Pedagogy and Art

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Hereandnow
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Hereandnow »

Dachshund:
To me, what Wordsworth is saying is that when we use the term "philosopher", it is taken for granted that we are referring to an adult, and we tend to assume, moreover, that the best philosophers are those "wise elders" among us, those venerable old souls who have - after dedicating a lifetime to quiet contemplation and reflection - perhaps managed to acquire at least some genuine insight into the true meaning of life. The great irony, however, is, as Wordsworth says in the lines I have quoted above, that the best philosophers are in fact children; it is they, and not adults, who are are the ones that possess a genius for true insight. Children have the ability to see the truth clearly because their vision has not yet been tainted and corrupted by age. As we grow older we progressively lose the pristine clarity of vision that we had when we were young children, we become increasingly blinded and unable to see clearly that which is most real. As adults, we are "In darkness lost" and " toiling all our lives" just to recapture hazy, fleeting glimpses of those ultimate truths which we could see so very vividly and effortlessly when we were infants.
When Wordsworth describes the child as "Thou best philosopher", he is, of course, speaking metaphorically...........
Does it not occur to you that to write so much is a burden to the reader?

So we are in English lit class? I do confess I like this. As to your ideas: I agree that W. is saying children are the best philosophers, though it is not metaphor, it is irony. As children cannot be philosophers they possess the only true wisdom. Their "Eye" is deaf and silent, for to speak is to bring corruption to innocence of the spirit. I speak of this to myself often, this irony of having the skill to speak and yet it is by this instrument of the understanding I am lost in the history, the culture, that which is not of God. Now, speaking of irony, there is no one that articulates this better than Kierkegaard, who holds the traditions and erudition of philosophers in far more contempt. You MUST read his Concept of Anxiety, for it contains in drastic articulation the clarity this stanza can only invoke. Wordsworth wrote this in 1800ish, 40 years prior to K. What W had in mind was the rationalism of his time as this was the age of reason, still, and Hegel had just retired his pen. Had W had a glimpse of what K would write, and Lessing's argument that inspired him, he would have had some basis to exclude at least one philosopher from his disdain. But again, I agree with this, though it is the philosopher that brings out the argument and turns the table of the cynic.
Infants and young children are I believe, master exponents of the phenomenological method as it was originally conceptualised by the founding father of the modern school/movement of philosophical phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, in his seminal work "Logical Investigations"
i am guessing you are going to bring up the phenomenological reduction, the epoche. I have commented elsewhere that this idea is very close to epiphany, that is, to reduce an object to its appearance, and remove from "sight" the presuppositions that crowd around it is to liberate the moment of apprehension. remember, to do this one is not examining, as he does in his tedious "Ideas" (long and tiring) the details of all that are attendant in the perception of an object, but one is aloof, or so I understand this from my reading of Anthony Steinboch's Phenomenology and Mysticism.
So, to continue. The phenomenologists (people like Husserl) were interested in the "shining forth" of things, and they made the presumption that the things that manifested themselves to you as most meaningful were the the most real things. And I think we can make a strong case that this is actually how our brains are "wired up", because our brains are wired to react to things that have meaning BEFORE they construct the perceptions that we think of as objects. The reason for this is because the meaning of things is more real (in some sense) but more IMPORTANT than the view of things as objects. To give an example, when you approach a cliff, you don't see "a cliff"; what you "see" is a "falling off place". It isn't that it's an object "cliff" to which you attribute the the meaning of the "falling off place" perception to, it's the "falling off place perception" that comes first, and the abstraction of the objective "cliff" - if it ever happens at all - comes much later; much later conceptually, because even babies and Dachshund dogs can detect cliffs, and much later historically.
Actually. I think you are closer to Levinas's totality and Infinity. He actually argues like this: There is a more primordial relation of the I to the "other" of the world. It is primitive and totalitarian, the drive to assimilate, to totalize all that lies before one. This also sounds a lot like Kant, on the rational side: all we see we conquer with our synthetic rationality, and spontaneously assimilate what is alien into what is the Same. At any rate, this stands against something that is also primordial, the Other (and the which is also Other). The Other is another person, a complete mystery to our gaze as we can never penetrate into that "dasein" if I may borrow a term, behind the appearance. Husserl speaks to this in his Cartesian Meditations, but for him it is more a bout that mystery Descartes leaves us with with the isolated cogito. Anyway the Other is the presence of God in the Other, Thou, as in Buber's I, Thou. Here is the heart of human sacredness. A very worthy read.
But Husserl would never say, as i have read, there is some kind of pre or protorational apprehension of a thing. Such a thing would clearly be an abstraction to him, for ideas are in the objects themselves, as he would put it. you cannot speak of objects seen through a kind of innocent eye as they are always already conceptualized; that is what apprehending a thing is. Without concepts intuitions are blind, without intuitions concepts are empty, Husserl would abide by this.
In "The Ode", Wordsworth, as you know, notes this phenomenon of the "shining forth" of reality and associates it with childhood. He recalls how as a child, every simple thing in the world appeared to be invested with an intense "dream-like vividness and splendour"; how "The earth and every sight" seemed "Apparelled in celestial light. There are, I think, good reasons for Wordsworth having observed the sense of wonder children manifest in their perception of ordinary, day-to-day commonplace objects; in the simple, mundane things of the world that hold no special significance for adults. One is that your brain is not so much of an inhibitry structure when you are a child before it is fully developed, so their are neurological reasons for noting it; but their are also reasons that stem from the level of lived experience. You can tell when you are around children that they're open to the things of the world in a way that adults aren't. Children are literally wide-eyed with wonder, and adults like being around children for that reason. Wordthsworth celebrates the joy that adults experience just by being having children around them in the following lines from Stanzas III and IV of "the Ode"...
I agree with most of this, and defend the notion that we have within us the original joy of childhood. The trouble is that W. does not give a full analysis of how it is we are as we are. Kierkegaard gives this extraordinary detail in his examination of original sin. He calls this hereditary sin and I cannot tell in a paragraph what labors at for many pages. But for our purpose here, know that redemption is not found in the myths about Christ's exclusive divinity, but in the divinity of one person's subjectivity. The extraordinary things W place in the child's vision of the world are ours, and it is ours to reclaim what has been lost in the "heritage" of what he calls quantitative sin: attachments to the world. to achieve the heights the soul can reach, one must take a qualitative leap out of the machinery of past into future (something Heidegger is going to really play up in a hundred years) into the eternal present.

Eternal Present? I think this is exactly what a child lives in, what the Ode is all about.
I think the question of whether adults are all irretrievably "fallen"; that is the question of whether or not experience, i.e; the process of growing up progressively "corrupts the spirit" in such a manner that by the time we are fully matured adults we are "afflicted" with an irreversible, indelible and permanent spiritual blindness is extremely important, and never more so than today where the dominant worldview in the West is scientism. Our Western scientific worldview assumes that what is most real is something that is dead, like a stone - dead, like dirt; that at its deepest level reality is something that is essentially like a lump of physical matter, that it is something "heartless" and "soulless", something objective and external; something "amoral" ; something that has no shred of inherent value or meaning or purpose in itself
Now that sounds like Husserl's European Crisis, though i am rusty on this. I agree with this, the idea that while science is great at solving problems, it is lousy at solving the problem of what it is to be human. As so many have said this: science objectifies and we are not objects. Period. What are we? We are blind to this. See Karl Jasper's Philosophy of Existence. His Encompassing is an attempt to name the "sense of Being" that defies the variosu modes of apprehending the world. Interesting.
The one thing I love about literature is that it can evoke the mystery and majesty of being human so as to actually touch upon what has been lost or is elusive.

I'm out of time for now.
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Burning ghost
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Burning ghost »

Fooloso4 wrote: September 17th, 2018, 6:00 pm Modern Western harmony and scales is only one of many. Most westerners do not immediately hear the traditional music of India or China, for example, as beautiful or harmonious. They may in fact find it quite annoying. Because our ears have been trained to hear equal temperament tuning other temperaments, and this means all music before the keyboard, will sound out of tune.
Not quite sure you follow? Harmony and scales are not created they are mathematically valid. Indian, Chinese or any other form of music is based on sounding in tune not out of tune - although some styles do play around with this (Jazz being the most obvious.) Like with paintings there are mathematical values of geometry that make a composition work, but they don’t need to be rigidly adhered to - in fact a little imbalance can make something work better.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Hereandnow »

Dachshund
Earth fill her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate, Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.



