Rewilding biology may certainly involve more transects, ID keys, multisensory exploration, and outdoor time. However, I argue a much more pervasive transformation is needed. In a nutshell, the problem is that while the living world as directly experienced might seem wild, classroom explanations hardly acknowledge the role that wildness plays throughout biological processes. With the exception of “genetic mutations” in natural selection and antibodies in the immune system, the overall lesson students learn about the biological world is that it is fundamentally composed of functional and dysfunctional mechanisms. This is out of step with what scientists observe a multiple biological levels of organisation, where in each case, the capricious and the coordinated combine.
Consider that it is now known that most proteins are “intrinsically disordered”, constantly fluctuating between indefinite ranges of configurations, and disrupting the notion that enzymes and signalling molecules are predictable mechanisms. However, in the Scottish (as elsewhere) high school biology classroom, proteins are described as having fixed structures altered only by external factors. Proteins are hardly unique. Scientists also know that most genes are sometimes (when?) ‘alternatively spliced,’ with some genes capable of producing thousands of different protein variants. An indefinite number of proteins, each which can produce an indefinite number of structural conformations. (And even between transcription and protein synthesis, there are several other wilding processes (such as post-translational modifications), which I will ignore here). I will also ignore the synergistic interaction between these various processes (Niklas et al. 2015).
The point is that from genes, to cells, tissues, organs, organisms and ecologies, within and between each level arises both new structures and regularities, and new kinds of indeterminacy. Such open-endedness not only enables more diverse functionality, but also the possibility of new functions to accommodate unpredicted situations, and is key to the resilience, creativity, and evolvability of life. This is not only happening in the long, slow and invisible timeline of Darwinian evolution. It is happening right now as each organism around you (and you, as well) is engaging with a specific situation that, in significant or nuanced ways, has never occurred before. We all need a repertoire of possibilities up our sleeves.
Common-sense intuitions are right, life is wild. When in the forest or the field, we see themes, like “oak” or “squirrel” or “inkcap mushroom.” A biology student may come to believe that the oak tree is merely the expression of a genetic programme modulated by ‘the environment’, or the squirrel simply performing preset instincts to pass on its genes. But in direct experience we can feel each particular being’s uniqueness, and sense its freedom. One reason why field studies is important is that it provides direct encounter with a wildness that is pervasive, yet occluded in the presentation biological process at other levels in the curriculum. It can teach us about the nature and role of the capricious, and give us clues for what to look for as we rewild our various mechanistic explanations.
There is no pedagogical or ethical justification not to foreground wildness in biology curricula, but students exit Scottish (and other) education system believing “properly functioning” biology is fundamentally mechanical. I can think of two main reasons why mechanistic explanations persist despite much evidence. The first is habit. In the 20th Century, much of biology tried to achieve rigorous scientific status by producing causal explanations modelled on a Newtonian worldview. The momentum of this aspiration is still felt in vestigial biological metaphors, textbooks, and modes of reasoning. The second is economical and practical. Industries benefit from finding more or less reliable mechanisms, because they can be harnessed or manipulated in various ways. I think these two reasons co-conspire in ways that are not to the ultimate benefit of students, nor society and nature. Mechanistic presumptions unhelpfully distort how people approach diverse contemporary issues, from ecological management to biotechnology. Our pedagogies too become mechanistic.
And yet, even here we should expect life to be rewilding our efforts. The mechanistic conservation scheme will give rise to unanticipated ecological developments, the biotechnological intervention to unconceived side effects, and the classroom dynamic will quickly show us that our mechanistic approaches are hardly performing the functions they were intended for.
(this post is my contribution to a co-authored AAACS presentation with Nathan Hauser, May 12, 2023).
Sometimes Tricksters throw themselves under their own bus. I once brought Starbucks coffee to drink during a lecture on the impact of economic globalisation to Scottish students. Feigning nonchalance, I continued to teach as normal. But I was enlivened with anticipation, waiting for the contrast between my actions and my topic to be discovered.
But what if no one noticed? Trickster Pedagogy is only just beginning. Do I make the cup logo more visible? Or take more frequent sips to increase the chance of it being seen? Maybe I should break the class into groups, tasked with investigating how globalisation has creeped into our learning space. (Their Canadian teacher might then get spotted). Or do I let it go, accepting some students have observed it, and not all educational experiences require my guidance to digest?
If discovered, the pedagogy continues. Do I steer how students interpret the dissonance? If so, when and how? Do I eventually confess to the setup? Will doing so serve the ongoing meaning-making of the experience? Keeping silent may foster a skeptical attitude towards experts, or a need for students to scrutinise their own contradictions. But it might also generate apathy if students deem the problem is too ubiquitous to change. It might normalise the idea that it is ok to do the talk but not the walk, or at least the idea that it is normal to have such abnormalities in one’s (apparently?) socially conscious teachers. Admitting to the set-up might suggest other tricks are in store, “easter eggs’ like in a Stanley Kubrick film, and raise sensitivity and attention in general. Or it might foreground trickery as a teaching method, and stimulate my students’ desire to experiment with this pedagogy in turn. It also might re-establish my possibly jeopardised authority, for better and worse. My ego might compel me to confess, even if this conflicts with my pedagogical wisdom.
Trickster Pedagogy role in ecologising education
The hidden curriculum of school systems is itself tricking us into unecological ways of thinking, doing and being, even if it is ‘about’ ecological topics. Luckily, trickery is itself a way out. Here I outline two ways Trickster Pedagogy exposes and/or disrupts unecological educational patterns, and possibly reorients them more ecologically: 1) the way it exposes the relationship between explicit and implicit; and 2) how it can confront students with ecological levels and paradox. For each, I will briefly outline how Trickster Pedagogy works, give examples, and explain why it is important for ecologising education.
The explicit, the implicit and the complicit
Trickster pedagogy counters the growing trend of explicit learning intentions and reduction of ambiguity in education. This approach risks habituating students to neatly structured learning, overlooking the unpredictable and complex nature of the real world. The world isn’t organized into easy propositions or models. To think otherwise is itself a terrible trick. It’s full of surprises, uncertainties, and ambiguous phenomena requiring patience and comfort with uncertainty. “Explicitification” can reduce people’s resilience in facing life’s inherent uncertainties and reduce our ability to sustain attention towards ill-defined situations or problems. It can also foster the misconception that uncertainty is insignificant or controllable in learning, and limit our capacity to appreciate the evolving, tacit nature of both human and non-human worlds—an urgent concern for educators navigating the complexities of the Anthropocene.
By merging pedagogy and curriculum, trickster pedagogy reconnects the means and ends of learning, fostering a more holistic understanding of the world around us.
