Author: ramsey affifi

Vegetal bebop

In normal times, the genes peppered across a plant’s DNA function more or less according to the common metaphors of popular science. Here, they look very much like ‘instructions’ used to build the plant’s body and direct its behaviour. But when a plant encounters an unexpected circumstance, things get wild. The instruction metaphor breaks down, and a new insight into the interconnected nature of genes, organism and environment is revealed.

I will zoom in on one wild phenomenon here, to make the point. Forty years ago, cracks in the genes-are-instructions metaphor had already appeared with the discovery of ‘alternative splicing’ (Berget et al, 1977). Alternative splicing occurs when a gene gets transcribed differently than ‘usual’. One way to think about what this means is to imagine a gene to be a paragraph of text. Under normal circumstances, the gene is expressed by pulling specific words and sentences from the paragraph and putting them together to be read. But in certain conditions, some of those words or sentences might be omitted, or others put in. In language, this amounts to a change in meaning. In genetics, this means changed physiology and behaviour.

Gene transcripts are shuttled away to get translated into long stringy molecules called proteins. Different parts of proteins push and pull at each other, and the strings often fold into complex but very specific shapes that then specify how the protein interacts. A dizzying array of different protein shapes enable and participate in an equally dizzying array of functions. If alternatively spliced transcripts are translated, these proteins —known as protein isoforms— have a different shape than their regular counterparts, and so can interact differently.

Some protein isoforms seem like well-established alternatives that can be pumped into action in the face of common disturbances, such as drought. But not all alternative proteins are evolutionarily conserved ‘Plan Bs’ waiting idly in the toolkit (Mastrangelo et al. 2012). For better or worse, it appears the number and nature of protein isoforms is not prescribed. A door is opened for the creative role that chaos plays in plant life. Some isoforms turn out to be nonfunctional. They are quickly degraded and their building blocks re-used. Others wreak havoc in the form of deformity and disease. Still others end up assisting the plant in new ways.

It turns out that alternative splicing in plant genes is especially prolific when a plant is encountering a novel stress. Why would a plant bother creating all these variants, with nonfunctional or unpredictable effects, at a time that requires urgent coordinated response? The answer turns out to be exquisitely Darwinian: in precarious times, it may be advantageous to produce a lot of new possible solutions to a danger. To do so, it adopts a randomization strategy. In risky times, it pays to take risks. Doing so, the plant increases the odds of an adaptive response. By generating variations of its gene products, the plant is increasing its repertoire, brainstorming without a brain.

This is roughly the same thing that happens in species at the population level in the process known as ‘natural selection’ (Darwin 1859): diversity in a population of organisms increases the likelihood that when given an environmental disturbance, at least some organisms of that species will survive long enough to pass on their genes. At the organism level, alternative splicing increases the chance that some behavioural response to a stress will be beneficial for the plant’s survival.

So, plant genes are more likely to produce predictable proteins when living conditions are stable, but the plant quickly generates creative chaos out of its genes when it needs to. With this insight, what happens to the ‘instruction’ metaphor? It seems to me this: the plant regulates and deregulates its genes, streamlining their effects in some contexts, relaxing those constraints in others. When genes behave in a streamlined way, it looks like they are deterministically instructing the plant cells. But alternative splicing during stressful conditions shows that if such determinism sometimes exists, it is only because the plant is determining it. The instructor is the organism, shifting how it uses its cellular resources in response to its shifting environment. In some situations it relies on routine, in others on creativity.

Alternative splicing is common in all eukaryotes, not just plants. But because plants cannot escape threats by running, slithering or flying away, the capacity to generate novel possible solutions seems especially crucial to the way they make a living. Readers of this journal will know that the ‘secondary metabolism’ of a plant is the set of processes whereby plants generate those complex chemical orchestras that so define their unique contributions to ecology as much as to economy. Consider the deluge of alkaloids, polyphenols, and terpenes that plants bring into the world: it is these chemicals that are used to ward off pests and attract allies, but that are also concentrated into tinctures and suffuse our aromatherapies. Notably, the secondary metabolism of plants seems highly susceptible to alternative splicing. For instance, 75% of Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) genes associated with producing secondary metabolites undergo alternative splicing (Clark et al. 2019).

In humans, there are more genes getting alternatively spliced —and spliced in more different ways— in the brain than anywhere else in the body (Yeo et al 2004). Just as animals employ alternative splicing to increase the problem- solving versatility of their neurons, plants use it to improvise volatile variations on their favoured fragrant themes.

Welcome to jazz ecology.

Christmas tree philosophy

Holiday season behind us, I walk down the street. Christmas trees are strewn across the pavements for collection. Well, that is the way we talk about it, at least. Their root systems lobbed off doesn’t seem to bother holiday merrymakers, perhaps because that part of the tree is invisible anyway. But roots are complex structures comprising a significant quantity of a tree’s mass and volume. And so, it must be asked: in what sense do we really decorate ‘trees’? Soaked in water, the tree continues to perform in minimal ways we think make it a tree; it sits there, stays green for a while, and emits fragrance from its resins. But like believing a corpse is merely sleeping because his nails and hair are still growing, are we oblivious to a macabre spectacle? What is lost when roots are cut off? 

In his last decades, Charles Darwin was increasingly devoted to studying plants. He wrote a number of illuminating but less well-known books on flowers, plant evolution and behaviour. Co-written with his son, On the power of movement in plants (1880) was his penultimate study. Its last few pages propose an arresting hypothesis that laid largely buried for over a hundred years. After conducting several experiments— pressing or burning root tip apices and examining subsequent changes to plant growth —they noticed an interesting phenomenon. If burnt on one side of a root tip, the plant’s aerial parts would grow the other way, even though this response would not occur were it burnt anywhere else (including further up the root). Injured plants seem to respond as a whole to local impacts on individual root tips. The root tips, they surmised, therefore play a special role in picking up relevant information and centralising a coordinated whole-organism response to it. The Darwins concluded root apices functioned analogously to a simple brain. 

Is it absurd to use neural analogies to understand plants? Some assert it is plainly so (e.g., Alpi et al., 2007). But many metaphors used to describe neurons and their synapses were themselves borrowed from botany. Consider ‘arborisation’, ‘dendrite branching’ (double whammy there), and neural ‘pruning’: if plants prove an effective source to describe aspects of neurons, why deem it anthropomorphic (or animal-centric) to go the other way and investigate how neural thinking might better help us understand plants? 

The Darwins’ intriguing idea remained uprooted until the rise of contemporary plant behaviour and signalling research (Baluska et al, 2009). According to these authors, plants are analogous to animals with their heads buried in the soil. Superficially, this seems to make sense— at least according to our mental image of the typical animal and the typical plant —roots, like mouths and nostrils, are where plants take in nutrients and gases from the air, while leaves and flowers are excretory and sexual organs respectively. However, the more important question is not to what extent the upside-down analogy is roughly true, but how much the root system really does coordinate responses to information a plant receives. 

One way to approach this question is anatomical. Is the root system organised (or not) ‘like’ a brain? The point is not to find specific similarities. For instance, a chemical that serves as a neurotransmitter in an animal might be doing things broadly served by a different chemical in a plant. On the other hand, that neurotransmitter might exist in plants but be involved in totally unrelated activities. The anatomical approach seeks correlations in structure and function between brains and roots. 

This approach immediately leads to a problem. Root system architecture tends to be vertical. Roots break into smaller roots, and so on, without evident channels between them— in obvious contrast to the messy, circular and interconnected nature of neurons in a brain. Lateral connections between parts of the brain are reinforced or atrophy— facilitated, reinforced or softened through use and disuse. It seems intuitive that lateral connections between roots would be a minimum structural requirement for an organ whose function is to coordinate information, because otherwise it would seem hampered by the siloing constraints of its shape. Can something like this be found between a plant’s roots? Perhaps we ought to look at root hairs (and their associated mycelia) as such flexible lateral structures. Like neurons, root hairs are usually long single-celled structures. Their copious 

growth means they certainly come into contact with other hairs of their own, or other roots. Root hairs grow and atrophy relatively quickly and easily. Looking at the growth of root hairs might be analogous to dendrite branching, while volatile organic compounds released in the soil regions between root hairs might be roughly synaptic. One concerns transmission along linear tissue, the other across spaces between such tissue. Sadly, research into communicative activity in root hairs is virtually non-existent. 

