Text is cool. Language is hot.

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.

Panic & Spiraling

I was scanning "Teacher as Stranger" yesterday looking for the term "lived life" in Greene's text. I'm up to chapter 5 and haven't come across it. Oh dear. And the Amazon "search inside" feature of "The Dialectic of Freedom" also didn't find any occurrences of the term. Yikes.

My concern/panic/hive-inducing-dilemma is that I had thought the term appeared in these texts. My research methodology (I call it "practice") also assumes this.

But I did come across the term "life-world" in "Teacher as Stranger." It's a term I don't recall hearing or reading before in Greene's works. Maybe "life-world" developed into "lived life" in Greene's later texts? Another reason may be that Greene's later texts ("Releasing" and "Variations") are more closely aligned with aesthetic practice. So perhaps "lived life" is rooted in Greene's aesthetic philosophy?

And if so, can I still find a bridge between Greene's use of "lived life" and her focus on social justice? Or is "lived life" distinctly and discretely contained in aesthetics without a bridge into social justice? I hope not. Nor can I imagine such discrete applications in Greene's thinking and writing.

I had a conversation yesterday with a student. She's a distance learner in my Critical Perspectives course. We were talking about Dewey's definition of the aesthetic experience as having a conclusion or end. Yet aesthetic practice sees instead a spiraling that occurs. There is no end to the aesthetic experience. Questions beget questions. Inquiry branches into inquiry. There is a spiraling that occurs where the circulating movement of questions and inquiry expands wider and wider.

I'm spiraling.