Encountering koans
A koan is a short anecdote which sometimes presents a monk’s cryptic response to a novice’s question. One, for example advises “if you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Koans show the value some Buddhist traditions place in answering by not answering at the level expected by the asker. The answer provided introduces an ambiguity or a paradox which forces the asker to consider the relationship between question and response, and to confront unconscious assumptions underlying the question in the first place. Many koans are not accessible to casual readers because the topic engaged is not a living problem for them. Indeed they are rooted in particular contexts of Buddhist practice. For a Trickster Pedagogue, the question is how to set up koan-like confrontations between a students’ expectations and alternative ways of handling what they are exploring.
As educators, we know explicit and implicit curricula are in constant interplay, one affecting the other, as what we do and how we do it co-inform one another, and as both interact with ourselves and our students across time. We can disrupt explicit curricula explicitly, by creating an expectation and then challenging it, in ways our students know is intended. Or we can disrupt implicit curricula implicitly, such as when we shift the tone of the room by changing our voice or turning off a light, without ever explaining what is going on.
But we can also play with congruence and incongruence across these modalities, creating explicit expectations and shirking them through how we implicitly engage with those expectations; or we can let implicit framings provide a context that we then defy explicitly. Like koans, the educational experience operates cross-modally, revealing not only that the content of some expectation leads astray, but that even the style, logic, habit, or some other hidden subordinate supportive structures of that belief were themselves complicit.
Experiencing crossmodal relationships and indeed incommensurabilities acquaints the student and teacher to the kinds of shifts entailed in ecological thinking. For example, upon hearing an environmental educator articulate that ‘the problem with the current globalising zeitgeist is that people are operating in a mechanistic worldview. They see things in linear cause and effect relations. If only they saw things more holistically, we could transition towards sustainability’, the trickster pedagogue might ask: ‘that is a nice explanation for what is happening. What ‘cause’ do you propose to get to this holistic worldview?’ The ultimate solution to this question is not to provide such a cause, which is directly asked for in the question, but to realise that the framing itself relied upon the very kind of thinking it was calling out. This would be a koan-like trick.
Trickster pedagogy and classroom relationships
Being a trickster can seem scary to some teachers because of the different kinds of relationships and responsibilities it brings out. In this section, I present three different relational dynamics that can arise through trickery: 1) how trickery can magnify and expose teacher vulnerability, 2) how it can threaten and restore trust, and 3) how it develops and makes transparent the ecological nature of ‘teacher identity.’ These situations are rich for critically interrogating and redeveloping more flourishing relationships with self, other humans, and the more-than-human.
Making oneself vulnerable
Like telling a joke, or acting out a role (themselves often tricks), tricks can fail. Setting up an experience which risks landing flat is more self-exposing than some other pedagogies. Further, we might intend our tricks to open scenarios electrified with drama or excitement, but this depends not only on the skill of our execution but on the “buy-in” from our students. Students’ lack of emotional engagement can be highly embarrassing or feel like rejection. When our tricks involve topics in which we are ourselves emotionally invested, especially those pertaining to our highest values, these feelings only magnify. And so teachers might resist the drama for fear of such vulnerability.
Cultivating the capacity to be vulnerable, and to support another when vulnerable, is important for a world in turmoil. The illusion of control exacerbates the ecological crisis. In our experience, with an open attitude, the occasional failed trick can deepen classroom relationships, humanising the teacher in the eyes of the students, fostering a learning community, and disarming the space of what’s then possible.
Threatening and developing trust
That said, tricks can also be emotionally disruptive and lead to socially complex situations for a teacher to navigate. I remember the time two experienced teachers taking a professional development Master’s course with me became quite hostile after a trick. I had set a task where students were told their online discussions would be assessed according to a rubric that would be provided. As the online discussions progressed, a student soon enough raised the question: “How can we know if we are doing this discussion correctly if we haven’t been given the rubric?” After letting the question sit for a while, I jumped in: “Yes, how would you know? What does good quality mean to you given your insights so far?” Answers from students trickled in at first, but gradually the discussion thread was tumbling with momentum, splintering off further thoughts and questions not merely about ‘quality’ in this context, but also about the function of assessment. After the online discussions, we reconvened in class, and I said, “I told you a rubric would be provided, but I didn’t say who would be creating and using it to evaluate your work.” My students soon realised what was happening. Response ranged from amusement to anger, highlighting assumptions about the nature and purposes of education. Confrontation with implicit assumptions can be visceral in a way not easily achieved through other pedagogies, so important work needs to follow to make sense of the experience and rebuild trust. In some way, this means being even less of a trickster than the average teacher, so as to connect at the level of the person and not through our ascribed social roles.
Exploring teacher identities
My Initial Teacher Education students are working out new identities. There are many competing voices on what that means, and some of them do not tend in directions that ultimately sustain and flourish, themselves or others.
I am interested in what ways ‘teacher personas’ are tricks, and paradoxically how they may actually enable the experiencing, sharing and developing of more authentic identities. If teaching is an art, do we, as Ursula Le Guin suggests, “lie to tell the truth?” I sometimes reflect on this paradox with my students, as of course, my ‘teacher persona’ is prone to do, opening questions about the nature of the self and relationships.
For example, as a teacher, I have a manner of being, a way I speak and am silent, listen and curate, foreground and background, that is sometimes very different from how I am when not in the classroom. Teaching is a performance. But it is not so simple as to say I am pretending to be something I am not. Sometimes I feel like aspects, or possibilities, of who I am are brought out, elaborated and distilled, through the kind of concentrating space that is ‘being a teacher in a classroom’. Sometimes I ‘try on’ a way of being for reasons that seem to make educational sense. When I feel what it is like, and what kind of self emerges through the subsequent interactions that ensue, I sometimes realise that this way of being, once a mask, is in fact an essential part of who I am becoming, or want to become. Perhaps the fact that this mask suggested itself, and not some other, indicates something of the dialectic between the truth and the trick. Perhaps not. In any case, I experiment with students in an ecological alternative between naive essentialism and constructivist views that might otherwise threaten our capacity to develop teacher identities grounded in deepening values, while inviting the active shared discovery our own true masks. (for earlier reflections on masks, see On teaching oneself).
Thanks to my inspiring friend, the Maestro Trickster, Anthony Weston.
Like artists, teachers face situations where they must make sense of and respond to dynamic tensions. For artists, this may involve things like the interplay between light and dark, detail and blurriness, foreground and background, and, of course, the relationship of these tensions with one another. Educators may have versions of these same aesthetic problems, but unlike the artist, they occur within educational situations and can be thought of as educational tensions. Educational tensions are complex problems which involve grappling with, and possibly dialoguing between diverse or contrasting factors that matter educationally. When and how do I bring myself into my teaching, and when do I hold back from doing so? When do I quietly support a student who is lacking confidence, and when (and how) do I challenge them? When and how do I resist department and school authorities’ plans or practices? And so on.
