach us how to embrace. This is the only way I wish to move through the farce.

Swift also wrote, I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

Old man I do not want a part in your republic.