Nevertheless, there is no point in looking for anatomical structures that might be organised like neural networks if no behaviour warrants the search for these structures in the first place. For this reason, a second area of research has to do with plant behaviour. It is certainly the case that coordinated plant responses are well-detailed and commonplace. A lot of plant coordination is owed to the release of hormones, such as jasmonate and auxin. This is not the kind of integrated activity we would be looking for in an organism with something brain-like about it. Instead, we would be looking for a globally coherent activity that involved differentiated responses amongst its parts. For instance, we might look for electric signals transmitted between cells, leading to local but coordinated responses. Electric signalling has been known in plants since even before Darwin’s experiments. Like Darwin’s root apices, its significance was also downplayed until evidence could no longer be ignored (Davies 2006). Action potential, for example, is now recognised as pervasive in plants. More detailed studies into signal transduction in roots, cambium, and other tissue that extends throughout the plant body is needed. 

A second issue is that coordinated plant responses do not appear to be as coordinated as, say, those in vertebrates. In investigating plant responses to stimuli, what level of centralising is needed to deem it ‘brain-like control’? Plants may be more decentralised than vertebrates, responding to their worlds more like a confederacy than a dictatorship (Firn, 2004). Response may be either at the cellular level, the tissue level or something more global— depending on the situation. An organism is likely to centralise its response to the extent it needs to, and plants may not need to— or at least not need to as much. But we should be wary of drawing dichotomies across kingdoms. Animal behaviour is not equally centralised across its phylla, either. By any anthropocentric measure, octopuses are highly intelligent— but they have more neurons in their arms than in their heads. On the other hand, citing Shomrat and Levin (2013), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (2020) points out that flatworms are able to regrow brains once their heads have been cut off, and retain memories of their prior experiences. 

When very young, some conifer cuttings can grow new roots, but not once the tree is big enough to wrap with tinsel and adorn with red balls. It would seem only small and simple bodies can get by without brains— or roots —long enough to sprout fresh ones. With or without an artificial supply of nutrients, such trees slowly die. Whatever it is, something more fundamental than a flatworm’s brain was taken from these firs and pines, their colours dull and bodies brittle, awaiting pick-up above pools of dry dead needles. 

References 

Alpi, A. et al. (2007) ‘Plant neurobiology: No brain, no gain?’ TRENDS in Plant Science 12 (4): 135-136 

Baluska, F.; Mancuso, S.; Volkmann, D. & Barlow, P. W. (2009) ‘The “root-brain” hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after more than 125 years.’ Plant Signaling & Behavior, 4(12): 1121–1127 

Darwin, C and Darwin, F. (1880) On the power of movement in plants. John Murray: Edinburgh 

Davies, E. (2006) ‘Electrical Signals in Plants: Facts and Hypotheses,’ in Volkov A.G. (ed.) Plant Electrophysiology. Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg. 

Firn, R. (2004) ‘Plant intelligence: an alternative point of view,’ in Annals of Botany, 93(4): 345–351 

Sheldrake, M. (2020) Entangled Life. The Bodley Head: London 

Shomrat, T. & Levin, M. (2013) ‘An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration,’ in The Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(20): 3799 LP – 3810 

Trewawas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK

A job offer: A lesson in empathy and pedagogy

I was recently offered an Assistant Professor job in a (mostly) online sustainability-focused doctoral programme in the US state university system. The position had much going for it. Most important to me was that my would-be colleagues were passionate, caring, thoughtful, and open-minded, and that I would have a lot of opportunities to develop my subject of interest. At the time, I was on a precarious one-year teaching contract in a programme at University of Edinburgh where I felt a bit out of place, often giving courses to teach well outside my area of knowledge or concern, and to deliver these courses in ways that did not make sense to me. I also felt constricted in what was possible. The programme at the American university was emergent and developmental, which really suits my preference for fluid co-evolution between teaching, curriculum, and students. By contrast, a favourite moaning point amongst colleagues in Edinburgh is that this university is highly bureaucratic and managerial. Forget allowing space for ambiguity and emergence! Even proposing course changes is such an elaborate affair that few bother to do it. Hence a culture of firing through unchanged powerpoint slides in courses year to year.

I was heading to class one morning after too many nights in sleepless indecision. It would be the first class I would teach since the job offer. The class was on quantitative research methods, a topic I know little about practically or theoretically. I was nervous about how it would go. The day before, I was busying myself trying to understand the meaning of ANOVA tests and the relationship between p values and standard deviation. I felt dislocated, and felt as sorry for my soon-to-be-students as I did for myself. I found myself veering heavily towards accepting the job offer. My interests and enthusiasm are not being made use of here, I concluded, to the detriment of my students, my programme, and my own life as a teacher.

Everything changed within 5 minutes of entering class. I felt a swell of energy rising from within as I submerged in the whirlpool of teacher-student interactions. A cluster of new faces, new people behind them with their unique hidden depths, new relationships between us, and so much growth awaiting! As I started explaining something about statistical significance, I felt a heaviness in my body when a young male student to my left starting slouching absentmindedly in his chair. When asking questions to check the class’ understanding of the concept, I welled with excitement when another student attempted an answer with bright, sparkling eyes. I realised at that moment I would rather be teaching a subject I knew nothing about (and, frankly, had some concerns about) face to face than my favourite subject online. I thrive in this dynamic space, where the currents of feeling circulate. Here is an ecology of emotions, spreading, evolving, co-evolving, eliciting my thoughtful attention and responsive experimentation. It is as alive and real as it is dynamic and complex. It is a space that terrifies me and thrills me, and is one I cannot live without. How might I engage that young man? How will I enthuse others?

I turned down the job. This led to an attempt to articulate semi-conscious aspects of my pedagogy, aspects that are coming into clearer apprehension through this whole experience. It is now becoming clearer to me how much I depend on (and enjoy) empathy as a way of knowing and interacting with students. The term “empathy” is used and thought about in many different ways. Perhaps I should attempt a sketch of what it might mean to me.

I am influenced by those working on the phenomenological descriptions of empathy that acknowledge the primacy of intersubjectivity (e.g. Zahavi; Thompson). When one is empathetic, one is feeling the emotion that is being felt by another. This feeling is not a projection or a theory. We do not form a hypothesis of what the other person is feeling based on an interpretation of their body language and disposition and then feel the consequences of that hypothesis (this is the “theory-theory”). Nor do we simulate the experience after having received our sense impressions of the other. Instead, I assert that the experience of empathy is co-emergent with the perception. It is simultaneous because the perceiving the other’s boredom or sadness or joy is our experience of these similar states emerging within us. I see boredom wash over the student’s body as I feel heaviness wash through my own body. The meaning of the outer experience and the inner experience are given significance by one another. We may be variously conscious of these affective flows, and sometimes not aware of them at all (as when your tired yawn makes me tired and yawn). But they are there. Our bodies gear into a sociality that is fundamental to perception itself, conditioning and enabling the possibilities for thought and action, lending situations a shared tone, a shared ground, a context.

In other words, empathy is part of how we know and interact with people. It is only when we are incapable of empathy that we need to piece together the various bits of information about another person to cobble an hypothesis of what they are experiencing. Void of context, the mind is left to its own scattered devices, analysing a situation with no horizon to give bearings or direction. This happens, and is experienced as a lack of connection, but when it is commonplace it becomes pathological. Thankfully, most of us can get better at empathy through learning. Even if it is such a fundamental pre-cognitive and embodied condition for experience, the capacity of empathy remains open to the world. It provides a context, but is not an impermeable framework. As Evan Thompson puts it, human empathy is open to “pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity” (2001, p. 1). And so we can learn new emotions as we experience new perceptions; the world outside us and the world inside get richer and more nuanced in tandem. The development of our self and our capacity to be affected by those around us are aligned not opposed. This is crucial for pedagogy but also in understanding and participating in the world more generally.

