Critical Expressivism- Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, 2014a

Petruzzi
Lakoff and Johnson give a concrete biological example of how classification
allows us to function in the world opportunistically:
Each human eye has 100 million light-sensing cells, but only
about 1 million fibers leading to the brain. Each incoming image
must therefore be reduced in complexity by a factor of 100.
That is, information in each fiber constitutes a “categorization”
of the information from about 100 cells. Neural categorization
of this sort exists throughout the brain. (1999, p. 18)
Most of our cognitive categorizations come from how our bodies function in our
environment. These are mostly unconscious and when we are in stable environments,
we tend to rely on them to speed decision making processes; however,
in environments that are unstable we tend to more carefully examine objects,
sometimes creating new classifications.
Elizabeth Flynn argues that the received view of romanticism/expressivism is
a form of “anti-modern” discourse or rhetoric: “Since individuals are unique and
since perceptions of reality are entirely subjective, scientific knowledge has very
limited authority, and the ability of scientific projects to lead to valid or reliable
truth claims is questioned” (1997, p. 542). Flynn is correct that romantics and
expressivists, like classical pragmatists, critique the modernist drive to calculation
and commodification of nature. Yet, while romantic writers are generally
considered to be reacting against the modernist quest for certainty, for objective
truth typified by modern science, these critiques do not mean that every expressivist
rejects natural science tout court. Many expressivists—Goethe, Thoreau,
and Emerson, to name a few—actually embrace the useful applications of new
facts that natural sciences disclose. Emerson notes that the human brain becomes
impatient when confronted with
a multitude of facts; it aims to find some pattern or reasoning
to set them in some order. Classification is one of the main
actions of the intellect …. every theory of science, every argument
of the barrister, is a classification, and gives the mind
the sense of power in proportion to the truth or centrality of
the traits by which it arranges. (,1972, vol. 2, p. 25. ).
IMAGINATION, USE, AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE
The endless passing of one element into new forms … explains the rank which
the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The imagination is
the reader of these forms.
—Emerson
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