Philosophy of education 9:1

CD/mp3 207, first part of ninth Cincinnati lecture on philosophy of education. Corresponds to CWL 10: 208-21. Sponsored by Tad Dunne. The discussion moves to art and history, each as a turn to ordinary living in its concrete potentialities. Differentiated intellectual consciousness is a withdrawal for a return. What one returns to is the concrete functioning of the whole, in which there is an organic interrelation and interdependence of the parts of the subject with respect to the whole, and of the individual subject with respect to the historically changing group. Art mirrors that organic functioning. Lonergan bases his notion of art on Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form. Art is an objectification of a purely experiential pattern. The words in the definition are considered one by one. The pattern in a work of art is the set of internal relations between its elements. The pattern is experiential in that to be conscious of something involves a patterning of the perceived and of the feelings connected with the perceiving. A pure pattern excludes alien patterns that instrumentalize experience. Fourth, purely experiential: of the seen as seen, of the heard as heard, of the felt as felt. Such a pattern is a release. Such experience is allowed its full complement of feelings, and falls into its own proper pattern and rhythms. The purely experiential pattern has a meaning, and the meaning is elemental. Knowledge is rooted in an identity of the sensible and the sense in act, and of the intellect and the intelligible in act. This is the initial stage of meaning, elemental meaning. Elemental meaning is a transformation of one's world. Elemental meaning can be set in a conceptual field, but words will not reproduce it. The artist withdraws from the ready-made world to explore possibilities of fuller living in a richer world. Art is objectification. The purely experiential pattern is unfolded, made explicit, unveiled, revealed. This process is analogous to the process from the act of understanding to the definition. It involves an idealization of the purely experiential pattern. The meaning of the symbolic and the artistic provides an apprehension of the reality behind the abstraction 'figures of speech.' The real meaning of simile, metaphor, and so on, is the normal flow of symbolic consciousness.

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Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon