…blatant problems of American democracy are directly related to, if not rooted in…epistemological and spiritual problems…where aesthetic, expressive, and spiritual dimensions are chronically undernourished, if not actively suppressed by schooling. – J Miller
Since the ultimate authority of life lies within the individual, there is nothing more important in life than to develop the innate tendency of the psyche to realize its wholeness. The psyche demands to be developed and to be made whole; obedience to this command is the highest good and the ultimate concern of life. – C.G. Jung
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity. – Rachel Naomi Remensee
For those who give primacy to Ultimacy, full human development is seen as not only needed for an individual, but for society as a whole. Societies need fully developed humans, because it is the heroes of virtue…who are seen as the well-spring of cultural and social renewal. – Scott H. Forbes
According to A. Maslow… metapathology [means] ‘Impairment of self-development due to thefailure to satisfy basic needs’. In contrast to Maslow’s metapathology, I refer to alldisturbances, both existing in general and specific to humans, as metapathologia.My definition: Metapathology is a philosophical and religious consideration that deals withthe question of disturbances of being that go beyond, but also include, all individualphenomena. Short: Metapathologia is the study of all possible disturbances. – Torsten Oettinger
To stop education’s ongoing violent impairment of learning and disturbance of students’ sense of self, schools need a guiding story of pluralistic intelligence that joins analytical reason with hands-on, intersensory engagements. Schools need to orient learners not only to their important career-related mental capacities and professional skills but also to the strength of moral virtue, imaginative cognition, and individuation honed by the arts and humanities, that when wedded to the sciences, leads to wholeness. For this to occur, an imaginative exchange must exist at the core of education whose justification must be that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life by uniting what is traditional and what is emerging in an imaginative consideration of learning (Whitehead, The Aims of Education). Schools impart information, but fail to do so creatively. The proper center for any school is an abiding concern with valuing and developing the nature and diverse function of the cognitive imagination, the intuitive intelligence that is the core of all knowing, typical and noetic.
A democratic society benefits when its schools embrace more than the intellect’s reduction to instrumental reasoning and economic rationality by increasing the diversity of intellectual perspectives, products, and performances, while raising the mean of all (Eisner 1998:50). American democracy is currently moribund in questionable epistemological and ideological presuppositions that have made society an agent of political, economic, and epistemic injustice. Truth is politicized; fiction is reality; morality is an expedient matter of self-interest; might makes right, God is on our side, and anyone not-me is suspect, villainized, or otherwise Othered. Ron Miller (2000:2) observes, “conventional education… strives to defend and fortify the imperfect social and economic structures…” and represents “…a massive, deliberate, and efficient mechanism for placing human energies at the disposal of the corporate state.” The story of healing education is my social critique and re-imagining of learning as a holistic, integral counter to disembodied, hyper-rational education that, by itself, undermines self-integrity, cognitive freedom, and ultimately weakens democratic social order. The democratic spirit of my project seeks to nurture and celebrate a diversity of people capable of “…never succumbing to a feeling of futility, or the belief that they have come to an end of what is worth having” (Mary Warnock 1978)
As a matter of mission, schools must necessarily prepare students with knowledge of how the world presently works. Because the world displays ongoing, turbulent, and discontinuous change triggered by international migrations, geo-political strife, volatile financial markets, systemic racism, planetary deterioration, globalization, and incursions into sovereign states, the ability to grasp the inner workings of the world is extremely rare. It is essential that graduates understand the chaotic, unpredictable processes at work, so as to perceive the sense of it all. Deane Nuebauer states, “Education at all levels needs to become in novel ways a theorizing activity and pervasive inquiry about the nature, order, and the way of things” (Globalization and Education, p.56). The fragmented world calls for different educational models to radically interrogate the ways knowledge is generated, disseminated, and retained. Neubauer points out that the historical standards that have generated taxonomies of our academic disciplines and professions must be replaced by “imperatives to understand the world in terms of processes and relations extant within it (Neubauer,p.57). Protracted problems of today and tomorrow will be systemic problems that defy solutions by any one specialty. Graduates will have to be comfortable working in cross-disciplinary teams that encourage multiple ways of knowing.Noetic literacy has been portrayed here as the ability to ‘read’ the warp and woof of our unique times, characterized by chance, emergence, synchronicity, liminality, emergence, patterns, and self-organizing systems across all domains of meaning.
