Category: Philosophy

On “The Moral Collapse of the University” by Bruce Wilshire

As a philosopher and an educator, I enjoyed Wilshire’s book. Quite a number of his experiences parallel my own with regards to teaching and the self-reflective processing and mulling over the ‘educational act’. I felt very at home with a number of his statements, like “we arrive at the capital feature of the educating act: self-awareness, or self-reflexivity” (Wilshire, 1990, p.27), or my favorite, “The ultimate educating force is who I am” (Wilshire, 1990, p.31 – italics mine).

These two statements are old-hat for Waldorf teachers (of which I am one), and I found most of what Wilshire brought in regards to his educational analysis familiar territory — but this is a good thing, as the educational philosophy behind Waldorf education is to educate the whole child. Much modern education lacks an awareness of the importance of consciously developing not only an open face-to-face relationship with one’s students, but also — going much further than Wilshire — developing an open spiritual relationship as well, through contemplative practices. And of course we should also play with the above statements by Wilshire in a cybernetic context: the educating act calls forth self-reflexivity through its realization, while self-reflexivity opens vast arenas of potential educability. Likewise, the force of education helps make us who we are, and who we are as educators.

I am grateful that Wilshire so adroitly points out the various cultural forces that worked to create the over-professionalization we have today — recognizing these causes is both enlightening and freeing. I especially appreciate his remark that “the organizing center of the university ought to be the organizing center of the developing human person” (Wilshire, 1990, p.85). In other words, I see Wilshire calling for the re-humanization of education, the recognition that education is not about knowledge, but about the development of human beings (Wilshire speaks of the returning the university to the “human scale” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 226)).

In this way, Wilshire parallels Rudolf Steiner’s view (as the originator of Waldorf education) that education is for the soul what medicine is for the body: a bringing to harmonic wholeness of diverse aspects. We are presently suffering from an overdevelopment — using the body metaphor that Wilshire favors — of the head. Specifically, we have brought education out of the realm of the heart and the hands, which have become atrophied, almost useless remnants when forced to squeeze themselves through the tight gates of academia. Education, to be a source of life, of passion, of deep inquiry and engagement, must explicitly and integrally include what in the body manifest as the rhythmic and metabolic realms. The techniques of much of modern education (I’m thinking here of grades, testing, quantitative reductionism, departmentalization, and so forth), from an alchemical perspective, are too heavy on the salt and too light on the sulfur, with almost NO mercury to be found. I won’t go on about these metaphors, although they are what we could call exact analogues.

Wilshire, in his language, points out the continual presence of ‘archaic’ forces, while showing how the university lacks awareness of the process of ‘mimetic engulfment’ and its concomitant effects on the thoughts and actions of both the professors and the students. And of course he continually relates both these aspects to the willfully obfuscated sense of the self as a ‘body-self’, with all the unrecognized or semi-recognized purification rituals which subersively accompany the imbalance:

“The failure to grasp the concept of body-self means the failure to grasp the utter inability of seventeenth-century psycho/physical dualism to grasp the nature of knowledge and the knower, the reality of the human situation” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 183).

We could just as easily point out the same drama via the polarity of Apollo/Dionysus (Wilshire mentions this in passing on p. 225 and p.230), nervous/metabolic, salt/sulfur, male/female, contraction/expansion, centric/peripheral. In every case what is missing is the third aspect: Eros, rhythm, mercury, the universal human, and the dynamic, responsive and evolving membrane; Wilshire speaks of the ‘reciprocating field’ (Wilshire, 1990, p. 224), a physicist might talk about entanglement, and Western esotericist the Cosmic Christ.

