The scanning process continues. I try to be cool and objective, literally searching--without digital or electronic aid-- for the term "lived life." But then I get swept into the language. I try not to see the "language," but instead to search for text. Just words. A couple of "l's" strung together. It's a "Where's Waldo?" approach.
But Greene sweeps me in with her language. I end up reading and thinking and interpreting and bringing my particular sense, my live life, to the language.
This happened with Greene's chapter on "Approaches to Truth and Being" in "Teacher as Stranger." In her remarks about pragmatism, phenomenology, and existentialism,, I started to see Greene's foundation in her doing philosophy. I see her disposal of the role of pragmatism in its attempts to measure things, like humans, that cannot possibly be measure without some accounting of biography. While "lived life" isn't being used, I think I'm witnessing its development here in this 1973 publication.
Earlier this morning I reviewed a booklet on dissertations in the humanities. One of my committee members very thoughtfully sent it to me to help me with this framework. It's quite different form the empirical/science-based framework that is being promoted within the Ed.D. program. The booklet offers standards that use descriptors of outstanding, very good, acceptable and unacceptable.
Within one of the standards for outstanding, the qualities listed int he area of language included "hot." I like this. Language should be hot.
Text, on the other hand, is cool.
A flood of after thoughts has overcome me after our conversation on Wednesday morning. I'm not sure Greene actually disposed pragmatism as you wrote above. Her list of preferred philosophers who moved her thinking in the Landscapes of Learning collection (published 1978 but many of them crafted in the decade before importantly listed William James.
ReplyDeleteI admit that this last has always fascinated me.
Anyway, I think Greene's love of literature and language, and whether literally using "lived life" or not may owe something to William James. To get an appreciation of both James and Dewey through some amazing writing—in preparing for the William James paper I did with Kurt Stuke last week in Chocorua—I read the following:
McDermott, John J. (2007). Ed., Douglas Anderson. The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture. Fordham UP
I'm not sure why I didn't mention this on Wednesday, but, if you want a full-blown appreciation of "lived life" directly hooked up to James and Dewey (which I believe is Greene's reading of them....the influence she's allowed them to have in her lived life) this is a very readable collection and also I think useful in a variety of ways (different courses). Essays on James, Dewey, aesthetics, popular culture, philosophy and everything else but the kitchen sink. Although that may be there and I missed it....