Dear Heidi
Thank you for pointing attention to "the postulate of ontological
discontinuity,"
I talk about 'ontological reversal' instead of 'ontological
discontinuity'. What I mean is 'knowledge precedes knowing'. This
condition is what makes 'reasoning' the ability/quality required to
'understand'. What happens then is that we remove the most essential
condition for the development of authenticity and creativity by
dealing with ready-made knowledge.
when you have to engage in the process of knowing in order to create
knowledge the first condition is that we have to be in the realm of
unknown. Unknown awakens wonder, observation, intuition etc. The
process becomes more important than the product. that is living
experience is turned into intellectual knowledge. In this case, the
reasoning is an integral part of the process seamlessly embedded. not
a fragmented stand-alone quality which even denies the role of sense,
experience, and even intuition.
In the context of modernity, intuition is used within the framework of
reason whereas in tradition (among the non-literates) reasoning is
integral to intuition. That is the in modernity the rational mind uses
intuition as a tool.
The ontological reversal is the outcome of literacy. That is our
dependence of codified knowledge which was the outcome of printing.
So you are right in mentioning 'the explorations of the mind-altering
implications of literacy'.
My single most research has been to understand the shift that literacy
did to our 'beingness'. As a person who has been living with
non-literate communities, it is very evident to me. And I had also
realized years ago communicating this to the literate is going to be
very difficult as the two exists in two completely different cognitive
paradigms. My simple definition is that for the literates
'understanding takes place within the realm of mind and language
whereas for the illiterates understanding takes place within the realm
of body and experience.
As a child, we have two possibilities for the formation of the mind,
in our growing up. One is to develop the mind as a 'process' with the
help of authentic experience, directly connecting with the world
around, using hands, body, manipulating inits natural relationship
etc. The other offered by modernity is to deny this direct experience
and autonomy by instructing, teaching and using the printed books and
now using the digital format.
As a person keenly observing the 'western modernity' I have come to
this conclusion. Western modernity addresses the symptoms and fails to
look at the root cause. Even while looking at the root cause they miss
the most evident proof because they seem to be celebrating that as
their most important aspect. Rationality. That is the very tool used
for knowing prevents the truth from coming out.
This is most evident in the case of medicine. Allopathy treats the
symptom and is very mechanical in nature whereas almost all
traditional medicinal systems treat the cause. As I mentioned in
earlier email 'out of the box thinking is a good example of addressing
the symptom.
Many thinkers have tried to understand where has the human being erred
and few of the anarchists start with leaving the jungle as the turning
point, and for some others, it is with the starting of agriculture
etc.
But I think it is the mass scale literacy that really shifted our
beingness. Few elites using literacy wouldn't impact a culture. But
when there is a critical mass then the culture shifts and slowly
spreads to others as well.
What literacy did was to shift the biologically rooted learning
process and autonomy in making sense of their context. Learning is a
sociobiological process very similar to what happens in the case of
food making and eating. After the 'input' both the food and the
sensorial input is biological. Like digestion, we have no control over
comprehension. But when mind took over the realm of knowledge egoistic
reasoning replaced the biologically based 'comprehension.
There is a beautiful saying by Milerappa, the Buddhist monk.
Spirituality is the last ploy of the mind. It is very clear how the
mind is doing this even in the realm of science, for example, the
attempts to understand the biological roots of being or the holistic
nature of science etc.
Jinan
On 16/02/2019, Heidi Overhill <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Jinan,
> This course sounds great, for many reasons.
> Your comments about Modernism here, and in the "indigestible" stream, may
> have wider application to other recent discussions. Historian William
> Everdell proposed that the essence of Western modernity is "the postulate of
> ontological discontinuity," meaning that things can be understood by cutting
> them up into little pieces and studying each piece separately. This is
> Plato's "carving nature at the joints," and one of its problems is that the
> joints are not necessarily obvious, or that what seem to be obvious joints
> at a particular time and place (gender/race) may not really be useful. In
> aesthetics, the approach can be seen when de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and
> others, reduced expression into what were hoped to be essential geometrics.
> Like all abstraction, this helped reduce the complexity of the world by
> distinguishing between a meaningful 'figure' and its un-noticed 'ground' —
> but the ground is not really separable from the figure, as our current
> ecological crisis shows.
> Obviously, the strategy of division has yielded tremendous progress in
> fields like engineering, to the benefit of all. But there seems to be a
> limit to its utility. If chemistry explains biochemistry explains biology,
> then we ought to be able to look at atoms and predict the giraffe; and we
> can't. Still less are we able to explain the human animal, because "the
> whole is other than the sum of its parts." Maybe it's just a matter of
> emergent characteristics. Even two points on a graph do not stand alone --
> the emergent slope created when the two are seen together cannot be
> discovered by any examination of each dot by itself. I think that a big
> challenge in contemporary culture may lie in finding tools to better deal
> with continuity rather than the separate bits.
>
> Part of that venture might be seen in your village explorations of the
> mind-altering implications of literacy. I look forward to hearing where your
> line of thought will lead.
> Heidi
>
> WilliamR. Everdell (1977). The First Moderns:Profiles in the Origins of
> Twentieth-Century Thought, Chicago: U of ChicagoPress, p.351.
>
> Kurt Koffka (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology.