One approach is to collapse the tensions, perhaps by concretising them into “if x, do y” algorithms. Another is to embrace the chaos by concluding that it simply a matter of ‘balance’, which often ends up being whatever compromised position one ends up taking, retroactively justified. Sometimes we surrender to an ad hoc alliance between our motivations to control and our desire to abdicate responsibility. While it is inevitable (and good) that we develop habits thinking and action that categorise similar situations together (and from which arises the possibility of categorical responses in turn), two complex situations may be similar along many key dimensions but require very different approaches. Complex dynamic situations have too many parts, ill defined parts, and are changing on their own and through our interaction with them. When to go with existing habits and when to doubt them? Another educational tension.
Getting a sense of how things hang together and develop, where they might go, and one’s place in the ecology, is an ongoing aesthetic process, and responding requires artistry. But what is required to respond with artistry, and what does it mean for teacher education programmes? Artistry too is a kind of alliance between intervening in situations and letting things be. But it is hardly ad hoc, nor can it be smothered by the word ‘balance’. Artistic resolution is not some comfy ‘it depends’. It does depend, preciously so, but sometimes the situation calls one to take risks so extreme they fall outside even the boundaries we thought defined the tension. Other times not. What guides how even this educational tension –between doing and letting be– comes together, and how to know if we have been led astray? What guides an artist? What guides a teacher?
Teacher educators might begin by telling student teachers about the complexity and need for artistry. I think this is not likely to be effective (for several reasons). Nor would simply ‘modelling’ artistry in one’s own practice suffice (also for several reasons, starting with it not being clear whether ‘modelling artistry’ is an oxymoron: to model it well, must forget we are modelling?). Both telling and modelling may be necessary, but neither are sufficient. They do not cut to the heart of the matter.
I suggest attending to the heart of educational tensions is deeply interconnected with attending to one’s heart, and that this is where teacher educators should start. The perception of an educational tension is felt as a tension in one’s body. Sitting in a problematic situation means sitting in uncomfortable feelings. Conversely, perceiving and attending to the problems that call us connect us to what we care about. Our educational tensions are not generic, and they find us.
The relationship between an educational tension we perceive and the corresponding tension we feel is the context for the possibility of artistry in teaching, but also why artistry is too often evaded. It sometimes hurts to be so called, but it is the kind of gratifying pain that draws the artist back to her easel or fretboard.
We sometimes settle on a solution that addresses the tension arising in our body rather than the situation our heart resonated with and called us to attend. We forget the cord. We deny the invitation. Sometimes this means we flee entirely, but often it means we decide some course of action is “good enough” and release ourselves from the burden of its presence. Exhaustion and fear (of uncertainty, failure, embarassment, etc) can also drive teachers (and the education system generally) towards premature resolutions. Competing pressures on time and a culture that does not value deep attention co-conspire with this drive towards goodenoughism. “Good enough” is sometimes good enough, especially when responding to tensions we face from tasks imposed but meaningless. But goodenoughism can be bad faith, a sleight of hand trick we concoct to lose contact, with our selves and with the other in a single puff of smoke, without seeing clearly that we have done so.
The kind of attitude one has towards what one works with contours the space of possibilities for engaging with it. For example, being fearful contorts how we are able to face and engage with uncertainty, whether we are willing to change opinions, ‘stick to our guns’, or be open to otherness, not to mention our stamina in holding genuine and ongoing concern for where it is all going. Unlike fear, care is an emotion/attitude that orients towards tensions differently. If we care about something, we will not settle on a solution that is simply good enough to calm us into not worrying about it. An artist that cares about a piece may rework a painting for hours and days even if they had thought it was ‘almost finished’. Artists do not aim for ‘good enough’ in what matters to them. They are guided by tensions in what they work with, and will not settle on shortcuts that anaesthetise their engagement too early. They keep themselves connected, and com-passion orients their endeavours. (This does not imply ‘perfectionism,’ which itself denies artfully encountering the tension discussed earlier, between intervening and letting things be.) The attitude artists manifest immerses good teachers too.
But why care, especially if it can lead to sleeplessness? Or if a ‘perfect’ outcome is not possible anyway? For those who fear caring, care seems like putting oneself in an unnecessarily vulnerable position. It seems like precarious sacrifice. It certainly doesn’t seem relaxing. But those who have devoted themselves to caring know the kind of beauty that can arise when participating in the ecology of the heart: that sacred feedback loop between more deeply encountering and responding to otherness, and more deeply encountering and responding our own selves. We grow as people, into new distinctions, nuances, pains and delights, as we grow more perceptive and engaged in the needs and possibilities of another. Care holds us back from overdetermining or underdetermining a situation. It has us revisit and recalibrate as our ongoing perception of the situation reforms itself.
Maybe teacher education should acknowledge and theorise such matters. More importantly, it needs to make space for student teachers to experience caring through educational tensions. For example, educational tensions arise naturally during placements. Picking up on the tension new teachers feel, mentors and others quickly try to provide solutions. If we believe care matters, then caring for a new teacher’s cares also matters. This raises its own educational tensions for the teacher educator, and along with it the possibility of heartfelt artistry.
I don’t think it is arbitrary that philosophy comes back, again and again to certain kinds of concepts. As I posted earlier, a philosophical experience can be seen as the disorienting severance from structures of meaning and action that we unreflectively partake in. But not all concepts are equal. The disruption of our unreflected upon use of certain implicit premises is more disorienting than others. Some such structures are relatively ‘higher up’, meaning less is disruptive when called into question. But other notions hold mountains above them, so when they are challenged, the level of possible disorientation that ensues is much more profound.
This is one reason why philosophy returns to questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics, ie to being, knowing, and doing. All trace back to basic categorical orientations of how we conceive and participate in the world, and which underlie language. Questioning ‘being’ is asking things about the nature of what we call nouns, questioning ‘doing’ asks about the nature of what we call verbs. Such questions operate at a fundamental level because they engage the different basic categorical ways in which we encounter ourselves and the world. “Basic categorical ways” means that, while particular nouns and verbs may be disrupted (and disruptive), by disrupting noun and verb themselves, we also disrupts all of the terms within them. ‘Knowing’ is a bit different. It is not represented in any basic grammatical category. However, it is also basic and underlies language because the utterance of any sentence implies an unquestioned cognisance of some sort. To say anything indicates an epistemological attitude towards what has been expressed, that we believe it, think it is true, for example. For example, the sentence “I am not sure” implies some certainty that I am not sure, an epistemological attitude underlying its formation and independent of its particular claim. (There is no getting around this. As soon as I say “I am not sure even if I am not sure” it is then that claim which holds some authority). The basic point is that something like knowing is unreflectively present and widespread, just as are things like doing and being.
