One effect of the notion of art for art's sake and of the ideology of modernism is an insulation of the aesthetic from the cognitive. Art, it is claimed, is a presentation to sense, or an expression of emotion, but it is not, or it ought not to be, a source of knowledge. Bell, for example, condemned paintings such as Frith's extravaganzas of Victorian incident on the ground that, while they had much to teach us about the manners of the time, they were not sufficiently interesting as pure form to be considered art. One practical and immediate result of this insulation has been the devaluing of the arts as educational technique and content. I am going to argue that art is a model of and a method for knowing. Likewise, I will contend that knowing can profitably be considered an art. And I will try to draw out some of the implications of these claims for education.
I.
There is a constellation of notions - a constellation associated with philosophical and artistic modernism - which is being challenged both from within philosophy and from within art. In epistemology, these notions include: that knowledge is essentially propositional (that is, that to know is to know some claim to be true); that knowledge requires justification and that justification consists in a logical/mathematical demonstration from self-evident premises; that knowledge is something that occurs only cognitively, only in the intellect, in isolation from the emotions and one's creative impulses; and that knowledge is essentially a matter of one's internal states (that to know something about the external world, for example, is to have an adequate representation, an accurate picture or image of it in the head). All of these claims are conveniently associated in philosophy with the name of Descartes, but they have roots in ancient and medieval thought, and run in one form or another throughout the modern era.
In art history, criticism, and aesthetics, there is a corresponding set of notions, a set of notions that I have been at pains to describe and criticize already: that art is non-cognitive or purely affective (it plays on the emotions rather than the intellect); that art is a matter of form rather than content (what makes a work of art good is its "significant form"); that the "fine arts" ought to be distinguished from the crafts and the popular arts; that art is the object of a special sort of experience (aesthetic experience) and a special sort of value (aesthetic value that is unrelated to other human values, for example, moral values); and that art ought to be segregated from the life of the culture into special buildings (museums and concert halls, for example).
Let me say that I believe that all of these claims - both the epistemological and the aesthetic - are false or misleading. Nevertheless, they have exercised a profound influence over the development of our culture, and the results have in many cases been extremely worthwhile. The epistemological claims, for instance, have funded much modern scientific practice. And that practice has been a remarkable success in many ways, at least on its own terms; it has led to a greatly increased understanding and control of the natural world. (This issue will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter.) And the modernist picture of the arts, too, has had its astonishing and impressive results, such as the works of Beethoven, Matisse, Rodin, and Mies van der Rohe.
But we have also experienced some problems associated with these notions. The mechanistic view of the universe and the mania for its control have alienated us from nature and encouraged us in projects that have greatly damaged it. When we account for ourselves as, above all, beings who are capable of intellection, whose highest nature is cognitive rather than physical and affective, we come to feel separated from the order of nature, and justified in exploiting that order. And we have devalued or debased the spiritual traditions of our culture because they did not seem to be well enough justified. This has to some extent set us spiritually adrift, or at least it has set spiritually adrift those people for whom these notions have currency: the so-called intelligentsia or avant-garde. Likewise, as we have seen, the arts have been alienated from the everyday life of the culture: housed in museums and understood fully only by specialists, great works of art have been separated from everyday interpersonal transactions, and many activities that were before accounted arts (especially the crafts) have been demoted to a lower status.
We might almost say, in fact, that these epistemological and aesthetic developments are two sides of the same coin, that one is inconceivable without the other. The modern intellectual era is characterized by dualisms: dualisms, for example, between between mind and body and between reason and emotion. Whereas knowledge (paradigmatically, science and mathematics) has been associated with reason, art has been associated with emotion. The value that the tradition places on reason has, therefore, led to a concomitant devaluation of art. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in the writings of logical positivists such as A.J. Ayer, by whom expressions of aesthetic judgement are held to be simply expressions of emotion and hence (!) cognitively meaningless.
II.
