Update – see the official Apple tribute to Jobs. Notable is Jobs’ valuing the liberal arts.
This on the first anniversary of Job’s passing. Death, as I analogize it, is a truck with its headlights on, bearing down upon one standing in the middle of the road. So carpe diem!
iTunes (free)
Nagel in The Nation
Tye in 3:AM
Here is the opening to Elizabeth Corey’s essay for the Companion.
I have often thought that one of the best introductions to the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott is a children’s book by Arnold Lobel. Grasshopper on the Road describes the journey of a remarkably even-tempered grasshopper who meets various other insects on his way down a pleasant country lane. Each of these insects displays some modern pathology. Grasshopper first encounters the members of the “I Love Morning” club, who raise placards extolling the virtues of morning while shouting such slogans as “Morning is Best” and “Hooray for Morning.” Grasshopper is welcomed into the club when he reveals that he, too, loves morning. But when he remarks that he also loves afternoon and evening, the other insects turn on him in disgust and order him out of their ranks. A bit later, he meets “The Sweeper,” a housefly who has noticed a speck of dust on her rug. Her effort to sweep it away has made her aware of the dust that has collected on the floor next to the rug, and also on her front stoop and sidewalk. She realizes, in despair, that there is also a great deal of dust on the road in front of her house. It is here, as she attempts to sweep clean a gravel road, that she meets Grasshopper. The book is full of subtle political commentary of this sort. It playfully lampoons the vanity of attempts to control the world, the desire of people to find purpose in life by joining a movement, and the general human inability to enjoy life as it happens. It is a wonderfully Oakeshottian book.
The Louis Armstrong House and Museum took a step toward further raising its profile by hiring its first curator in David L. Reese.
Here is a trailer of Corey Abel’s essay “Whatever It Turns Out To Be: Oakeshott on Aesthetic Experience,” the eighth essay in the run-up to the Companion’s official publication on October 19:
Orbaneja, a fictional painter from a real town, is criticized by Don Quixote for painting so badly that he produces only “whatever emerges,” so that he must append a sign to his work. He paints a cockerel “so unlike a real cockerel that he had to write in capital letters by its side: “This is a cockerel’.” Cervantes uses the tale twice in the second part of Don Quixote, in which our hero confronts a literary representation of himself that has been published almost simultaneously with his own adventures. Its representational accuracy concerns him, as does the disturbing possibility that his own “history” could be like Orbaneja’s painting, “needing a commentary to make it intelligible.” In “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1959), Oakeshott uses Orbaneja to introduce beauty, friendship, and the “delightful insanity” of childhood. In Don Quixote, the tale of Orbaneja introduces a discussion of the relation between poetry and history. When Oakeshott’s discussion turns to poetry in “The Voice of Poetry” the first footnote in the section cites passages in Aristotle’s Poetics differentiating poetry from “medicine or natural science” and from “history.” Orbaneja, the painter Oakeshott says all poets are like, allusively introduces us to Oakeshott’s themes — creativity and imitation, signs, beauty, love and friendship, childhood, Aristotle, the relation of poetry, science, and history.
Remembering Marc Bolan who died on this day not far from where I used to live in SW London. I think that though Bolan was highly respected by other major artists of the day (Bowie for one) Bolan never was able to escape the teen idol yoke.
Here is a recent news item: Mystery of Marc Bolan’s death solved
Here is the power pop of Bolan at his peak:
and a late characteristically quirky flourish from his very short career:
Here is a rather obscure and confused invocation of stigmergy.
Our habits, the way we present ourselves to others and the persona we have created, our social context – all these things constrain us, limit our capacity for change, and drag the “old” us into any attempt to start afresh. Kol Nidre annuls those vows and breaks the chains that hold us back from reassessing our goals and practices as the year begins.
This is vulgarly rationalistic and at odds with custom and tradition which is by it’s very nature is stigmergic.
To human beings, “essence” and “self” depend on ideals and values, on will and commitment, and on actions and practice. The moment we truly change course on those levels, we are different – and we will begin to build other stigmergy structures that are better suited for the new place that we want to be.
There is a tension here. Mereological theorizing from a stigmergic perspective does not preclude personal identity issues: “actions and practice” are part and parcel of stigmergy.
Jazz As A Liberal Arts Education
Liebman more directly argues that a jazz education, though unlikely to result in a full-time performance career, provides exposure to a lot more than technical knowledge. “Playing jazz combines several qualities: instinct, honesty, confidence, experience, trust, imagination and a positive attitude . . .
From Why Jazz Education?
Having trailed the chapters comprising section II of the Companion I now present my co-editor’s piece.
Michael Oakeshott’s writings on education form one of the most attractive aspects of his philosophy and have duly garnered considerable attention. They evoke an ideal of liberal learning for its own sake, freed from the narrowing necessities of practical life and social purpose. This ideal is summed up in Oakeshott’s famous image of the university as a “conversation” between the various modes of understanding that make up our civilization, a conversation that has no predetermined course or destination, an “unrehearsed intellectual adventure” (VLL 39). Of this ideal, Noel Annan wrote: “It was the finest evocation of “the idea of the university’ since Newman; and more subtle and persuasive.” As I hope to show, however, Oakeshott’s philosophy of education is not without its difficulties, and these difficulties largely mirror the ones that run through his philosophy as a whole. In its formalism, conceptual compartmentalization, and rigid separation of theory and practice, Oakeshott’s philosophy of education does not adequately address the problems of specialization, intellectual fragmentation, and cultural isolation that currently afflict education, especially higher education, today.