The particular philosophical attitude that each of these fundamental and pervasive aspects call upon in us is itself a reflection of the differences between them in daily experience. For example, doing is an activity, and when “I” am doing something, there is a feeling that I am involved in the world, can direct myself, and that my doing has effects. It is because the unreflected subjective experience of doing has these dimensions that it generates ethical questions. Doing in non-subjective experiences may lack certain of these feelings, and attenuate others. For example, a rock falling off a cliff may not seem directed, and its effects are instead foregrounded. So doing in some circumstances can also lead to philosophical disorientation about the nature of causality. Both in turn are very different from the kinds of questions that arise when we think what it means for something to ‘be’. The particular philosophical experiences that arise from questioning what ‘noun’ is, in turn depends on what entity we are considering ‘to be’. Again, for example, whether that entity is a subject or not leads to different philosophical experiences with different attitudes for exploration. The reader will detect an obvious side effect. Philosophical experiences foregrounds how words such as being and doing, seem to have coherent and pragmatically understood meanings in unreflected upon daily life, but actually harbour very different and conflicting phenomena under their umbrella. This realisation is itself disorienting, itself a philosophical experience.
Aesthetics is another big basic area in philosophy, and it is probably not far off to suggest that it has something to do with exploring what it means to live in a world where there are qualities in phenomena, which we call adjectives and adverbs.
There are other perennial philosophical topics, such as what is: thinking, mind, time, consciousness, understanding, truth, explanation, goodness, purpose, nature, and so on. Time (and space) are interesting in a similar way to knowing. Rather than being an instance of a basic grammatical category, or an aspect that arises through questioning such categories, time and space also appear as underlying the possibility of utterance in the first place. Kant called them forms of intuition, and distinguishes them from categories. (He also thought that time was connected to the kind of knowing that broadly underlies awareness and language, above, in the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’). The kind of philosophy that engages time and space is thus expected to have a style different from the rest in this list. The others terms seem to develop from distinctions, approaches, and questions that arise within the base categories. For example, although understanding is different from knowing, it can be thought of as a distinction within epistemology. (Obviously, I am not using the word category in the same way as Kant’s first critique, which consisted of discriminations of categories within knowing. It is closer to the kind of categorisation that led Kant to separate books on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics.)
As far as educational implications, I am not going to suggest some simplistic scaffolding story. It cannot be the case that those uncomfortable with the disorienting feeling of philosophical experiences can slowly be inducted into it in a straightfoward way, such as starting with what I have called ‘higher level’ experiences and moving gradually towards the bottomless depths. Whether or not a disorientation is uncomfortable and avoided is much more personal than that. Some people may be comfortable with the abstract musings of reconstructing basic premises because doing so is ‘armchair’ enough to not have significance in their ‘real worlds’. Or the other way around. Some topics (such as death, which is a philosophical atomic bomb) are philosophical experiences (related perhaps to time and nouns and other things) that can hit harder even if they are at a higher level. The important idea is that it is crucial for educators to at least be aware of the layeredness of philosophical experiences, and to explore and experiment with individual students to see what trajectory towards more profound philosophical experiences is possible.
There is also implications for learning for sustainability, but here I will list just one. If it is the case that most of our unreflected upon behaviour is also destructive, then philosophy can play a role in calling such patterns into question. We might even say that philosophy can disrupt disruptive habits, relationships, and ways of understanding, and in so doing, make space for alternative ways of recoordinating with ourselves, people and the planet. In this way, among others, philosophising education plays a role in the broader project of ecologising education.
I am interested in bringing philosophy into teaching, and believe it plays an important role in all educational activities. There is a field called “philosophy of education,” but this is primarily interested in generating philosophical questions about education. In philosophy of education classes, students philosophise about educational issues. This tends to place emphasis on the role philosophy can play in conceiving (and practicing) pedagogy.
But outside of philosophy of education, students can profit from philosophising topics of any course. Philosophical issues are implicit, explicit or nascent in particular topics within a subject, but are also present in the relationship between subjects, and in the relationship between what is taught and how it is taught (ie curriculum and pedagogy). To bring philosophising into education in this way connects with certain philosophical premises about the purposes and nature of education. For example, philosophising tends to leave students with more questions than answers, and against a view which sees education as the commitment to replace ‘ignorance’ with ‘knowledge.’ Because my main interests are ecological education and biology education, I am always finding philosophical questions to bring out in these areas. While I think there is a place for ‘understanding’ ecological and biological phenomena, I think the artistry of education involves navigating an ongoing situation which involves making and breaking questions and answers. When to linger on one or the other, or to rupture them, is the process I aspire to improve in my pedagogy.
I think academic philosophy is becoming increasingly unphilosophical, so my bringing philosophy into education is not an attempt to get people acting like professional philosophers. My main concern with professional philosophy is that the ‘philosophical experience’ is very often absent or buried, because of the tendency to focus on quality and validity of method, which for philosophers is mainly the development of arguments. The focus on developing better arguments may have its own pedagogical value, but on its own I consider this to be the field of logic, not philosophy. I suggest that bad philosophical positions can be investigated and defended with highly rigorous arguments, while important philosophical positions can be developed through poor ones. While an important philosophical position argued well is perhaps the best outcome, given the choice between the two options in the previous sentence, I would often opt for the good philosophical idea over the good argument. The fact that Plato continues to be read, even though first year undergraduates can rather easily punch holes in his arguments, suggests that this intuition is still held by others, and that despite appearances the philosophical spirit has not yet been destroyed by logicians. His ideas are defended with new arguments, or tweaked and then supported, suggesting method is subservient to vision. Why else do some ideas get resuscitated perpetually, while others are left to fall away?
A master logician might see errors in arguments so quickly that they prevent themselves from ‘experiencing’ the idea being argued for. Also note that a computer could in principle identify errors and develop logical arguments extremely effectively, but is unlikely to be considered a philosophical machine. Perhaps pedagogically, an argument sometimes only needs to be as good as is necessary for a student to take the idea seriously, and imagine what the world is like through that lens. Perhaps it only needs to be good enough for a student to care enough to enter into that world, explore it, and spontaneously develop their own reasons, consequences and connections, –but also feelings– within it. To ‘experience’ the world philosophically.
I used the word ‘philosophical experience’ and ‘philosophical question,’ and claim that these are importance, not only for retaining the philosophical spirit, but also pedagogically. What what is a philosophical question, and what is it like to experience such questions?