Once I feel empathy, I am now in some sense on a similar path as the other person. I don’t feel “exactly” the same thing that my bored student feels, but this may not matter because they do not feel the same thing from one moment to the next either. The important thing is that an affective feedback loop is occurring, where my empathy is continually calibrating and re-calibrating as I continue to perceive my student. We share a path, perhaps at first a vague synchronisation, but one which is a condition for our respective experiences to hone in on one another with more particularity. With boredom as a shared context, a shift in their chair is felt as an alert break from disengagement and I feel myself suddenly attending to the student’s next move. On the other hand, a continued slouch is also new information because of context; it is felt as a more prolonged boredom. With the passage of time, our immediate perceptions are always put into context. Empathy is the condition for shared experience but is also conditioned by such experiences. The shared path dilates or constricts. Sometimes it brings others into it. Sometimes it dissolves in an instant of total incomprehension.

The meaning of particular statements that students make or do not make is always couched in contexts. The more perceptive I am to these contexts, the more empathic I am to them. The more I feel, the more I see.

Without context, particular statements can be interpreted in many different ways. Our focus shifts from the relationship between the statements and the context to the multitude of semantic possibilities that reside within the utterance. This can mislead us into thinking that it is the nature of language to be infinitely ambiguous and open to interpretation. But textual meanings and their ambiguities result from dissociating statement from context. We hone into nothing but sterilised font, and the contexts at play are only between previous and present words. People who read too many books might be susceptible to forgetting that the meaning of words emerges within and contributes to a more-than-worded world. Those analytic philosophers obsessed with the meaning of words divorced from situation come to mind.

In the case of my job offer, I realised the subtle and dynamic dimensions of the body would disappear: the reams and realms of empathic feedback that accompany the shared words of the classroom. Not only could I not engage in the kind of pedagogy that makes most sense to me as an educator, I would be constantly fighting the quiet but pervasive meta-lesson that we must succumb to, instead of mend, the problem of abstraction. I do not want to contribute to reductionistic assumption that events can be abstracted from their contexts, even if (especially if) I teach that such abstraction is dangerous, leading to instrumental thinking, stereotyping, automaticity, a lack of receptivity, a lack of growth, the logic of standardised solutions, and much of what is contributing to personal, social, ecological destruction widely. (Quite the claim). In other words, I don’t want enact the assumption that form and content do not have to be congruent in pedagogy, itself a miseducative lesson in context.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no place for abstraction. But abstraction is only half of thinking. On its own it can lead to models, theories and hypotheses. It can also lead to concepts and ideas available for analogical transfer into new situations, such as when I parcel out a ‘story’ of my experience and tell it to others with the hope that it resonates for them (it sometimes does!). But the more we apply abstractions, the more we think they work, and the less we are open to remembering that they were in fact abstractions. We must pair our skills in abstraction with skills in contextualising. When and how do the abstractions breakdown? What situations do we invite such that other people and the world might nudge these mental constructions into better coherence, or discount them entirely? For me, it is in face to face situations that my abstractions (such as my cognised hypotheses about what the other person is thinking or feeling) are recontextualised by the ongoing flow of the interaction. Through computer screens, this would forever be an upward swim. Perhaps it would be full of insights about the nature of these problems, maybe even a catalytic opportunity to reconstruct “distance learning.” But this work for another.

The rejoining of abstraction and contextualisation is an important pedagogical project. But it is more than that. The same problems that lurk in our fractured classroom pervade our fractured world, so the rejoinder is an epistemological and ontological project as well.

It is epistemological because it concerns the process and nature of knowing, suggesting that any knowing is incomplete unless it goes back and forth between these two registers. Its ontological significance lies in the fact that this is a necessary way to engage the world. If we pay attention to any phenomenon closely enough, we find it asks us to avoid the extremes of surgical reduction and wooly holism.

Things have parts and these parts interact to form wholes. That is why breaking things down into components and analysing their properties and interactions leads to knowledge. But the wholes also have a sort of “downward causation” because they set the contexts for local interactions in the form of organised relations, boundaries, and relative interconnections and disconnections. There are a lot of wholes and parts in such circular causal organisation in between the smallest and largest phenomena. It is within this meso-world that we live and is here where our actions are meaningful or meaningless, wise or misguided. Empathy is a perceptual response to an ontological whole, the global feeling of another being that pervades and unifies a person’s various behaviours. This whole is not simply created by a set of separate local interactions, as though the eyes, nose, back’s behaviours were all causally effective on their own and the whole body merely an epiphenomenon. No. The whole body sets the conditions for the local parts. People are wholes. And empathy teaches us teaches us there are also wholes in social co-ordination, dynamically whirling between people who co-emerge together like starlings in murmuration or the infectious bellowing of howler monkeys.

Daoism, differential equations, and death: Offerings from the seasons

February is ending, 56 degrees latitude, east side island, eastside Atlantic. The world is still shivery but from sky to sky it is blossoming, and my inwardliness is also unfolding outward. The crocuses are sending orange and violet flames from the grass, but this time of growth does not belong to the plants. This blossom is of the Sun and the swift elemental energies it circulates into expression. An aggressive vigour develops the air, hurtles windy momentum, and light breaks new angles between buildings, new geometries cast almost daily now onto the city’s granite floor. My eyes can feel it even if my skin is attuned to a different spring, one that will only appear once lakes and oceans embrace these energies and contribute to them in turn.

Days have been getting longer with the northern tilt’s accelerating plummet toward the fire orb. The stretching of daylight is at first undetectable to my eyes and nose. Measured in seconds added to the day, the solstice holds winter in what seems a catatonic lull, ambiguous in its beginning and end -until one day it isn’t. The shift is felt in ways I live but do not always acknowledge. The alleyway I pass on my morning walk now glitters in light rather than shadow. The difference is felt but not cognised, the stroll feels brighter even if I do not pinpoint why.

The first climax of light will come this year on March 20th at 9:58 pm, but this climax like all celestial transitions, comes with its paradoxes.

Between March 10th and March 26th, days will be getting longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. Between winter solstice and this time, days were getting longer more and more quickly, after march, days will be getting longer more slowly. We are now rushing towards this peak in vim, after which will be its ageing and senescence. The official first day of birth is the first day of death. Ostara is an inflection point.

Growing up, our summer break always seem to coincide with my father grumbling that autumn had arrived: the days were now getting shorter (his unsolicited astronomical realism never seemed to raise its head during winter solstice). But as I contemplate the hurtling unfolding before me, it seems summer solstice is already the second autumn of the year (my father might be proud of this pessimistic observation). The rate at which days get longer begins to slow in March, decelerating to a standstill in June.

In other words, we are observing changes, and we are also observing changes to the rate of changes. The latter is what mathematicians call “first derivatives” of differential equations. The first derivative of velocity is acceleration. Let’s follow the seasons with an eye on such rates of change. From June until September, death will gain increasingly in vitality, days not only getting shorter but getting shorter increasingly quickly (and like the initial hiddenness of January’s Spring, this death is hidden for awhile by the slow transition and the lagging heat). When the heat begins to catch up a bit, the loss of light is in free fall and Mabon lurks. His first Spring a hidden bloom: beneath the autumnal gloom, with everything about us is withering back into the ground, the accelerating darknesses pivots and pulls away.

But does it end there?

The cos x curve depicts the rates of change of the sin x curve

If changes in daylight hours etch a sine curve into the galaxy, high school mathematics tells us that changes to these changes is a cosine curve. This is represented as f’(x)sin x = cos x. But the rate of change of the cosine graph is an inverse sine curve (-sin x). There is a technical term for this. The rate of change of acceleration is called “jerk” -a term which is almost certain to confuse any intuitive sense we have of what is going on in the passage of the seasons. Because all derivatives of the sin curve are oscillate with the same amplitude and frequency as the original curve, the only difference we should expect is phasic. But can we experience this?