That “education is basically a moral relationship between persons devoted to truth” (Wilshire, 1990, p.229) is a much more sane approach than what presently passes for education is without much doubt for those of us who have experienced both sides of the screen, as it were. His call to reclaim, following Wordsworth, the “feeling intellect” (Wilshire, 1990, p.231) is a call put forth much more directly and strongly in regards to education by Steiner almost a hundred years ago. He recognized that education must fit the reality of the developing human being, not vice-versa, and partly for this reason included practical arts as well as aesthetic arts in addition to more intellectual topics — all of which were presented in time to work with whatever stages of body, soul, and spirit growth the child was experiencing. Steiner also embodied and presented the model of the educator as model, in which the presence of the educator is more educating for life than any specific verbalization of concepts, even if those concepts are about life.

Wilshire’s last chapter on Reclaiming the Vision of Education: Redefining Definition, Identity, Gender was the most juicy for me. I appreciate his delving into the need to reframe the discussion in a way that includes the feminine aspects of the situation. His suggestion (following Dinnerstein) that male and female parents take a nearly equal hand in raising children (Wilshire, 1990, p.271) is probably a bit oversimplistic, although I’d love to see it happen!!! A crucial aspect, as he points out, is that we desperately need “examples of meaningful human lives, [which] must be provided first and foremost in person” (Wilshire, 1990, p.230). By human, I presume, he means human qua human universalis, or perhaps human archetypus, for the central mystery of the archetype is that it is both universal and particular, both dynamically evolving and homeostatic… just like us.

March 1, 2009
seeing upside down (with bonus experiment!)

Did you know that your eye is related to the pinhole camera?

Light enters through the pupil of the eye, and a tiny image of the outside world fans out across the back of the eye, on the retina. If you have an extremely dark room that has a window to the outside world, try this:

Get some pieces of thick card-stock paper, or even a piece of cardboard, that covers your window entirely. Make sure that your room is as dark as possible and that no light enters (this is much more difficult to achieve than you may think, but perfection is not required). Poke a small hole, about 3 millimeters in diameter, in the paper, so that light from outside your room can enter through the hole (this works best during bright daylight conditions outside). Now get a white towel or sheet, or even a white piece of paper, and hold it right on the hole. Now slowly move the piece of paper/sheet/whatever back from the hole… and be AMAZED! No really, you will be amazed, trust me!

For the truly inquisitive (that should be all of you reading this), try different sized holes, as well as holes of different shape, and see what effects this has on the resulting experience. Also pay close attention to what happens as you move your ‘screen’ closer or farther away from the hole. Now, for even MORE ridiculous fun, have someone go outside and move around in front of the window as you watch the screen on the inside…

But this was all just a little experimental tangent to my real topic, which is that, just as in the above pin-hole camera exercise, the image which falls upon your retina is inverted. Why, then do we experience the world ‘right side up’?

A ridiculously simplified picture of the inversion of images on the retina.

Our brains – and this is a mysterious process – re-inverts the image so that our experience of the retinal impulses fits with information we get from other senses. Equally fascinating, the process which the brain accomplishes is not restricted to any particular given orientation of the incoming retinal stimulus. What I mean is that the image of the world can be presented onto the retina with any arbitrary rotation, and given sufficient time, the brain will compensate in such a way as to perfectly cancel out the rotation so that we again experience the world ‘right side up’.

Even more interestingly (I know, can you stand it?) it isn’t just with orientation that this occurs. Check out this quote from a 1967 paper by J.J. Gibson:

“The altered ‘form’ of the sample-field produced by spectacles can be of many sorts: Stratton’s inversion, or Erisman’s reversal, or Kohler’s reversal, or tilt, or displacement (with wedge-prisms), and curvature, and compression, or ordinary telescopic magnification or minification, or single-meridian magnification or minification (Ogle), or for that manner, a non-geometrical bias of the sample-field such as the chromatic aberrations or color. The ‘invariance theory’ should still apply. We ordinarily don’t notice the forms of the visual field anyway, except in pictures: what we detect are invariants.”

Such phenomena are well known in the realm of optics (the first such experiments being performed by Stratton in 1896, and later by Ivo Kohler in the 1950’s) where research subjects (probably volunteer grad students) wore a prism that inverted the retinal image all day long for a period of at a few weeks. For many subjects, it took approximately a week or so for the image to switch.

