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Abstract
The paper considers T.S. Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’ thesis, considering its philosophical value and attempting to defend it against published objections. While accepting some of the criticisms, it is argued that Eliot's argument is sound to a significant extent. Eliot's account retains explanatory power with regard to an enduring arts-science divide in schooling and, more broadly, in environmental ethics. In both these areas, educators can, and should, find greater synergies between arts and science, and theoria and praxis, despite continuing pressures on the school curriculum to move in the opposite direction. It is suggested that an acknowledgement of living as semiosis can be helpful in this respect.
Notes
Notes
1. Neither the Aristotelian nor the contemporary terms are transparent: a problem that besets any work in philosophy of education that attempts to discuss ‘educational practice’. In the Nicomachean ethics and elsewhere, Aristotle distinguishes between contemplative, objective knowledge (theoria) and subjective, practical know-how (praxis), in terms of a number of related ideas (phronesis, poiesis, techne–roughly judgment, making and skill respectively). In addition, the aims of philosophy as moral and as rational were not separate in Aristotle; to the Ancient Greeks, arête (‘the good life’) implied both. Thus, for a number of reasons, it is difficult to be precise about these terms in the present context.
2. Of all the literature on Romanticism, one of the most interesting recent discussions of the degree to which William Wordsworth (specifically) can validly be construed as a ‘nature poet’ is that by Jonathon Bate (Citation1991). Bate's own position is, in fact, one of attempting to restore Wordsworth as a nature poet in the wake of a mass of work denying him this status.
3. www.bartleby.com (accessed September 28, 2005).
4. The title ‘Daffodils’ is not Wordsworth's.
5. i.e ‘our souls’.
6. For a particularly interesting discussion of the development of modern forms of educational practice–and their deviation from earlier models–see Derek Pigrum's discussion of the practices of the Renaissance workshop (Pigrum Citation2001).
7. Interestingly, Eliot himself did not identify industrialisation as a key determinant. Indeed, he never committed himself as to what exactly caused the claimed shift in consciousness, though in later life he is reputed to have suggested that it had something to do with the English Civil War.
8. Not a term used by Kermode himself.
9. See also Stables Citation2003a.
10. cf Wittgenstein's construal of understanding as ‘knowing how to go on’ in Philosophical investigations (Wittgenstein Citation1953).
11. Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys, and sour prentices … (Donne, Citation1971: 80).
12. It is important to note that Donne wrote both religious and secular (often comic) verse. In the latter, human aspirations are ridiculed. It is foolish to chide the sun, but not foolish to relate natural science and personal morality.
13. Lines written above Tintern Abbey.
14. For a full discussion of the implications of Heideggerian philosophy for sustainability, see Michael Bonnett (Citation2003).
15. For an earlier critique of humanism and environmental education, see Stables and Scott (Citation1999).
16. See Stables (Citation2006).
17. Kant, Critique of pure reason.
18. Robert Nozick (Citation2001), for example, has pointed out that ‘relativity’ is in some respects a misleading term, since Einstein was not a philosophical relativist.
19. See also Stables (Citation2004).
20. Interestingly for environmental ethics, and particularly Kantian conceptions, in such a situation, we tend to attribute a sort of desert or responsibility to the bull: ‘If he hadn’t charged I wouldn’t have tried to poke the stick in his eye …’ Do animals actually have responsibilities as well as rights?
21. See Stables (Citation2003b) for the implications of the implications of this for research into ‘effective schools’.
22. This example was prompted by an incident in the author's own teaching career. The Year 7 (11–12 year-old) students whose lesson was interrupted by the storm went on to write their own poetic accounts of it. Whatever the effects on them, the event is certainly still vivid in the writer's mind.
23. This is not, in Wittgensteinian terms, ‘language going on holiday’ or the mixing of language games. There remain different forms and fields of knowledge. From the premise that answers cannot be found in one language game to questions posed in another does not follow the conclusion that nothing that happens in one language game can affect another.