In the course of the Meditations, Descartes worked himself into what is known as the "egocentric predicament"; he worked himself into a state where he (claimed to) doubt the existence of anything but his own mind. Whereas the existence of his own mind followed directly from the self-evident fact that he was thinking, the existence of his body and of the external world were (at this stage of the operation) merely unjustifiable assumptions. For all he could prove at this stage, the experiences he was having that were apparently of the external world, could be his own hallucinations, or hallucinations induced by a malicious being. He then proceded to deduce the existence of his body and the world. (However, this deduction is notoriously flawed.)
There are two things that I want to emphasize about this procedure: first, Descartes asserts that one's knowledge of the external world and even of one's body is of a different sort than knowledge of one's own mental states (in particular, the former is inferred from the latter). Second, Descartes concludes that he is essentially a "thing that thinks," and only contingently a thing that moves, or speaks, or interacts with other people.
This procedure, and the picture of what it is to be a human being that emerges from it, is the philosophical construction of a zone of individual isolation. Descartes' method for gaining absolutely certain knowledge is a retreat into himself, which is also a retreat to the foundations of knowledge conceived as incorrigible access to one's own inner states. We come to know the external world, if we come to know it at all, by examining our own `ideas,' that is, our own internal representatons of that world. And this picture is shared by empiricists such as Hume, for whom knowledge of the external world could only be arrived at through an examination of internal `sense impressions.' (I shall have more to say in the next chapter on the notion of representation.)
In addition, knowledge is conceived as a matter of knowing propositions to be true, in isolation from skills or activities. Knowing a proposition, in turn, is constituted by the relation of that proposition to other propositions known or believed by the agent: a relation of "justification." Knowledge, in a formula accepted in one form or another by almost all epistemologists since the time of Descartes, is justified true belief. That is, for one to know a proposition, the proposition has to be true, one has to believe it to be true, and one has to be in a position to show that it is true, or at any rate to give compelling reasons to think that it is true. It is as if the knower were a page on which a list of propositions was inscribed. That the person has other relations to these propositions, and to the real-world objects to which these propositions refer - relations of desire, aversion, interest, indifference - is hardly acknowledged. And when it is acknowledged, it is regarded as rather an embarassment. As knowers, as epistemic agents, it sometimes seems that we would be better off if we were machines for the manipulation of propositions (computers, for example), rather than the messy organisms we are.
However, the reason that these propositions are not mere syntactical items, mere arrangements of shapes, is that we reach through them into the world. We use words to refer because we have needs. This is why (so far, anyway) computers can't think: because they can't emote. Our beliefs, that is, are the obscure shadows of our needs; they are the means by which a tenuous organism clings to life in a threatening environment. Reference is need. If we ask how it is that my "idea" of a potato can actually refer to a potato in the real world, we cannot answer in terms of the character of the idea. I can refer to potatoes because I am a thing that hungers, and a thing into which potatoes can be incorporated. It is the function of our intellects to meet our needs. I've got to get my body in a position to eat, or have sex, or save my child. That means I've got to be detecting what's going on in my environment and responding to it. My logic is an obscure reconstruction of my values. The mind is not a disembodied soul, a computer, nor a brain. It is an organism in an environment.
Furthermore, we use the word `know' in ordinary language in several ways that are omitted by accounts that focus on propositional knowledge. There is, for example, knowing how to do something. This cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. I can teach my five-year-old daughter many propositions about how to ride a bicycle, but that does not teach her how to ride. That is something that her body has to learn. It is an adjustment of body to environment, not an argumentative structure.(1) Further, we speak of knowing someone or something. I know all sorts of propositions about Bill Clinton, but I do not know Bill Clinton. For that, I need to get face to face: I need to be physically present with Clinton. It seems to me that knowing a proposition to be true always depends on knowing how to do things, and on knowing people and things. If I did not know how to do anything, and furthermore didn't know anyone, I would never come to know the truth of any propositions at all. So in fact, these other notions are fundamental. Here again, the modernist legacy is one of artificial isolation.
