This is not really Great Works blog.

Rather, it is more like a Great Works learning portal –at once a philosophy of digital learning and a practice of digital learning.

For the duration of the Fall 2018 semester this digital space will serve both as a storage repository for my Great Works 2850 students to submit both informal and formal writing assignments, and additionally serve as a kind of course-guide to our chief home-practice and classroom-practice this semester — namely what I call our “digital methodology.”  

Welcome!

Striking and vaguely uncanny is that Alexandre Koyré — quoted at the top of the page —  understood the scientific “instruments” of the modern age (which includes all the instruments of our “digital age”) firstly, not exactly as tactile-material-inanimate “tools” (which is how we normally understand and define “instruments”) but rather as extensions of, or as aids to, something like mystical theological desire — specifically the desire “to see what no one had ever seen before” of the heavens, where Galileo’s stars were thought to live. Koyré observes that where most people in Galileo’s time marked and guarded an unsurpassable limit with regard to the process of scientific observation, Galileo comprehended — and he incarnated when he invented his instruments — infinite possibility: the desire to always see more than has already been seen.

Effectively we will be using “instruments” all semester, too. We will be using digital instruments, specifically digital videos — and we will be using them precisely in harmony with Koyré’s characterization of them.  Specifically, we will be using the modern resources of “the digital” (i.e., video) always in the interest of seeing “what no one had ever seen before” of our so-called “great works,” and always in the interest of making visible, incarnating, “making-flesh” certain possibilities of meaning that frankly would not have been possible without a digital methodology… such as the one that we’ll be using all semester.  That is, we will not so much only read our great works this semester but more poignantly experience the ways in which certain digital users have given expression to their own experience of our semester’s great works in online video creations. Consequently, what we (in the course our semester) will necessarily see and experience is not just how I (“Mr. Professor”) see and experience our great works — or how you or how one professional scholar-critic see and experience our great works — but rather how a vast galaxy of seers see and experience them. Our experience of the many and myriad ways of seeing and experiencing our great works through video responses to them is an experience that is irreducible to no one experience but inclusive of ALL of them.  Effectively, we will be using the resources of the digital to allow a “great” galaxy of seeing and experiencing to in-form our own seeing and experiencing of our semester’s great works.    

Our “digital methodology” abides in a kind of spying process. It is a process that mainly exists to engender the appreciation of aesthetic appreciation — to engender, in other words, not only that bond of affection and appreciation that, firstly, exists (whether actually or potentially) between ourselves and the great works, but also, secondly, between ourselves and other digital users like ourselves, and, thirdly and most importantly, between online digital commentators on our great works and the great works themselves.  Our chief practice this semester — encompassing 50 percent of the student’s grade is to simply spy out online video creations related to our great works and next communicate something of the reality of “aesthetic appreciation” that he / she has spied out in a short-informal written commentary (to be put on the student’s personal blog) and in a short-playful-informal classroom presentation (to be delivered to your classmates on a scheduled date).   

 Incidentally, Wikipedia’s simple definition of aesthetics serves us well, because note, it entails the experience of “the appreciation of beauty,” sometimes referred to as the experience of love:

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty.  

Another way of saying this is to say that aesthetics is a discipline of asking the question: what makes us recognize and, most importantly, appreciate somethings (but not all things) as things of beauty, as radiating with a power of attraction? 

OUR SEMESTER LONG PRACTICE IN DETAIL 

Our basic activity is to recognize and appreciate another digital user’s enthusiasm for a great work. 

Each student will create his / her own Baruch blog, to include:

1.  a page for each “great work”
2.  one digital online response to the “great work” that the student found personally interesting / inspiring and which the student identified as worthy of contributing to our semester long immersion in aesthetic appreciation and experience. 
3. finally the student will offer a comment aimed at elucidating the ways in which the video commentary that the student selected in some sense expresses an enthusiastic aesthetic experience — precisely as according to our semester-long exploration and experimentation with aesthetic experience, the terms and contours of which I will come to spell out below shortly.

   * * * note * * *

We are NOT called to understand our blog glosses on public video commentaries as exercises of formal writing on the core (aesthetic) experiences of great works but rather as starting points for classroom discussion on this core experience, a core experience to be developed all semester in face-to-face classroom discussions.  Therefore, optimal is to isolate a one (or two) minute section of the video that you will be commenting on, because it is this one (or two) minute section of the video that you will be representing to the class as, in some sense, expressive of aesthetic appreciation / experience. 

* * * *

Students will be scheduled daily to present their blog pages to the class, to explain their digital selection and comment, and students will do so chiefly in the interest of “sharing in the promotion” of aesthetic experience with the rest of the class.

By the end of the semester students will have built a blog to include a “Digital Commentary” page corresponding with each of our 12 great works, terminating in a 12-page digital commentary blog — “Digital Glosses on Great Experiences” — to be submitted as a final project.

 

In short, our most basic practice is one of glossing other peoples’ video glosses on our semester’s great works; yet our more elaborate practice is one of glossing the more aesthetical dimensions — which entail the appreciative dimensions — of these online video appreciations. 

Sharing and Promoting Aesthetic Experience as a Form of Learning and Knowing 

Mine is a methodology that desires to be conducive to a process of accessing “the great experience of a great work” through a feeling of reverential appreciation — specifically through a feeling of reverential appreciation for another digital user’s way of communicating love for a great work’s great experience by promoting, publicizing, and possibly making viral something of a love for that experience online.

The philosopher-educator John Dewy, who we will read all semester, argued that to know a work of art at all is “to share in…and to promote” the very experiences and “vital processes” (i.e., the aesthetic experiences) that the artist went through in order to create his / her work. And so it is on Dewy’s grounds that we can even say that the digital users online offering video commentaries as a form of “sharing” and “promoting” our great works in fact do, in some sense, “know” our great works.

Holding fast to the aim of sharing and promoting the uniquely aesthetical dimensions of our semester’s great works, students will be invited to occupy a place of unbounded scholarly-academic responsibility as a form of being invited to engage, firstly, in a process of selection — a process of selecting “appropriate” digital glosses from out of the numberless (potentially “inappropriate”) creative digital glosses to our semester’s “great works” all over the Web; and, secondly, students will be invited to occupy a place of scholarly-academic responsibility as a form of being invited to engage in a process of offering both written and spoken communications (during scheduled class times) on the more aesthetical dimensions of the online digital glosses of their free choosing.

To conclude, we will engage BOTH “a practice” (namely a digital methodology) and “a philosophy” of Humanities Learning through the “instruments” of the digital as according to Koyré definition.  

On the following few pages, I’ll explore both our semester-long  “practice” and the  “philosophy” from which it springs.