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Week of April 9, 2001

Mirror Sites:
 CSUDH Habermas UWP
Painting This Week:
Topics: The NOW Is Cracking and Graduation

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: March 31, 2001
Latest update: April 6, 2001
 E-Mailjeannecurran@habermas.org

Discussion Topics

Fish

Portrait by jeanne of a goldfish crashing out of its bowl,
with glass flying, because the NOW is cracking.

    Because last week was the first week in which we brought back the painting project, we all feel the need for a little more time on these topics. We also have discovered that sharing our paintings and interpretations at the end of the class period is fun and productive. Students who just started out to paint, no matter what, found themselves interpreting their work in terms of the major issues discussed in our dialog. And many of you wrote to tell me that painting seemed to improve your concentration, rather than distract you. Good! We'll paint for the rest of the semester. You may also come up to my office where I can share some of the painting techniques. Now, back to the Week's Topics for the Week of April 15, 2001: The expression, "The NOW is cracking!", came from Richard Moncure, one of our CSUDH students several years ago. He uttered the phrase as he stared at the painting. As I recall, there were a couple of smaller fish trying to struggle upstream back into the rapidly disintegrating bowl. Looking just at the detail of the painting provided here, what does the cracking of the NOW mean to you?

    Peace and Conflict Class

  1. Conceptually link the detail of the painting to anomic suicide.
    jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

    "Got to find the other fish." Recognition that we are social. Recognition that anger turned inwards provides a climate for suicide. Anger turned outwards provides a climate for homicide.

    Anomic means alienated, confused, not able to make the norms work or to find them. But in the sense of anomic suicide it means that there are not enough ties to other humans to give the individual a reason for being. Anomic suicide means suicide brought about by a loss of connection to others. Think of Teresa Mason's painting. "People are afraid to connect." Egoistic suicide means suicide brought about by a god-like sense of omnipotence, that one is the center of the universe. Too many ties, and none of us is up to the job. Do read some Durkheim so you'll have a sense of this important concept.

    Moot Court Class

  2. Conceptually link the detail of the painting to social fact.

    jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

    Our agency doesn't extend to preventing the NOW from cracking. thus, in the consideration of justice, we will need to examine how we feel about justice as fairness (Rawls), and justice as allowing the most capable to move as far and as fast as they can (Nozick). We will also need to decide whether we believe that there is a social justice to which ethics holds us, as well as individual success. This means we will need to discuss the balancing of tension between the individual and the community.

    Durkheim's description of social fact lends itself well to these considerations. As you will recall from our brief overview of Henry and Milovanovic, Constructive Theory, individuals to not have free agency in their own right. They are dependent upon the normative expectations of the community. The interdependence between individual and community is what caused Durkheim to reject psychology in the study of society, and turn instead to sociology, a science based on the interdependence of interpersonal relationships.

    Theory Class

  3. Conceptually link the detail of the painting to Fellman's concept of mutuality.

    jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

    "We'll all fry together when we fry . . . Yes, we will . . . " Tom Lehrer, a college circuit entertainer in the 50's and 60's, sang this song that still haunts many of us who knew the "flower children." Dr. Strangelove, starring Peter Sellers, was a dark comedy on the dangers of an atomic holocaust.

    This is essentially Fellman's message: this is no longer a time to dominate and compete; we have already done enough of that to survive as a species, and to survive very well. The object is no longer to dominate nature, but to survive interdependently with her, and with each other. Hence, Fellman's call for a paradigm shift towards mutuality.

Criminology Class

  • What does this detail of the painting suggest to us about the "criminal" nature of activities that heighten the possibility of the NOW cracking?

    jeanne's notes on one plausible response:

    If we all fry together, there's no crime anymore, there's nothing. The NOW will have cracked, and even those little fish trying to swim back into the bowl will be lost to this new condition of a cracked universe we do not understand. That would seem to suggest that it's time to place more emphasis on creating a nice large fish bowl we can all survive in together than on punishing the poor fish who aren't doing too well anyway.