[MD] Dewey, Pirsig Book

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

Double dang it!!!!! Now it looks as if my access to the article is because I am
on a PSU domain. If you can't view the article
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_journal_of_aesthetic_education/v040/40.2granger.html), and would like to read it, please email me and I will send you a copy.
-Arlo

>From the article

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Accordingly, this article will explore the idea of aesthetic
education—conceived in its broadest sense—using a mainly Deweyan lens.
Moreover, it will do so by examining everyday classroom practices as they are
informed by the general social and philosophical culture of education. For it
is here, Dewey suggests, that the limitations of conventional thinking about
the arts might take their greatest toll on students' prospects for developing a
wide range of richly funded experiences. To make the discussion more contextual
and concrete than Dewey's highly conceptual texts themselves permit, we will
try to imagine what this Deweyan alternative might look like—its problems and
possibilities—through selected scenes from Robert Pirsig's autobiographical
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.6 In these brief scenes, Pirsig (the
narrator) is working to recall some of his past successes and failures in
making qualitative immediacy, as the primary media of aesthetic education, a
working concept in the teaching of college freshman English. Like Dewey, Pirsig
holds to the primacy in experience of the immediate [End Page 46] qualitative
world. He also sees himself as very much an exponent of the pragmatist
tradition in philosophy.7

Quality and Context

Pirsig begins his recollections by telling us that his initial assignment to
teach several sections of freshman English—or rhetoric—had created what
appeared for a time an intractable problem. The problem, as Pirsig then saw it,
was essentially this: How, especially given his own deeply analytical mind,
could he effectively teach something like rhetoric, "the most unprecise,
unanalytic, amorphous area in the entire [University]"? (ZMM, 156). How, as he
would later put it, could he to teach "Quality?"8

The truth be told, Pirsig knew very well what the preponderance of the English
department faculty expected of him: "What you're supposed to do in most
freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a little essay or short story, discuss how
the writer has done certain little things to achieve certain little effects,
and then have the students write an imitative little essay or short story to
see if they can do the same little things" (ZMM, 156). This highly formalistic
approach to teaching rhetoric was relatively painless to put into practice,
Pirsig knew. Yet it always seemed much less than satisfactory to him, and he
could speak from firsthand experience.

Pirsig had tried using "calculated mimicry" of this sort in his teaching any
number of times, but on each occasion a dispiriting mediocrity would eventually
result. The students seldom achieved anything remotely close to the models they
were given. Typically, in fact, their writing exhibited an overall decrease in
quality. The most daunting problem was that every "little" rule of composition
Pirsig attempted to teach them was "so full of exceptions and contradictions
and qualifications and confusions that he wished he'd never come across the
rule in the first place" (ZMM, 156). And when the students did manage to apply
one of the rules correctly, it often seemed "pasted on to the writing after the
writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the
fact" (ZMM, 156). Yet Pirsig was convinced that the high-quality writers the
students were asked to imitate worked without a premeditated regard for these
formal rules. They had plainly already developed an immediate sense of the
aesthetics of composition; they used previously refined habits to put down
"whatever sounded right [and] then [went] back to see if it still sounded right
and chang[ed] it if it didn't" (ZMM, 156). The efforts of those writers who
wrote with calculated premeditation, on the other hand, characteristically "had
a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but didn't pour" (ZMM, 156).

Pirsig's problem, then, looked much like the proverbial chicken or egg paradox.
Form and content—one or the other must seemingly be preeminent in teaching
rhetoric, even though they obviously cannot function [End Page 47]
independently. Is placing form before content really the better strategy here?
he asked himself. Or is the opposite maybe the case? It was the dualistic logic
of an age-old dilemma. Like Dewey before him, Pirsig would soon learn to
distrust such either/or formulations.9

The turning point here was Pirsig's increasing awareness that (to use Dewey's
terminology) qualities are innately contextual, the function of a larger
situational whole. Since they are both concrete and existential, they cannot
survive on their own uneviscerated. "When you try to say what the quality is,
apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof. There's nothing to talk
about," is how Pirsig put it (ZMM, 163). With this important realization Pirsig
moved to scrap the whole conventional approach to teaching rhetoric. Up to now
he had felt "compelled by the academic system to say what he wanted" from the
students, but it greatly disturbed him that those "who went along with [the]
rules were then condemned for their inability to be creative or produce
[high-quality] work. Now that was over with" (ZMM, 187).

About midway through Art as Experience, Dewey identifies for us the means of a
possible alternative to these conventions. It accords well, I believe, with the
new trajectory that Pirsig's teaching was about to take:

    If art is an intrinsic quality of activity, we cannot divide and subdivide
it. . . . Not only is it impossible that language should duplicate the infinite
variety of individualized qualities that exist, but it is wholly undesirable
and unneeded that it should do so. The unique quality of a quality is found in
experience itself; it is there and sufficiently there not to need reduplication
in language. The latter serves its scientific or its intellectual purpose as it
gives directions as to how to come upon these qualities in experience. The more
generalized and simple the direction the better. The more uselessly detailed
they are, the more they confuse instead of guiding. But words serve their
poetic purpose in the degree in which they summon and evoke into active
operation the vital responses that are present whenever we experience
qualities. 

(AE, 218-20, my emphasis)

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