Wordsworth was a Christian; he believed that when we are born we are "thrown" down into the world ( i.e. down onto the Earth) from the "imperial palace" of Heaven.Thus, man's real mother is Heaven, and so, as Wordsworth puts it (above) the Earthly world is merely his foster nurse. It seems that as his foster carer, the Earth believes that the best thing she can do for her new foster child to "do all she can " to make him forget all about the exquisite dream-like splendour of Heaven and learn how to live in his new and far humbler home, the material world. In doing this, Wordsworth accepts that "The homely Nurse" is demonstrating a sincerely caring maternal instinct ( "something of a Mother's mind") and that what she is trying to achieve is "no unworthy aim"
.

And this is where poetry shows its limitations, foundering on the banks of metaphor it cannot proceed to elucidate. "Mother"and "nurse"--are these appropriate for the understanding? A metaphor carries meaning from one term to another to "borrow" meaning in order to bring out a quality that is descriptively effective, but metaphors have the limitation of being able to do no more that what the word carries, and can, and this is important, distort meaning, corrupt interpretation in leading criticism into obscure references. It is literary fun, but wanders from the mark, which is to find out what it means to be a person. Philosophy is our only option to continue seriously. Again, poetry can take one to the brink, the "bank and shoal of time" but it is, like W's nature herself, what binds us here. True analysis is the only way to bring human thought to its consummation, the destruction of interpretative systems, which W sought but could only sentimentalize (and ironically, again, this sentimentality IS the prize. In art, in music and poetry, there is "intimated" what cannot be "totalized" to borrow from Levinas, for the shared language that is used to understand the world is a finite construction that brings the world Down. Kierkegaard thought this our collective sin.


While we are young, our memories of Heaven are still quite fresh and so all of the things we see on Earth are still vividly bathed in the dream-like splendour and glory of Heaven's divine light. But our foster nurse knows that we will not be able to survive in the harsher material realm of the world if we continue to remain awe-struck and bedazzled by a sense of intense wonder ( however blissful it may be) in everything that we see on Earth. She knows that sometimes one has to be "cruel to be kind" and this is why in the process of growing up the splendid brilliance of our childhood vision is progressively dimmed and the doors of our perception narrowed in order that we not be "blinded by seeing too much of Heaven's celestial light" and rendered vulnerable, paralysed like rabbits caught in the glare of an oncoming car's head-lights.
This is an important matter. But one must take a term like "celestial light" seriously, and this is all but impossible in this culture as it is clouded by tradition, by liturgical excess, by, simply put, a LOT of bad thinking, ill conceived scripture based sh**. One must stop living a story, put the bible, the text, and the poem aside and first hand examine the world allowing literary and philosophical education to break down rigid and dogmatic thought that implicitly dominates one's every iota of consciousness. This is freedom, this is redemption.
There is only one true religion, and that is philosophy.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Fooloso4 »

BG:
Not quite sure you follow? Harmony and scales are not created they are mathematically valid. Indian, Chinese or any other form of music is based on sounding in tune not out of tune - although some styles do play around with this (Jazz being the most obvious.)
Let’s begin with the harmonic series which is the basis of just intonation. A keyboard tuned to just intonation will sound out of tune. The keyboard compromises or tempers the pure intervals of just intonation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATjHiOuc70