An analogous process of isolation has taken place in the arts. As we have discussed, the ancient Greek word techne and its Latin cousin ars traditionally refer to the way something is made, rather than to the object made. To do something with art was to do it with great skill. Fundamentally, the term connoted craft, or the devoted and skilled use of materials for a satisfying and practical result. That was indeed the way such arts as painting, sculpture, and music were conceived through the renaissance, and most of the great practitioners of these arts were members of crafts guilds. Such arts were not pursued simply in order to make beautiful or aesthetically challenging objects, but for religious rite or festive occasion. (Indeed, this is also the function of the arts in most non-western cultures.)
To repeat myself with a twist: in the eighteenth century, in response to such developments as a growing middle class and increased secularization of culture, the notion of the "fine arts" was developed. This notion is characterized by the claim that works of art have no practical purpose, and that they are precisely to be contrasted with, rather than integrated into, the everyday life of the culture. They are the objects, in addition, of a particular mode of human experience - "aesthetic" experience - which is to be characterized in terms of "disinterested pleasure" (Kant) or "psychical distance" (Bullough). That is, works of art do not, or at any rate should not, play any role in what Bullough terms our "practical, actual lives." The aesthetic experience is not an expression of, say, sexual or economic desire, but is a pure appreciation of pure form. Works of art, hence, have no cognitive content, or they ought to be treated as if they had no cognitive content.
This gives rise to a situation in which art is simply regarded as a luxury, something with no practical value. Art is not something we need, but only something we desire as a rewarding occasion for non-practical cultivation of taste. And art is something that is done, or done really well, only by (slightly crazed) specialists.
III.
Though I think the modernist picture of human knowledge is false to the core, and though I think it can be shown to be false, I want to emphasize a common-sense objection.(2) First of all, we all know perfectly well that we are creatures who are embedded in an external world, a world of trees, cars, other people, and so forth. So there is no point, for present purposes, in trying to prove that. Second, we all know that we are participants in, and not merely spectators of, this world; we know that we alter our environment and that our environment alters us. I suggest that this is absolutely key in formulating a defensible epistemology. Third, though this is no argument against the modernist picture, it is worth pointing out that it is historically exhausted, that philosophers from Dewey and Heidegger to Rorty and Foucault have been busily showing us the bankruptcy of this picture for a hundred years.
As against the modernist conception of human experience - on which, to repeat, to experience the external world is to examine one's internal representations, as if one was watching a movie - we need to develop a conception in which experience is a dynamic participation in existence. We need to emphasize the situatedness of the subject in time and space and within a social context. Such an expanded notion of human situation is developed beautifully in Arnold Berleants's The Aesthetics of Environment:
This, then, is what environment is; this is what environment means: a fusion of organic awareness, of meanings both conscious and unaware, or geographical location, of physical presence, personal time, pervasive movement. There is no outward view, no distant scene. There are no suroundings separate from my presence in that place.(3)
I shall return to this notion of "fusion" presently. But notice that the modernist conception is related to dualism, the notion that mind and body are two radically distinct sorts of thing. This is not compatible with what we know about animals such as we are; it is not compatible with a naturalistic approach to what it is to be a human being. People are of the order of nature, are always in the process of trying to achieve a mutual adaptation of organism and environment. That situation is a participation in, or perhaps more deeply an identification with, the world.
Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the distinction of the organism from the environment is itself only a convenience, and is, in any case, fluid. We absorb parts of the environment into ourselves, and eliminate parts of ourselves into the environment. As we move through the environment, the environment, quite literally, moves through us. The materials out of which we are composed, and into which we impress our mark (out of which we construct shelter, for example) are the environment in transformation. And in social life, persons are parts, at times overwhelmingly important parts, of the environment of one another. I suggest that it is our complete embeddedness in the environment that makes human knowledge possible, and that we need to articulate a new orientation in epistemology that is true to our identity with the world.
Such an orientation would be new in some sense to the west, but it is the traditional conception of knowledge in many other cultures. For example, in India, the closest equivalent to the English term `knowledge' is darsana. Darsana is not spectation, but realization; to know an object is to become one with it, to realize it in oneself, as a computer realizes a program. Indeed, the King James Bible uses "know" to mean "have sex with," a usage that reveals something deep about knowledge. To know is to interpenetrate with someone or something out of desire.
