Category: ideas

Philosophical experiences Part 2: Approaching philosophy’s core concerns

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.

‘Philosophical experiences’ in 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.

For a continuation, click here.

Between scientific explanations and life: Exploring the chasm

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.

Education’s Copernican Revolutions

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

Ecological and existential barriers to interdisciplinary

This blog post takes an ecological approach towards understanding interdisciplinarity, opening questions about the purpose and consequences of different ways of keeping disciplines separated, intermingling, or fused. By extension, I explore how an ecological approach might inform the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we might need to conceive, evaluate and respond to the inter/disciplinary challenges currently faced. Here, I am particularly concerned with the existential sides of engaging in interdisciplinarity and how these ‘ecologise’ with different facets of human and biotic worlds.

Interdisciplinarity is often promoted for the benefits new knowledges play in addressing social, economic or ecological problems. One concern is that siloed knowledge leads to actions and attitudes based on partial premises, and dialogue between silos can achieve a more holistic picture of phenomena. Undoubtedly the interdisciplinary conversation between, say, coral reef biologists and atmospheric scientists helps understand the causes of, and steps forward in addressing, mass bleaching of these wondrous systems. But does it follow that interdisciplinarity is always good ‘ecologically’? 

Through dynamic interactions between relata, ecologies maintain certain variables while changing others. They develop ‘dynamic equilibria’ (Kauffman 1993), patterns of stability across space and time, which become enabling conditions for the organisation and emergence of complexity. For example, while a species of bee and flower may in principle evolve in diverse ways, in practice they mutually specify the range and rates of change of the other (Maturana and Varela 1992) -at least until dependence relationships break down. 

Disciplines and interdisciplines are also involved in a range of ecological dynamics. They are not only patterns of knowing, they are also patterns interacting with the world. These interactions can become very complex, affecting, among many other things, the ‘psychology’ of the knower. Our epistemological and existential needs also regulate rates of being and becoming in the relationships they constitute. These may be dangerous (dysecological), healthful, or either or both, at different temporal and spatial scales.

An ecological approach to knowing suggests sometimes even false premises will be ‘used’ for the stabilities they produce. Plastic in the ocean becomes a niche for new ecosystems, a faulty theory may still be the basis for a prosperous academic career. In the ecological and existential dimensions of interdisciplinarity, errors can become true through the relations they come to sustain. But such scaling out eventually leads to laissez-faire relativism. We need to make a cut. Ought we see how different ecologies emerge on different scales, within and without, before we do so?  How do we learn to give up some cherished ecologies when we come to see others as more important? How can education approach these problems?

Some scholars have suggested there is a magical moment two disciplines cross boundaries and meet one another (Angerer). ‘Magic’ suggests positive qualities seen characteristic of an interdisciplinary experience: a sense of suspense, of surprise, of enchantment, perhaps a feeling the synthesis appearing before consciousness is the result of some subterranean sleight-of-hand work in our personal or social physiologies. I have felt something ‘magical’ in the arising of new ideas and insights when seemingly separated rivers come to ramble together. But I also sometimes feel resistance, and I remember that magic has long been associated with the dark arts, a space where people fear to tread.

A discipline is a habitual way of attending the world, where people, boundaries, concepts, logics, practices, and materials, ecologise into a self-reinforcing groove. Much has settled into the unconscious, because we stop thinking about what we know well or do often. But a vibrant edge of novelty remains,  like a magic froth on the invisible wave that carries us. As researchers, we may relish this edge; it gives opportunity to experience freshness, but within the safe contexts of a sensible matrix. We get our little adventures but we still get our home.

Interdisciplinarity demands a different psychology. What does it feel like to have the foundations of one’s home pulled away? Even the silent work sustaining our magic froth seems now at risk. Along with it, the decades of work invested into that way of worldmaking, the professional identities constellated around it, even the way it has simply given to the world a structure, a logos, a nest: there may even be inklings of a spiritual abyss gloaming in the distance. (Moreover, other people and perhaps species too have come to rely on the regularities arising from my habit, however ill conceived it may be). Add the pragmatic fact we have trained to see and act towards phenomena in a certain way, magnified our focus of a sliver of the world while backgrounding the unknown unknowns needed to sustain that gaze. Is it any wonder attempts at interdisciplinarity often have lackluster outcomes? 

