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Thought of the Week Archives
April 2002
April 1
I have tried to make the case that the function of literature as art
is to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible
worlds that a text can refer to. I have used the term "to subjunctivize,"
to render the world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation.
Literature subjunctivizes, makes strange, renders the obvious less so,
the unknowable less os as well, matters of value more open to reason and
intuition. Literature, in this spirit, is an instrument of freedom, lightness,
imagination, and yes, reason. It is our only hope against the long gray
night.
- Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, p. 159
April 8
There is a certain sickness in this drive for ever-increasing consumption
and the danger is that by being filled with a need for consumption the
person does not really solve the problem of inner passivity, of inner
vacuity, of anxiety, of being depressed because life in some way doesn't
make sense....
But the person who is lured to consumption becomes anxious, because
he becomes a passive person, because he always only takes things in, because
he does not actively experience anything of the world. The more anxious
he becomes, the more he must consume, and the more he consumes, the more
anxious he becomes.
- Erich Fromm, The Essential Fromm: Life Betweeen Having and Being
April 15
Life is not just one self sufficient story after another, each narratively
on its own bottom. Plot, characters, and setting all seem to continue
to expand. We attempt to stabilize our worlds with an enduring pantheon
of gods who continue to act in character, though circumstances change.
We construct a "life" by creating an identy-conserving Self who wakes
up the next day still mostly the same....We impose coherence on the past,
turn it into history.
- Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, pp. 143-144
April 22
To conceive of education as a matter of growth and development, of
instruction as nurture, of learning as a natural process of assimilation
and accommodation is the philosophical foundation of an organic pedagogy
whose aim is to liberate the innate powers of the mind, to guide the natural
bent.
- Anne Berthoff, The Making of Meaning, p. 88
April 29
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