A philosophical experience can be characterised in several ways. Here are two preliminary intuitions:
1) A philosophical experience occurs when something one unreflectively assumes, and which forms the basis of daily life, is suddenly the focus of consciousness and our assumed attitude cast in doubt. Such an experience renders to that thing a sense that it is both better known and less well known than it was previously. It appears as ‘better known’ in the sense that our previously unreflected-upon engagement with that idea now appears somewhat dreamlike and superficial. But for this same reason the thing also appears less well known, and mysterious. Such experience is similar to how a word appears odd when we dissociate it from its use by saying it many times. As such, a philosophical experience needs no argument at all. It can even be experienced without words, as gestalt switch, an insight, a possibility, a doubt or a contradiction.
2) Often a kind of jamais-vue, philosophical experience is inherently an emotional experience. It can be exciting, terrifying, lonely, eery, beautiful, confusing, loving, or a combination of all. There is something uncanny and disruptive about philosophical experiences. They are discoordinating and disorienting because such experiences open and then sustain questions which shake basic foundational assumptions we rely on in our lives, and put at risk any sense of firm footing in the world. A philosophical experience feels like an adventure. It can feel dangerous, and people may not be equally open to it, or need different kinds of scaffolding or preparation for it.
One reason philosophical experience / questions is backgrounded in courses (including philosophy courses) is because it seems more difficult to standardise a way of evaluating its quality. I believe I can sense when someone is experiencing a philosophical problem, but it is harder to pinpoint on rubric sheets just what a marker would be looking for compared with, say, the validity of the argument. This leads to another version of Biesta’s (2009) observation that in assessment, we tend to value what we can measure rather than measuring what we value. (We could call this ‘the assessment fallacy’, recognising its resonance with Dewey’s ‘philosophical fallacy’). Another reason it is backgrounded is because students and teachers may have unquestioned assumptions about the purpose of education at odds with cultivating philosophical experiences.
Of course, the development of arguments and the development of ideas cannot be as easily parsed as is suggested here. The act of working out an argument is sometimes a clarification of its consequences, scope, conditions, and connections with other ideas, and so developing arguments can itself be the act of dwelling in a philosophical experience. But even here, I am not so sure the quality of the argument always matters. Sometimes, the arguments provide qualitative depth and texture to the philosophical idea. Other times, I feel it is the time spent reading or thinking up the arguments that sustains the philosophical experience, and that the minimal condition is that such arguments are simply ‘believable enough’ to hold this imaginative space. In any case, argument is subservient to the ideas it develops.
The assumption that it would be otherwise is grounded in the premise that our beliefs are founded and develop primarily through reason, evidence and justification. But we often have a feeling that something is plausible or true, and then work out why we think this is the case. If the philosophical experience is important in education, then the cultivation of plausible possibilities becomes paramount. In addition to reasoning, this requires an engagement with the full dimension of what underlies a person’s openness to novel ideas. This means philosophising education has psychological dimensions too, a rhetorical aspect including context setting, mood, responsiveness, narrative, silence, and much else besides.
Living organisms sustain, and are sustained by “vital norms” (Canguilhem, 1966). A norm is vital if it is necessary for life. For example, the human body maintains a norm of 37C temperature and specific levels of minerals, despite fluctuations in the external environment. From the point of view of physics or chemistry, vital norms are abnormal. 37C is a far-from-equilibrium state, and so it is only because life can tap into, store and distribute energy, that it is able channel material flows towards norm maintenance.
There are several feedback loops sustaining any norm. First, there is the fact that maintaining a norm keeps the organism alive, which in turn maintains the norm. On a smaller scale, every norm is itself maintained by feedback loops between contrasting tendencies. 37C is achieved through a feedback loop between processes that heat the body, and those that cool it. All norms are dynamic fluctuations around some ideal, optimised point or range. There are also the feedback loops between different norm sustaining feedback loops. Life sustains norms at varying scales, from those norms sustained through gene regulation in a cell to global nutrient cycles, with many interconnecting levels in between. Because organisms sustain such vital norms, life is intrinsically normative.
What maintains a vital norm is valuable, what does not may be destructive. Unlike the world of phyiscochemistry, life exists in a world where healing, pathology, strength, weakness, safety and danger all exist. From the point fo view of physics and chemistry, these words make no sense. They are surely just vague global descriptions of processes that can ultimately be understood by mechanical underlying components. Not so, says biology, and feedback loops are the way out. Pathology is an ontological state on equal footing with chemical reactions or quarks because it is a description of the dynamics of feedback loops. The scale of the atom or molecule brackets space and time too narrowly to perceive these feedback loops, let alone explain them. When an organism’s vital norms are at risk, the feedback loops themselves are threatened. If the norms cannot be sustained, neither can the organism they sustain. And vice versa. Physics and chemistry are only necessary and sufficient explanations for a lifeless world, and will lead to one unless biology restores itself.
It should follow that a basic understanding of different kinds of feedback loops (ex positive, negative, and interlocking combinations of both), and how they manifest vis a vis norm sustaining relations, ought to be foundational for biology education. Instead, many school systems hardly emphasise the pervasiveness of feedback in bio-logic. For example, in the Scottish biology curriculum, it pops up as simply one among many dislocated factoids about this or that phenomenon, such as in glucose regulation or predator-prey cycles. This is not because it is too complicated; many national curricula do demand understanding (or at least the performance of understanding) of many much more intricate biological processes. It seems instead a vestige a 20th century vision of life premised on its ultimately reducibility to chemistry. We are in the midst of a transition towards a 21st view that acknowledges and seeks to understand what and how life accomplishes what it does, on its own terms. While there is basic lethargy underlying resistance to any change, many industries still profit from the 20th century vision. This means the transition to an empirically more satisfying and unifying understanding of the living world is further gummed up. The reduction of life to chemistry ‘works’ for certain purposes, even if it piles on downstream side effects.
The view that life sustains itself through feedback loops that can be healthy or not also implies a different kind of empiricism, which suggests a different approach to teaching biology. Because such feedback loops are often meso-scale (meaning neither too small nor too big for the eye to see), we can perceive the quality of such relationships directly through the senses. There is an ‘aesthetic quality’ to understanding life’s maintenance of norms. For example, we can tell if a plant or animal is sick because we can sense disruption in its internal relations. The role of the senses in perceiving, evaluating and diagnosing quality of biological relationship could be given some prominence amongst the ‘skills’ development science curricula insist upon. This does not mean there is no place for instrumentation or computation in perceiving the health of living systems. It is instead to suggest that our sensory engagement in the world is not detached from the reality of things in the way we suppose when pondering whether a chair ‘really is’ just jostling molecules, or colour ‘really’ just specific frequencies of wavelength. The scale in which many norms are established and sustained is often the same scale we perceive the universe. And this is not surprising, given we evolved our senses in order to sustain the norms of our own physiology and that of the community of others we depend upon. Another angle into making science curricula have more contact with the ‘real world.