Elsewhere, I have tried to construct such an epistemology using the notion of fusion. `Fusion,' as I use it, is a technical term describing certain relations. Technicalities aside, the central notion is this: to experience the world is not to enter a certain internal state. It is not to entertain, say, a certain mental image or representation which turns out to represent the world accurately. There is no purely internal state in virtue of which I experience the world, and which is necessary for me to have the experience of the world I am having. Experience is a dynamic transaction with the world; experience, as it were, occurs between myself and my environment, or rather arises in the interaction of myself and my environment. I am a physical object among other physical objects, and vision, hearing, and the other sense modalities are ways that physical objects have of bumping into each other. To see a tree is to be fused with a tree in this sense. Seeing is like breathing: a process in which part of my environment is incorporated into my body, in which the distinction between myself and the object is collapsed.
And here again, we are pursuing a structure of thought which has recurred throughout this book. We are already fused with our environment; we are already things among other things; this is already the source of any knowledge we possess. It is not a matter of ceasing to be spectators of the world; it is a matter of realizing that we never were, and never can be spectators. To be a spectator is to be safe. No one has ever been eaten by a movie monster. And we seek safety by pretending that we can experience the world at a safe distance. But the world is all around us and inside us; the world is us. There is no escape, no evasion, no surcease. Modern epistemology, like modern painting, perhaps, arises in part out of fear and hatred for the world; a new epistemology and a new art might arise out of joy in the world even in the face of cruelty and danger.
Knowledge supervenes, typically, on experience. For human subjects, a dynamic interchange with the environment yields a series of beliefs. If these beliefs are true, they constitute knowledge. Think here of scientific experimentation. The scientist sytematically (or haphazardly, for that matter) creates changes in the environment and experiences the result. Scientific experimentation is a transaction in which the scientist alters the environment and is in turn altered by the environment in the sense that the experiment effects knowledge, as Dewey saw with clarity in The Quest for Certainty. And as he also saw, the dream of absolute certainty is an illusion born of fear; belief acquired in interchange with the environment is always open to revision under further interchange. But knowledge is the result of an active construction within the environment.
This is particularly clear with regard to non-propositional knowledge. To know how to ride a bicycle, I must actually get on a bicycle and ride. In fact, I first have to get on a bicycle and fall down; gradually, I "get the feel of it," something that can only be accomplished in practical, and risky, life-experience. "Know-how," as we call it, is a practical affair; it is knowledge that can only arise in a full-scale integration with the environment, as for the cyclist the bicycle is an extension of the body. And I can get to know you only by interacting with you, only transactionally. I need to see something of your emotion, something of what you need, and what you reject; it will not help me very much to hear you reel off a list of propositions. In turn, my knowledge of you is a feel for you, rather than something propositional.
Likewise, I believe that the modernist conception of art is false and invidious. First of all, no human activity can be truly non-practical in the way the modernist mythos directs. When it comes time for people to make things or look at things or listen to things, they cannot leave the normal range of human desires behind. I might go to the museum to impress my friends or relax after a hard day; one way or another, if I go at all, I go with a human purpose. And when I see a picture, for example, of a nude person or a serene landscape, I respond not, or not only, to the pure form - the combination of lines and colors - but also to what is depicted. And this response is an engagement rather than a disengagement of desire. Art, in other words, emerges from and fulfills real human needs.
And it is worth noting that, even as the "fine arts" are segregated from the life of the culture, the full range of what are traditionally accounted arts - the crafts, the popular arts (such as blues and country music) - are all the while just as fundamental to the life of the culture as ever. If we are willing to countenance such activities as art, then the everyday life of the culture remains permeated with art. Mara Miller, in her book The Garden as an Art, points out that the garden has been regarded as an art for most of western history, and is so regarded even today in Japanese culture, for example. And she points out also that the garden as art is not compatible with "aesthetic distance":
What does it mean for a work of art to be also a site? What are the implications of this for the garden as a work of art?
