Talking of Muse

The Positively Pirsig post below referred to an upcoming book by David A Granger of SUNY. David Harding posted a link on MoQ-Discuss to a David Granger paper on Dewey and Pirsig published on the scholarly journal site “Project Muse”.

Turns out to be an excellent paper. Right to the point about Pirsig’s indirect teaching approach to Quality in his Bozeman days being a real example of Dewey’s later ideas on aesthetics leading science. Shared the link with Friends of Wisdom too.

Art, [Dewey] tells us, is best seen more liberally as “a quality that permeates an experience,” whereby, in any number of life contexts, the meanings of objects and events become “the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or ‘impassioned’ experience” …

Modern preoccupation with science and with industry based on science has been disastrous; our education has followed the model that they have set. It has been concerned with intellectual analysis and formularized information …

It is disastrous because it has fixed attention upon competition for control and possession of a fixed environment rather than upon what art can do to create an environment …

It is disastrous because civilization built upon these principles cannot supply the demand of the soul for joy, or freshness of experience; only attention through art to the vivid but transient values of things can effect such refreshment.

Very promising stuff. Look out the re-release publicity for Pirsig’s “Lila”, and the later publication of the Granger book.

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