I think we can. In fact, I have already alluded to it above. Between March 10th and March 26th, days get longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. This approximation hid the fact that the rate of change at which days were getting longer was itself changing extremely slowly. Days are getting longer more quickly, but longer more quickly more slowly. Compare this to the difference between December 23rd and 24th last year. On December 23rd there was 9 seconds more light than the 22nd. On December 24th, there was 17 seconds more light than on the 23rd. The rate of change in March is almost constant even though it is dramatic. The rate of change is in rapid flux in December even though it is imperceptible. There is a lull at the equinoxes too, but unlike the lull during the solstices, it is a lull where we stop feeling the days accelerating. For a week or so, they just seem to be in an almost steady acceleration.

I believe this is the end of what can be perceived (and this only with some difficulty). Who knows what if further derivatives are picked up on and responded to by other creatures? But the mathematics suggest that the extent to which life and death are intertwined in the seasons goes well beyond what has so far been suggested. The derivative of -sin x is -cos x, and the derivative of -cos x is sin x. After four derivatives, we return full circle. Although this cannot be felt or witnessed, it suggests something very powerful and subtle. Superficially, it evokes the four seasons that are themselves also indications of cyclicity. But the more luminous point is that with sin curves there are an infinite number of rates of rates of change, each an oscillating wave. There is no end in sight. In March, the rate in which the rate of change in daylight is changing, is itself changing too, this rate too is changing, and so on ad infinitum. Wrapped into the dynamics of the sine curve is an infinitely intricate conjoinment of slowing downs and speeding ups. Every inflection point is a turning point governed by a new inflection point.

The fourth derivative of sin x is sin x

The solstices and the equinoxes are all moments where solar expansion and withdrawal switch hands, one birthing process now dying, but within that dying another birth. This reveals in the most acute way a concrete and infinite dialectical contradiction.

On teaching oneself

It is for each teacher to figure out what kind of teacher they are.

At one point, I was very attracted to student-centred teaching, especially those models that broke down the teacher-student relationship in favour of a community of co-learners. I developed a school where the attempt to do this was itself a large part of the curriculum. I was attracted to Freire’s critique of banking education, and of the project-oriented Deweyan student. These approaches made sense. They seemed right, and not just in terms of my learning style. I also felt that such pedagogies were attempting to enact an attractive democratic vision that I’d like to see come alive writ large.

But I found very few, if any, situations where they seemed to ‘work’. Most often, students would complain about lack of structure, about excessive focus on process, and about not feeling like their errors were being corrected (students often have a healthy suspicion of the platitude ‘there are no right or wrong answers’). I confess to feeling that the aimless atmosphere evoked in these attempts often led me to lose confidence in my learning and in my educators’ capacity to facilitate such learning. The student centred teacher might be delighted to hear that their authority was being questioned. But I don’t think it was being questioned in the way they might hope. (They might be delighted in that too, but again for the wrong reasons).

I felt there was something missing but my conviction that such pedagogies must be right led me to fast and easy excuses: growing up in a system that so favours authoritarian approaches, I’d ask myself,  is it any wonder that there is some bumbling about on the part of teachers and students in recreating democratic pedagogies? I was reminded of how I would analogously defend those rudderless moments in my community activism work. In that work, I often witnessed an abundant need for people to debate microdetails. I saw that being suddenly able to have strong agency in a collaborative process meant we now needed to learn that responsible agency is partly knowing when not to exercise agency. In both the classroom and the community, certain types of engagement with democracy can quickly lead people to yearn for the vision of the ‘benevolent dictator’ that provides a goal and context that people can work within. I am still unsure to what extent time and experience might render such process-oriented approaches more effective and satisfying.

As time passes, I become less convinced that my students’ need for a teacher to explain things, correct errors, reveal interests and passions, and guide the classroom is merely a matter of students being unable to “understand their own rights because they are so ideologized into rejecting their own freedom, their own critical development, thanks to the traditional curriculum” (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 21). In this same chapter, these authors discuss the aesthetics and artistry of being an educator. A key idea, but they seem to miss an essential point. Students want to experience an aesthetic phenomenon. This means an experience where there is a discernable integrity between the whole and the parts. They want to experience something crafted with mastery. Fraying ad hoc tangents, inexplicable eddies, a convoluted narrative arc that leads nowhere -there are many ways that an overly passive teacher can disrupt the relationship between the parts of the class. This forfeiture of responsibility is felt – it does not make sense rhythmically or melodically- and it reduce the student’s trust in the learning experience not because students need an authority but because they yearn to experience an author.

This is truer than ever in the dialogic student-centred classroom. I suspect that students will themselves be keen to collaborate in co-authoring the art of a developing classroom if they see their educator take up the challenge. In asking students to engage authentically in democratic and dialogical classrooms, we are asking them to make themselves vulnerable. If the educator hides their own vulnerability behind the opaque role of ‘facilitator,’ students will hardly feel free to open themselves up. By way of invitation, provocation, solidarity, and good faith, a teacher can show how and why their heart, and everyone else’s, matters. Their own fumbles can then be seen as parts of a whole they are trying to work on, the whole being of course their own integrity as people and as educators. The aesthetic nature of the classroom will come out in the relationship between the ways teachers present themselves as a whole and what they do to move towards this vision of themselves in their particular actions. Devoid of this part/whole relationship, the student is left without the content/context interplay that is so key to developing meaningful understanding of what is happening (this leads to hermeneutic analogies).

We can invite students into their hearts by showing our own in many different ways. When looking back at the various teachers that have made an impact on me, few ‘approaches’ are common to them. Some were strict, some playful. Some experimented pedagogically while others took traditional didactic styles. One especially exciting teacher was fiercely didactic. When Zev Friedman would stand at the podium, clutching both sides of it, his crooked reading glasses poised on his nose, my heart would thrum and shiver at the beautifully serious struggle, the momentous spiritual stakes at hand in details usually depicted as boring or souless concerns of canonical 17th and 18th Century philosophers. This was no academic brain game. A quiet profundity pervaded Dr. Friedman’s world and allowed him to reach into and draw out those same depths in the thinkers we studied. He dared to share it and I fell back in love with philosophy at a time when other course made it seem like egoistic head trips. What seemed to make a difference had nothing to do with some pedagogical principle he was applying. It was instead all about the extent to which I sensed his emotional engagement with his subject. It was an empathic response.

I remember being equally drawn to moments where a teacher would reveal excitement, fear, even despair.

Teacher educators often talk of ‘modeling reflective practice’. How might we model emotional response? How can this be anything but a contradiction? Might emotions be the very things that slip past our attempts to model, -glints and pulses of life breathing through the machine?

An educator might slip unconsciously from honestly exposing themselves to their students one year to expressing the same idea in a formulaic way the next. I have found myself often tempted by this and have occasionally succumbed. I treat my moments of authentic engagement as having given rise to tools that can now be applied to generate authenticity. I have occasionally done this in full awareness that it is impossible and contradictory, knowing full well that authentic engagement is not about applying the past to the present but about showing up to what the current situation has to offer. I have even done this (ah, the absurdities of the human soul!) in describing this very problem itself.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Occasionally such stories can play a role because stories do have a life of their own, because experience is cyclical, because the present is often not so unique as to constantly require a radically new response. Sometimes I can respond to the current situation through how I tell the story, allowing it to be in reciprocal relation with what is around me (like replaying a piece on the piano in fresh awareness of it in all its immediacy). But the more times I tell it, the better I get at telling it, the more I sense it lose colour. Raw emotional expression is vulnerable to the same technocratic thinking that pervades all ‘what works’ approaches, mechanising itself to the purpose of mechanised relations.