Perceiving, understanding, and responding to vital norms should itself be a vital norm which human societies orient around. An education system that does not work towards these ends is itself engaged in pathological feedback loops, while not even providing students with the eye to see the destruction it is complicit in.
The difference between how the world appears in direct experience and how it appears through investigation generates philosophical problems. This is one reason why it is impossible to separate science education from philosophy: even if a scientific theory is not itself ‘philosophical’ (which I question, but for another time), the chasm that theory opens up when juxtaposed against taken-for-granted experience is filled with question marks. Consider, for example, the difference between the mechanical cause-and-effect explanations commonplace in molecular biology and the feeling of what it is like to be alive at ‘our’ level of the world.
One quality that obviously characterises living organisms, be it trees or birds or people, is that they are organic. This means that while there may be regularities in their structure or behaviour, they are not predictable. In animal just as in plant, life feels wild and free, each according to its kind. With the rise of mechanistic explanations, we are posed with a problem. Between wildness and mechanism, what is appearance and what is reality? This is a philosophical question, and it gives rise to philosophical hypotheses: Animals are ‘really’ just giant, complex molecules, and their wildness is just an illusion. Or, the world is everywhere wild and the causal necessity we see in biochemistry tells us more about how we look at the world when we investigate it than how it ‘really’ is. Or perhaps some hypothesis about how order evolves freedom, and so on. A similar chain of questions arise when we consider how these biochemicals are assumed to be lacking sentience whereas our experience of life is that it is filled with feeling. How did molecules become feeling? How could we know? How do we know molecules are insensate?
If we do not confront the chasm, there are pedagogical dangers. If we do, there are exciting rewards. If students are continuously taught that varied aspects of life are all explained by underlying mechanism, they may begin importing such schemes into how they template encounters with life in their daily world. I often see people explain the activity of an animal they see as ‘just instinct’, which is an effective way of shutting out any further interest into the creature. There are implications for Learning for Sustainability here, because constrained ways of seeing creatures lead to constrained ways of interacting with them, further a dislocation of humans and the rest of the living world. Alternatively, many students may simply not see the significance of these countless mechanical details, which feel disconnected from their real worlds. The may get bored and tune out, concluding that even though they thought they were passionate about the living world, biology is not for them. I worry often a combination occurs, where students abandon the subject feeling that life is a complex, tedious machine without vitality, a repetitive reorganising of particles without freshness, an intimidating scribble of acronyms and arrows without inspiration.
We might avoid turning students off by confronting the chasm head on. The contradictions between our models and the world we so clearly see and breathe gives rise to questions, and it is in these questions that students can connect the meaning of what they study to their lives. Is life just a complex molecule? If so, then why do living things seem so free? How can molecules become free and still obey their laws? If molecules have wildness in them too, then why do they succumb to our chemical theories? Is it possible to come up with an explanation that does not reduce phenomena to cause and effect mechanism? What does the answer to this question mean about human knowing and/or the world?
Exploring the chasm is the flip side of cultivating knowledge. An enriching experience more deeply encountering the world arises through engaging with the interplay between answers and questions. Science curricula will not effectively engage the imagination of many students when subject teaching is conceived primarily as the developing and deepening of knowledge alone. It will exclude those who vaguely feel the contradictions I’ve been discussing, feelings unacknowledged as the contradictions go unarticulated and the course units march on. For those teaching in countries where assessment is still geared towards establishing how many facts have been filled into the head, working the chasm will likely be a few minutes here and there, every so often. But we must judge our educational impact based on the amount of time we spend on a subject. A careful and well-timed question may take 20 seconds to pose, a further 10 seconds to linger on in silence, but have far more reaching consequences for a young person that a dozen hours spent on mandatory course specifications.
Do you remember when you learned the Earth revolved around the Sun? I certainly don’t. But why not? It is such a surprising fact, one astonishing enough to deserve inducing its own ‘flashbulb memory.’ Its surprise cuts in several ways. First, there is the obviously strange idea that we live on a sphere with no direction up and yet we do not fall off. Second, is the idea that we are constantly in movement, and moving very quickly too, around a giant ball of fire over a 100 times bigger than our own planet. This movement, this speed, and the spherical shape of the Earth are not felt in direct experience. Learning that the Earth revolves around the Sun is therefore a moment where we see that the way the world ‘appears’ is significantly different from what it ‘actually’ is. It is like Plato’s cave, but without the need for a convoluted metaphor. The duality between appearance and reality has reappeared in countless ways in human thought, but the Copernican revolution remains one of the most visceral possible encounters with this split.
That I do not remember learning it implies to me I learned it too early. There is a point when we can be told something without ‘getting’ why it is significant, and so when we do come to understand what the ideas means we do not feel its significance. It is almost like how children come to understand the meaning of words. Using them first, and gradually getting a more nuanced sense of the contexts they can be used, and only much later thinking about what the words actually mean. We seem to have a similar pragmatic engagement with ideas about the world, where ideas often regulate activity first and are only sometimes later popped out of this field of immersive, unreflected upon usage, to be engaged explicitly.
If not the Copernican revolution then perhaps there is some other idea that came to you at just the right time. The significance of its truth hit you like a thunderbolt, clutching your imagination, seizing your heart. What if there was only 100 such amazing ideas in our world, and say 15 more yet to be discovered? We do not know how many mind-bending ideas await discovery, and many of us hope there are an infinite in store. But it could be that all have been discovered, or that there are only finite left, or that it simply becomes too expensive (economically, ecologically, etc.) to keep discovering them. If we do not know, do we assume amazing ideas are a renewable resource, to be mined ad infinitum? Or do we treat such ideas with the same care and attention we ought to treat any potentially limited resource? What is the ‘sustainable’ approach to engaging with amazement or wonder?
One approach would be to dismiss the problem altogether. Even if there are just a few such ideas, it does not matter. The primary purpose of such knowledge is for it to be ‘used’, not for whatever effect ‘realising’ it may or may not have. The quicker people know how genes, atoms, solar systems, electricity, ecologies, etc ‘work’, the more able they will be in engaging responsively or productively in the world. From this counterargument, one might even suppose that the basic structure of the world ought to be learned quite early, so it is ‘first nature’ just like one’s mother tongue, rather than counterintuitive facts to be wrestled clumsily and spoken of with a lisp.