From the Wiki article on the harmonic series:
If the harmonics are octave displaced and compressed into the span of one octave, some of them are approximated by the notes of what the West has adopted as the chromatic scale based on the fundamental tone. The Western chromatic scale has been modified into twelve equal semitones, which is slightly out of tune with many of the harmonics, especially the 7th, 11th, and 13th harmonics.
From the Wiki article on musical temperament:
In musical tuning, a temperament is a tuning system that slightly compromises the pure intervals of just intonation to meet other requirements. Most modern Western musical instruments are tuned in the equal temperament system. "Tempering is the process of altering the size of an interval by making it narrower or wider than pure. A temperament is any plan that describes the adjustments to the sizes of some or all of the twelve fifth intervals in the circle of fifths so that they accommodate pure octaves and produce certain sizes of major thirds."
From the article on microtonal music:
Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones—intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of twelve equal intervals per octave. In other words, a microtone may be thought of as a note that falls between the keys of a piano tuned in equal temperament.
From the article on scales:
Through the introduction of blue notes, jazz and blues employ scale intervals smaller than a semitone. The blue note is an interval that is technically neither major nor minor but "in the middle", giving it a characteristic flavour. A regular piano cannot play blue notes, but with electric guitar, saxophone, trombone and trumpet, performers can "bend" notes a fraction of a tone sharp or flat to create blue notes For instance, in the key of E, the blue note would be either a note between G and G♯ or a note moving between both. In blues, a pentatonic scale is often used. In jazz many different modes and scales are used, often within the same piece of music. Chromatic scales are common, especially in modern jazz.

Many other musical traditions use scales that include other intervals. These scales originate within the derivation of the harmonic series. Musical intervals are complementary values of the harmonic overtones series.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

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Fool -

I think there is a misunderstanding here. My point was only that harmonics and scales are objective and reliably recognised by anyone with half an ear easily enough.

If someone trains their ear they don’t learn how to play out of tune and create disharmony.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

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Burning ghost wrote: September 18th, 2018, 10:43 am Fool -

I think there is a misunderstanding here. My point was only that harmonics and scales are objective and reliably recognised by anyone with half an ear easily enough.

If someone trains their ear they don’t learn how to play out of tune and create disharmony.
Scales are interesting since they might well be objectively agreed, but are in no way absolute.

It is a matter of convention that the pitch of middle C is where it is and not 0.34 tones sharper or flatter.
The question as to whether value of one tone from one note to another relates to a biological factor is a mute point.
And it is bizarre that the normal scale that we all seem to love in the west is TT sT TTT sT, rather then perfectly linear.

So in objective terms the format of the western system of music is a non absolute scale that is objectively agreed upon and culturally subjective.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Burning ghost »

Did I say that? No. Physics is physics. Scales are arbitrary decided upon they follow strict physical structures. I was merely making a comparison of painting to music to drive home a point.

None of this is actually do much to address the OP and questions of how to “teach” art.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Fooloso4 »

All of this may seem to be off topic, but it is actually a good illustration of pedagogy and art. Part of the learning process is unlearning certain assumptions and retraining of the ear in order to hear differently.

Listen to the comparison between just intonation and equal temperament. A good set of headphones will help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqa2Hbb_eIs

Listen to the compositions based on scales that are not Western 12 tone scales:

https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find- ... le-systems

If someone trains their ear they don’t learn how to play out of tune and create disharmony.

Anyone who learned to tune a guitar before digital tuners is familiar with the problem: tune the open strings and certain chords will sound out of tune, tune to the chord and the open strings and other chords will be out of tune. The electronic tuner is compensated to match the equal temperament of the layout of the frets, so that all chords will sound reasonably well in tune although they are not precisely in tune.

Because the instrument does not have frets an upright bass players must compensate, that is, play slightly out of tune in order to play in tune with a piano since the piano uses equal temperament rather than just intonation.

Disharmony has no exact definition. The rules of Western harmony are not invariant and are only one of many sets of rules. Certain notes played together will sound dissonant or in tension, but that may well be part of the harmonic structure of the piece.
Western harmonic structure is incommensurate with an Indian raga, for example, which is melodic or horizontal rather that the stacked or vertical notes of a chord.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

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Burning ghost wrote: September 18th, 2018, 12:15 pm Did I say that? No.
I was not being combative.
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by ThomasHobbes »

Burning ghost wrote: September 18th, 2018, 12:15 pm
None of this is actually do much to address the OP and questions of how to “teach” art.
I teach sculpture..

