Dear Harvey,
Many thanks.
I think this is a very pertinent question, especially in view of Richard
Trowbridge's mailing concerning aim-oriented rationality, which seems also
to relate to the long trail of correspondence with Karl Rogers.
To cut a long story short, I have nothing against aim-oriented rationality
as an AID to wisdom enquiry, made alongside and in the context of a much
wider and deeper awareness of the natural dynamic geometry of which we are
inclusions. But I do not think aim-oriented rationality can be the SOLE
source of wisdom any more than I think the tip of a tributary can be the
sole source of a river. Man the objective Measurer is in my view akin to the
tributary tip that declares independence from the river and sets itself
apart as an observer excluded from what it observes.
I have just written two draft sections in a book chapter on 'beyond
objectivity' which tries to address these issues. I have pasted them in
below FYPI.
Best
Alan
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Mathematical Definition and Beyond - From Box World to Flow Whirls
Elementary mathematics, the stuff we are exposed to from our first day of
schooling that constrains our formerly unadulterated pleasure in playful
enquiry into and understanding of nature, is founded on two great definitive
abstractions: two great lies. Euclidean geometry imposes a three-dimensional
frame upon the infinite possibilities of space and arithmetic dislocates
figures from their spatial grounding. At a stroke, commonly reinforced in my
living memory by a stroke of the cane of corporal punishment meted out to
those of us who can’t or won’t conform with expectations, we have our
imagination knocked out of us, never to return if we want a successful or
quiet life.
Elementary mathematics treats nature as a fixed whole that can be subdivided
into sub-wholes that can be re-assembled by simple addition to reform the
whole. This is the basis for the linear methods of analysis that underpin so
much of our working lives and transactions. It’s fine and useful so far as
it goes as long as we don’t take it so far as to think it provides us with a
way of explaining, controlling and predicting the evolutionary behaviour of
all nature, including human nature. But we take it too far when we regard
the sub-wholes as purely material ingredients of nature and so omit space
from consideration by treating the receptive ‘presence of absence’ as
‘nothing’ or ‘void’. In doing so we alienate ourselves from our own
experience as inclusions of space and so lose sight of the source of our
complex local and non-local self-identities in fluid dynamic neighbourhood.
We set everything, including ourselves, against the grain of natural
process. We try to force nature and ourselves to comply with our mathematics
rather than vice versa and suffer when our predictions fail to account for
the inherently unpredictable implications of our imposition as we break down
socially, psychologically and environmentally.
If we want to have a mathematics that corresponds more closely with real
life experience and helps us to understand our creative potential as well as
the implications of opposing natural flow, then we need a different kind of
mathematics from what most of us are schooled in. This different kind of
mathematics includes space in its representation of natural form and dynamic
geometry. It liberates us ‘beyond the box’ and immerses us ‘into the flow’.
I will discuss further how it may be developed in Chapter 8.
Scientific Definition and Beyond - From Particles to Stream
In its quest for definitive certainty, by way of concrete fact that all
observers can agree to regardless of their unique situation, rationalistic
scientific method attempts to isolate the objects of its study from the
circumstances in which they are being observed. The objects are in effect
stripped free from dynamic context so that they can be independently
observed from a distance, as though through some impenetrable partition that
alienates them from the observer(s). Although such objectivity is commonly
portrayed as ‘dispassionate’ or ‘unbiased’, it is actually the most
prejudicial form of enquiry imaginable, coming close to Inquisitorial
interrogation where the kinds of answers abstracted may be misleading, to
say the least. The inquiry invariably begins with the selection and
extrication of a sample, which is placed within some actual or theoretical
limiting boundary or reference frame and then subjected to various kinds of
experimental manipulation. A piece of nature is excised and brought under
scrutiny within the imposed framework of the sampling grid, laboratory,
containing vessel, experimental apparatus or mathematical construct.
The underlying hope of this kind of inquiry is that the small picture it
provides of the part realistically represents the big picture of the whole
from which the part was abstracted. Some hope!