> Robert K. Logan (2011). Figure/Ground: Cracking the McLuhan
> Code. www.e-compos.org.br/e-compos/article/download/709/548/0
> Plato (c. 370 BCE). Phaedrus.
>
>
>
>
> On Friday, February 15, 2019, 11:16:47 a.m. EST, Jinan K B
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Exploring culture as lived experience
>
> I just offered a very interesting course of two weeks to design
> students in their first-year foundation. To sound very official and
> serious, I called it CULTURE and COGNITION. This is the 4th time I am
> offering this course and each time I was able to fine tune it and this
> year it really went off very well.
>
> Hope some of you would give me feedback about the course.
>
> I have uploaded the same for discussion at the academia site. Please
> feel free to join. The link is
> https://www.academia.edu/s/30a4f65a8c/from-knowing-culture-to-being-culture-an-experiential-enquiry-into-the-meaning-of-culture?show_pending=true
>
> The subheading for the course was ' from Knowing culture to Being
> culture- an experiential exploration to understand culture as lived
> experience.' Naturally, it meant discarding the frozen notions about
> the 'Indian culture' and explore one's own growing up process, the
> context of one's life and the factors that formed one's 'beingness'.
>
> The primary objective of the course was to enable self-exploration, to
> regain 'cultural' self-respect, to understand the context and the
> conditions that were responsible for their formation and how they,
> knowing and unknowingly contribute to the making of 'culture'. One
> could say that it is this total context that is culture, which is also
> being formed and transformed and the cognition is the connection that
> establishes between us and the culture (context)
>
> One of the things that are very difficult is self-reflection because
> we do not have the 'mirror' that enables us to see ourselves
> critically. This is also because we only encounter our types, formed
> in a similar way, with similar worldviews, likes and dislikes
> aspirations etc. Modernity has ensured that we all fit into the mold
> with the illusion of freedom, creativity or the lack of it, etc.
>
> There were other purposes as well for conducting the course. One was
> to make them aware of their illusions about education, knowledge,
> development etc and the other was to make them understand the process
> of westernization and what it means to be culturally rooted. It is
> difficult for the so-called educated to face their mediocrity as they
> are conditioned to believe that they are educated.
>
> The process was to enable them to see through these myths and develop
> the courage to explore deeply. Naturally, it meant that deal with the
> habits and notions acquired due to schooling and learn to see afresh
> life around them.
>
> Therefore, I have been taking the students to the nearby villages
> where the vestiges of the traditional culture are still there and
> enabling the students to see the 'other' without their schooled
> spectacles. So I also prepared them to observe without the biases.
> Often we assume that they are behind us, in the path to development
> and that they belong to the same culture as we are in terms of
> aspirations and hold the same world- view. This is far from truth. The
> village people of this country belong to a very different cognitive
> domain, naturally with a different world -view.
>
> So, after a few days of 'preparation', the students were taken to
> three villages near Hyderabad (around 100 km away) and did about a
> weeklong interaction with each day reflecting on their experiences.
> The shift that took place between their first day and the last day was
> so dramatic.
>
> There were two types of students- one that had no prior experience of
> village life and the other who did have experience and felt inferior
> about their connection. So, in their first visit, all of them saw only
> poverty, illiteracy, lazy, dirty and backward people.
>
> So the students were directed to see through these biases by making
> them document the village life. The first two-three days were kept
> only for making friends, talking about their life etc and then two
> days for drawing and the final two days for taking photos. The last
> two days were kept for reflecting on the documentation.
>
> Actually, the so-called educated Indians and the illiterate Indians
> belong to two different and diametrically opposite cultural paradigms.
> Educated Indians are uprooted from their cultural roots, made to
> believe in their schooled knowledge, and even made to feel inferior to
> the western culture from where their 'knowledge' has come. Whereas the
> illiterate Indian is rooted in their context, leading a sustainable
> and eco-friendly life by rediscovering through experience the
> knowledge of his ancestors and even responding creatively to the
> changes that modernity is imposing on them.
>
> So, as students began to uncover the true strength of the village
> people they began to reassess their own 'knowledge' and the notion of
> development etc. They found that most people in the villages have far
> more knowledge about farming, cooking, healing and various other kinds
> of skills and on top of that, they were very contented, happy and even
> generous, in spite of their 'poverty'.
>
> The 'design' aspect in communities are very different from the way
> modern person approach design. The focus of solving the problem with
> whatever exists make this very process oriented, unlike a modern
> educated person who is product oriented. The focus is on not
> developing a particular product to solve the problem but to make use
> of what is available. So, in 'illiterate' village communities jugaad
> is a way of life and not a special ability. Their sense of beauty is
> also organic and rooted in their context unlike the educated whose
> aesthetic sense is totally western.
>
> Another important aspect to pay attention is the way people recycle
> almost everything and use it until the material totally disintegrates.
> The very notion of waste is absent from their consciousness. The
> students did good documentation of several examples of recycling.
> Their ability to connect with the real 'nature' of things is
> noteworthy and they are able to be very apt in their solutions.
>
> Overall, it was a life-changing experience for most of the students as
> many of them shared the feeling of being humbled by the whole
> experience.
>
--
Jinan,
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
http://jinankb.in/
http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org/
http://rethinkingfoundation.weebly.com/
http://sadhanavillageschool.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/sadhanavillagepune
https://www.youtube.com/user/jinansvideos
www.re-cognition.org
https://independent.academia.edu/JinanKodapully
09447121544
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