I do not know if that is true for some ideas. For example, perhaps there are ways of understanding the animals, plants and weather in one’s local ecology that seem to depend on early immersion to achieve fluency. But many of the big ideas I have in mind are not the kind with daily practical implications. Most of us continue to say ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ and navigate our homes or towns as though the earth was flat. So, let’s assume I am specifying the kind of scientific (but also philosophical, spiritual, etc.) ideas that have significant possible impact on humans conceptualise themselves and their place in the world, but not the kind likely needed for any obvious use in our quotidian lives.
If we can agree that there at least some ideas that are powerful but without immediate application in such daily contexts, and that such ideas can be taught at the wrong time, or the wrong pace, then some educational questions follow:
If there is a finite number of such powerful ideas, when and how should they be taught? My pedagogical intuition is that we should be slow and careful, inviting and provoking particular students in response to interests, thoughts and feelings we see developing in them. But until there is a broader understanding of the role of slowing such knowledge down, parents, the media, and others will surely ‘let the cat of the bag’ too early despite our discretion. I view this as short-circuiting students’ capacity for enchantment and nothing short of a normalised infringement on the rights of a child. It leads to people educated with a head full of facts but undernourished and underskilled in exploring emotions associated with such facts. It is also likely a violation of nature.
Is it possible to recover some sense of the power of such ideas even after we have habituated to them? If so, how? What kind of meditation, discussion, prompts, activities, language or art, or thought experiments might re-sensitise? Note that the answer to this would address a bigger education problem: our tendency to take many things for granted in our lives, and the benefits of reawakening feeling towards them.
If there are only a finite number of such ideas still undiscovered, then what pedagogical implications does this have for how we ought to pursue further inquiry into nature? Where do we slow down? Are there some questions which we simply let be unanswered? And how do we communicate such societal questions to students? Is it important to protect the eros of our encounter with the world in a pornographic age? And does the mystery we protect tell us something important about the world in turn, like how the fog on a mountain accentuates its contours while hiding its face?
I am watching a dog chasing a ball. I see so clearly that matter is not insensate. It is able to yearn, to pursue with frenzy what it craves. Perhaps all matter yearns to become what it can next become, and the evolution of the world is brought about by its ongoing desire. When we say particles are attracted to or repelled by one another, perhaps we should take these terms seriously. Perhaps matter channels itself into different capacities and intensities to desire. How else to make sense of the clear fact that once there was a zygote, before that carbon and hydrogen, and now a frantic chase?
People are eagerly discussing whether ChatGPT is intelligent, and if not, they are making predictions on when it might be. ChatGPT’s performance is not arising out of the attractions and repulsions of its matter, but by a structure imposed on it. By contrast, whatever problem solving abilities dogs have, they are in service of what dogs desire. In life, intelligence is how organisms find ways of satisfying what they yearn. It is completely interconnected with and dependent upon an emotive tug. Without this tug, there is no incentive. The animal sits listless, –almost like a computer. Granted, if all matter yearns, then the electrons and silicone and what not inside a computer will be compelled towards certain ends. But these ends are being funnelled by the organisation of the hardware and the constraints of the software. Perhaps the electrons desire to move down the wires. But the disconnect between the apparent function of the computer at the level we interface with it, and its material process is most evident when the computer breaks down owing to a ‘malfunction’ of some inner component. It no longer does the apparently intelligent things we want it to, but it may in fact be an instance where matter is achieving change through its own quietly persisting willing and achieving. One might suggest that it is no different from a cell ‘breaking down’ and becoming cancerous, but the analogy is flawed. The activity of cells produces the multicellular organisms that they in turn depend upon. A cell malfunctions when it no longer reliably brings forth what it has co-created. The material in a computer is not disrupting its own creation when it burns out a circuit.
In the tradition of enactivism, biologists sometimes suggest that cognition and living are the same process (ex Maturana and Varela). Cognition makes the self, and self-making is cognitive. The intuition when seeing the powerful impulsive obsession of a dog and contrasting it with the passivity of ChatGPT opens for me thoughts that such self-making (or ‘autopoiesis’) is driven by desire. Schopenhauer spoke of a ‘will’ in nature, and Bergson of a desire or volition that creatively compels evolutionary process. And yet, the idea seems odd to modern ears (even New Materialists feel a need to de-phenomenologise desire), as science has decided (without evidence one way or another — what evidence could settle the question?), that matter cannot yearn unless it happens to be a human, or perhaps a mammal. But how molecules, operating according to physicochemical ‘laws’ evolve the ability to thirst for anything, is quite impenetrable. Wherever we look in physiology, we see mechanisms of causal interaction between parts. We even see the mechanisms underlying such thirst. But this does not explain its urgency, intensity, feeling and power.
I should also say we don’t even know where to begin in thinking about how to create a computer programme that desire. In science fiction depictions, it often just kind of happens. The problem may be that unles matter itself is organising into hardware and software, we will be stuck simulating desire through imposing constraints and rules. And so, the desire in ChatGPT remains extrinsic, in the minds of the people creating it.
One might suppose all matter is affective. While we say that particles yearn or have desire, this is not meant to suggest it is at all like the spatiotemporally complex and textured kinds of affects that multicellular organisms can have. The difference between the kind of desire a particle has compared to a human may be as wide as the structural and organisational difference between them. It is simply to suggest that, just as a human and a particle are both material, albeit vastly contrasting in scale and complexity, so too are they both feeling, and with just as much difference.
It is not scientific to assume that matter is feeling or unfeeling because we have no empirical evidence either way. And yet, this is nevertheless a topic that matters for science education. Why? Because we do have theories and hypotheses about the evolution and development of feeling (since Darwin many biologists have written about it), and also because it is striking that all our scientific progress remains inconclusive on this point. It tells us something about science, and about nature, when empirical investigation cannot make concrete progress in certain realms of inquiry. The question unfathomable marks science opens up are just as important ‘products’ as the predictive theories it generates. Particles may well be completely insensate, but then it is a powerful mystery how it is possible that they organised themselves into feeling.
But the most important reason it matters, I think, is twofold. On the one hand, the misidentification of AI with intelligence is rooted in a sharp dualism between cognition and a feeling body, and each time we succumb to this separation in thinking about entities in the world, we further detach our thinking minds from our own feeling bodies. We risk becoming more like a computer at a time when we need to pay attention to what our own hearts yearn for, and reorienting thinking in such service. On the other hand, such misidentification also continues to drive a wedge between humans (and computers) and the rest of the biological world. The latter may not have the computation complexity of a computer or a person, but calling AI intelligent and not a tree or bird does much damage to our relationship with other species.