For one thing, we enter it. It is spatially and temporally continuous with the rest of the world in which we live. There is no change of scale. Psychic distance is severely challenged, as physical distance is literally destroyed. We do not merely look at the garden, we are surrounded by it, bringing the same psychological habits of perception to the garden that we bring to any other environment. In addition, the tempo of our experience of the garden is the same as that of ordinary life. To the extent that special tempi may be called for, we ourselves initiate the change, as we do in our normal environment, rather than respond to changes initiated externally, as we do in listening to music or watching a film or drama.(4)
Indeed, many folks devote to their gardens the sort of absorbed activity that I have describing as art. But the nature of the garden involves the slow mutual adaptation of organism and environment that is, in germ, human existence in the world. Recovery of the arthood of gardens is, hence, recovery of art outside the modernist myths, and recovery of ourselves in our fusion with the world.
Such arts as popular music, however, are regarded as "low," primarily because they are so explicitly intended for engagement; for example, they engage the body in dance.
As I have said, I would like to regard art as a way of doing. We are engaged in art when we are performing some activity for its own sake as well as for the sake of whatever end may be in view. And the results of such activities, if they give rise to objects which are themselves inherently satisfying to use for their ends, are works of art. So the experience of a painting may be inherently satisfying, as well as a needed relaxation or a challenging conceptual exercise.
The fundamental experience of art, as I said in the first chapter, is an experience of absorption. Notice that the notions of absorption and fusion are closely related: to become absorbed in something is to become fused with it. Now I want to distinguish the varieties of fusion according to their objects, according to that with which the individual becomes fused. And I want to assert that it is the characteristic function of art to achieve fusion in all these dimensions.(5)
First of all, there is intrapersonal fusion, that is, an integration of the capacities and faculties of a single person. Art, I claim, typically effects such an integration. When one is engaged in art, either as a maker or an experiencer, many of one's faculties - emotional, cognitive, physical - are called into play simultaneously. This is, in part, what makes the activity autotelic; one has the sensation that one is being made whole in the activity itself, an experience that is inherently satisfying. In fact, I think that this is what characteristically leads to what we regard as masterpieces of art; in them, the intellectual and the emotional are exquisitely balanced, and embodied in a made object.
Second, there is fusion of the person with the environment. This is perhaps the dimension of fusion that I have emphasized most so far; it includes the absorption of the artist in her materials, and the absorption of the viewer in the work of art. In both cases, one experiences a "loss of self." And I want to interpret that phrase quite literally as the absorption of oneself into the `external' object. Through the loss of self one achieves the expansion of self: as one becomes identified with what surrounds one, one encompasses it even as it encompasses one. This is typified, for instance, by Taoist and and Zen approaches to art, as well as the use of art in yoga as an object of identification. It is also the function, for example, of the medicine bundles of the Menominee tribe. Here one places tokens of various animals into a bundle, with the result that one becomes fused with that animal; one gains, for example, the hunting prowess and ferocity of a weasel. (I will return to this example in the next chapter.) The bundle "represents" animals only in the service of self-identification.
Third, there is interpersonal fusion. This, I take it, is again a central and characteristic feature of the making and experiencing of works of art. It can be as mundane as the attempt to be understood as one writes a poem, say, or as ecstatic as a festival in which one's sense of individuality is emptied into a collective activity and consciousness. Indeed, much art of much of the world is made and deployed in social and festive contexts. Think again here of the tea ceremony. Navajo "sings" for example, though they have practical purposes such as healing, incorporate many of the arts (story-telling, music, and sand-painting, for example) into a context that is a creation and affirmation of a culture, and of the individual's place within that culture. And the same might be said, for example, of two-step country and western dancing. As one performs a line dance, the agent of the action becomes the group, acting both spontaneously and with perfect coordination. What music one listens to, what visual art one enjoys, how one adorns oneself, and so forth: all these are artistic means of expressing cultural identification.
