LIBERAL STUDIES 7005  Technology, Invention, & Power Dr. Ogden

LIBERAL STUDIES: Literature & Language  Liberal Studies, in our course, is the study of Literature specifically, and Art generally, as a means of two things: Understanding the world and its aspects Effectively communicating this understanding through powerful writing and speaking  Liberal Studies has its unique human mental faculty as its primary domain: IMAGINATION Cognition, Emotiveness, Memory, Deliberation are some of the other human mental faculties.

LIBERAL STUDIES:Workplace  Liberal Studies are not an alternative way of understanding any aspect of the world: they are a complementary perspective on that aspect.  Liberal Studies provides a hard skillset in the professional workplace

Civilisations: (one conception of)  A civilisation is a shared set of values, culture, art, architecture, history and ways of life; and most of all, fundamental and (usually) unconscious assumptions about the way that the world works and is.  Latin American  Orthodox Baltics, Greece, Eastern Europe, Russia  Eastern  Muslim  Japan  Sub-Saharan African  Western Anglosphere + western Europe

Cultural Exclusivity Thesis  Give every civilisation the benefit of its own assumptions  Civilisation chauvinism to assume one’s own civilisation has the universal understanding  Approach other civilisations and cultures from the assumption that their fundamental values and understanding of the world is different from your own.  Universality (multiculturalism) may be a Euro- centric ideology?

Western Civilisation Values 1. All civilisations and cultures are fully explainable from Western premises and methods. 2. Western science is the universally-valid method of study. 3. All civilisations and cultures perceive the world—configure phenomena—identically and in away that Western science can explain

Japanese cultural assumptions: examples.  Western concept of symbolism: one thing signifies another type of thing. Platonic Forms; Judæo-Christian type-archetype; Freudian conscious-subconscious  Japan: this thing is associated with that experience or aspect. Non symbolic.  A lonely old tree is associated with—invokes—thoughts of age and loneliness. The meaning is in the person, not the object: an æsthetic approach to the world.

Japanese cultural assumptions: examples con’t.  Western Art—the fuller the mind of the perceiver the better the Art is appreciated Literary Modernism: James Joyce Finnigans Wake Renaissance Art: Giorgione The Tempest  Japan: the less the mind is active, the better.

Joyce, Finnigans Wake  A pure Ideolect:  Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- 4core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy5isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor6had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse7to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper8all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to9tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a10kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in11vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a12peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory13end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.14 The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner

Renaissance Art: Giorgione

Japan: mushin—’no-mind’  Mushin is an intellectual, æsthetic & martial concept: remove the conscious mind from getting in the way of understanding, appreciation and response.  Zen 禅那 : from zenna = a practice of meditation  Zen koan emphasise meditation on nothing (‘mu’)  Japanese martial arts work toward mushin as highest warrior state

Mushin: 無心

Shuichi Kato on Japan & Literature  No story to history; no plan; no plot of events. SV&R: 183 “undeniable tendency of Japanese culture is to avoid logic, the abstract, & systemization, in favour of emotion, the concrete, the unprogrammatic.”  Events are accumulative by addition  Japan assimilates by a simple addition of an external concept or item and then recontextualising it— Shusaku Endo: ”…the swamp of Japan” In the West, there is an accommodation required: a reconfiguration of the addition or of the entire system around it.  No transcendental values: which means that when adding new not necessary to discard the old. No cultural crisis.  ‘Born Shinto, Married Christian; Buried Buddhist”

Wabi-Sabi: æsthetic objects