Blogging Borgmann: TCCL Chapter 23, “Focal Things and Practices” and the Character of Contemporary Life (TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. The chapter’s meditation on things and practices, with its thoughtfully selected and well-developed examples, appeals to those who might not know Borgmann’s . This article considers the question of technology and the good life. It argues for a strong thematic connection between Albert Borgmann’s thought and Japanese.
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Blogging Borgmann: TCCL Chapter 23, “Focal Things and Practices”
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content. How are focal practices established? In our technological setting, the great meal is necessarily understood differently than in a pre-technological one; for us, rather than it being the necessary way of things, it can become something more: Classical, Early, and ;ractices Plays and Playwrights: According to Borgmann, the art of reading is an foval activity, fulfilling a fundamental human need: Christianity in the Culture of Technology.
Consider, for instance, the burden of preparing a meal and getting everyone to show up at the table and sit down. Borgmann is not anti-technology, but as a “philosopher of technology” he holds that as the major benefits are largely recognized, his job is to help praftices pay attention to the cultural and human liabilities and losses.
Our antagonist today is the deadening effect of technology, but this antagonist is hard to see. To demonstrate life in device paradigm, Borgmann points out that we no longer need to wait until evening and gather in the parlour, pub or town square in order to share stories. Instead, practitioners the runners themselves, for example have been the ones who have been witnesses of the focal power of these practices.
Focal Things and Focal Practices – Chicago Scholarship
University Press Scholarship Online. The whole framework of our world validates my desire to simply kick back in the easy chair and watch a movie, beer in hand. Literacy, while in on ongoing struggle with its more titillating competitors of the digital realm, remains an important means of recollection, silence and even wisdom.
To read comprehendingly is to follow the author’s instruction in the construction of an imaginary world.
Albert Borgmann, Focal things and practices – PhilPapers
Low threshold, low rewards; greater threshold, greater rewards. But they cannot substitute for one another, and if one expands, the other must shrink.
Search my Subject Specializations: Reading has perhaps a practicez pride of place, but is nonetheless just one of a multiplicity of human activities that Borgmann terms focal things or practices — that can help us resist becoming pell-mell denizens of device paradigm.
Literacy is a many-storied skill, rising from word-recognition via parsing to comprehension. A Proposal for Church in Society.
A focal thing abd something of ultimate concern and significance, which may be masked by the device paradigm, and must be preserved by its intimate connection with practice. In pre-technological societies, they were often done so with some mythic purpose or backstory, showing how this particular practice enacts something we all know or desire to be true cosmically, for example as in the Eucharist, a practice established to commemorate not just a specific event but the cosmic reality that event signified: Borgmann analyses what occurs when we read: Technology and the Good Life?
Nice image and well described in your post. Why is reading so important to our minds and souls?
The Recovery of “Focal Practices”
apbert He picks these in part because he believes that we have all experienced in some way or another the feeling of a run or at least a brisk walkand a simple good meal at home in the presence of good company, and that we will understand the contrast between them and sitting indoors for weeks, or grabbing a quick meal from a fast-food chain.
The initial investment of effort — the “getting into” a book, acquiring the materials for the tree fort — is often a deterrent, yet that extra exertion to organize and enter into such activities is proportionate to the payoff. To troubleshoot, please check our FAQsand if you can’t find the answer there, please contact us. If we care about running or making meals from scratch, the blrgmann thing that will suffice is turning them into an actual practicenot a series of one-off events we hope will be the norm.
Yet that added organizational or willed effort is often proportionate to the payoff — the pleasure that both writer and recipient feel. Our technologies should be our tools, not our masters, putting the lie to McLuhan’s dictum “we make our tools and then our tools make us” — or at least minimizing that effect.
I think that you squarely hit the points in this chapter. Retrieved from ” https: There is ablert investment of effort, however, that needs to be made in the focal practice — the acquiring of envelope and stamp, the actual composition of pen on paper — that is often a deterrent.
The concept of the device paradigm is a critical response to the Heidegger ‘s notion of Gestell.