Professor in Ken has made me read the book ‘Return to reason’ by Stephen
Toulmin. I was lucky to get a pdf copy of his book from the net. If any one
wants I can mail the copy. One thing I feel is that the title of the book
is misleading. Till you read the book you may not understand the way he has
redefined reason.
I would like to quote Toulmin here.
*As Wallace Stevens puts it, in the lines I have chosen as an epigraph for
this whole book:*
*They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.*
*We shall return at twilight from the lecture,*
*Pleased that the irrational is rational.*
Another one.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the English writer George Meredith
exclaimed,
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
when hot for certainties in this our life!
and so captured the fears, anxieties, and self-doubts that oppressed
European
intellectuals in the Modern Age. *The certainties that John Dewey found
philosophers aiming at from 1600 on all took verbal forms, but these*
*verbal “foundations” added no security to our knowledge, as they rested on*
*practical, non-verbal supports. *Theoretical axioms stood ~rm only where
their roots went deep into pre-theoretical experience. The World-View of
Modernity thus stood knowledge on its head, like a tree painted by
Baselitz: *verbal superstructure replaced its substantive roots*. Nor is
this
weakness overcome by substituting “post-modernity” for “modernity”: all
that does is to trade in an unhelpful verbal formula for the insistence that
all such formulas are invalid, without exploring the practical foundation of
our knowledge. Substituting top growth for roots—formal axioms for
substantive experience—must ~nally give way to a less dogmatic point of
view, which leaves the discovery of the preconditions for everyday
“certitude”—
so different from mathematical “certainty”—to be achieved bit by bit, as we
go along.
And this from Wikipedia on return to orality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin
Toulmin advocated a return to humanism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism>
consisting of four returns: a return to oral communication and discourse,
a plea which has been rejected by modern philosophers, whose scholarly
focus is on the printed page; a return to the particular, or individual
cases that deal with practical moral issues occurring in daily life (as
opposed to theoretical principles that have limited practicality); a return
to the local, or to concrete cultural and historical contexts; and,
finally, a return to the timely, from timeless problems to things whose
rational significance depends on the time lines of our solutions.
And on Innis I will take from the article Professor Bob Logan send few
days ago and will come back if I am able to get hold of his original books.
His jaundiced view of academia was something he shared with Harold Innis
who wrote,
Perhaps we might end by a plea for consideration of the role of the oral
tradition as a basis for a revival of effective vital discussion and in
this for an appreciation on the part of universities of the fact that
teachers and students are still living and human… we must keep in mind the
limited role of universities and recall the comment that 'the whole history
of science is a history of the resistance of academics and universities to
the progress of knowledge' (Innis 1951, 32 & 194).
McLuhan not only critiqued higher education he also made fun of his
colleagues who were for the most part specialists and experts. “The
specialist is one who never makes the smallest mistakes, while moving
toward a grand fallacy…. In education the conventional division of the
curriculum into subjects is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and
quadrivium after the Renaissance" (McLuhan 1964, 124 & 301).
McLuhan in a letter (June 19, 1974 – National Archives of Canada
collection) to Peter Buckner reflected why his approach annoyed so many of
his colleagues:
I continue to be baffled by the panic and anger people feel when the
effects of any technology or pursuit are revealed to them. It is almost
like the anger of a householder whose dinner is interrupted by a neighbor
telling him his house is on fire. This irritation about dealing with
anything whatever, seems to be a specialty of Western man.
Dear Friends
This mail is long. It is not directed to Ken. I am using this opportunity
to talk about a very different kind of experiential, existential research-
one could also add wholistic and integrated- which many of you could
relate.( At least the experiential aspect of research)
One thing to be kept in mind is that we can’t wish away the problems of
modernity like fragmentation, mind body divide, alienation etc
So when we say we have to be wholistic don’t we have to enquire how did
fragmentation happen? When we claim that children are creative when and how
did we loose creativity (I am stating a general concern)
I have been on a lifelong re search from 1981- 82, almost 30 years. Till
1989 I read all kind of books- philosophy, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, politics, literature and spirituality. Topic of my research
was cognition, culture, beauty and the primary purpose was to understand my
being-ness in the world. Even the books were very much part of this re
search it was also always experiential. Way back in 1982 I have spend an
year teaching in a primary school to understand what happens to children in
school. I was still a student of engineering at that time. I took an year
off to do this.
First and for most I am confessing that I have no ‘academic’ interest but
‘existential’ interest in understanding cognition, creativity, culture,
aesthetic sense etc etc(It has been an ever growing list) or to put it in
another sense ‘how to live authentically’. As a person who has gone through
the education that uprooted me from my culture or even from my own being I
had no choice but to engage in to this lifelong enquiry.
My real understanding began to happen when I stopped reading for couple of
years as this helped me to get out of the categories and frames and
constant rationalization one did. At this time I have been living with
sense cognite people (so called illiterates). This gave a clear picture of
how cognition takes place in a non coercive environment where there is no
teaching at all. The more I spend time with them the more I understood the
difference between people who use their senses to be in the world and
people who use language to understand the world. Infact I began to de
textualized myself in order to see and experience the world as it is.
This also led me to explore the problem of communication that the
linguistic paradigm is creating. Infact this is more subjective than the
experiential paradigm. Five people who are eating mango could talk about it
more objectively than 5 people who have never seen a mango but are reading
about mango. Possibility of interpretation is endless. I am reminded of the
story of 5 blind men describing how elephant looks like after each of the
experiencing 5 parts of the elephant. This story clearly shows the perils
of fragmented research no so common.
In fact the way I describe the present situation is that we are becoming
from ‘human beings’ to ‘human knowings’ as we are forgetting to live as we
are engaged in knowing how to live. Language is after all description and
not the life itself.
Let me re state my mode of research- it has been existential, it is knowing
by being, It is by knowing more about self and the removal of mental traps
that perception becomes clearer and un biased.
I had to enter in to total re defining of modernity to get out of its
traps. Naturally my mode of research is not the one defined by modernity as
it would have kept me tied to its questions and answers. I believe that
modernity is in a catch 22 situation where its own rules prevents the
seeing of truth. I have no interest in convincing anyone but I do have
interest it connecting with people who are willing to let go and enquire
from the realm of ‘unknown’.
Objectivity is one concept I redefined and the way I look at it is that
‘objectivity’ is possible only when the person who is enquiring has no
personal, subjective interest or else what one seeks will be biased. In
that sense the objective of education could be to make one aware of the
paradigmic limitation that colours one’s perception. How to shed of ones
biases, fears etc and see the Truth from the authenticity of ones being.
Frankly I do not need western philosophers to support my statements but
since most people in this group may not appreciate my personal insights I
was just using them. But I do relate to the original seekers whose insights
I am able to connect. There have been many but on the fringes who has been
raising this alarm but the main stream has been totally re interperting it
to continue its linear, rational journey.
Let me end this by stating a very provocative claim.
The biggest myths of modernity are freedom and democracy which exists only
in the realm of language. In reality neither exists.
--
Jinan,
'DIGITAL MEDIUM IS A TOOL.DIGITALLY MEDIATED KNOWLEDGE DESTROYS THE BEING'
www.re-cognition.org
www.kumbham.org
http://my.opera.com/jinankb/blog/
reimaginingschools.wordpress.com
09447121544
0487 2386723
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