Tag: architecture

Two Kinds of Extra Understanding: Pre and Post

We argue here in this proposal for an educational remedy that two dimensions of understanding must be added to “retro-fit” education.

In the first addition, call it pre-understanding, a student is given an overview not only of the field but of his or her life as well as the “techno-commercial” environment that characterizes the globe.

Pre-understanding includes such “overall cautions” offered to you by Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century classic Spanish play, Life is a Dream (Spanish: La vida es sueño). A student would perhaps ask: “what would it be like if I faced this “dreamlike quality” of life, as shown by the Spanish play, and suddenly realized that a life of “perfect myopia” is not what I want.

Hannah Arendt warns similarly of a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Again, I, the student ask: do I want such a Hannah Arendt-type leaf-in-the-whirlwind-like life, buried further under Calderón de la Barca’s “dream state”?

But that’s not all: while I’m learning about these “life dangers,” all around me from my block to the whole world, humanity does its “techno-commerce” via container ships and robots, hundreds of millions of vehicles and smartphones, multilateral exchange rates, and tariff policies. Real understanding has one eye on the personal and the other on the impersonal and not one or the other.

All of these personal and impersonal layers of the full truth must be faced and followed, “en face,” as they say in French (i.e., “without blinking”).

Call all this pre-understanding which includes of course a sense of how my “field” or major or concentration fits into the “architecture of knowledge” and not in isolation without connections or a “ramification structure.”

Post-understanding comes from the other end: my lifelong effort, after just about all that I learned about the six wives of King Henry VIII and the “mean value theorem”/Rolle’s theorem in freshman math, have been completely forgotten and have utterly evaporated in my mind, to re-understand my life and times and book-learning.

Pre-and post-understanding together allows the Wittgenstein phenomenon of “light falls gradually over the whole.”

Without these deeper dimensions of educational remedy, the student as a person would mostly stumble from “pillar to post” with “perfect myopia.” Education mostly adds to all the “fragmentariness” of the modern world and is in that sense, incomplete or even disorienting.

Education in this deep sense is supposed to be the antidote to this overall sense of modern “shapelessness,” to use Kierkegaard’s term.

Essay 103: “Nervous Breakdowns” for Countries or Regions?

Hannah Arendt who became world famous with her Eichmann in Jerusalem 1960s book, says in her essays that Europe in the twentieth century was determined by a kind of national “nervous breakdown” in and centered on Germany.

If we allow for the fact that this is a “façon de parler” (way of expressing something) and not a rigorous comparison (a country is not one person writ large) Arendt’s figure of speech is suggestive and evocative.

Here’s an example. In 1919, Walter Gropius (died in 1969) gave a speech to students of his “Bauhaus” school, which sounds like a person picking up on a kind of national nervous breakdown:

First of all, Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar.

Gropius says (July 1919, speech to Bauhaus students):

“We find ourselves in a tremendous catastrophe of world history, a transformation of the whole of life and the whole of inner man.
We now have to forget the time before the war, which was totally different.

The more quickly we adapt to the new changed world, to its new, if austere beauties, the sooner the individual will be able to find his subjective happiness.
We will be more spiritual and profound as a result of the German distress.
As the economic opportunities sink, the spiritual ones have already risen enormously.”

(quoted in German Expressionism, University of California Press, 1990, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long, page 250, “July 1919 Gropius speech to Bauhaus students”).

We are reminded of Kierkegaard’s (died in 1855) anatomy of the kinds of human despair in his The Sickness unto Death.

The Gropius despair is a bit different because it mirrors a real or imagined German national catastrophe which is folded into a “catastrophe of world history.”

World War I and its aftermath loom as a kind of infinite “desolation row” for Gropius and we cannot judge what percentage of the despair is German and what percentage has to do with Gropius’s subjective state of mind.

In any case, we do have the sense of a “nervous breakdown” atmosphere, nationally and personally.

Might we also wonder if Anglo-America is flirting with such a “nervous breakdown” in 2019?

Essay 66: Education and the Question of Fecklessness

We propose in Meta Intelligence an education that is completely global and cosmopolitan from Day 1.

The problem with education as a confusing area of activity is revealed to us in an episode of the great Japanese novel, The Makioka Sisters.

