Showing papers in "The Journal of Aesthetic Education in 1972"

Putting Aesthetic Education to Work.

Abstract: During the past several years the term "aesthetic education" has been used so frequently among music educators, art educators, and others that it has become an accepted part of the language of these fields. Yet the reality to which the phrase refers remains disturbingly obscure. Some people have had the queasy feeling that the term is a disembodied ghost, lacking flesh and blood but, like an old superstition, compelling enough that one must pay some attention to it if only to stay on the safe side of things. No matter what the difficulties with the term, aesthetic education is now something real and will become more central a reality in human experience in the future. To strengthen that reality to make its impact more widespread and more powerful in the lives of children and adults is the major obligation of music education. As a guide in my discussion I will use a description (a safer word than "definition") of aesthetic education as "the development of sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of things." This description has several key components: "development," "sensitivity," "aesthetic qualities," and "things." A few words about each component (taken in reverse order) will show that we are not dealing with a ghost. We will then be able to tackle some problems of how to put aesthetic education to work more effectively. By "things" I mean perceptible objects and events. One of the major characteristics of the aesthetic realm is the necessary involvement of things. The thing may be a piece of music, a sculpture, a painting, a

Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environment

Abstract: TJnlike such a phrase as "green mold on the cheese," the very phrase "aesthetic aspects of the environment" belongs, as a whole and in its parts, not to the language of men but to the language of bureaucracy. Not just that it is abstract: I suppose a phrase like "perfect simplicity of love" is abstract, but it belongs to human speech. The trouble with "aesthetic aspects of the environment" is that its bits are benumbing and its totality stupefying. Using such language injures the soul; to use it all the time, as many of us probably do, is slowly to choke to death. Those who use such words to defend their surroundings against the despoiler are in danger of losing the battle in their own hearts and minds before it is joined. Talking about real lives led by real people in real streets and houses, we use language that serves the purposes of those who, like new Romans, create a desert and call it urban renewal. Of course the position from which I throw these stones is a highly glazed one. As a philosopher I am professionally committed to the higher aridity, accepting the duties of irrelevance and dullness. From where I stand it looks clear enough that the notions of the environment and of the aesthetic, not to mention the notion of an aspect, are beset with grave obscurities and confusions. What is not clear is that these obscurities and confusions have any practical importance. Any practical problems that are going to arise, I should suppose, will be about who

Metaphor and Literature

Abstract: Metaphor has long been acknowledged as a primary tool for the writer. Literature without metaphor would become less imaginative and poetry would be so impaired as to become dull and perhaps even trite. Writers and critics have rarely denied the utility and attractiveness of metaphor for their trade. Philosophers, however, have too often suspected it of being a weak and illegitimate form of language. Striving for precision of expression and clarity of meaning, they rejected metaphor as an imprecise and unclear device. Although many traditional philosophers employed magnificent metaphors in their writing, these were explained as evasive maneuvers to bolster weak points of arguments. Within the last decade the attitude of many philosophers toward metaphor has changed. There has been a growing recognition that metaphor is not necessarily an illegitimate linguistic device and that it may be very useful and necessary not only for literature but for philosophy as well.' Historians have recently come to a similar conclusion about scientific terminology; words like "force," "mass," and "atom" are metaphors rather than carefully defined terms.2 Furthermore, it can be argued

On Play and Music: A Critique

Abstract: Whenever the focus of analysis in music moves from the purely objective to matters of aesthetic sensibility, some confrontation with play theory is probable. While theories of play as explanations of artistic behavior will not suffice as closed systems, they are valuable as means, however tentative, of understanding aesthetic experience. It is the intent of this article to examine some relationships between play theory and music.

A Demurral to Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism?.

Abstract: From a first superficial reading of Bell's essay I gained the impression that there would be some interesting points of departure for relating his political and aesthetic themes to education. On a careful rereading I have not been able to find a way of proceeding constructively, one that would keep recognizable contact with the essay. I must be content therefore with pointing out the grounds of my dissatisfaction with Bell's analysis; and this will show incidentally why I believe it cannot be, or at least does not deserve to be, treated more positively. 1. Throughout the article, Bell takes for granted a neat, clear-cut distinction between culture and social structure. He speculates in these terms about the sources of change in society and claims that it is now the culture that is dictating the shape of the social structure. The consequence of such a classification is to obscure the real complexity of interaction among all the aspects of life in a society. At the very least, it tends to focus attention simply on the dialectic between what has been labeled "culture" and "social structure" and to overlook the conflicting elements that may exist within each. In the latter part of his essay, Bell himself speaks of cultural-political and cultural-social issues; and he observes that members of the corporate class are divided into tradition-

