Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Paradigm Shift - A Letter to My Sister - Thoughts in Progress


Western thinking has long been based on the belief that reality could be represented conceptually. Plato, an acknowledged founder of the western rational tradition, proposed that concepts (ideas) were the ultimate reality, located in the heavenly realm of Truth, in opposition to the realm of matter, error and illusion: mere earth. 

Our commitment to this paradigm is shifting. Perhaps starting with the Pragmatists in the U.S. (R.W. Emerson, C.S. Peirce and the culture that produced them) and Heidegger in Europe (who, through Nietzsche, was influenced by the Americans), a widening wave of thinkers is realizing that “reality” cannot be reduced to concepts. This is because any thing that we distinguish in words can only emerge as a thing or concept against a larger background that itself in its essence remains unwordable, a background that yet preexists as a condition for the possibility of forming any such concept or words. 

For example, if I point out a “tree,” if I distinguish the concept “tree,” I imply and presuppose the whole world  in which the tree is embedded, although all of that wider context remains in the background when I foreground the concept or object “Tree” in my languaging. We can "chase" the background by talking about it, but we can only do so through words that themselves always function only through their relation to an ever-tacit background. (This background has been called the "tacit dimension" by Polanyi, the "implicate order" by Bohm; I believe Heidegger may have called this context "world" on some occasions, although I'll have to check up on that.) 

Aside: In naming this “background” (tacit dimension, implicate order, world, context), I do not mean to refer to an external reality independent from our experience. The background refers to the wider experiential context from out of which and against which we generate words and thoughts — while the notion of experience may imply some reality “external" to our experience, we have no access to such. Instead, we as human beings are able to explain any of our experiences only through other experiences, i.e. through the coherences that we discover among our diverse experiences (as Humberto Maturana has put it). So it does not make sense to refer to an objective “external reality." 

Instead, rather than through an objective external reality, we create a common world -- i.e. a world that we can communicate in and act in together -- by coordinating our behaviors with one another in our daily living together through the coherences that we discover in our experiences with one another, which means by discovering “agreements" both through establishing habitual patterns of non-verbalized consensually-coordinated interaction, and in also developing -- on the foundation of this non-verbalized world of consensual coordinations -- express shared agreements and understandings through our conversations or languaging. This accounts for our sense that "reality" is something we rely upon, rely upon together, have a feel and sensitivity for, experience on the level of shared culture, and not as something we simply "think." 

However, under the longstanding belief that, with sufficient (scientific-technological) rigour, reality could be captured in words and representations (models and the like), the west has created a complex array of specialized disciplines, each more and more isolated from each other and removed from common sense and from ordinary understanding. 

What we are starting to realize is that what is omitted from the thinking and languaging of each of these specialized disciplines — the wider context from which they have distinguished themselves — is in fact the radically common world, the common context from which they developed and that holds them all together! And it is this common world that our specialized forms of discourse, all the professions and university departments are unable to think! As a result, common sense has been decaying precipitously in the world, and, because we are unable to think what we are doing relative to our common context, human harmony, scientific, political, economic and cultural, is threatened. 

What the world needs to do is to rediscover the portal through which we can approach the future together, which portal I sometimes refer to as the generation of the commons (where I mean "commons" in a very broad sense). This means that our expert professionals in every discipline need to rediscover their link to the commons, and through that alone, to one another. By and large, we have trained our experts and leaders to pride themselves for the very distance they have achieved from the "merely common," the ordinary, the lay mind. "Progress" has been conceived, partly, as progress away from pejoratively "common" ignorance. "Educated" people have been valued over the supposed "uneducated" commoner. "High tech" excites more peole than low or no tech. And so on. But to rediscover the commons is to rediscover and re-experience our universal commonality as ordinary human beings, and it is only in this rediscovery that we can give meaning and direction, and collectively benefit from, the insights and learnings of all our separate disciplines. 

We are starting to move out of an age that believed “truth” was the “correct or incorrect” representation  of an external reality, a notion of truth that makes us very judgmental beings, too often acting under the supposition that there are right and wrong answers to everything and often pitting us against one another and ourselves. 

A shift is happening as we begin to reconceive the purpose of “reason” and thought as that of bringing people into harmony with one another and nature (our common context), not merely through writing and other forms of representation (media, books, ideologies, sacred texts, etc.), but in actual in-person acting and living together. All thinking is doing.

As Hannah Arendt once said: There is a sense in which the brilliant expert physicists who created the nuclear bomb knew what they were doing in order to create an unimaginably destructive weapon, an extraordinary feat of engineering; but there is a deeper and wider sense in which they did not realize what they were doing.  The essence of science is not scientific. The essence of technology, as Heidegger said, is nothing technological.  Scientific-technological thinking that is committed to the notion of truth as certainty-of-representation is itself a doing, but what science and technology are really doing remains unthinkable to science and technology; this comes into appearance only when we consider science/technology within the wider context in which they are embedded, as are considering it here: One thing scientific-technological thinking is doing, as presently instituted, is fragmenting the world ever more while delegitimating what most fundamentally gives coherence to a beloved and fully human world embedded in a beloved nature. 

C. S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, held that the “truth” of any proposition is in its consequences (not merely in its presumed correctness or incorrectness).  Hence, for example, if the consequence of some people being republicans and some being democratics is constant fighting and failure to take shared responsibility for the world, then the “truth” of the republican and democratic propositions is not in the ideological “correctness” of either side, but in the dynamic of fighting that they are producing.  

One dream of science was to harmonize the world by establishing objective truth that would compel everyone to agree (this is arguably the underlying non-scientific rationale that provided a context for science).  To carry out this purpose, science put all its hope in truth understood as certainty of representation, and counted as “real” only what could be objectified through representation. This led not only to the fragmentation of the world into specialized professions and jargons as described above, but also to the rigorous exclusion of emotion, so-called "subjectivity," the felt experience of “the now,” etc., from the domain of scientific thinking -- except to the degree that could be objectified and captured in representations. This exclusion was concomitant to the exclusion of the wider, always inherently uncapturable context within which we live, whose relational richness and complexity will always by definition exceed the capacity of human beings to think it, rationalize it, capture it in representation, from the thoughts that we accredit.  

As humanity wakens again to its dream and opens again to this wider, uncapturable context in which we are embedded, the great mystery in which we find ourselves and which exceeds us, we will hopefully adopt anew — in new ways and old — a common quest.  

As humanity opens in this way, we open again to the incomparable gift that has been given us, wider than the sky, greater beyond all comparison to the things of our own making. 

In completely unexpected ways, we open to the quest of harmonizing with one another and with nature.
We open again to what is called the spiritual, the domain of consensual resonance from which being-together in harmony emerges. In completely unexpected ways, we open again to the sacred. 






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