The "lived" as emergent

I am looking at Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom (1988). I remember the first time I read it was on the Amtrak platform in Hartford, CT waiting for the train back to Grand Central. I had misread the train schedule and found myself with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. So I opened up Dialectic. I was in grad school, studying with Greene, and thought it a good idea to read some of her works. I picked up an idea or two from the book but for the most part, I couldn't make a connection. I just wasn't "there" yet; "there" being situated for discussion about how freedom and new possibilities are created through consciousness and reflection.
I think I'm approaching "there" now.

In looking at Dialectic, I am finding a clearer sensibility, for myself, about what goes into creating a lived life, a lived world, a lived situation, a lived experience. It is an active, reflective process that is foundational to consciousness. I had come to this understanding the connection of reflection with consciousness in my reading of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and certainly Dewey, who distinguishes consciousness as “the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience” (Art as Experience, 1934, p. 270). Greene notes in Dialectic,

There is a difference between those who unquestioningly accede to the given and those who find refuge in that way. In both cases, however, there is an incapacity to look at actualities as if they could be otherwise, as there is an unwillingness to try to transcend determinacy or surpass facticity. Consciousness, it so happens, involves the capacity to pose questions to the world, to reflect on what is presented in experience. It is not to be understood as an interiority. Embodied, thrusting into the lived and perceived, it opens out to the common. Human consciousness, moreover, is always situated; and the situated person, inevitably engaged with others, reaches out and grasps the phenomena surrounding him/her from a particular vantage point and against a particular background consciousness (1988, p. 20).

From this I take "lived" as a qualifier that is only achieved through the act of consciousness. What's more, Greene makes it clear that consciousness is not an internal mechanism, but an outward one. This presents for me an interesting contrast to Stella Adler and "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The lived life, though it necessitates an inward process of reflection, it is only achieved through the active pursuit of engaging with the "common" or the world in which we're situated. Where Adler may have rightfully been concerned about an actor turning inward in their craft making engagement with the audience difficult, the reflected life requires the actor to turn outward, to consider their experiences in contrast to that of others.

This also aligns with the active idea of doing philosophy or doing history. It aligns with learning as an active process, not a situation with the student as vessel to be filled by the accepted, rule-formed world of reliable knowledge. For Greene the lived life is an emergent entity that is always changing as the indiviudal changes. It is not static. And neither is learning. It is never complete. It needs to always be emergent.

The "lived" as active

I am looking at Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom (1988). I remember the first time I read it was on the Amtrak platform in Hartford, CT waiting for the train back to Grand Central. I had misread the train schedule and found myself with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. So I opened up Dialectic. I was in grad school, studying with Greene, and thought it a good idea to read some of her works. I picked up an idea or two from the book but for the most part, I couldn't make a connection. I just wasn't "there" yet; "there" being situated for discussion about how freedom and new possibilities are created through consciousness and reflection.

I think I'm approaching "there" now.

In looking at Dialectic, I am finding a clearer sensibility, for myself, about what goes into creating a lived life, a lived world, a lived situation, a lived experience. It is an active, reflective process that is foundational to consciousness. I had come to this understanding the connection of reflection with consciousness in my reading of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and certainly Dewey, who distinguishes consciousness as “the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience” (Art as Experience, 1934, p. 270). Greene notes in Dialectic,

There is a difference between those who unquestioningly accede to the given and those who find refuge in that way. In both cases, however, there is an incapacity to look at actualities as if they could be otherwise, as there is an unwillingness to try to transcend determinacy or surpass facticity. Consciousness, it so happens, involves the capacity to pose questions to the world, to reflect on what is presented in experience. It is not to be understood as an interiority. Embodied, thrusting into the lived and perceived, it opens out to the common. Human consciousness, moreover, is always situated; and the situated person, inevitably engaged with others, reaches out and grasps the phenomena surrounding him/her from a particular vantage point and against a particular background consciousness (1988, p. 20).

From this I take "lived" as a qualifier that is only achieved through the act of consciousness. What's more, Greene makes it clear that consciousness is not an internal mechanism, but an outward one. This presents for me an interesting contrast to Stella Adler and "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The lived life, though it necessitates an inward process of reflection, it is only achieved through the active pursuit of engaging with the "common" or the world in which we're situated. Where Adler may have rightfully been concerned about an actor turning inward in their craft making engagement with the audience difficult, the reflected life requires the actor to turn outward, to consider their experiences in contrast to others.

A conversation with the text

In my earlier post today I mentioned that I scanned Maxine Greene's Teacher as Stranger (1973) to locate instances of lived life in the text. There were none.

This was a hunch that I had prior to the data collection and knowing that, I made sure to also scan for what I might interpret as variations on lived life. And sure enough I was able to locate life-world which originated with Edmund Husserl. I also have a hunch that life-world becomes less frequent in Greene's later writings when lived life starts to make a presence. This may be a situation of coincidence, but it is possible that Greene abandoned Husserl's "Umwelt" for lived life.

With the scanning, I found myself talking to the text. Because lived life wasn't presenting itself, I started to take notice of other qualified "lifes" in Greene's writing: social life, family life, instinctual life, to name a few. I asked aloud if I would find these "lifes" in her later books. If I was to find that they're not present in her later books, would it be a fair deduction for me to think of these other "lifes" as being subsumed by lived life? Could lived life be a repository for the social, family, and instinctual aspects of life? If lived life is such a repository, could this mean that what once might have stood as a clear distinction among these other qualified "lifes" becomes blurred in Greene's later writing and thinking? Are these qualified "lifes" too intersubjectve/interconnected to be distinguished from one another?

I might be in line for a hermeneutic hat trick here...