It’s rather like trying to represent a river by scrutinizing the contents of
a cup dipped into it. No form of enquiry based on the deliberate ignorance
of spatial context can comprehend the behaviour and properties of a complex,
dynamic system. True, comparison of the properties of water contained in a
cup with those of the river may yield valuable insights into the dynamic
possibilities of the latter and how these are affected by isolation within a
fixed boundary. But to extrapolate from what can be defined within a fixed
container to the uncertainties of the open field makes nonsense. Whatever
certainty we may gain about the properties and behaviour of our isolated
sample or system, comes at the expense of profound uncertainty about the
applicability of our conclusions to the wider dynamic context. Through
imposing definition upon a complex flow-field, what is vital to the dynamic
form of this field is excluded, resulting in stasis, whereupon it can appear
via dissection to consist of discrete particles. But this is an artefact of
the imposition, which leads to an inverted understanding of natural process
in which the incoherent fragments become regarded paradoxically as
fundamental ingredients of the whole.
A more comprehensive kind of scientific enquiry therefore needs to include,
alongside analytical method, approaches that can take the observer beyond
the immediately explicit, measurable and countable into the deeper realm of
the implicit where all is spatially included in all. One way or another the
observer needs to immerse in the dynamic natural situation in which both
he/she and what is being observed are included. Then the fixed particles
melt into the stream of nature, a current in which all remains clearly
distinct and distinguishable, but never collapses into the discreteness of
isolated forms.
Ecology in its deepest sense as the study of pattern, process and
relationship over all natural scales therefore demands the inclusion of some
kind of field trip to experience how it feels to be included in the
situation of study. If you really want to understand the ecology of, say a
forest, can you really do so whilst, like increasing numbers of modern
‘remote-sensing’ scientists and students, you are sat at a laboratory bench,
reading a book in the library or viewing a power-point presentation in a
lecture theatre? Don’t you need to walk into the scene you are observing?
Moreover, even if you do walk into it, can you really experience its full
complexity if, like some forest ecologists I know, you enter only on
isolated occasions, fully clothed and booted so as to insulate yourself from
its prickles and temperature and humidity gradients? Don’t you have to live
in the forest as one of its uniquely situated indigenous inhabitants? Don’t
you have to recognize that the full picture of the forest cannot be seen
from your unique standpoint alone, but can emerge through sharing your
perspective with others, as in an indigenous ‘sharing circle’?
Of course, there are practical difficulties in the way of our gaining such
subjective experience of immersion, especially if the situation of interest
is far removed in distance or size from human scales. But that doesn’t mean
that we should lose sight of the value and relevance of such experience, or
fail to acknowledge the limitations of our understanding if we don’t or can’
t gain it. Also, even if we are physically unable to immerse ourselves in
the situation we are studying, this doesn’t mean we can’t imagine what it is
like, both individually and collectively.
Our ability to imagine situations is a most wonderful human facility, yet
the way we use it can exaggerate and stifle as well as enhance our awareness
of possibility. Ironically, it is the fear of ‘fantasy’ - the subjective
creation of an imaginary reality - that compels objective scientists to
impose imaginary limits upon nature and isolate themselves from what they
are observing, with all the potential for misconception and loss of insight
that I have described earlier.
Those innovations of science that transform our understanding of nature may
often if not always depend on feats of imagination that have very little to
do with hard fact and analytical method. They have much more to do with
intuition and empathy - the related abilities to gain insight by drawing
diverse strands of personal experience mentally together so that they fall
into an identifiable pattern, and to imagine how it feels to be in the
situation of another. These abilities have always been very important to me.
Nothing gives me more pleasure than to recognize a pattern or recurrent
theme emerging in my mind from what on first sight seems like a clutter of
disparate information. This is no more and no less than the kind of process
all of us are capable of when recognizing a human face notwithstanding its
many variations in expression. In my case I also use it in being able at a
glance to identify and name several thousand species of fungi, plants and
animals. Also I often joke when giving lectures about fungi by asking
members of the audience to imagine being a fungus - like I often do! But it
is just that kind of imagining that has led me to ask some of my most
productive research questions. Why on Earth should we exclude such
imaginings from our methods of enquiry?
It is also true, however, that if we allow our imagination to run completely
free from material constraint it can - as I know from my OCD experience -
dream up the most unlikely catastrophic and euphoric scenarios and make
these seem probable if not inevitable. Such dreaming is all too evident in
the conspiracy theories and doom and bloom-laden prophecies that are
currently mushrooming in our culture. To make creative sense of nature, our
imagination needs to work in partnership with our informative senses, just
as nature itself can be understood as a co-creative inclusion of
electromagnetic and spatial field.