With their legacy of noetic ways of understanding, the arts and humanities traffic in experience of ongoing change, the uncanny, the disenfranchised, and the ‘wild’. They satisfy the objective requirements of life and the subjective needs of spirit. They offer us a depth-poetics of meaning. However, because the arts and humanities have been for at least two decades in decline in America in favor of education as job preparation, things have taken a dark and dangerous turn. The role of the artist traditionally was to make its citizens believe not primarily in physical reality – i.e., the role of science and technology – but to believe in noetic and numinous things that could happen, that is, what is possible as being probable, or necessary. The irony is that the creative invitation of artists to indwell in visions of as-if has been hijacked by the ‘art’ of the con, lying in public, gas lighting, deflection, ghosting, media channels of ‘alternative facts’, and AI deep fake. It is a dark, distressing time.
Citizens across all meaning oriented professions need to support holistic and integral curricula and pedagogy that feature acquisition of adaptive psychosocial skills that include frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, resilience, ‘response-ableness’, transdisciplinarity, interdependence, ‘copeless-ness’, negative capability, noetic discernment of the difference between one possessing personal agency as a doer and the state of one being done to, and overcoming conviction confirmation bias. While obtaining an absolute and definitive knowledge of the world is unlikely, noetic based learning and inquiry through the arts and sciences, is the healing education for our directionless, soulless times. Healing education project must necessarily have strong roots in depth psychology, since self-understanding is pre-requisite for understanding the world and how it works.
Studying the depths of the psyche in its interior and exterior aspects, means schools need to make inquiries into the unconscious mind that is itself, like the present times, characterized by uncertainty, oppositions, supra-rationality, compensation, shadow, synchronicity, and self-organization, as expressed in dreams, revelations, active imagination, altered states, synchronicities, visions, and uncanny psychic phenomena. The re-storying of education of student and faculty healing via noetic literacy with its antimonial both/and logic closes subject-object splits offers the best approach to grasping the complexity of processes, relations, problems, dilemmas, and networks of global operations.
Schools in a democratic society must enhance the epistemological and cognitive pluralism required for effective decision making, problem solving, and evaluation of competing claims to truth. The reconstructive imagination, following Vico, is the tool to ‘enter into’ other cultures and enlarge ones’ fundamental Being, as a result. Imaginative cognition is necessary for our ethical decision making and comprehension of the subtleties of life. Cognitive diversity as expressed through the arts and humanities means we add more not less than logic to the mind of learners. At the heart of the healing education project is “the practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritarian systems, freedom to structure creative energies to propel and direct the human spirit, freedom to become one’s own intellectual authority” (Rojcewicz, Current Musicology 2001:111). The learner, “develops the capacity to move among worldviews, transcending particular identities while simultaneously honoring each of them” (Zajonc, Kosmos Journal, Vol. V, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2006 www.kosmosjournal.org).
Cognitive freedom means ‘thinking’ with critical disciplined feeling and ‘feeling’ with conscious evaluation of experience that leads to knowledge prized not exclusively for its effective utility, but also for its essential truth, and potential for transformation. My healing education project travels a middle way between subjectivism and cognitivism. For example, Gerhard Grössing notes that one is often “confronted with Albert Einstein’s statement that the setting of principles (axioms), which are intended to link up the elements of experience in a meaningful way, will not be accomplished through a logical method but only through an ‘intuitive (psychological) connection’, whereby he meant that the ‘free creation of the human mind´ is an indispensable part of theory construction.” Similarly, Noam Chomsky held, “It is quite possible … that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” On the other end of the continuum of either/or worldviews are those who believe in the incontestable authority of scientific empiricism. Francis Bacon asserted that scientific “knowledge is power.” Freud referenced “Our God, Logos.” Maturana asserted that “to live is to know” ontic apodictic knowledge. By themselves alone, neither non-cognitivism nor cognitivism leads to development of a balanced, all-sided humanity and the fullness of life (Quotes in this paragraph are found in Torsten Oettinger, “The Absolute and Pseudo-absolute – Basics of Different Realities”).