What do you want to know?
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Dachshund »

Hereandnow wrote: September 18th, 2018, 8:06 am


And this is where poetry shows its limitations, foundering on the banks of metaphor it cannot proceed to elucidate...A metaphor carries meaning from one term to another to "borrow" meaning in order to bring out a quality that is descriptively effective, but metaphors have the limitation of being able to do no more that what the word carries, and can, and this is important, distort meaning, corrupt interpretation in leading criticism into obscure references. It is literary fun, but wanders from the mark, which is to find out what it means to be a person. Philosophy is our only option to continue seriously. Again, poetry can take one to the brink, the "bank and shoal of time" but it is, like W's nature herself, what binds us here. True analysis is the only way to bring human thought to its consummation, the destruction of interpretative systems, which W sought but could only sentimentalize (and ironically, again, this sentimentality IS the prize. In art, in music and poetry, there is "intimated" what cannot be "totalized" to borrow from Levinas, for the shared language that is used to understand the world is a finite construction that brings the world Down. Kierkegaard thought this our collective sin.


I disagree, HAN. For me philosophy is not so much concerned with "what it means to be a person" but more importantly, what it means to "live the good life". This is one of the oldest philosophical questions, and it has been posed in different ways - "How should one live" ? "What does it mean to live well" ? - but these are really just the same question. After all everybody wants to live well and no one wants to live "the bad life".

So what does the phrase "the good life" mean ? One basic way that we use the word "good" is to express moral approval. So when we say that someone is living well or they have lived a good life, we mean they posses and practice many of the most important virtues, and for me the most important virtue is love as it connotes "charity"; that is, the kind of love the ancient Romans referred to using the latin word "caritas" and the ancient Greeks by using the term, "agape". This was also the view of the great apostle and builder of the early Christian Church, St Paul. "Caritas" and "agape" refer to the charitable, selfless love displayed by those men and women who do not spend the majority of their time preoccupied with satisfying their own selfish, egocentric desires and pleasures, but place great importance on the process of "going out of themselves"- on freely giving of the personal resources they possess as human individuals ( be they material, spiritual, intellectual, emotional) by engaging in concrete actions that are intended to benefit others, especially those "others" who are suffering physically or spiritually and in need of help to restore their material welfare and/or emotional sense of well - being (happiness).

Plato and Socrates were certainly two great champions of this moral conception of the good life. They both gave absolute priority to being a virtuous person overall other supposedly good things such as pleasure, wealth and power. Plato's dialogue "Gorgias", Socrates takes this position to an extreme. He argues that it is much better to suffer wrong than to to do it; that a good man who has his eyes gouged out and is tortured to death is more fortunate than a corrupt person who has (and uses) wealth and power dishonorably. In the "Republic", Plato develops this argument in even greater detail. The morally good person, he claims, enjoys a sort of inner harmony, whereas the the wicked person, no matter how rich or powerful he may be, is fundamentally at odds with himself and the world.

I totally agree. I think the best way that one can realise "the good life" is through adopting a moral conception of the term "good".

In my opinion one of the most effective ways for man in the modern West where the dominant world-view of objective science/technological rationality has disenchanted, de-moralised, disvalued and strip genuine life-affirnming meaning and purpose from the lived experience ( the lived perceptual consciousness) of it inhabitants is not so much through the study of analytic philosophy per se Rather our lebenswelt can be be re-enchanted - resaturated with moral value , meaning and purpose through a disciplined study of the the great poetry of the English Romantic movement that flourished in the 18th and 19th century in the work of men like William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, John Claire and Percy Byssche Shelley. This Romantic canon should , I believe be reinstated as a matter of urgency, in such a way that it re-occupies the most prominent and most prestigious place in the common, compulsory, core English curriculum of all our secondary high schools in the West.

You may ask, "How would you justify this radical reform of the English curriculum, Dachshund"? Well, I will let Percey Shelley himself speak on my behalf in this matter, by quoting the following passages from his magnificent essay, "ADEfense of Poetry" ( I would, BTW, HAN urge you to read the whole piece if you have time). In "The Defense", Shelley writes that....