Some educational questions arise from thinking about this existential ecology:

Maybe all new thought is magical. It involves the birth of the new from the old, and with it our participation in the creation of the world. The more difficult and unexpected the birth, the more astonishing it may be, -and so how do we respond to the dynamics of stability and change in interdisciplinary education? Perhaps the psychology guarding the well-disciplined mind against radical novelty produces and protects something sacred in its arising, and it would be somehow desecrating or improprietous to force such confluences. 

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to try to protect the ‘magic’ of an unexpectedly rare offspring when the cost of keeping disciplines separated is a thousand clumsy cuts into the also magical world outside of us. The ecologies of the mind retained at the expense of the ecologies around it. Cancer too is an ecology. Sustainability cannot concern solely with inner ecologies or outer ones, but with the interconnected dynamics between them. After all, hidden connections between things in the world are occluded by the disciplines, and the magic we experience in the novelty of knowing mirrors the magic felt at the revelation of the world. What kind of discipline or interdiscipline can perceive these dynamics and respond to them?

If current disciplinary structures need to be taken down urgently, what kind of disciplinarity follows, given ecologies necessarily sustain patterns and enabling conditions? What is an ecological approach to ecology? If there is no solution we must agree on, how to educate for pluralism in light of our existential needs? 

Impatience with Impatiens

I was born and raised in a settler city sprawling through the middle of traditional Anishnaabe territory. Despite living and breathing land kept by Anishnaabe people, my education occurred within, and indeed maintained, a bubble separating me from this broader cultural world. I grew up with a love, admiration and care for the living world around me, and yet even here, my stock of concepts was influenced by people born to those across the Atlantic, not by the children and tenders of my own watershed. 

Despite this all too familiar scenario, a number of concerns with the environmental narratives circling about crept into my consciousness. One concern was with the term ‘invasive species’, a label cast so casually by those within my bubble. Even if these creatures were shaking up existing ecological balances, it bothered me that adults taught children to vilify them under the guise of ‘education’. I wondered if the phrase victimised not only Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Purple Loofestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and countless other animals and plants, but also the young recipients of these words, replacing the possibility of enchantment in their story of the world with experiences of judgment and division. When the xenophobic language of the populist right in Britain and North America regularly hit my social media feed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the stock of metaphors used in politics was being imported into ecology. I was struck by an apparent contradiction: many of my environmentalist friends were appalled at the use of such language in the human realm but adhered to it unflinchingly in the field of the green, the feathered, and the furry. 

How could the impulse to ‘other’ others be condemned in one context but taken up in another? I pondered whether something Jungian was at work. Even if invasive species were sometimes causing disturbance to local ecosystems, is calling them ‘invasive’, creating ‘eradication programs’ and all the rest of the militarism, really the best way to approach them? Are many of us settlers and globally mobile citizens unsettled in our depths about where we ‘should’ be living? Are environmentalists projecting onto other species a darkness within? What inner work do we need to do before treading into questions of how we might treat these prolific newcomers? 

Now living in the land where my grandfather was born, and still not feeling quite at home, I stand at the edge of the Water of Leith, watching its inexorable flow under the crisp, winter sun. I imagine clusters of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) clambering along its edges sometime after the summer crests and the days start shortening again. The government has occasionally called the Royal Marines in to destroy this showy, pink flower, and researchers are investigating biological diseases to wipe them out. But bees have accepted this plant into their web of relations, delighting in what seems a joyous frenzy from its copious nectar. When does a plant— or a person —become native to a place? 