The mask is fake… but the mask is also real. Looking back on times I have exposed some aspect of my inner horror or guilt about the ecological crisis, I find there to be something tentative in its first expression. In some way, it is was ridiculously honest and unfiltered. It had not been turned into a story or style or approach (yet). But it was still a performance. I knew I was being listened to, in some cases by two dozen or more people. I felt acutely the radial concentration of consciousness in the room, with me as the hub of the wheel. Such an experience sometimes draws out and magnifies the emotion I was am to convey, like a concave glass concentrating the rays of the sun. In a sense, I became even ‘truer’ than I am normally capable of. It became a piece of music that I was inside of. Per-form. “Per” means through, thoroughly, very, utterly, all around – how I can be so utterly formed through those all around me!

Such is the fate of ‘masks.’ Sometimes our performance brings out something authentic, indeed it develops our range of experiences and self-understanding. Other times it robs us of ourselves. Each performance has its fate, sizzling out of truth or groping towards it, sometimes hiding from it entirely.

How often a scholar’s ‘expertise’ lies precisely in the topic they seem to lack in skill and grace! An expert in care pedagogy fails to make eye contact with me when we meet. An advocate of interspecies interactions tramps loud and thoughtless in the forest. A theorist developing a concept of authentic student-teacher relations lectures behind a thick authoritative facade. Why is that? I believe it evokes a purity of heart long corrupted. Initially, we read and write because we yearn to grow. Oftentimes we are passionate about things we recognise are important but are not very good at. We write because we want to improve, knowing that in putting our strengths towards developing our sacred weaknesses, our heart’s ‘deep gladness meets the world’s deep need’ (as Parker Palmer would put it). But somewhere along the line, we confuse our expertise in writing and theorising about the topic with expertise in the topic itself! Piles and piles of “know that” fill the space still empty of “know how.” In this circuitous way, passion suffocates itself. A culture of academic posturing makes this slip into hidden inauthenticity all the easier.

I think we need to recognise and resist this transformation. As people, as teachers, as researchers, we need to recognise that vulnerability is our asset. We must even guard against becoming ‘experts’ in vulnerability. It is not a turf or territory to be defended, but an attitude to cultivate. It is an attitude that dissolves itself at high altitudes.

Immersed in such questions, I raised them in an exploration with a student, rich peaceful pauses. At one point in the conversation, she mentioned that she has some traits that she “prefers” in herself (one was kindness), and that she consciously reminds herself throughout the day to potentiate these dimensions of herself. It struck me how her list was different from mine (I find myself constantly wanting to work towards humility, astonishment, gratitude). Why were our lists different? Why was I attracted to certain types of experiences and enactments? At this moment, the glow of my desk light illuminating the room more prominently with the sun now set, I realised how pervasive the dialectics of the soul are at work. I know the power and beauty of humility because I have experienced it, but I have experienced its awesome power because I am not always a humble person. Someone who is often or always humble is immersed in the state, so it is nearly invisible in the accustomed background of their being. We contain within us the shadow side (this was her term, perhaps invoking Jung) of each of our most inspiring characteristics, a shadow which tortures but also teaches us the meaning of what we are capable of and the importance of striving for it. Chiaruscuro. I asked her about her kindness and she said she felt that she was sometimes kinder and sometimes much less kind than most people around her.

It often seems I have access to the feeling that life is an astonishing and wondrous event, as utterly beautiful as it is contingent and fleeting, and indeed this sense guides me in my pedagogy and my research. I am lucky that for me there is no choice but to let this feeling, both delicate and powerful, guide me into my best teaching and writing moments. But the excitement of these moments is contrasted by my passages through mazes of ungrateful doubt and self-deprecation. This darkness is exacerbated because I can still know the powerful lightness that suffuses everything, I remember it and can conceptualise it as a statement of fact all through my interminable journey into the night. But such knowing is not enough to pull me out.

We lean towards our vocation through acknowledging and being open to the generative tension between our poles, embracing the drawn string that we can pluck and strum to bring our tunes to the world, the gifts we’ve been given to give, modulating as music often must, between the minor and major key. I can teach this truth by struggling towards unification in front of my students, inviting them to assist, and supporting them (if and when they are ready) to identify and integrate the poles of their own soul. De-ossifying dualisms back into dialectics.

rats

          rats

Our very own Bruce Whitelaw,
(nestling into ageworn fabric fissures,
above, Alba’s winter blows amber rays across passing clouds),
hankers prim for humans minding animal matter
“decisions based on knowledge rather than fear”
To which I shed a tear, a feary tear.

Roslin chapel’s leering dread:
that Esvelt Church has leaks in its ducts
That : “drive systems should not be developed
nor field-tested in regions harboring the host organism”
(meanwhile precipitous drops in third quarter charts),
A trumpeter spurts the death of synbio.

seething murinae are pulled from the trope jar
vermin invasive, disease-carrier crop-crunching hoardster
squeals jitter waves and repulsion shocks cross bustling streets
beautiful border walls secure gutters from maelstrom,
genotypophenotopophylologies loop with career glitters, and
trample Rosetta’s bone. Then young Gus jumps in

“You are only targeting the target species you plan to.”
And the trophic systems thrum with entwining tongues and tendrils
fluttering reorder throughout our panicky telos
a web of ways trims toward oblivion.
The knots untie. With lumps in their throats (and strummed nucleotides a rosary)
The sestet’s ducts are sealed, and it’s gone

Author Posted on Categories lyrical

Contemplating contemplation II: Dewey’s “qualitative thought”

This is a further development of an earlier blogpost, entitled Contemplating Contemplation.

Given the logocentric tendencies of modern western culture, it is unsurprising that the need for a contemplative approach has been systematically disparaged and neglected. Even Derrida, arch critic of logocentrism (1976), with his busy weaving and winding of words, could hardly escape its grasp. Education theorists who do venture broader conception of thinking and embodiment are quickly contained; liquidated of their explorations in secondary interpretations. This is perhaps most striking in the case of John Dewey (Pappas, 2016). For Dewey, language and linguistic thinking was a small fraction of embodied cognition, which he referred to as “qualitative thought.” He considered qualitative thought to be the non-reflective, non-linguistic, affective and evolving base that contextualises lived situations. As a base, it contextualises everything that occurs in a situation, including the forms of logical thinking that emerge in it. As such, Pappas and others (ex. Johnson 2008) strongly critique the attempt to sequester Dewey’s (1916; 1930) observations about qualitative thought to soft subjects, like art and aesthetics, and insist that this embodied affective dimension is key to understanding even (and perhaps especially) the processes underlying the seemingly coolest empirical work or most austere and abstract reasoning. Recognizing the phenomenological dimensions of American pragmatism, they seek to bring to contemporary awareness an observation pithily captured well over a century ago by William James: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (James, 1890, p. 256). (Here is a lecture by Mark Johnson, one of the leading philosophers working to heal the right between thought, feeling, and the body).

The result of this Deweyan fracture has had reaching impacts educational considerations. One of his most popular applied ideas is certainly his famous reflective loop (1910), arcing thinking and action in an experiential circuit. The originary and ongoing role of the qualitative dimension of thought is pervasively ignored in popularized descriptions of this concept, rendering it a seemingly mechanical process. This ignorance reflects the epistemological bias of his readers rather than his position (Alexander 2013). An education that recognizes the importance of qualitative experience, seeks to develop skills in which people can pay attention to them as a necessary part of devoting oneself to understanding and developing thought. This follows from the fact that a qualitative dimension is both the fountain and foundation for any logos. To do this, what is needed is more explicit contemplative pedagogies.

With contemplative approaches, we learn to slow ourselves down. This can assist in thinking in copious ways, one of which is that it enables us to examine single propositions. We can take a single claim which we have (unreflectively or reflectively) assumed as true, and let ourselves explore the relationship between that proposition and the more-than-linguistic reality it births from and seeks to describe. It takes seriously the notion that “language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought” (John Dewey LW 5:250). In so doing, it unhinges us from a dogmatic allegiance to what James and Dewey called “intellectualism.” James (1909) described it in these terms:

We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of “nothing but” that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought.

