A classmate I
had in college once said of classicists who malign jazz that they have a
“univocal notion of being,” whereas jazz lovers have “an analogical notion of
being.” He was referring to the Aristotelian Thomistic refutation of the Platonists.
He was arguing that being or reality was
approached through analogy rather than direct intuition of eternal ideas. Reality is not fixed out-there apart of human intellectual
operation. There is no perfect form of music or of anything. Reality appears
only through human perception that uses images, models, and
analogies—constructed forms. It distinguishes itself from a passive theory of
knowing that assumes an independent reality in itself separate from human
imagination and symbolic activity.
Recently a
colleague accused my ethical theory of integrity as illogical and unrealistic
because it was built on an understanding of existence as operating in the
environment to fashion worlds, many diverse worlds. He thought I had gone
bonkers. “if it quacks and looks like a duck, it is a duck,” said he. “An apple
is an apple is an apple.” Yes, said I; but “apple” and “duck” have a long
development in the Indo-European language tradition and take their meanings
within a whole set of assembled relationships in the English speaking world.
“Bonkers,” he responded.
In epistemology
or the theory of knowing, I situate myself with those, like Ernst von
Glasserfeld, who call themselves “radical constructivists.” I find John Dewey’s
pragmatism, Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, and Thomas Kuhn and Karl
Popper’s instrumentalism within the same vein. I argue that human knowing is a
construction and reconstruction of the images, metaphors, or models we use to
encounter the world and achieve reality. And I cite many a neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist to prove it.
A fact (“factum’) is the construction
of interacting minds. It is a model that fits our common experience, a formula
that works to sum up and express the evidence of our perceptions, or a word
that we use in common to standardize and pattern our sensations. It is “radical”
construction because it follows on the deconstruction of previous patterns and
habits of thinking. However, it does not destroy the past, but transforms it
into the new mode and model of thought.
I don't like to divide
the world into twos: liberals and conservatives, good guys and bad guys,
citizens and barbarians, christians and heretics, clean and unclean, and so on.
Doing so neglects the complexity of life and the multiple tensions of human
existence among which are past and future, interior and exterior, self and
other--the Kantian mind categories of space, time, and self. Also it confuses
economy where life's needs are met, culture where we assert and make meaning,
and politics where we act together in common space. It's too simple, uncritical,
and too absolute.
But that's just it.
Those who see the world in terms of either/or lack the subtlety, ambiguity, and
irony of our humanity. They are the "realists" with a univocal notion
of being. Let me define "realist" as that mode of thinking in which
thinking tries to mirror or correspond to the reality out-there. Things are
there and give off their essences to the open, receiving mind. All you have to
do as a realist is look. Realists are distinguished from
"constructivists" who think that knowing is a
dialogue between the organism and it's environment through, in the case of
humans, symbols (images, words, formulas, models) that are fashioned to adapt
the organism to its environment and the environment to the organism. Now this
division of minds explains a lot to me including all the other manufactured
dualities.
I believe that
this mind, the radical constructivist theory of knowing, separates the
progressive revolutionary from the true believer of the absolute mind. The
absolute mind falls into either idolatry where the word is venerated as
unchanging truth that cannot be transformed into a more complex and inclusive
model. Or iconoclasm where all past words and formulas are disdained and
destroyed, wiped out in favor of some discontinuous ideal that has been
revealed from outside.
The true
progressive revolutionary mind is that of the early Marx and Mao, not the Marx
interpreted by Engels, not the Mao of the Cultural Revolution. It is the mind
of Socrates before Plato and Jesus before the Fathers of the Church. This mind
accepts the founding documents, whether Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon, Upanishads,
or Constitution, as living developing words, not dead and embalmed.
The difference between the two
minds, realist and constructive, is significant. In the realist mind, one
shifts responsibility to the divine or the demonic. In the mind of reconstruction,
one accepts responsibility.
As Von Glasserfeld says: “Indeed, one need not enter very far
into constructivist thought to realize that it inevitably leads to the
contention that man – and man alone – is responsible for his thinking, his
knowledge and, therefore, also for what he does. Today, when behaviorists are
still intent on pushing all responsibility into the environment, and
sociobiologists are trying to place much of it into genes, a doctrine may well
seem uncomfortable if it suggests that we have no one but ourselves to thank
for the world in which we appear to be living. That is precisely what
constructivism intends to say – but it says a good deal more. We build that
world for the most part unawares, simply because we do not know how we do it.
That ignorance is quite unnecessary. Radical constructivism maintains – not
unlike Kant in his Critique – that the operations by means of which we
assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this
operating … can help
us do it differently and, perhaps, better.“[i]
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