Once they adapted the research subjects then experienced the world ‘normally’ with no strangeness – their brain simply found it more economical to re-integrate the incoming stimulus in a way that allowed it to mesh with other sensory stimuli; the system tended towards a relatively stable attractor.

Of course, when the subjects took the glasses off, the world re-inverted, and they experienced the world upside down, just like they did when the glasses first were put on, but the re-adaptation took much less time, and subjects could even become ‘practiced’ at switching between wearing the prism glasses and having them off.

Do you not find such a phenomenon both compelling and mysterious? Do you not sit in awe at the complex workings going on behind your eyes all the time?

Our sense of touch and proprioception play a large role here, but also hearing and other senses which include directionality in relation to our 3D physical space. Even more important, however, is the ability for the subject to actively move through space with the altered perception. If the subject is restricted from moving (some subjects were literally strapped into a wheelchair), no visual adaptation occurs, and the world continues to be experienced in an inverted fashion.

A lesson to be learned from this is that we are complex beings, WHOLE beings, in whom stream diverse sensory flows, which, like rivers in confluence, turbulently spin off vortices in a chaotic and ordered dance of becoming. Our senses, rather than objectively reporting pure sensory ‘data’ to a central computer, are continually involved in, reshaped by, and reciprocally influenced by the dynamic, pulsing whole that lies beheath and within conscious experience. This includes our emotions, our thoughts, our desires, as well as our other senses, our metabolism, our memory, and our will, to name just a few.

No sense is isolated from any other. Channels overlap. Information bleeds. The source is also the receiver. The created is also the creator.

Mmmmmmmm. chewy!

February 23, 2009
how do you know what knowledge is?

It’s quite a dilemma – not being able to directly check much of what we are exposed to and presented as ‘knowledge’. Unless we begin to discover our own ways of knowing (a very difficult proposition, but I think possible), then we likely remain wanderers in the fog of our own (and other’s) unconsciousness.

Of course, at least in any near future, it doesn’t seem like subconscious situational effects can be avoided – nor do I think they should be. Much of what we enjoy as part of our everyday capacities for thinking, feeling, and willing are rooted deeply and complexly in unconscious processes. Indeed, what is normally conscious for us is perhaps one of the tiniest slices out of what can be potentially conscious, and perhaps the potentially conscious is just the tiniest slice out of the full depth and breadth of the universe as a whole – or not (because, in accord with what I just said, this is an impossible determination, requiring consciousness to take place).

In any case, pretty much EVERY modern study that follows the basic scientific practices is a study in obfuscation, requiring for its potential success a decided ignorance of as many ‘attenuating’, ‘circumstantial’, ‘probabilistic’, or ‘random’ factors as possible. The more willfully ignorant a study becomes, the more exact are its pronouncements, and the more its knowledge is sequestered from the whole. This is why all studies require additional work to be re-connected to the complex actualities of the world, necessitating interpretation, reframing, and recontextualization.

This suggests a different way of performing ‘studies’, discovered long ago by Goethe and others, in which the situatedness, the contingency, the circumstantial, are all necessarily included aspects of any attempt to work with and understand a phenomenon.

February 21, 2009
distinguishing between the ego and “I”

Our experience of ourselves is in many ways completely mediated by aspects which are located beyond the normal boundary of the “I”. I’d like to offer one possible way of looking at the issue.

I approach this question concerning the boudaries of the “I” by taking into account the transformations of the “I” as it works through and within the physical body and the soul body on its path from death to life to death to life. To do so requires distinction between the ideas we have about our “I” and our unmediated, direct experience of our “I”, and more importantly between our “I” and what we can call our ego, on the basis of the usage of this term in the Western traditions (particularly psychology, which deals almost exclusively with the ego).

