Betwixt and Between: Working Through the Aesthetic in Philosophy of Education: George F. Kneller Lecture, Conference of the American Educational Studies Association Savannah, Georgia, October 30, 2008

Abstract

At a time when both philosophy of education and the arts are under threat within education, this article inquires into interdisciplinarity as one way of approaching the disciplines of philosophy of education and aesthetics. The article offers a retrospective autobiographical intellectual history and phenomenology of the author's own learning and scholarship within Higher Education in three main areas—philosophy of literature education, women's studies, and philosophy of music education, areas paralleling the three periods of her academic career. One sub-theme of this narrative about the balancing act of working in literature and music through philosophy of education is the author's ongoing resistance to professionalization or disciplinary academic control—of literature, philosophy, and music—while being a critical student of educational theory and practice in these areas—philosophy, literature and music within philosophy of education—of thus being “betwixt and between.” Two other themes comprising the article's subtext are “praxis” and “embodiment.” The double entendre of the phrase “working through” entails, first, using the arts of literature and music to practise philosophy of education; and secondly, embracing the psychological, ethical, and spiritual introspection that comes with critical engagement of the arts and its discourses. In short, the article aims to reprise some burning philosophical educational questions that have preoccupied its author over the years, questions deemed especially pertinent to the current increasingly diverse membership in the discipline of educational studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I acknowledge Susan Laird's generosity in the many discussions we had during the preparation of this Lecture, as well as her insightful editorial suggestions. My thanks also go to Jane Miller of the Institute of Education, University of London, and to Hilary E. Davis, York University, Toronto, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. For contemporary studies of this “problem,” see Edmundson (2004), Farrell (2004), Roche (2004), and Zunshine (2006).

2. For example, Twyla Gibson (2000, 2005, 2006) argues against Havelock, observing a more gradual transition between orality and literacy than Havelock's, including the view that Plato represented the end of the oral culture rather than the beginning of the era of literacy. Gibson and others (see John Miles Foley 1999) contend that Plato's dialogues manifest a ring composition, the pattern of organization found in Homer's poetry and identified with the oral tradition.

3. See, especially, Jean Baker Miller (1976), Sandra L. Bartky (1990), Mary Field Belenkey et al. (1986), Jean Shinoda Bolen (1984), Susan Cady et al. (1986), Teresa de Lauretis (1987), Josephine Donovan (1975), Judith Fetterley (1978/1981), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1983), Carol Gilligan (1982), Madeleine R. Grumet (1988), Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1979), Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (1981/1983), Jane Roland Martin (1981, 1985, 1994), Jane Miller (1994, 1996), Elaine Showalter (1977, 1985), and Carolyn Kay Steedman (1986). In 1985, Showalter's (text)book was already recording a history of feminist literary criticism. My own experience teaching this course is described and analyzed in Chapter 6 of Re-educating the Imagination (Bogdan 1992) and elsewhere (Bogdan 1989, 1990a). Important books in Women's Studies published the same year are Gisela Ecker (1985), Toril Moi (1985), Jane Roland Martin (1985), Christa Wolf (1985), and Marion Woodman (1985). Woodman's conception of the “feminine” shares in a tradition of feminist thought that dates back to Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), who advocated not only for women's rights but for a fluid, dynamic conception of gender, the importance of a strong body to contain women's intellectual and spiritual development, and, most important, an independence of mind and spirit free from the fetters of patriarchal constraints that are politically and socially instantiated in the culture. See Susan Laird (2008).

4. For a possible way out of The Unbearability Issue, see Jasmine Zine, Lisa K. Taylor, and Hilary E. Davis (2007); and Kathleen Gallagher (2000, 2007, 2008; Gallagher and Booth 2003).