Sometimes academics want ‘impact.” We want to ‘make a difference’ in the world, now and after we die. According to Terror Management Theory scholars, desire to make lasting change may be rooted in a fear of death. A kind of surrogate immortality. But the aim to see one’s impact externalised for posthumous significance stems from a thwarted understanding of nature. Everything we do is both the product of infinite events in space and extending back infinitely in time, while also having infinite and eternal ramifications. The entire history of the universe in its every detail was necessary to bring forth the uniqueness of each particular thing existing now, and each thing contributes essentially to its endless extended ripples and permutations. Perceiving the scope of one’s power in changing the world gets corrupted when detached from awareness that this very power is itself nature’s power, present and effective regardless and independently of whatever evaluations humans place on who or what has ‘impact’. One’s existence necessarily is equally infinitely significant and insignificant. Rather than feeding into the seeking of personal immortality, this realisation destroys the foundation of the ego, and offers in its place a deeper matrix within which to conceive oneself and others. In other words, every one of us cannot help but have an eternal impact.
All things are immortal, forever a part of what the world is, has been, and will become, and the thread-lines between these. And yet, all things in existence change, echoing, reflecting, refracting, varying… And so, “she lives on in our hearts” is her soul fractalising out in a hundred different forms, that themselves change even as our memories of her recur. By great great grandchildren, her effects are now in rhythm and melody instead of voice and image, and gone is a conscious association with her being. She has also merged with the rhythm and melody of countless others. Merged not in the sense of dissolution, but as contributing through interplay, dialogically, in ways now implicit. She lives on not only in the mind or behaviour of other humans, but in all things. The reason why no two things in the universe are identical, and the reason why there is necessarily ‘experimental error’ in scientific experiments (however precise), is because each thing is stitched into space and time in its own particular place. The conditions are different, which means the weight of the entire universe –past and present– offers to each being something absolutely unique, while in turn each gives back its uniqueness, reshaping nature through its arising. She has forever influenced ever forest she’s walked through or stream she’s waded in. We forever change everything we interact with, and to varying extents, we interact with everything. This sounds like a ‘spiritual’ pronouncement, and perhaps it is. But it is implied but the insights humans have gleaned from centuries of empirical investigation into how things hang together, from evolutionary process to ecological relation, and beyond.
Spinoza tells us an increase in our power to act is experienced as joy. But he also says everything is interconnected and he denies free will. This seems like a contradiction, but only from the point of view that conceives ‘power to act’ egoistically. This is the same partial lens that seeks personal immortality. The power to act individually is ultimately increased by recognising that one’s individuality is the process and product of nature. It frees us from judgment of self and other entrapments that limit exploration of what we are as existences arising uniquely in the world.
One acts– as a unique but interconnected activity of nature itself. The more one is able to act -be an activist (as Naess calls it in “Spinoza and the Deep Ecology Movement” (3250)), the more one experiences joy. It is joyful to act according to our own interests and abilities. It enlivens and energises to act in the way nature has uniquely gathered in us, and which it has given for us to contribute back into it. This means acting towards those things which attract us to action, because what we can care about or have compassion for is also unique to us. Active care is a form of what Spinoza calls amor intellectualis (loving understanding); it is love towards another particular being that is itself a unique expression of infinite nature, and the love is developed through more deeply caring for this being and in so doing, understanding it ever more deeply.
Because our actions have infinite consequences, we cannot predict them. This does not mean that strategising for ‘impact’ is altogether pointless. But it comes with big warnings. First, we may be misled about what we think is worth prioritising. Second, strategising can lead us to close off to the impact we actually have. When discussing means and ends, Gandhi says ‘the means are everything.” What happens when we focus on ends in academic impact? Chasing publication citations can lead to fear of getting scooped, a hermit-like avoidance of exploring ideas with colleagues, an advertising attitude towards our work, or a jealousy of the fecundity of others. Even if these approaches make sense for maximising citation impact (and they may well not), it is not necessarily the case that an academic has their influence measured well through such metrics. The means aren’t only everything, they are also everywhere — scattering effects outward with our every gesture, pause, or movement. We do not know how we influence the world, but the clues and feedback needed to responsively attend are often in concrete encounter. If we choose some arbitrary and abstract spatiotemporal level as the domain for intended impact, we background what we currently interact with. Our students, family, colleagues, as well as our own values or nascent vulnerable ideas ignored by impatient ends-based thinking. Why do we hold onto certain stories of how we causally affect the world, and what are the effects of those stories? What keeps us caring about such things even if we know they are illusions? We should be vigilant about such questions if we choose to orient our power around particular aims we think worth achieving.
If the individual is expressing, and an expression of, the whole of nature, we can develop understanding love / loving understanding towards nature through focusing on individuals, and our quality of relationship with them. The actual things we meet in our moment to moment lives are the primary points of contact of our infinite power. We meet the world and respond best to its rich and dynamic textures just where we are. It is a mistake to instrumentalise or bypass those we encounter for imagined effects “down the road,” because how we affect the world now now affects the quality of subsequent reverberations. We only treat “down the road” as generalities, calculations, or statistical games which silence the infinity within us and others, which only appears in our commitment to the particulars.
How can I be an activist in loving attention to this person, this idea, this work? How can I help understand and support the infinite uniqueness coming forth in those I encounter, nascent with power and vulnerability, recognising also that my own uniqueness is also dependent on their flourishing? How and when do I teach in this way? I propose several interconnect approaches. The first is developing a metacognitive practice of realising when one has shifted into treating present particulars as means to an end, and remembering how flows of actual effects are backgrounded by such thinking. This might involve forming a community with others who can remind us, with the practice becoming a cultural norm. The second involves practices of attending to the uniqueness and becoming of the particulars we encounter. This does not mean ignoring how they are similar to others, because seeing similarity also foregrounds difference (affifi 2019). This may range from relatively passive appreciation of another, to actively engaging it. Third, we need to critically uncover how the perceived topology of our impact in the world has been contorted by systemic values and beliefs that do not serve humans or the earth. Because these values and beliefs have found their way into the 21st Century’s academic’s identity, we need to consciously create alternative spaces where we normalise pluralistic and process-focused approaches to conceiving our role and effect in the world.
Spinoza teaches that we share kinship with all. Even those we merely tolerate and even hate are all born of the same nature that births us too, and the same billions of years of interactions are working themselves out to produce all of us. We share this moment of space and time together, astonishingly so, in the midst of the countless dark miles in every direction. We sit around a campfire together, so to speak, and are each the kinds of beings that can appreciate its warmth and comfort. Our shared kinship softens rivalry. And yet, we each also manifest our shared heritage differently, because we are both manifesting nature’s process from slightly different positions in its manifold.