When incarnating, the human “I” experiences a period of darkness, which only gradually lifts throughout life, until (perhaps around the age of 21 or so) the first glimmerings of what I am referring to as the “I” become available to the experience of the ego, which is a structure that is present much earlier on, and is built up through a variety of relations between the burgeoning activities of the physical/soul bodies and the ‘outer’ worlds.

The incarnation of the “I” takes place not at birth, but much later, and sometimes not at all; this despite the fact that we each have the constructed ego that is constantly built up as a semi-permanent dialog between the inner activities of the body/soul and the various bodily and ensouled elements of our environment. This ego includes the remnants of the activity which is rightfully regarded as the spiritual activity of the “I” – thinking. Thus the ego becomes filled with thoughts but lacks the awareness of whence these thoughts originate. In the meantime (in accord with all the social, cultural, historical, familial, etc. ‘forces’ at work around all the activities of the aspects of the human being which are not the “I”) the ego maintains the false impression that it is the one doing the thinking.

This then leads us to the question about how we draw the boundary around what we consider to be our “I”, which turns out more often than not to be a question to the ego about the ego. There are no boundaries to the “I” in the normal sense, the “I” is a spiritual activity, a process. It is a wonderful aspect of the spiritual world that “I’s” are capable of penetrating and moving with each other; their activities can merge, coincide, and diverge. The idea of boundaries of the “I” only arises when we take our experience of the rules at work in the realm of physical bodies and our sense life and apply them to an arena in which no physical bodies or physical sense organs exist. In other words, it is like asking about the flavor of a trapezoid.

We can have ideas, thoughts about the boundaries of our ego, but the activity upon which such ideas are based rests only in the “I”. We can have the thought “My physical body only works because it includes trillions of bacteria and other organisms which I do not directly experience, but which science tells me are required for my process of digestion; if these microorganisms did not permeate my gut, I would be incapable of digesting my food.” This leads us to the thought that perhaps I’d better take a look at what I consider to be my ‘self’ – shouldn’t it include all the aspects necessary to maintain the activities of my physical body, which support then my capacity to think and experience?

We can thus, in our thought-life (not our thinking-life) come to the idea that the normal drawing of the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is in some ways quite spurious. There is then an attempt to fill the gap thus created (in thought) with other thoughts, which try to reorganize the connections made in thinking. So we say things, perhaps, like “Well, yes, ‘I’ really must include the bacteria in my gut” and so forth.

But all the while we are missing the very activity that is the source of all of these reconfigurations of our thought-life; our thinking. It is when we turn our attention to the thinking process itself that we start to come directly into contact with the “I” itself. This experience, the recognition of the “I” by the “I”, is not a thought, but is what can occur when thinking takes itself as its own object. In such a case, a completely different set of experiences become possible with respect to the question of the ‘boundaries’ of the self.

Moreover, what our ego keeps hidden from consciousness directly affects our perceptions and assumptions. It seems that the ego, in a sense, precisely constitutes its boundaries by this very omission. What I feel coming from my ego changes dramatically from situation to situation, not on the basis of what is included so much as on the basis of what is left out, and what’s more, on how it is left out.

The ‘mood’ around the process of the ego’s self-entrainment says more about my deeper nature than its explicit self-identifications ever could.

February 19, 2009
Alchemy and narcissistic, reproductive, and creative learning

Alfonso Montuori, one of my professors at CIIS, has identified three styles, or modes, of learning, which he calls the narcissistic, the reproductive, and the creative.