Newspapers regularly remind us of ‘pollinator collapse’ set in motion by a collision of threats; from pesticide use to habitat destruction. Might Himalayan Balsam’s flourishing be part of ecological rebalancing rather than disruption? Few questions so quickly furrow my ecologist friends’ brows. Perhaps their irritation is warranted. Alongside other local species, bees seem to favour Himalayan Balsam (Horsely, 2016). The presence of Himalayan Balsam may thereby reduce the pollination of other species, some already curbed by its fecundity. But like many ecological studies, how we bracket our vision turns out to be crucial. A study must have a beginning and an end, and conclusions are drawn from within these boundaries. While the results are in a certain sense objective, the decision of when to start and stop the study is not. In this case, as long as the Himalayan Balsam’s nectar exceeds the needs of the bee population, bees may well favour it to the detriment of other plants. But such a scenario is obviously temporary. At some point Himalayan Balsam’s plentiful supply will increase pollinator populations but can no longer supply the demand. Other less alluring food sources are then sought out. Davis (2011) calls this ‘the car dealership effect’. In recent years, some popular science books have argued that invasive species seem to cause fewer extinctions than previously assumed (Pearce, 2015; Thomas, 2018). Perhaps they jump in to fill opening niches and catalyse evolutionary change? 

Others point out many invasive species run rampant because they have no natural predators. Maybe so, but the best way to ensure a predator develops is to let a would-be prey expand its range. If there is any ecological rule, it is that an unexploited niche is an evolutionary opportunity. It is not clear how long we’d wait for animal grazers to step in, but we can be confident opportunistic microbes will quickly emerge. Again, the question is timescale. People are currently testing fungi that might infect Himalayan Balsam (Tanner et al., 2015)— but we know that if we didn’t, something would evolve anyway. What is the rush? What kind of hero story do we need to maintain? Why do we need to insist that the intervention restoring balance come from us rather than nature? And how does this hero story link up with the villain story? Is there a tragic feedback loop between guilt and hubris? Instead of revelling in a nature increasingly manipulated to fulfil an image we’ve concocted from the arbitrary past, might we not become careful students and attentive lovers of the process by which ecosystems adjust and accommodate change? Is nature an active intelligent process or a static process to be preserved? Might ecosystems’ self-regulation exceed our comprehension? The biosphere, after all, evolved myriad creatures in complex co-existence with all their countless fascinating features. Surely the arrival of new species— be it through hitching on the backs of birds, on logs projected into the seas by violent monsoon rivers, or through continental merging —is nothing new in the story of the Earth. What role does patience, indeed humility, play in conservation? 

With these thoughts in mind, I google how Anishnaabe people view invasive species. As many Anishnaabe people still live in intercourse with the land, I imagine invasive species might impact them more directly than urbanites who malign new species’ encroachments on their places of leisure. Reo and Ogden’s (2018) ethnography of indigenous Anishnaabe communities reveals some common features lacing through a wide variety of views and practices towards invasive species. Anishnaabe people are likely to view invasive species as migrating communities or, as they call them, nations. Many consider every nation to have gifts to share, and accepting their gifts fosters reciprocal responsibilities of care and respect. Human and more-than-human nations may not yet know or understand the gifts a new nation might bring to a place, but all have an active role in co-determining the new relationship that will emerge. So, whilst important food and medicines are often significantly affected by the arrival of a new species, for the most part the attitude is ‘let’s wait and see’. In other words, the process begins with listening. 

Perhaps we need not wait for fungi or bacteria to make food of Himalayan Balsam. It has been around the British Isles long enough for many of us to know how delicious its yellow seeds can be. To me, they taste a bit like watermelon. If more of us consumed this offering with gratitude, their numbers might be controlled but not eliminated, and our community made the better for it. That might be a better lesson for our children. 

References 

Davis, M. (2011) ‘Do Native Birds Care Whether Their Berries Are Native or Exotic? No.’ in BioScience, 61(7): 501–502 

Horsely, C. (2016) ‘Alien invasions! Himalayan Balsam, friend or foe?’ in Buzzword 32, November 2016 

Pearce, F. (2015) The new wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation. Icon Books: London, UK 

Reo, N.J. & Ogden, L.A. (2018). ‘Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species,’ in Sustainability Science 13: 1443-1452 

Tanner, R.A.; Pollard, K.M.; Varia, S.; Evans, H.C. & Ellison, C.A. (2015) ‘First release of a fungal classical biocontrol agent against an invasive alien weed in Europe: biology of the rust, Puccinia komarovii var. glanduliferae,’ in Plant Pathology, 64(5):1130-1139. 

Thomas, C.D. (2018) Inheritors of the earth. Penguin: New York

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.

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.

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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.