The Makioka Sisters (細雪 [Sasameyuki], “Light Snow”) is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (died in 1965) that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

In the novel, there’s a description of a “failed educational odyssey:”

“Mimaki was an old court family. The present viscount, the son, was well along in years. Mimaki Minoru, son by a concubine, was a graduate of the Peers School and had studied physics at the Imperial University, which he left to go to France.  In Paris he studied painting for a time, and French cooking for a time, and numerous other things, none for very long.

“Going on to America, he studied aeronautics in a not-too-famous state university, and he did finally take a degree, it seemed.

“After graduation, he continued to wander about the United States, and on to Mexico and South America. With his allowance from home cut off in the course of these wanderings, he made a living as a cook and even as a bellboy. He also returned to painting and even tried his hand at architecture.

“Following his whims and relying on his undeniable cleverness, he tried everything. He abandoned aeronautics when he left school.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Vintage Books, 1985, Seidensticker translation, page 473-474)

This person winds up dabbling in architecture after his return to Japan.

This episode in Tanizaki’s great novel gives us a “flashlight” or “searchlight” into the whole problem of educational confusion.  Is this simply a case of one person’s “fecklessness?”  Is this just a case of what’s called “failure to launch” (see the movie by this name)?

Or is it partly perhaps that education as a “lockstep system” of schools, exams, courses, semesters, quizzes and grades is very “inhospitable” to “searchers?”

If we call everyone who “stumbles around” a dilettante and a feckless failure, we might be unnecessarily “binary,” exclusionary and unaware of the problem of “cold educational ecosystems” which punish exploring for those who are not “born specialists.”  Winners and losers are too polarized as an educational judgment, perhaps.

The classic German novel about youthful confusions is Fontane’s classic Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1888) and perhaps an argument could be made that the coldly “binary view” of “successes” versus “the feckless” causes the loss of many young people who had various kinds of emotional resistance to education as an “Olympics” of sorts, with “winners and losers.”  This might be seen as a kind of overly narrow kind of “edu-brutality” which is intolerant of more difficult adjustment stories for young people, which are not uncommon.

Essay 54: Movies as an Off-Campus “Open University:” Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night, 1961)

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, painter, and short story author.  

Antonioni died on July 30, 2007 (aged 94) in Rome, the same day that another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman, also died.

He is best known for his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”—L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse from the early sixties.

One “hidden pillar” of the world Antonioni depicts in his movies is that “you are what you read.” This gives the viewer a “meta-intelligent” (latent overview signal) handle on the world being depicted:

In La Notte of 1961, Antonioni starts with an image of the Pirelli Tower in Milano, the most famous skyscraper of its time in Italy. In contrast to the impressiveness of the building, the characters in his movies are trying to “navigate” boredom and the enveloping sense of ennui.

One of the characters in the movie is said to be reading the masterpiece by Herman Broch, The Slkeepwalkers:

The Sleepwalkers (original title Die Schlafwandler), is a 1930s novel in three parts, by the Austrian novelist and essayist Hermann Broch. 

Opening in 1888, the first part is built around a young Prussian army officer; the second in 1903 around a Luxembourger bookkeeper; and the third in 1918 around an Alsatian wine dealer.  Each is in a sense a sleepwalker, living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and waking.  Together they present a panorama of German society and its progressive deterioration of values that culminated in defeat and collapse at the end of World War I.

Antonioni implies the characters he depicts are a new version of “sleepwalker.”

When the movie starts, the characters played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau visit a friend in the hospital who mentions his new work on Adorno.  Adorno (1903-1969) was a German-Jewish theoretician who wants to understand how the world has gone off the rails leading to WWII and the death factories of the Nazis.  He argues that this is connected (paradoxically) to the relentless rationality of “The Enlightenment” and works in a “dialectical” way (i.e., something becomes its opposite).

In the movie, there’s a scene where the author played by Mastroianni is at a book talk concerning his new book.

In other words, the world Antonioni is depicting, a kind of “odyssey” of ennui made confusing by gleaming architecture such as the Pirelli Tower of Nervi (built from 1955-1958) shown in the opening shot of the movie.

The books mentioned in the movie confirm the director’s “you are what you read” motif.

The recent book: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark is consistent with this sense of things.