From his article, The Quest for a New Education, From Oppositional Identities to Creative Inquiry, narcissistic learning is “an approach to education that sees the source of knowledge as inside the knower. It focuses on the expression of the knower’s experience and interiority and his or her personal growth and transformation.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

Reproductive learning, by contrast, is “an approach to education that sees the source of knowledge as almost exclusively outside the knower, and focuses on the accurate reproduction of that knowledge by the knower.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

Creative learning is a middle path, “an approach that views inquiry as a creative process.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

I see a correspondence with Montuori’s categories and those of the alchemical tradition and the anthroposophical tradition. Alchemically, what Montuori describes as reproductive, creative, and narcissistic learnings are embodied in the principles of Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur. The Salt principle is one which is observable when you have a solution out of which a precipitate falls. The process is ruled by Gravity and tends to result in innumerable discrete bits with a greater density than the original solution. The precipitate literally ‘falls out’ of the continuously interconnected fluid mass to become something distinct, something identifiable and separate. Alchemically, the Salt process produces forms which have Earth characteristics. This describes the process of reproductive learning as an exact analogue: more of the same. Specific bits of information carry the value in reproductive learning, to the detriment of the interconnectedness of the facts when they were ‘in solution’. It is a strange irony that reproductive learning has most strongly co-opted the very metaphor that exemplifies the state of being inextricably contextually connected and turned it into its rally cry: “Solve!” The word ‘solve’ actually means to loosen, but the Salt process of reproductive learning inverts the dynamic into one that requires a singular, discrete, and correct answer to the undifferentiated mass of the original ‘solution’ out of which a ‘solution’ is derived! The Salt process densifies, separates, and agglomerates into ‘false’ wholes by virtue of external pressures while lacking inner coherence or connectivity.

Taken to the other extreme, we end up in narcissistic learning, exemplified by the process known alchemically as Sulfur. Here, learning ignites itself from within, taking its own substance as fuel. Sulfur is ruled by the higher-order process of Levity, and is precisely what counteracts (in a polar-opposite way) the Gravity of the Salt process. The Sulfur process tends towards the periphery, taking the facts in only inasmuch as they can be added fuel to the fire; i.e. Sulfur as a process is completely self-involved. The particularity, the individuality, the singularity of the specific facts are burnt away exactly to the extent that they carry within them what relates to the particular mode of manifestation of the Sulfur process. Everything else gets left behind as a char, an ash, devoid of (apparent) life (in fact, you may notice, the Salt and Sulfur processes always occur together in reciprocity, complementarity, or opposition). Sulfur, like narcissistic learning, takes only itself as its object and contextualizes everything else around its own process.

Creative inquiry embodies the Mercuric process. Mercury is the process that links the Salt and Sulfur – it is the process that performs the alchemical ‘marriage’ between the Salt and the Sulfur. The goal “to make the academic transformative and to ground the transformative in the academic” (Montuori, Quest: p5) is a way of saying that the transformative (Sulfuric) needs to ‘marry’ the academic (Salt) in order for a healthy learning to occur. Montuori recognizes explicitly that the path of creative inquiry is one that exemplifies “a middle way, a spectrum of possibilities between extremes” (Montuori, Quest: p5). The Mercuric process is the go-between, the walker of boundaries, the oscillator, the Messenger, the one who takes on the characteristics of the other while leading the other beyond itself. It embodies aspects of both the Salt and Sulfur processes, by integrating them into a new form – a creative act – that is impossible without either the Salt or Sulfur. Mercury’s/Herme’s caduceus, with its two entwined snakes, can be considered the alchemical Mercuric ideal of continuous interplay and harmonizing between the Salt and Sulfur processes, acted out in the being himself and carried as his most prominent symbol.

Anthroposophically speaking, the Salt process is linked to a being known as Ahriman (a name taken from ancient Persia) while the Sulfur process is linked to a being known as Lucifer (whom I imagine you are all familiar with in some form). The Mercury process – the middle way – is linked to the Christ being. However, I won’t go into the details as this post has probably already put some people to sleep (another dual Salt/Sulfur process: part of you becomes a precipitate – your physical and life bodies – while another part of you expands to the periphery – your astral body and “I”; and in your dreams you embody Mercury…)

February 15, 2009
on destruction

The role of destruction, and of the working out of polarities, is a subject that has been dealt with an the alchemical tradition for a very long time. Alchemically, it is understood that the issue you are dealing with, in which you find yourself (the prima materia) MUST go through a process of putrefaction, of fermentation… the individual elements cannot by themselves produce a work of lasting value (a Great Work), but must be destroyed in order to be refined. The refined elements then have the capacity to ‘marry’ the other elements to form a higher, more integrated, more complex and simple unity which ennobles and embodies the transformation of the worst parts of ‘the matter’.