Nelson Goodman on Picturing, Describing, and Exemplifying

Abstract: The most sustained and rigorous treatment of the work of art as a sign or symbol to appear in recent years is to be found in Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art.l If his analysis proves to be correct then the consequences for aesthetic education are momentous. For Goodman attempts to show that art as a symbolism may be understood by means of the same logical categories used in the analysis of the symbol systems of science and its related intellectual activity. If science is taught by introducing the student to the appropriate manipulation and appreciation of symbols in a systematic fashion, then the same approach may be feasible in aesthetic education. Several objections arise, however, concerning the legitimacy of treating art as a sign phenomenon. While I think that Goodman is able to answer these objections, his discussion seems to need correction in important details. Like any semiotic aesthetic theory, his analysis must face two important problems arising from the nature of signs themselves. First, there is the fictional character of art. In the theory of signs, the most literal interpretation of "fictional" implies that the work of art does not have denotation (i.e., reference); at any rate, if art does denote or refer, that fact is irrelevant to its function as art. But if the art object is a sign, there must be sufficient conditions for symbolization other than reference or denotation. Thus in his classic discussion of the conditions for the

The Uses of Aesthetics in Planning: A Critical Review

Abstract: From its early beginnings, planning as a professional activity has had a vital interest in the aesthetics of the environment. Indeed, the field itself emerged from the design professions that undertook to protect and enhance the aesthetics of rapidly growing urban areas. Though the tasks of the planner have broadened and become more complex, concern for the aesthetic has continued an implicit ingredient within the cascade of programs to upgrade and reconstruct our urban communities. As planners over the years grappled with aesthetic problems in their activities of city building, a number of theoretical approaches emerged. While some of these approaches have been successfully applied, all have had serious flaws as theoretical formulations. They remain isolated and random attempts at solutions to specific problems with little or no systematic relationship to one another. As a result, these approaches remain baffling and frustrating to planners who have since tried to put them into practice. In this age of rapid city building, the consequences of an inadequate aesthetic theory can be a costly misuse of limited resources. If the planner is to fulfill his responsibilities in the creation of an optimum environment, it is imperative that he be equipped with the conceptual and philosophical tools to do the job. To arrive at such a stage requires rigorous review of past performance. Questionable theory must be recognized as such and clarified, amended, or when necessary, rejected. It is through such self-criticism that truly effective approaches may ultimately

Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth Psychology

Abstract: Rollo May has spoken for many of his colleagues in arguing that Freud's ideas grew out of the intellectual and historical context of the nineteenth century and must be understood in that perspective.1 Although we do not wish either to support or to deny that argument, we would like to show one strikingly full anticipation of psychoanalytic theory in a poet who lived a hundred years before Freud. The poet is William Blake (1757-1827). Freud himself suggested that his concepts were anticipated in such nineteenth-century thinkers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and even Kant, and the elements of their thought in Freud's work have been discussed ably. But the imaginative embodiment of nineteenth-century depth psychology in Romantic literature has not been given its due. Blake was a professional engraver and painter as well as a poet, and almost all his published literary works are intricate combinations of his own pictures, designs, and words, of great power both verbally and pictorially. These works are complex and difficult, but in recent years much progress has been made in understanding them, and no one today doubts that in both pictures and poetic text a searching symbolism is at work. Blake's message is expressed in a myth, largely of his own invention, of four Zoas, or life forces, who are part of every human being. The myth operates on the levels of religion, politics, and history, but above

The Cultural Contradictions of Daniel Bell

Abstract: In 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," Daniel Bell has done an excellent job of defining and summarizing the attributes of the new sensibility, the postmodernist and antirationalist "psychedelic" culture that is actionist, anti-establishment, experimental, and obsessed with continuous change. Even better, he has elucidated the cultural and intellectual trends and movements which over the past two hundred years have led to the apparent dominance of the new culture. In fact he has done such an excellent job of proving the cumulative power of the trend that we fail to see, on the basis of his evidence, why the new culture did not predominate in the 1950s instead of in the late sixties, and why its impact was so sudden, shocking, and discontinuous. On the basis of the overwhelming evidence Bell cites, the growth in salience of the new culture ought to have been continuous and should have appeared in a slowly evolving way. Moreover, if all these factors have been operating for so long, the new culture should not have come as such a surprise to so many people. To come directly to the point, we suspect that Bell is guilty of providing an overdetermination of causation, of providing enough causes to explain half a dozen cultural revolutions but no specific causes for the one that did occur. Moreover, we will argue that his central theme, the freeing of culture from its socioeconomic base, is not a cause for the current cultural revolu tion, which in fact did not occur as Bell describes it. To state it differently, Bell's central argument that culture is now free from its socioeconomic base is, at best, only partially true. Indeed the major ways that culture still

An Alternative Postmodernity.

