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.

Imaginative literature

One of the themes of Maxine Greene's teaching involves the primacy of questions. She states often that she prefers questions over answers and this is why she uses imaginative literature in her teaching. Literature gives us the questions; for the answers we can go to psychology.

A dissertation committee member chafed at the term "imaginative" literature. He rightly asserted that the imaginative quality of literature is in the encounter. It is the reader who is the trigger for the imaginative. Nevetheless, I continue to use the term because Greene and others do. It seems to be accepted in the field of "Greene studies."

Perhaps the term "imaginative literature" is a description of that encounter between reader and text whereas "literature" is merely the text?

Nevertheless, one of the perks of using imaginative literature in teaching is in the glory of that encounter with fiction, with poetic narrative. I am using Toni Morrison's Sula for a philosophy and ethics course I'm teaching. As compelling as Dewey and Greene may be in their writing, the experience of opening the first page of Sula and engage in the description of a place known as the Bottom is exhilirating:

The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees whter children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosemetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothers will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

This rich description is such a blessed break from the typical academic reading that students and their professors must engage in. This writing compels the reader to enter the world of the Bottom, to turn the page, to learn more. This is what my dissertation writing needs to achieve.

One of the proposed rationales for my dissertation concerns my own teaching practice. The hope is that through my inquiry into Greene's writings that my approach to teaching will transform. The aesthetics of both the inquiry and of teaching will move into a new realm that might create an aesthetic of learning--for both student and teacher.