Today’s intractable problems are systemic challenges that defy solutions via single worldviews and individual disciplinary approaches. Noetic learners are well suited to work in transdisciplinary teams that require a broad portfolio of ways of perceiving, knowing, acting, and making. We understand the accompanying growing pains from opening to new perspectives when old institutional policies, structures, and configurations no longer serve students’ greatest needs. We should ‘play’ innovatively with the structures dividing typical from atypical learners to the mutual benefit of students and society. We should overcome the brittle territorialism school overseers hold regarding rational, objective, and techno-scientific disciplines and practices. Knowledge found in broad based arts and humanities “expose the contingency of present arrangements” and “unearths a priori[s] buried in present assumptions…” (Sameer Pandya, Miller-McCune,Online Smart Journalism. Real Solution, July 29, 2010, 11:47 am). Atypical learning modalities that implicate emotions, interpersonal engagement, intuition, and extended sentience are adaptable to effectively address racism, nationalism, global warming, neoliberalism, and planetary degradation that require more than rational or technological approaches. Noetic modalities flexibly serve personal and socio-political needs by honoring human idiosyncratic wisdom across knowledge of arts and humanities, multicultural, folk, and indigenous carriers of wisdom.
Healing education project is my ‘constructive postmodern’ (David Ray Griffin 1992), holistic critique of today’s dominant worldview that is excessively material, exterior, objective, and dualistic. It places integral importance upon the interior and exterior dimensions of individual and collective life composing a whole. Healing education theory augments the notions of intelligence and human excellence when perceived strictly through lenses of techno-science, specialization, hyper-rationality, and neoliberal standards that serve corporate needs over broad-based educational outcomes. Part of education ‘healing’ its own illness will come from dethroning its underlying fantasy of intelligence as residing within a single factor ‘G’ (Mesa Foundation). This fantasy promotes the idea that real meaning, research, teaching, and truth depend on a single, unified vision of cognition. My educational project is a working meditation on authentic broad-based learning from a perspective of pragmatic idealism. As an educator and a poet, I am an idealist seeking to practically realize holistic values and integral outcomes through the arts and humanities, looking to poetry, folklore, mythology, depth psychology, and indigenous wisdom systems. The task requires a rethinking not only of education at all levels, but also of the teaching roles of faculty, family, community, and cultural institutions that influence learning, knowledge, and human development. This enormous undertaking must be accepted without cynicism or despair, for deep, transformative learning may take place informally where it is noticed least, as a “learning beyond any teaching” (Hillman (Re-Visioning Psychology).
We currently witness a contagion of fragmentation throughout education. Reflecting the “worldwide pandemic of polarization” (Kirk Schneider, The Polarized Mind), 2013, p1, 5), schools have fixated on limited sets of reductive, exclusionary values to the omission of arts, ‘spirituality’ (Laurel H. Campbell and P. London), and greater epistemological and cognitive diversity that would augment normative standards that perpetuate human alienation, disjunction, decay, and conflict. My point is that school curricula based primarily on either quantitative science, or the qualitative arts are by themselves inadequate and have contributed to the polarization of society. The healing education initiative highlights the intersection of multiple academic and tacit forms of cognition and envisions a noetic humanity open to all images of selfhood, subordinate to none (Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man)). To heal the fragmented nature of education itself and thereby offer citizens learning experiences that mend their mental, emotional, and spiritual splits, we must avoid the romanticizing of atypical non-discursive knowing as superior epistemic events and the senseless discrediting of scientific knowledge and practice. Both forms of knowledge are essential to a salubrious self, vibrant life, and concordant society. And yet, education typically ignores atypical knowledge.
We stand at a crossroads and must decide whether to continue to support an educational model that cripples diverse learners or begin to pursue human and environmental wholeness. We must not avoid this ethical challenge, no matter how strongly we may believe that normative, numbers-based quantification methods guarantee the correctness of the techno-sciences. Education at all levels suffers from the limits of its rationalistic and techno-scientific virtues. Education privileges and then separates the hard sciences from the human sciences is a “disguised moral discourse,” producing widespread human, socio-political, and ecological calamities (Jennifer M. Gidley,Evolving Education: A Postformal-integral-planetary Gaze at the Evolution of Consciousness and the Educational Imperatives – Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Education, Southern Cross University, May 2008). As we make human splitting and the marginalization of groups acceptable by disconnecting learning from the larger ethical questions of humanity and everyday life, we make the sickness unto education allowable and student trauma inevitable. We must leverage upward personal and social fragmentation like scattered seed for noetic flowering. Education itself is the problem; and education is the solution. Let us ‘re-story’ schooling, learning, and learners in ways that restore an all-sided formation to human development. Let us cease imposing upon nonconventional learners arbitrary, academic identities that reflect not the splendor of their implicate uniqueness but the stupor of mass identity and culture.
… rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them … imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them … for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. – Giambattista Vico
The truth is no longer the truth. It’s much more difficult to agree on facts. Beliefs replace facts and truths, and opinions become the new truth. One of the most difficult challenges for leaders, especially in a global organization, will be how to manage this when creating a narrative that can bring people together.” – Morten Wierod
Our polarized schools, like Western society in general, are marked by noetic mal nourishment that has endangered humanity. The assumption that separateness defines human nature and the universe has won the epistemic justification necessary to amount to privileged knowledge (Philip Berghofer, “Husserl’s Noetics: Toward a Phenomenological Epistemology, Journal of The Brit Society for Phenomenology 2019, Vol. 50, No. 2, 120-138 https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2018.152(.?)5778 p.122 Notes) and provides the ground of the western techno-scientific worldview: fragmented, impersonal, random, mechanical, objectivist, separated. These consequences of the Western worldview are also negatively rendered upon the noetic learner, causing adisjunction of selfhood. The Western mind’s alienation from the world is a result of a series of paradigmatic revolutions (Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western World). From the theories of Copernicus, we witnessed a cosmological shift away from a geocentric perspective where the earth was believed to occupy the center of the universe and humanity held a predominate place to a heliocentric perspective in which the sun is at the center, and the earth and humanity wholly unexceptional. The Copernican cosmological crisis and its alienating effect on the mind received philosophical development from Renee Descartes. The autonomous modern self became distinct from the world it sought to know and dominate. A human was a conscious, personal observer facing an unconscious, impersonal, material universe.
The estrangement of humanity from the world produced by the Cartesian ontological revolution received epistemological expression by Immanuel Kant. Kant who pointed out that all knowledge is radically interpretative, as the mind can have knowledge only of its internal phenomena and not of external things. The cumulative outcome of the Copernican, Cartesian, and Kantian schisms is that humanity is seen as but a tangential agent adrift in a purposeless universe. But the lesson of Kant, supported by postmodernism, is that the world is never as described by our worldview. We represent the world to ourselves as impersonal, mechanistic, and purposeless, and we respond to those representations, as if they were metaphysical laws. The truth is more likely to be that the impersonal, mechanistic, fragmented, and purposeless qualities residewithin us.
We need a healing narrative of schooling that leads to noetic insights beyond normative categories of fragmented knowledge and intersubjective division, a story of all-sided learners free of epistemic harm, cognitive splits, and diminished mental health. The divide has been recognized long ago. Snow described the antagonism between the two cultures of science and the humanities (C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures). Understanding these divisions are essential to the health and safety of humanity; failing to do so threatens humanity and the earth. Conflict between the epistemic legitimacy of various assemblages of knowledge over millennia have seen truth claims of numerical relations emerge as superior. Numbers have become the sine qua non to human claims to knowledge and certainty. Knowledges have deep impact upon how we live our lives, as the Cold War era of the previous century witnessed a struggle between two theories of knowledge – Marxism and liberalism – that violently shook the world (Nirenberg, Uncountable).
Healing education project offers a narrative of education that would transform our schools’ understanding of how nonconventional learners phenomenologically experience coming to knowledge. It valorizes and confirms multiple values and logics of both the natural and human sciences toward a synergetic, transdisciplinary integration, without sacrificing their unique and valuable distinctions. Educators should seek not to deny or downplay the power of reason but to augment the best of STEM curricula with transdisciplinary, real-world opportunities, including arts-based inquiry that inherently call for employment of multiple learning modalities, bridging the gulf between empirical science and nonconventional intuitive ways of knowing for the purpose of realizing all-sided individuals.