But key to the success of such an approach is a release from the obsession with the relationship between epistemology and language -from correlationism. To understand the qualitative context out of which a linguistic articulation emerges, we must be able to let ourselves experience and pay attention to the unique character of the situations we find ourselves in. This involves cultivating openness, which means (in different situations) self-compassion, a sense of wonder, humility, appreciation, and peace (we shall have a sense to explore how these are connected). Openness depends upon, and yet enables these and other affects developed through contemplative approaches. One consequence of openness is that inquiry will involve moments -many moments in fact- where the mind drifts from its object of attention. It accepts this movement because openness develops trust that the mind may be at work even if progress is not clear and available to conscious thought, either in conceptual terms or in in felt experience. The emotions, feelings, and thoughts that emerge from a particular focus must be allowed freedom to flow as they may. Paying attention to qualitative thought therefore means letting it evolve as it will. If the conscious mind seeks to police what type of thought is allowed or type of feeling experienced, it will tend to conform understanding of the topic at hand to preset contours. When this inversion occurs, such thinking redirects the quality of the lived situation from which it emerged. While this may be necessary at certain stages of understanding (here is where Dewey’s very specific use of the term “instrumentalism” comes in –where a purpose for intervening in the situation is taken up and the relationship with one’s environment coordinated thereby), it goes against the very nature of exploration. In other words, it may that some of the thoughts and feelings we have are indeed “tangents.” The flow of experience is such that unconnected ideas, feelings, or thoughts do jump into the current. At some point, we will need to make a decision about what is relevant and what is not relevant in our understanding of our topic. The point is only that this decision cannot be made ahead of time without stifling clearer listening, and consequently better responsiveness and creativity.

Given the famous (and now quite old) stories of Kekule, Poincare and others, the more-than-rational “logic of discovery” should really be at the forefront of education. An attentiveness, an openness and the capacity to receive, has been repeatedly shown to be a necessary (but not sufficient) element in creative and scientific endeavors. But its value extends far beyond these spheres. One area of crucial importance is the ethical dimension. In this fast moving world, with the urgency of the ecological crisis ever looming, can we allow ourselves remain in a state of ethical perplexity, patiently awaiting the consolidation of a proper response? It seems that the skill will become increasingly difficult as it becomes evermore necessary, as the demand for panic-alleviating solutions drives easily accessible cognocentricism. Can the jump to Deweyan instrumentality before adequately engaging in Deweyan listening do anything but exacerbate what is likely also a crisis in our capacity to attend? I suspect that navigating between panic and patience will become a defining challenge for environmental education in this century.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research. doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1699026

Alexander, T. (2013). The human eros. New York: Fordham University Press.

Derrida, J (1976), Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Dewey, J. (1930, 1984). Qualitative thought. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, Vol. 5 (pp. 243-262). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Essays in experimental logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. DC Heath and Co.

James, William (1909/1979) The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’, Harvard University Press, pp. 135-136.

James, William (1890). Principles of psychology, Volume 1. Dover.

Johnson, Mark (2008). The meaning of the body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pappas, Gregory F. (2016). John Dewey’s radical logic: The function of the qualitative in thinking. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52(3), 435-468.

Contemplating contemplation

As educators, we often hope or assume that providing information about the pressing sustainability challenges we face is sufficient to help humanity change course. This may be facts about the crises before us, facts about the natural, social, and cultural systems in decline, facts about possible feasible alternative courses. Many weary of information-based approaches to education advocate for conceptual, worldview or value shifts. Many still insist that the problem is not merely the content of the environmental educator’s lesson but also the process, with calls for education that is more experience-based, issue-based, place-based, constructivist. For some, this has also meant that learning be participatory with the nonhuman beings and processes -to name a few.

The trend away from abstract content and towards meaningful contextualised activities and actions is a positive one. However, it is not sufficient. This paper suggests a different, complementary approach to pedagogy. Information, worldviews, experiences, and issues are experienced, processed, taken up or ignored in diverse ways depending on the person and their circumstances. The same seemingly compelling issue can be approached with gusto, hesitation, or downright terror depending on a number of interacting factors, including past experiences, one’s capacity for sustained reflection, current emotions and general moods, social circumstances, and even on whether or not one has had an adequate meal before the lesson. There are no simple linear causal relationships in this vast evolving ecology of interacting factors. An acontextual approach to process is not much of an improvement over an acontextual approach to content.

Given this complexity, one approach to education might be to focus on generalities. Perhaps it is possible to ascertain the sorts of approaches that work for most people and to employ such approaches in schools and other settings. This would seem the most obvious approach both for educators and for researchers. The experimental design would be relatively straightforward, the implications for practice easy to roll out, and the securing of funding for the research feasibly attainable in a climate that favour statistical generality as serious and reliable knowledge. There are obvious merits to this approach. Perhaps most striking is not its instrumental benefit but its psychological value. Especially given the urgency of contemporary problems, we may feel the need for something secure to stand on and to build upon. It would seem better to be able to make tentative, though applicable claims rather than to simply wallow in a messy web of “it depends.”

Except that, of course, it does depend. Any particular generality will be grounded in particular contexts which may or may not be adequately acknowledged, and which are themselves changing, however slowly. It might be that in the short term educating about mass species extinction propels people into action while in the long term it fosters resignation. It may be the other way around. It may be one way with one population and another with another. A generality may appear on one temporal scale but disappear on another. While all pedagogy is context dependent, this is especially true for topics which are emotionally or existentially heavy -which is obviously the case for increasingly weighty net of crises we are wrapped in.

A second reason for concern is that pedagogy based on evidence-based generalities only teaches to the bell curve. This expediency leads to another nonlinearity. Those on the edges of the bell curve can be pushed in dangerous directions through the very approaches deemed successful for the majority. A small number of disaffected students may wreak great havoc on one’s pedagogical aims. It would be a ridiculous and complex calculation to figure out when and whether the ends justify the means here, especially in cases where those outside the mean are also those most likely to end up in positions of power.  

A third reason for concern is that focusing on generalisable tricks and approaches treats education as something that an educator does to an educated. Even (or especially) when the generalization works, it sets up a situation where sustainability is ultimately an external and extrinsic imposition, rather than an autonomous, decentered generative process.

We look for and expect simple linear causal interactions. It makes our job as educators easier. There is a human (well, biotic) tendency to look for patterns to economize energy and time resources is part of this too. The sometimes desperate yearning for a way to teach for sustainability is born out of this.

I suggest and want to explore a different approach largely based on my experiments teaching a Master’s level course called “Educating for Environmental Citizenship.” Offered is a pedagogy that accepts the finitude of human knowing, casts suspicion on atemporal solutions, and seeks to foster humility, wonder, and resilience before the magnificent challenges that lie ahead. The aim is to catalyse the development of lifelong contemplative skills (this work fits into the constellation of ideas gathered together in a recent compilation (edited by Eaton, Hughes, and MacGregor 2017). For example, instead of trying to figure out what makes people engage in sustainability, such a pedagogy might aim to help people develop the capacity to pay attention to the various and evolving motivating and demotivating factors that occur in their own daily lives. This perhaps seems, on the face of it, an easy thing to do, but the fact is we are mostly oblivious to the way in which ideas, emotions, beliefs, knowledge, and social dimensions interact over time. And a stock of favoured theories, however habitual, parsimonious, or elegant, often obfuscates direct engagement with this complexity while cloaking ignorance in fancy and fanciful security. Luckily, as educators we do not need to figure this out in order to educate. In fact, we cannot do so. Cultivating a contemplative attitude requires attempting a contemplative pedagogy, where the educator dwells in confusion, combines grace and self-doubt, succeeds or fails. If teachers are not able to unshackle their own learning process, they will hardly be able to responsively work with others in doing the same. It is only through gaining a greater capacity to understand ourselves as thinking, growing, feeling, and acting beings that we can come to appreciate the sheer immensity of the ecology we are both within and to which we contribute. This does not involve abandoning generality entirely, but rather restoring it within the dynamic balance of two forms of observation. Education ought to help students develop appropriate generalities about themselves as well as the skill of abandoning generalities when they lose their helpfulness (see Affifi (forthcoming) for more on this dialectic). As citizens of the universe, we are continually pulled between the general and the specific, as patterns and their ruptures co-occur ubiquitously both within and without.