5. Although Plato proscribed Lydian and Phrygian modes for their deleterious effects on character, the central place of music in the curriculum for Plato “is fully justified, because rhythm and harmony ‘sink farthest into the depths of the soul and take hold of it most firmly by bringing it nobility and grace’ [Rep. 401e]. But it is not only because of the psychological power of music that Plato considers it vital: music trains us, more precisely than any other subject, in recognizing what is right or wrong in a beautiful work and its performance. Anyone who is properly educated in music takes it into his soul while he is still young and his spiritual growth is unconscious; and he develops an unerring accuracy in enjoying what is beautiful and hating what is ugly, so that when conscious reason comes later, he can welcome her like a friend’ [Rep. 402a].” In his system of education for the guardians, Plato insists that a musical education “is the indispensable preparation for pure philosophical knowledge, which without the foundation of musical knowledge, would be left hanging in the air” (Jaeger 1943, 229–230).

6. See Frye (1993), Morrison (1992a), and Campion (1983). The exploration of fugue in Frye was singly-authored (Bogdan 1999); the use of jazz occurred in my response (Bogdan 1994a) to my former doctoral student Charlene Morton's feminist critique of the add and stir approach to the displaced music curriculum (Morton 1994); and the Campion study was in collaboration with two other former doctoral students, Judith P. Robertson and Hilary E. Davis (Bogdan et al. 1997).

7. In 2007, former doctoral student Twyla Gibson of The Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, invited me to mount another meta-performance, this time a one-woman multimedia presentation, in which I combined my own live piano performance with various types of electronic media,. This project returned me to Aristotle and Plato. Here melos (melody) is metaphoric of how international Canadian communication theorist's Marshall McLuhan's (1964/1966, 23–35) famous coining of “The Medium is the Message” radically collapses Aristotle's Four Causes into a single instantaneous apprehension of electronic total field, and how Glenn Gould's views on recording embody McLuhan's theories. McLuhan's electronic philosophy of media merges with Gould's philosophy of sound in a kind of dialectical sonic environmentalism, in which the arts form an antienvironment against media's deterministic effects, and media's democratic potential enables listeners to become composers—thereby fulfilling Plato's objective for “[our] lives [to] be art.” See Bogdan (2008), McLuhan (1964/1966), and Glenn Gould (April 1966, as quoted in Cavell 2004, 47).

8. See Buber (1958, 1966). Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe ground their ontology of teaching by drawing on Buber's distinction between I–It and I–Thou to elaborate the role of the teacher within what I could call a liminal space of undecideability. “Buber uses the ‘I–It to describe the desirous logic of finite subjects and objects, and the term ‘I–Thou’ to relations based on infinitude” (Game and Metcalfe, 2008, 462). Game and Metcalfe elaborate an impersonal, nonintentional “authority of love” that is “subjectless,” in which the teacher's acceptance of “hopeless hope” moves students to respond directly to texts freed from the drive to perform. In this theory the logical priority of direct response is linked to teaching itself (Game and Metcalfe 2008, 461–473).

9. Said defines “worldly” as “possible, attainable knowledge” (1991, 105).

10. See Bogdan (2001). I read this process of (inter)playing in the dark through Willa Cather's (1965) novel The Song of the Lark, Edward Said's (1991) notion of the amateur in its etymological sense of amata, lover; Roland Barthes’ (1985) death of hearing, Jim Garrison's (1996) theory of democratic listening, Kristeva's (1982) abjection, Richard Schechner's (1988) poetics of performance, Elizabeth Grosz's (1994) volatile bodies, Peggy Phelan's (1993) politics of performance, Bakhtin's (1990) answerability, and Maxine Greene's (1990) call for interdisciplinarity as key to fortifying the social imagination and the metaphorical habit of mind.

11. See Tanglewood II: Declaration, Tanglewood II: Charting the Future. http:www.bu.edu/tanglewoodtwo/declaration/declaration_vision.html (accessed September 25 2008).

12. A companion piece to this article, “Philosophy of education as mousike techne: Footnotes to ‘Betwixt and Between,’” is in press (b) with Paideusis: Journal of the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society.