The experience of rationality

When anticipating our Rationality course, before we began, I was also anticipating the Fall MALA 6010  interdisciplinary course (see below*; I get the first two-week block in September), and next Spring's Experience course (MALA 6050 "Experience" Tuesdays/Thursdays 6-7:30 pm web-supported)...

The theme of next year’s tag-team MALA liberal arts course at our school, I'm gratified to learn (having proposed it), will be Experience. So, I'll get to do a two-week trailer in the Fall for my semester-long Spring '23 course of the same name. 

We'll do William James's 1901-02 Gifford Lectures, Varieties of Religious Experience, the first week;  then Carl Sagan's from 1985, that thanks to Ann Druyan's perspicacity became the posthumous Varieties of Scientific Experience.

The juxtaposition will be apposite, and true to the pluralistic hearts and minds of James and Sagan. Both Gifford fellows, in their strikingly distinctive ways, made the point that assimilating our personal experience, valuing it, respecting it, defending it, is precisely how we make ourselves feel (and be) at home in the world and in our own skins. 

And James explicitly, Sagan implicitly, defend that state of being and feeling as the epitome of rationality. 

Hence the rationale for melding my impending summer MALA course, Rationality (commencing shortly in July), with Experience. They do belong together. As Jennifer Michael Hecht once wrote of the Hellenic "Graceful Life" philosophies (Epicureanism, Stoicism et al), the great task of a reasonable life is to stop searching manically for a way out of the "forest" (the natural universe). Hang a sign on a tree that says Home and be done with it.

I did that once, or got Younger Daughter to do it back when she was in her arts-and-crafts phase. The sign eventually faded but the message has stuck. 

 

6.9.22

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Defending experience--

The problem I have set myself [in my Gifford Lectures] is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act... --William James, To Miss Frances R. Morse. Apr 12 1900. Letters II

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Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture

Our experiences periodically convulse and disturb us. They force themselves upon us and demand awareness, retrospection, and evaluation. This book has as its intention to assist the reader to plumb those streams of experience that affect us in a distinctively American way. What shakes us are questions about death, loneliness, transiency, the handicapped, the bomb, pollution, violence, cultural literacy, urban aesthetics, the meaning of America and of the end of the century. These are the streams of American experience. They force us to ask, in the spirit of Emerson, not only what we know, but what we should do... John J. McDermott

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* MALA 6010, Fall 2022--

CRN: 83561
MALA 6000: Foundations of Liberal Arts II
Day/Time/Location: Thursdays 6:00 – 9:00pm, WPS 310
Course Coordinator: Dr. Janet McCormick
Office Hours: virtual – email me any time (janet.mccormick@mtsu.edu)
Office: Jones Hall 202


Course Theme and Overview
Life is interdisciplinary. Broadly, education in the liberal arts prepares students to think critically and actively about the sorts of problems and possibilities they will encounter in their lives as employees and employers, as participants in friendships, partnerships, families, and communities, and as citizens of a nation and the world. The broader knowledge and understanding of the world a liberal arts degree cultivates helps students engage in some of the most important issues of today: the environment, foreign policy, social justice, national and international security, ethics, indeed, all of the issues we face as humans in relationship to others.

The best education asks students to reach beyond their own experiences to see and imagine worlds different from them in time, space, and thought. Education and experience in multiple disciplines creates depth and versatility for success in a highly competitive and changing job market as well as in the essence of the human experience—relationships. Through a liberal arts education, students develop multiple lenses for looking at the human experience. The kind of interdisciplinary thinking a liberal arts education provides makes students better observers not only of phenomena, but also of the very lenses through which they observe. All knowledge and the way we know it becomes subject to analysis, criticism, and evaluation. Students become critical readers not only of human experience but also of the lenses through which they themselves interpret or “read” the world. Examining not only what other people look at but also at how they look at it, creates the capacity for empathy and for more effective and fulfilling communication between people who might be very different from each other. This, of itself, enables students to become better friends, partners, parents, citizens, and human beings. Isn’t that what education, at its best, is for?

This course offers diverse perspectives on “experience” through the lens of the various disciplines of the Liberal Arts.​

BLOCK 1, Phil Oliver--Sep 1, 8.

In the western philosophical tradition, Empiricists like John Locke and David Hume historically defended experience as the touchstone of all knowledge and action. American philosopher William James (1842-1910) called himself a Radical Empiricist, but also on occasion defended experience (including religious experience) "against philosophy." In our time, working scientists sometimes express disdain for both philosophy and religion. But the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (of "Cosmos" and the "pale blue dot") had great respect for both, at least in their better representations. In this block we'll explore ways in which philosophical, religious, and scientific experience support and complement (as well as diverge from) one another.

Week 1 Readings/assignments: Excerpts from William James's 1901-1902 Gifford Lectures: "The Varieties of Religious Experience"

Week 2 Readings/assignments: Excerpts from Carl Sagan's 1985 Gifford Lectures: "The Varieties of Scientific Experience"

Grade Distribution: Attendance & participation, including posted responses on our blogsite to at least two discussion questions per week: 50% each week