***

Contemplative approaches are unlike reflexive or reflective approaches.  Reflective approaches are primarily cognocentric, that is to say they involve thinking as their primary tool (Eaton, Davies, Williams, and MacGregor, 2017). In particular, they are metacognitive, in that they usually involve thinking about thinking. Thinking is an activity that makes certain demands on time. When thinking happens it has a range of rates of change within which it can occur. If the rate of change is too slow, thinking does not occur. It is a river that dries up when it does not flow at a certain speed. When success is viewed primarily as the capacity to develop new thoughts about something, anxiety can easily emerge in arid times. The mind will want to stay within a thinking modality at all costs, and as we shall see some of these costs are expensive. As such, reflective approaches demand that a certain rate of progress of occurs.

The main methods that reflective approaches have for breaking down habitual ways of thinking are critique and synthesis. Critique generally involves employing ready-made ways of analysing assumptions, ways that are themselves habituated thought processes. Likewise, while synthesis involves the combining or recombining of ideas and methods, it depends upon styles of argument that either one has had in the past or has acquired through learning from others.

In general, reflective approaches do not provide the space and time for other resources to engage in developing understanding. A cognocentric approach tends towards greediness,  we strive for answers with hands outstretched and grasping. We seize the idea that comes to mind that seems good enough, often without even knowing it. To consider carefully whether “good enough” is itself good enough might break the flow of the thought that has just emerged and lead us right back to the arid void. And so, we often build up and tear down compositions made like prefabricated LEGO blocks, and scarcely open ourselves up to the harder work of considering whether these LEGO blocks really are the shapes that we think they are. Or the shapes we want or need. The resources needed for this work come from a different space than pure thought (whatever that is). It is a space that runs parallel to thought at all times but which constantly runs the risk of being ignored for the rich resource it is, and trampled over when thought is elevated in exclusive importance. The resources I am referring to are the feelings of the body, emotions, and the various ways and degrees to which we are conscious of them. The skills we need to develop would equipe us to pay attention to these feelings, to how they emerge, persist and evolve, and to how thought eventually takes them up and organises them in different ways, contributing to the feelings themselves as it transforms them.

What this involves is reconceptualising the nature of the process of understanding.  Instead of considering understanding as primarily a cognitive process, we now recognise that cognition itself is better considered as one component of a set of skills and experiences. (Alternatively, we could simply redefine cognition, stripping it of its computeristic analogies and restoring to it the role of feelings, body and the environment). Violence is done to the whole person and consequently to the world when this field of skills and experiences is backgrounded and a sub component within it –thought– is elevated in importance and falsely considered to be the creative engine propelling things along. A contemplative approach is primarily seen as an antidote to this kind of epistemological greediness and it does so through opening up a space. It opens up a space through developing the capacity in people to be patient – patient without an answer, without progress, without immediately jumping too readily available building blocks. It develops a sense of trust that the ecologies of the soul are more-than-conscious and more-than-personal, percolating at rates that do not always conform to our conscious demands. Most importantly, it does not do this through another cognocentric move. It does not seek to convince a thinker to trust ambiguity, uncertainty, regress, and the assorted confusions that come with paying attention. It is a lesson that cannot be provided by a Powerpoint slide or through a blogpost. Logic is easy, but cheap. The importance of contemplative approaches may easily be accepted if the argument given in defence of it is persuasive enough. But these argument alone are insufficient to equip anyone with the capacity to do the work of paying attention in these ways. For this reason, contemplative approaches are primarily experiential and the role that cognition plays within experience can only be fully understood by experiencing it in contemplative ways.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research. doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1699026

Eaton, M., Davies, K., Williams, S., and MacGregor, J. (2017). Why sustainability education needs pedagogies for reflection and contemplation. In Eaton et al. Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education (Chapter 1). London, UK:

Routledge.Eaton, M., Hughes, H.J., and MacGregor, J. (Eds.) (2017). Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education. London, UK: Routledge.

The wide wild world between anthropocentrism and new materialism

New materialist views have taken hold in many disciplines over the past couple decades and have recently sharply increased in education theory. They are seen as suggestive new ontologies that transcend pervasive humanistic and anthropocentric shortcomings. While I am attracted to these motivations and to the de-centering project, I am currently exploring the limitations of a strong new materialist ontology and hope to share some thoughts today for discussion.

Between strong anthropocentric views and strong new materialist views lie a range of ways of conceiving and interacting with the world. In this blog entry, I shall briefly argue that ethical engagement in the world involves exploring this middle space -and that this is especially relevant for the environmental educator. To do so, it is worth articulating the types of strawmen I want to set up on either end of my spectrum. On one side, I argue are positions which claim for various biological, cultural, linguistic, or religious reasons, that humans are ontologically unique entities in the cosmos. They have a special sort of causal potency distinguished entirely from the physicochemical order, a particular consciousness that requires serious ethical engagement, pedagogical attention, and so on. Descartes (in his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa (1644)) is known for occupying this position. Most views that inform decision making in education practice as much as policy, follow closely this sort of thinking. Often blamed for this persisting worldview is the so-called “Great Chain of Being” (Lovejoy, 1936) an Aristotlean, and later Scholastic, model of creation that places humans somewhere between apes and angels along an ascending spectrum between the lowliest and grittiest inorganic matter and the highest form of being, i.e. God.

While there are obvious problems with the “Great Chain” ontology, diagnosing it as a root conceptual problem of the (now) globalizing culture throws the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of a nefarious spectrum there is something closer to a deadly dichotomy, with humans positioned as having vastly different ethical and ontological standing than any other being or process. This may not seem like a radical proposition given that Descartes saturates anti-anthropocentric papers with a prominent bull’s eye painted on his head. Nevertheless, it is important to not conflate these positions because the possibility space of each ontology is very different.

It is largely because we are living in the shadows of dichotomy and not a great chain of being that new materialism has emerged as a dominant way of challenging the anthropocentric view. A key new materialist strategy is to collapse the dichotomy by extending the vocabulary used for allegedly unique human traits to the most unexpected of things (Bennett, 2010). It makes a name of itself by speaking candidly about the “agency” of chairs, the “voice” of electrical grids, or the ethical considerability of cement. To flatten the ontology is obviously a neat parsimonious trick, especially for those of us steeped in the economic aesthetic of western scientific theory (i.e. Occam), so new materialism has attracted many recent adherents. Because ontology flattening rejects the unique qualities given exaggerated place in humans (and wrenched from the rest of the world), it appears to undercut the presumptions of humanism, and a scientism based on the laws of efficient causality, -in a single stroke. As such it tempts its proponents, who may inadvertently become “blind mules,” smuggling in humanistic and scientistic assumptions in the soles of their human-supremacy-steel-toed kicking boots. A flattened ontology holds onto dichotomy not by choosing one side over another but by collapsing it entirely, which often means amalgamating the qualities that define either side while missing all the diverse phenomena in between. We end up with de-agentialized humans and hyper-agentialized chairs; all the while those blinders block a clear view of the many diverse sorts of agency in the world are kept intact.

Some new materialists are not so crude, but the trickled down message often comes to this. Environmental education is not likely to meet a fruitful end if it follows new materialism down this rabbit hole. What is needed, rather, is a different sort of “great chain of being,” a chain that recognizes that the various beings and processes of the world are both similar and different -to each other, and to us- in complex, diverse, and partially understandable ways. While anthropocentrism and new materialism each bleeds the world of its diversity through homologously related sorts of reductionistic maneouvering, a strong antireductionism resists any ontological generalisation in favour of everflowing pluralism.