Abstract: I am not sure why Daniel Bell had to insist that the phenomena he describes represent the cultural contradictions of capitalism. To be sure, the American or West Eureopean situation has its own peculiar aspects. But the basic relationships between the structural modernization of societies and the psychocultural responses of individuals to it seems to have a much more general character, of which the American or Western experience represents merely a series of special cases. Perceiving the "disjunction of culture from social structure" as a problem not peculiar to affluent capitalism but inherent in the modernization cycle would help to explain why it appears in noncapitalist societies that have attained a high level of modernization for example, in Eastern Europe. (See pre-invasion Czech films.) To be sure, politically imposed constraints in Eastern Europe result in an "under-registration" in the cultural products of the unexpected psychological changes actually occurring, particularly in the younger generation. In the United States, the workings of the mass culture, with its tendency to exploit the unexpected for whatever the market will bear, may well produce an "over-registration," an exaggerated cultural image of what is actually occurring. Yet the character of the underlying process may be the same. It probably differs in degree, though, as the disjunction Bell speaks of is likely to be more thorough where social structure has been more com-

Defining Art: A Classroom Discussion.

Abstract: In this article, we shall examine one aspect of the teaching of an undergraduate course in aesthetics. Leaving aside the more obvious matters such as choice of reading material and sequence of topics, we shall focus on one of the most perplexing elements. It is this: the students attracted to such a course are those usually termed "original" or "creative." Some of them produce art objects, and almost all of them have an interest in performance or appreciation in one or more of the arts. Learning the history of aesthetic theories or becoming acquainted with established current theories is, of course, appropriate and necessary in such a course, but it is not entirely satisfactory to such students: they like to think through aesthetic problems on their own, and this propensity becomes evident as soon as they engage in free discussion of the theories developed by philosophers who have written about aesthetics. How, then, can the instructor in aesthetics, while presenting the views of acknowledged authorities in the field, as he is certainly obligated to do, provide for the students a substantial experience in working out their own answers to some of the basic problems of aesthetics? The reader of this article may think that undergraduate students are not yet sufficiently mature or competent in philosophizing to develop

Social and Cultural Congruences in American Civilization

Abstract: Inevitably, the reasoning of those who attempt to interpret the dynamics of a civilization is shaped by their world view which affects their selection and interpretation of data and the conclusions that they reach. This principle is applicable to all realms of thought and experience. It is as true today as it was in antiquity. When Aristotle contemplated a falling stone he saw a state not a process, a perception that was to become modified only after Galileo's experiments with a pendulum. The geocentric pre-Copericans viewed the heavenly bodies as immutably fixed.' Agassiz and Cuvier viewed the paleontological record as evidence of divinely instigated cataclysms and creations; Darwin interpreted the same data as manifestations of the evolving web of life. Hegelian logic and its Marxian-derived dialectic of historical determinism provided a powerful political and economic ideology which many intellectuals have found a comforting framework for interpreting and predicting the course of events. Further exemplifying references to establish the point

From Disjunction to Multiplicity.

Abstract: Daniel Bell has been preoccupied with "the disjunction of culture and social structure" at least since 1965, when he published an essay on the subject in the Daedalus issue on "Science and Culture."' Concerned at that time with the growing emphasis on "immediacy, impact, simultaneity, and sensation" in the arts, convinced that changes in art forms prefigure changes in the collective sensibility, he was not then willing to forecast what was to come. Now, six years later, he is crying havoc. Grimly convinced of the "primacy" of a culture become predominantly anticognitive, anti-intellectual, permissive, and apocalyptic, he fears for the survival of liberal capitalism. The "new sensibility," he believes, is responsible for the erosion of the work ethic, self-discipline, and belief in rationality. As if he were acceding (from the other end of the spectrum) to the triumph of what Charles A. Reich calls "Consciousness III,"2 he appears to see a "revolution by consciousness" under way. Unlike Reich, however, he neither celebrates its advent nor

The Pop Intellectual as Antichrist.

Abstract: The term "intellectual" once implied a man of knowledge and competence in social analysis, an individual who was consumed with a passion both for social justice and a humane and rational social order. The intellectual was adept at cutting through the mythos of his culture and in exposing the shams and hypocrisies of his society. He was sophisticated about the political currents of his time currents which may have nauseated him but which, he felt, one had to understand, deal with and try to circumvent, if one wished to know politically what the limits of the possible were. The intellectual also knew something of natural science, not in terms of what the expert would demand and expect but rather in terms that could be considered meaningful to a serious, intelligent, interested and educated layman. He was certain to be steeped in the literature of social criticism and he could be expected to be familiar with some of the classic works in what would now be

The Theater and the Crisis of Language.

Abstract: The tragic artwork is the poet's restoration of order and restitution for wrong. And his audience receives it as such. I offer these sentences only as thoughts that might help us understand the actual effect of tragedy, which is in part a healing effect, not indeed in the outright sense that tragedy would cure a case of epilepsy or schizophrenia, but in the sense that it springs from a need to feel that one can make good one's destructions. Without such feelings, I suggest, one would go mad. I am not saying that nothing but tragedy, or nothing but art, can provide them. I am saying that art, that tragedy, can provide them. Eric Bentley