"... poetry acts in another and divine manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. THE GREAT SECRET OF MORALS IS LOVE; OR A GOING OUT OF OUR NATURE< AND AN IDENTIFICATION OF OURSELVES WITH THE BEAUTIFUL WHICH EXISTS IN THOUGHT ACTION OR PERSON NOT OUR OWN.[/b] A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species ( and of other species) must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever-new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new interval and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb".


And here is the "proof in the pudding" for you HAN ! Consider the following verses ( the first 36) from Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", I believe they speak very clearly for themselves in the context in the of the points Shelley makes above ( though naturally, I strongly recommend you read the poem in its entirity if you can spare the time)...


[b]"AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE"



To see the World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wildflower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove-house fill'd with doves and Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human Blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing,
A Cherubim does cease to sing.
The Gamecock clipp'd and arm'd for fight
Does the Rising Sun affright.
Every Wolf's and Lion's howl
Raises from Hell a Human Soul.
The wild dear wand'ring here and there,
Keeps the Human Soul from Care.
The Lamb misus'd breeds Public strife
And yet forgives the Butcher's Knife.
The Bat that flits at Close of Eve
Has left the Brain that wont believe.
The Owl that calls upon the Night
Speakes the Unbeliever's fright.
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be belov'd by Men.
He who the Ox to wrath has mov'd
Shall never be by woman lov'd.
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider's emnity.
He who torments the Chafer's Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night.
The Caterpillar on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mother's grief.
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.
He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar's Dog and Widow's Cat
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer's Song
Poison gets from Slander's tongue.
..."




Well... what do you think, HAN ?



Regards


Dachshund
Fooloso4
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Fooloso4 »

Dachshund:
Plato and Socrates were certainly two great champions of this moral conception of the good life. They both gave absolute priority to being a virtuous person overall other supposedly good things such as pleasure, wealth and power.
You have misunderstood the Greek notion of virtue (arete). Arete does not have absolute priority over power because it is a kind of power. It means excellence, the ability to do or accomplish something. Human excellence is the realization of one’s highest natural potential. It is related to but is not primarily or limited to moral virtue.
The morally good person, he claims, enjoys a sort of inner harmony …
You’ve got it backwards. The inner harmony has to do with the balancing and control of various conflicting desires. It is because the soul is well ordered that one is able to do good. Getting the soul in order is a necessary condition of morally appropriate action not the result of being moral.

Since you’ve thrown Paul into the mix, a quick comment: The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus said that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. With Paul this becomes a matter of man’s powerlessness against sin. It is neither by good will nor good action but only by grace that man overcomes sin. It is only by grace that one can be a morally good person. But all this he believed was about to change. The end was near and with it the death of the body and a new life.
I think the best way that one can realise "the good life" is through adopting a moral conception of the term "good".
Here you show that you have not understood Socrates and Plato at all. It is not about adopting a moral conception of the good, it is about a critical examination of what is said and done, and this includes a critical examination of “a moral conception” of the good. The imposition of a moral conception of the good is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to shape the world in conformity to your xenophobic prejudices.

Blake:
Poison gets from Slander's tongue.
Indeed!

You quote Shelley as if:
Percey Shelley himself speak on my behalf
but what you advocate is the exact opposite of what he says in the quote:
... poetry acts in another and divine manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.
Rather than awaken and enlarge the mind you attempt to restrict it to “a moral conception” of the good.

If any of this has anything to do with pedagogy and art, it is an attempt to teach by example the art of misappropriation of the work of Plato and the poets, and even of that old ascetic Paul who taught man to be powerless, that is, the opposite of Greek virtue. But in saying this I give you too much credit by gathering together your unapprehended combinations of thought.
Dachshund
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Dachshund »

Fooloso4 wrote: September 21st, 2018, 1:15 pm Dachshund:
Plato and Socrates were certainly two great champions of this moral conception of the good life. They both gave absolute priority to being a virtuous person overall other supposedly good things such as pleasure, wealth and power.
You have misunderstood the Greek notion of virtue (arete). Arete does not have absolute priority over power because it is a kind of power. It means excellence, the ability to do or accomplish something. Human excellence is the realization of one’s highest natural potential. It is related to but is not primarily or limited to moral virtue.