We need neither a dualistic ontology nor a flat one, but a description of the world that enables us to encounter the diverse ways in which forms, functions, properties, relations, qualities, emotions, experiences, modes of communication, etc. emerge and re-emerge perpetually in radically different ways. We need a sort of new empiricism, a gentle and embracing empiricism not grounded in notions of supremacy nor desires for control, that inquires into the world out of a respect for its possibilities of kinship and difference, that sees both poles of relation as equally astonishing and worthy of exploration, and forever resisting the expectation that preset templates (either way) are adequate. Environmental education should be grounded on a view that neither presumes that the diverse phenomena of the world are identical or different, nor that we know a priori in what ways it is -or becomes- either, or both. To assume otherwise is to silence the world, putting us on a hellbent mission to destroy our sense of human superiority through firing our shotgun into an open crowd.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Descartes, R. (1644). Principia philosophiae (free Google ebook)

Lovejoy, A.O. (1936). The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Harvard University Press.

The new materialism of morphogenesis

This blogpost explores morphogenetic approaches to biology, characterized by the work of Goodwin (1994), Newman (2015), Müller (2010), and others[1]. Essentially, the morphogenetic view asserts that, contra neo-Darwinism[2], evolution does not proceed primarily via small incremental shifts in information bearing genetic code. It instead proposes that a range of meso-level physical properties in matter emerge through different organizations (such as adhesion, viscosity, etc.) which one the one hand constrain and on the other enable certain types of body plans over others (Forgacs and Newman, 2005). The role of genes and the role of physical properties of matter are put in considerably new relationship. Against the endless debate as to whether biological causation occurs at the “whole” level of the agentic organism (such as von Uexküllian subjectivist biology) or the “part” level of genetic code (such as Dawkins (1976)), morphogenetic approaches assert that causal relationships emerge temporally at multiple reciprocally interacting levels. This thereby contextualizes rather than rejects either side of dichotomy. And against the competing views that biology can or cannot be ultimately reduced to fundamental physics, morphogenetic approaches observe that new biological organisations and new physical patterns co-develop, often one in consequence of the other. These facts alone have implications for environmental education, through providing a non-deterministic but naturalistic description of life without giving special ontological authority to alleged “programs” like DNA[3]. This highlights the power and novelty-generating capacity of the physical material world in a way not generally recognized by either advocates of scientific reductionism or those who critique physical sciences as inherently reductionistic. In this way, new biology is new materialism.

One rationale for this line of thinking is as follows. A number of studies in environmental education research have focused on the ways in which “matter matters” (as Barad (2003) put it) in human-nonhuman assemblages. One of the purposes of these works is to replace a conception of the world that has the human as a unique and disembodied agent acting in an otherwise merely physical world. The challenge is to restore continuity between humans and the rest of the world but without succumbing to the eliminative materialist’s dream of reducing humans to some base level set of physical laws (ex. Churchland (1989)). This has occurred largely through the strategy of giving allegedly unique human attributes and qualities to matter itself (ex. Bennett (2010)). As much as I see some dangers in certain applications of this vision, I am largely receptive to the overall goal of nonreductively deanthropocentrizing environmental education. However, this is not the only way to do new materialism. Biologists have long been thinking about the role of matter in biological phenomena such as evolution and development. Understanding this research programme is also important for the deanthropocentrizing project, as it helps collapse untenable dualisms set up in our consideration of other organisms, species and processes. How so? With a predominant focus on deanthropocentrizing the human, there is the risk that we persist in anthropocentrizing our focus despite (or rather because of) our efforts. In other words, it is not sufficient merely to focus on the human as a subject to be deanthropocentrized, rather we must also devote ourselves to developing the sensitivities and capacities to understand, theorize and learn deeply from the rest of the universe beyond the deanthroposized anthropos. A second rationale is that our work is “environmental education,” which (should) by definition involve a world of myriad creatures, beings, and processes, few of which are human. The logocentric infatuations imported from postmodernism have taken environmental education theory and practice away from its traditionally sustained engagement with the nonhuman world and have explicitly or implicitly associated any such engagement with some sort of naive or corrupted scientism. New materialism promises to restore such an engagement with phenomena, but without the conceits of earlier epistemologies that assert uncontroversial access to the world for the deified western subject. But to do this, new materialism needs to get beyond articulating what humans are and are not, and pay attention to the processes and transformations of the actual world. Until this point, vestiges of postmodernism still lurk and hamper progress.

With this in mind, I am concerned with some environmental education implications of new ways in which the properties and powers of matter are being taken seriously in the biological sciences. Because much of this work has been done in evolution and development, these areas will form the basis of the discussion. Morphogenetic approaches place the evolution of physical relationships as equally dependent on biology as biology is dependent on physics. In working to uncover the genealogy of the relationship between emerging physics and emerging biology in particular circumstances, science has overcome the urge to seek what DeLanda (2010) calls “reified generalities” (for a video where he discusses morphogenesis, click here). For example, while certain types of cellular organization are possible and others forbidden by physical laws operating at the subcellular level, once cells exist and the biology of genes and signals emerges, these biological processes sustain cells that create new physical properties[4]. Importantly, these emergent mesolevel physical properties in turn constrain and enable certain types of biological organization and activity instead of others. Quantitative changes sometimes lead to qualitative transformations, giving rise to a dialectical materialism but without the rigid necessity of its earlier incarnations. Multicellularity, for example, is not merely a genetically programmed feat. It is only possibly because genetic activity can bootstrap upon the mesolevel physical properties (such as cell adhesion) that had emerged as a result of the prevalence of cells.

The most obvious educational implication is that we abandon tired and vapid dichotomies that see physics as necessarily reductionistic, matter as inanimate, and the organism (or “mind”) as a solution to the apparent violence wrought by such eliminations. In its place, we should study of the actual ways in which different modes of interaction collaborate to enable and constrain the evolution of phenomena. Educators need to pay attention to the complex world around us, which sadly seems long abandoned in “sophisticated” environmental education theory and practice. But instead of returning to a world that is the fateful unfolding of necessary law, the new empiricist is observing and engaging in a developmental world. Pining after and pinning down atemporal laws is replaced with the exploration of particular contingent conditions that give rise to forms of difference and of repetition.

[1] The view described in what follows has a number of historical precedents, ex. Wentworth Thompson (1917), but has only more recently been corroborated evidentially in developmental studies.

[2] Popularised by Dawkins (1976) and Dennett (1995, listen to him here), neo-Darwinism holds that evolution proceed through the differential success of genes (rather than the classic Darwinist view that examined the differential success of reproducing organisms in a population).

[3] The programme view of the genetic code smuggles “mind” back into matter through the back door (Deacon 2007, watch his video here) by replacing organism with a series of micro-teleologies in the form of signalling molecules, receptors,etc., while at the same time mechanizing the process by treating the organism as not merely programmed, but pre-programmed.

[4] We can say “create” new physical properties, because features such as the sorts of adhesion, viscosity, etc. that emerge in cellular life do not occur elsewhere in the universe.

 

References

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3).

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Churchland, P.M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

Deacon, T.W. (2007). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

DeLanda, M. (2010). Deleuze: History and science. New York: Atropos.

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea. Simon and Schuster.

Forgacs, G. & Newman, S. (2005). Biological physics of the developing embryo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, B. (1994). How the leopard changed its spots. London, UK: Orion House.

Muller, G.B. (2010). Epigenetic innovation. In M. Pigliucci and B.G. Muller (Eds.), The extended synthesis (pp. 307-331). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Newman, S. (2015). Development and evolution: The physics connection. In A. Love (Ed.), Conceptual change in biology: Scientific and philosophical perspectives on evolution and development (pp. 421-440). Dordrecht: Springer.

Wentworth Thompson, D. (1917). On growth and form. Dover.