All diagnoses are misdiagnoses because they stay at the level of the overt fact, and do not take into account the necessary inclusion of relationship, reversal, and the whole. The image of the fireweed and the pinecone are examples in nature of the aspect of the Fire element in which destruction is required for new life. In this sense, the destruction is viewed not as a negative process but as a transformative one, in which the potentials of the lower state are realizable only through their passing away, and indeed, it is their very passing away which creates the space (Air element) into which the potential new state can flow, because room is made for it.

The same pattern occurs in the human being all the time – we do not transform without the heat of the Fire, also known as the Will – but not a will directed towards a specific absolute (an Earth), but what is known as an ‘open will’, which is just the part which maintains itself by transforming itself through its own death into a new state…

February 13, 2009
unknowing and the creative moment

There are some things about creativity that have been on my mind. I have been trying to hone in on the qualitative experience of the creative moment… what does it feel like to be creative? What kinds of qualities distinguish the feeling of being creative from other types of feelings, like the feeling of ‘producing’, ‘innovating’, and so forth? What makes a creative moment creative?

It seems to me that in the experience of the creative moment, there is always a place where knowing runs out… where consciousness finds itself in a state of openness, as if surrounded by space. In particular this feeling seems to be accompanied by the sense that the normal boundaries of the ego are loosened, expanded/expended, but not yet replaced or filled with anything. This is specifically true with respect to the actual genesis of the creative activity, while during the activity this sense can be replaced with a feeling which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called ‘flow’.

In every case that I can think of (for myself, that is), creative moments are states of being characterizable by a sense of potential, of a sort of future-coming-into-the-present — but notably always without knowledge or specific anticipation. It is a very hard state to even think about because it seems that thinking itself — at least in the normal, ego-centered thinking of much of daily life — is suspended, as if in the air. And even in thinking ‘about’ the creative moment, there is almost a lacuna of consciousness around the creative moment itself, as if consciousness met a border that it could not cross with its normal configuration… so I have the feeling that it is as if some part of consciousness travels ‘underground’ or perhaps ‘above’, into the ‘sense of awaiting’ that permeates the surrounding ‘space’.

You can see that the normal tendencies of speech have a hard time when applied to a moment which seems to transcend encapsulation. One usage of languge serves to delineate, define, demarcate, depict, circumscribe, form, or otherwise pinpoint (alchemically this would be representative of the Earth element). My initial questions are, in a sense, Earth questions, with language leading towards and assuming this Earthy aspect. Yet by its very nature the object of the inquiry is perhaps unable to be Earthed – so I find a contradiction even in the asking of the question. Thus a paradox: if it were possible to actually describe in words the qualitative essence of a creative moment, the creative moment itself would necessarily remain undescribed, even de-described.

Therefore some questions:

Is language as evocative rather than descriptive enough of a tool to allow thinking about creativity to proceed?

Do all creative moments share some specific qualities, perhaps at a meta or meta-meta-level? Or is it impossible for creative moments to be bound at all by any possibile prescription?

With respect to the individual experiencing a creative moment, what kinds of processes occur qua the experienced sense of self/other? That is, what happens to the sense of self in such a moment?

Related: Are creative moments ever something that can be ‘mine’ in the same way that I can speak about (a perhaps naive) experience of ‘my’ pain, ‘my’ thoughts, and so forth?

Also related: To what extent do ‘others’ play a role in creative moments that ‘I’ experience?

Lastly: If we were seers, able to perceive the activities of the spiritual worlds, how would we describe what is experienced by a single human being in a creative moment?

February 11, 2009