American Literati, Dialog & Dialecticians
as well as Colleagues Across the Curicculum.
(Courses W/O Borders: continued)
A
produced
“The aim of a liberal
“is to unsettle presumptions,
familiar, to reveal what is going on
behind appearances, to disorient young people
and to help them to find ways to reorient
themselves.”
(David Brooks—who goes on to praise institutions
and institutional values in “What Life Asks of Us.”
NY Times, Jan, 27 )
Brooks is talking about the Liberal Art, I’d say.
Not Not Not the liberal arts—math, physics, chem.,
bio, sociology, history, literature, philosophy, religion etc.
They’ve got their own professional get-into-grad school
agenda and don’t aim to unsettle presumptions,
tweak the controlling metaphors of their disciplines
or snuffle up hidden assumptions to disorient the first
year seminarians. Just the opposite: make the transitions
as seamless as possible and assess the growth almost
moment by moment. How are we doing? How are
we doing NOW?
The Liberal Art:
that’s something else
subversive, creatively destructive,
elenchus-to-aporia practicing, re-creational
& cultural apocalyptics esoteric epiphanic format
reconfiguring transformational argumentative
Indoor Leadership & Dis-embarassmental
super-ordinate to the arts and sciences the way
Temperature is to
Transcendentalism call it.
SELF-RELIANCE?
“At the end of the day,
your job is to listen to your own music.”
says Elizabeth Alexander, Obama's inauguration poet.
Music.
Muse.
Bemused.
Amused.
Long ago poets would invoke the muse —as inspiration:
a conspiracy of poet & higher-power, equivalent with,
perhaps, or at least LIKE, the idea of a “personal-
relationship-with-Jesus” which Xtian evangelists
urge.
Socrates referred to his Idios Daemon: his personal
guide; what Emerson would call “genius”--any one's
particular spirit.
with your Idios Daemon? Your Genius? Your Muse?
(A liberal art issue.)
IDIOS: “personal,” “private,” unique
( not to be replicated, franchised).
“IDIOCY” & “IDIOSYNCRATIC”:
all in the family.
To paraphrase Obama’s personal poet laureate:
at the end of the day which is to say in the final
analysis, or ultimately aka right now for crying
out loud: your job is to listen to your own idiocy.
Who's got the music of the spheres to do that?
How hard is it is to invite one's genius, listen
to one's own music, invoke the muse? You can
improve my terms, I'm sure. We can argue—or
what's a college for?.
Some Idiosyncratic if not Idiotic
notions for the sake of argument:
Thinking about Thinking:
A) The heart of thinking is divisive,
discriminatory, drawing distinctions;
B) the heart of academics is arguing
them out;
C) the heart of liberal art:
relating them.
THINKING counts more than (trumps)
what is thought.
ARGUING counts more than (trumps)
what the argument is about.
REPRESENTING counts more than (trumps)
the representation and what's represented.
The MAP is not the territory; and the
MAPPING counts more than (trumps) either
map or territory mapped.
The image is not the thing imaged and
IMAGINATION counts (trumps) more than both.
RELATING counts more than (trumps)
what is related.
WRITING this stuff down counts more than
(trumps) this stuff I've written down.
It's not what I know these days (every kid with a
lap top is the smartest kid in class): it's whether I
can put IT in play. It's not whether I win or lose:
it's how I play, .
Some say the Age of Information has given way to
the Conceptual Age, that “literacy”(the book-o-cracy)
has given way to a post-literate age of neo oralcy: a
new oral tradition...
Can you tell the difference?”
a) draw a distinction,
b) argue it out
c) relate the two?
between information and concept?
All this (above) is conceptual & not information
unless, of course you are informed by it. Then
it's information. Need we argue? ( This is NOT
your liberal arts.)
(anyone is urged to improve my terms and images;
I beg for differing. Punch Reply-to-All if you think the
topic is worth sustainable converse-action.)
xxxooo, Sam
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