Really, Fooloso4 ? It's strange you should say that because here, in a nutshell, is what Wikipedia and two other authoritative sources( both reputable Classical scholars) I consulted on the internet had to say regarding Plato and the Greek notion of arete...

For Plato, arete is mainly associated with MORAL excellence. It is superordinate to specific moral virtues of Courage, Temperance, Justice, etc; something they all share, a special, unnamed quality, their essence. It is clearly related to Goodness.

So it seems you have "misunderstood" Plato and Socrates' interpretation of the Greek concept of virtue ( arete ). You will note that these were the two ancient Athenian philosophers to whom I referred in my post above; I was not, that is referring to how, say, Aristotle understood the term, nor to how the term is generically interpreted, which by the way, is as... excellence of any kind OR "moral virtue".

Isn't that right, slippery one ?


Regards

Dachshund
Dachshund
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Dachshund »

Fooloso4 wrote: September 21st, 2018, 1:15 pm Dachshund:




You quote Shelley as if:
Percey Shelley himself speak on my behalf
but what you advocate is the exact opposite of what he says in the quote:


Perhaps I need to get my eyes tested, Fooloso4, because when I read Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry" , I clearly understood it as an argument in which he is attempting to prove that poets are philosophers, that they are the creators and protectors of moral and civil laws; and that if it were not for poets, scientists could not have developed either their theories or their inventions. According to Shelley, poets introduce and maintain MORALITY
. The mores so created are codified into laws, thus the social function/utility of poets is that they create and maintain the NORMS and MORES of a society.

In the passage from Shelley's "Defense" that I quoted, he says, does he not, that...


"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."


What he means is that poetry broadens the mind to stumble upon newer and unthought-of series of thoughts; and to have LOVE or move beyond our baser natures and identify with what is beautiful beyond ourselves IS THE FIRST STEP TO MORALITY. That is, to be truly sensitive to RIGHT and WRONG, one should posses compassion and a sensitivity to others' happiness and despair. Thus, in the passage I quoted, Shelley declares that...

"The great instrument of MORAL GOOD is the imagination: (and) poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause."


For Shelley, poetry enlarges the imagination and due to the constant flow of thoughts there is no stagnation, thus he says ( again in my quoted passage)...

"Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the ORGAN OF THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb."


It seems to me that in the "Defense", Shelley is linking poets/ poetry very directly and very firmly with a "moral conception" of the Good ? But, as I say, perhaps I need to get my eyes checked, because you , "wise one", are asserting that this is not at all the case? Either that or my eyesight is perfect and you are, again, spouting disingenuous nonsense ( why exactly, I don't know ?!)


Finally, do yourself a favour and read what Shelley has to say in the "Defense" about Plato and Jesus as poetic figures, I think you will find it enlightening.


Regards

Dachshund
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Re: Pedagogy and Art

Post by Burning ghost »

ThomasHobbes wrote: September 18th, 2018, 4:46 pm
Burning ghost wrote: September 18th, 2018, 12:15 pm
None of this is actually do much to address the OP and questions of how to “teach” art.
I teach sculpture..

What do you want to know?
I set out the question in the first two posts. I was asking how "art" can be "taught".

My general conclusion is that exposure through practice is not exactly the same as teaching someone arithmetic. My view is that in lessons the most useful approach to allow students to find their potential is to expose them to as many different artistic mediums as possible - and for simplicity I was asking in reference to drawing, painting and sculpture in particular.

Then I asked if "creativity" could be "taught". I don't see how. The question at hand is then, for me at least, about how to properly "expose" students to different stylistic techniques and how to analyse/critique artwork - meaning learning to understand why some art is more pleasing to your eye than others (not to enforce an idea of what is "good" art.)

The thread has gone little wayward but maybe you could bring something to this view of mine?

Note: I have something quite separate to talk about regarding the whole expansive genre of "art" but for my purposes here I have expressed what I think the "art lesson" is about. If you "teach" then your personal view of what it is you're doing in the class would be interesting to hear. In an ideal situation what would you frame as the best possible way to go about this?
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