Finally, art may achieve cosmic or spiritual fusion with the divine (if any) or even with the universe as a whole. This is surely in some sense the goal of religious art of all sorts. Christian art of the middle ages, for example, is an attempt to depict the divine realm, to make it sensible, that is, to bring it together with the world in which we live. Though I am not currently interested in evaluating whether there is any truth in this purported function of art, I want to point out that most of the world's great art has been made for such purposes. And in fact all these dimensions of fusion are themselves fused. People in a festival, for example, may be employing objects they have shaped in a culturally significant way to achieve fusion with their gods.
IV.
If we identify fusion as the source of our knowledge about the world and one another, and if we identify art as a source of fusion of a particularluy intense and systematic sort, then it follows that art is an important source and paradigm of knowledge. This is precisely what is denied by the modernist picture, with its consignment of art to the realm of the `emotive.' But one thing that we have been experiencing here is the collapse of the distinction between the emotive and the cognitive. We come to know because we are in a certain situation, and we retain our knowledge because we are moved and changed in certain ways by that situation. In these processes, emotion and cognition operate simultaneously, or rather they are distinguishable only as moments embedded in the total experience.
It is by the manipulation of materials that we come to know those materials, that is, to know a part of our world, and this is also how we come to know how to do various things with materials. That is, knowledge is, paradigmatically, the skilled making that is the primordial meaning of `art.' And of course, in this process, we also come to know various propositions, for example, those embodying procedures for the further development of skills. We come to be able to describe, say, clay, and the vessel made of clay, with a depth and an appreciation that only arises in thorough and involving experience. And this in turn ramifies into our experience of the vessel thus made, and of similar vessels: as we understand more, our experience of use is enriched. Indeed, the experience of making a vessel may lead to a cherishing of vessels and their makers, an understanding of and respect for persons and things that could not arise by other means.
Think, as well, about how we in fact come to learn about our own cultures and about what it means to be a member of our culture. We learn this by participation in shared rites and celebrations, in collaborative works of art. That is, we learn it by an experience of fusion among members of our culture, as at parades, football games, musical performances, classrooms. And with regard to other cultures: it is one thing to master a set of propositions about them and quite another to meet them face to face, to be confronted by their people and their art. It is in the possibility of that fusion that multi-cultural understanding might be realized.
Finally, think about how we learn about ourselves, learn who we are and what we are capable of doing. First of all, we learn this in all the ways mentioned above: we construct ourselves, or find out how we are constructed, as we engage in our cultures and with our world: always by active participation, artistic participation, rather than by passive reception. It is often held that one finds out about oneself by introspection, by retreating into oneself to explore the inner terrain. In general, however, I cannot come to know my own capacities without employing my capacities in the world; I cannot know my potential without beginning to realize it externally; I cannot know what I love doing without doing things. All of this is at once a gathering of knowledge about the world and about oneself. And it can be profitably understood on the model of art. It is an odd fact that you cannot find out what you love doing by simply going out and running through a set of activities. You have to let yourself love, allow yourself to become entrapped in the activity itself. Love is not something you make happen, but something you allow to happen in an absorption in an activity (or, for that matter, in a person).
V.
The reader will, at this point, hardly be surprised to find that this conception of knowing as an art, and of art as a fundamental source of knowledge, requires a deep re-envisioning of the aims and practices of education.
The model of education suggested by the modernist picture is one in which the student is a passive and passionless absorber of propositions. Recall that on this picture, knowledge is propositional, and that justification (which is held to be necessary for knowledge) is a result of the evidentiary relations obtaining between propositions. So if a teacher can, as it were, inscribe the right set of propositions on the tabula rasa of the student, the teacher has imparted knowledge. The deepest and most obvious impulse that a child has is to interact actively and physically with the environment. But we try to make them sit still as we lecture to them, or as they memorize or copy propositions out of books. The impulse to move is itself a demand for knowledge, it is an impulse for exploration of and fusion with the environment, and hence of the child's own capacities. Dance and sport, as concerted forms of movement, are ways of knowing.