How, then can we combine our imaginative and informative facilities in our
scientific enquiries in a way that can make sense and enhance understanding
and creative possibilities? My suggestion is simply to include much that
currently gets excluded from objective enquiry so that the latter can be
subsumed and transformed but not entirely replaced. Let’s allow ourselves to
dream and play with imagery. After all that’s how August Kekulé von
Stradonitz dreamed up the structure of benzene in his mind whilst dozing on
a bus, and Watson and Crick fiddled about with jigsaw pieces representing
the molecular structures included in DNA until they formed a beautiful
spiral staircase. Let’s include art and feeling and subjectivity and love
and receptivity to others’ viewpoints, wherever they may come from in our
Science. All in all, the scientific community might gain deeper
understanding of nature if it saw itself as a dynamic neighbourhood
gathering complementary insights from diverse, uniquely situated
perspectives, instead of a gathering of conformists seeking consensus in a
single objective view, abstracted out of context.
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----- Original Message -----
From: Harvey Sarles <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 17 October 2006 22:18
Subject: Re: inclusionality, rivers and indigenous cultures
Alan, Ted, Cherryl,
I "wonder" what Protagoras meant (and mean to interpret him) by the
notion that "man is the measurer of all things." My question, and much
of my thought and study, attempts to probe the nature of the (hu)man
who is "the measurer."
I suggest this has been done quite specifically and narrowly. A place
to begin is with what I've been calling "An Archeology of the Body." -
how did I get from the tiniest early cells to this thing which I am,
today (in order to locate myself - "the measurer").
If we are objective observers - within this thinking - it is a form of
"active" observing. How/what? The activity of observing? The observer?
Harvey
On Oct 17, 2006, at 3:55 AM, Alan Rayner wrote:
> Dear Harvey,
>
> Very much with you here, and hopeful that through this piece Cherryl
> has brought a sense of peace into our group conversation.
>
> What I am hoping is that inclusionality not only brings to the fore
> the sense of 'somewhere (local) as an expression of everywhere
> (non-local)' but also helps to place their relationship as inclusions
> of one another on a dynamic footing. By abstracting the 'somewhere'
> from the 'everywhere' and defining 'it' as 'something', rationalistic
> logic not only prevents deeper enquiry into the nature of causation
> but fixes the inseparable dynamic evolutionary relationship of the
> informational with the spatial so that these become regarded as
> 'something' (material) and 'nothing' (immaterial) instead of
> co-creative aspects of the same fluid possibility field ('dynamical
> oneness'/ 'dynamical coherence' / 'dynamical togetherness').
>
> By the same token, I very much like your generalization of the meaning
> of 'pregnancy', but not so much as the 'bringing of existence from
> non-existence', more the 'dynamic emergence of somewhere as an
> expression of everywhere'.
>
> In inclusional terms, we are OF Nature, a continual transformational
> process in which the destination IS the journey, rich in complex
> dynamic experience of the kind that we can all recognise in our
> everyday lives but tend through rationalization to reduce into
> discrete factions and fractions, devoid of space.
>
>
> Best
>
> Alan
>
>
> --On 16 October 2006 14:16 -0500 Harvey Sarles <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Cherryl et al,
>>
>> I truly love this piece...but I have some thoughts and wonderments
>> about
>> some contextual or actual life-events which seem to aid or help in
>> making
>> this close to our experience.
>>
>> My first question takes us back (in the West) to Aristotle, and the
>> nature of "causation." This, like most other gathering principles
>> rings
>> of the "self-caused first cause." Not all that bad, but it seems to
>> halt
>> further questioning, as if to have "solved" the nature of our being
>> and
>> thinking.
>>
>> The second question: relates to my life-work on the observation of the
>> individual, and the noticed/noted fact, that each of us is "attached"
>> with some person(s) with whom we are in deep and developing
>> relationships. Whatever is "attachment," the question of the
>> individual
>> self remains in question, assumed to be the fount of our being -
>> somehow
>> by our being. All this thinking omits or doesn't much notice all the
>> thought and work of those who take responsibility for our continued
>> being
>> - don't they have to have some notion of inclusionality, of existence
>> from non-existence (otherwise called pregnancy - for lots of reasons
>> and
>> directions) - which they imbue to our being, and further notions that
>> we
>> are one with the world?
>>
>> That is, much of the actual-experiential human condition (which I
>> believe
>> is much more "complicated" that we have noted thus far), is active,
>> involving others, their (bodily and expressive and contextual being
>> and
>> understanding) which they endeavor (often successfully) to visit upon
>> us
>> and our becoming...who we are. Harvey
>>
>> On Oct 13, 2006, at 6:52 PM, Cherryl Martin wrote:
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