Note, as one symptom of the modernist conception of education, the way that the results of education are measured in America: by standardized tests. These simply attempt to assess whether the student has memorized the desired propositions. To say that this process is a dehumanization of education is an understatement. By the standards deployed in the SAT, the computer that grades the exam is more knowledgeable than the people who take it. Notice, however, that the computer knows nothing whatever. That in itself ought to indicate that the models of knowledge and of education in play here are radically misguided. And I hope it is clear by now that such tests could not possibly measure knowledge in its richest sense. Try to imagine a multiple-choice test for art.
It is hardly surprising that this picture makes the arts peripheral to education. Whereas the arts consist of active exploration and administration of materials and states of affairs, our goal is the inscription of propositions. The segregation of art as an emotive luxury item in our culture immediately renders the arts superfluous to our educational aims. And indeed, when school budgets are trimmed, it is invariably arts education that is the first to go.
I have argued that knowledge is always a result of a transaction between persons and environments, that knowledge always is a feature of the situation in which both the knower and the known are embedded. It follows, I think, that the most effective means of education is to engage the student as actively as possible in as wide as possible a variety of situations. The arts are precisely a systematic range of situations in which people can be embedded, and they are the sorts of situations most elaborately developed as sources of knowledge. Over many centuries, we have found that some materials are particularly fascinating to work, and, worked, are particularly satisfying to employ in a range of capacities. We have dubbed these processes `arts.' And, again over a period of centuries, we have labored to understand how best to employ these materials in these capacities. Thus, the arts form a body of cultural tradition for teaching, a set of resources for the focused achievement of fusion, and, hence, knowledge.
Note, too, that these particular materials and processes have come to be accounted arts because they are particularly suited to give rise to activites that can be pursued for their own sake as well as for the sake of an end. For just this reason, the arts pluck out that thorn in the side of educators: the lack of motivation. If you teach a child to paint or to make music, you may well find it more difficult to stop than to start her. The structure of motivation in present-day American education is absurdly teleological; we educate people to "grow the economy," "achieve competitiveness in the global marketplace," "develop human resources." That such ends are incapable of motivating students is too obvious to need emphasis. In fact, it is absurd to think that such goals could motivate anyone to do anything. After all, whatever I do, its effect on American global competitiveness is less than negligible.
But the arts are the arts precisely because they spontaneously generate a structure of motivation. They provide the motivation to pursue the activity from within the character of the activity itself. Furthermore, they make use of the fundamental hiuman impulse to explore and transform the environment in inherently satisfying ways. Perhaps the most profound change that would be achieved by centralizing the arts as a model and a method for education is that this would provide a fundamental shift in the pursuit of educational ends. This also holds out the possibility of unlocking the creativity of students, of allowing them to find what they love doing and what they can do best. Ironically enough, that is itself likely to increase "productivity."
Here, however, we also see the possibility of achieving a profound moral transformation in how students are regarded and treated in the educational setting. For when we attempt to imprint propositions on people in order to develop them as economic resources, we are using these people as mere means to achieve an extrinsic goal. We are treating them as if they were so much bauxite awaiting technological development. Indeed, this picture is often accompanied by the ever-increasing demand for more technology in the classroom, as if machines could educate people where people cannot. There is nothing wrong with technology in the classroom (indeed, the arts themselves, as we shall see, are technologies in the oldest sense), but looking at the classroom itself as a technology for the processing of raw materials into valuable human resources is both educationally counter-productive and dehumanizing.
So the final suggestion is this: that the activity of teaching itself can be understood as an art, or transformed into an art. One teaches, when one teaches as an art, for the sake teaching itself, and in devotion to the students for their own sake as human beings, rather than as resources to be developed for yet other ends. Indeed, I believe that most teachers embarked on careers in teaching for just such reasons, because the activity is inherently satisfying. Yet the technological picture of the classroom that has resulted from the modernist picture of art and knowledge forces teachers to aim at some end without regard to the means. Teaching, like art and knowledge, is an experience of fusion, and teaching, like art and knowledge at their epiphanic moments, is a fusion in love.
1. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson House, 1949), chapter II.
2. For an elaborate attack on al of its aspects, see my book Knowledge Without Justification.
3. Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), p.34.
4. Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp.102, 103.
5. This discussion is indebted to Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists (New York: New York University Press, 1988), chapter 6.