Traditional learning is assumed indirectly through external performance of facts, knowledge, and capacities via tests, term papers, and projects. Nonconventional learners, however, arrive at knowledge directly in ways more aptly experienced as ‘not-knowing’ and ‘unlearning’ via intuition, hunches, epiphanies, and insightful moments of aha! The story of noetic learning told here recognizes what Nilofer Merchant refers to as onlyness, “that thing only one person can bring to a situation.” Healing education project is about respecting and honoring each and every learner, as “each of us stands in a place no one else occupies” (Merchant). It includes learning about subject matter content but also learning-to-be (John Seely Brown, Ch 4, New Learning Environments for the 21st Century) an all-sided integral person. Presently in our schools, noetic learners, students, and faculty are “betwixt and between” (Victor Turner) academic norms of achievement, due to their epistemic uniqueness, trapped in education’s ‘liminal’ zone (Victor Turner), sentenced to learning stagnation and disjunctions of Being.
The narrative of the healing education initiative invites student and faculty learners to make a bold onto-existential turn toward the generative relationship of diverse and tacit knowing to undisclosed Being. Its premium concern lies with each whole student. Atypical learners arrive at their nonscientific understanding and personal ‘truths’ in ways that are neither countable nor recognized within education’s Enlightenment legacy, and so they appear transgressive, mercurial, or dumb. Atypical learners are indeed learners, but they suffer profoundly in ways that may reflect or trigger adverse childhood experiences (ACE cf., https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.14022) when they experience the classroom as a dead end, while understanding the truth of their noetic knowledge is otherwise.
In my vision of learning for a new noetic humanity with consciousness of wholeness, students and faculty alike have ample opportunities to enhance their integral consciousness and atypical learning in ways that accurately mirror the tacit understanding taking place that gives form to their true identity. On this point, Scott H. Forbes (Holistic Education 2003:22) states, “This militates against education to fit an externally derived model of who a person should be and sees the teacher as helping students find and actualize who they are.” Noetic learners need support to fashion self-understanding and self-completion missions that stem from their intrinsic atypical ways of thinking, reasoning, acting, and seeing the world. To enact the story and ‘sing the myth’ of the new human of noetic consciousness, following the ancient Greeks, means to lay bare and make appear the form of outer appearance and inner essence of lived personal and communal experience in both interior and exterior quadrants. The arts, humanities, supported by the related wisdom of folklore, mythology, and depth psychology are available to us to augment scientific materialism, engendering in students and faculty a sense of awe, wonder, and imagination, as declarations of who we are and what we value in the world.
When we immerse ourselves in the ‘dream’ language of unfathomable art, we give over our local, autonomous identity in self-surrender for the All of life. Between egotism and ego-loss, we shudder in awe before great art as before a ‘tremendum’ and‘fascinosum’ (Otto, Idea of Holy), a mysterious reality beyond ourselves. As we move deep into the aesthetic experience, we open to “a feeling of being entered – or entering upon-something greater” that is “at the heart of the sense of transcendence” (Murphy, Michael H. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology; Palo Alto, Calif. Vol. 1, Iss. 1, (Spring 1969): 21.). In that way, we find strength from sensing an all-encompassing self which overcomes anguish of ontological uncertainty. And, in the words of Joana Macy, “It is a source of courage that helps us stand up to the powers that are still, through force of inertia, working for the destruction of the world.” In that space, we experience integration of learning and ‘spirituality’. As educators, parents, and citizens, it is our ethical responsibility to end the widespread epistemic damage done to atypical learners, many of whom are BIPOC, requiring attention be given to their mental, moral, physical, social, aesthetic, and spiritual needs. We live in a broken world in need of repair (cf., Hebrew Tikkun olam). And because the outcomes of how we educate largely depends on the health of who we are in our essential Being, schools themselves must be more complete in order to actively nurture the complete learner in themselves, their students. and their faculty, and their communities.
Education at all levels must purposively heal itself of the ‘illnesses of one-sidedness of operations, values, disciplines, structures and processes, reflected in accelerated, ‘advanced’ programs in elementary and high schools and career-focused STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) specializations in colleges and universities. STEM arises from a ‘theology’ of materialism; it enshrines logic and calculation, ‘idolizes’ objectivity, privileges exterior life over interior life, and projects a flatland view of reality devoid of interiority and spirit. The goal of my healing education project is creation of a learning environment that recognizes and nurtures the natural and human sciences that together can serve human completion. It seeks learning experiences that link the wisdom of noesis to the wisdom of logos, overcoming their current split.
Overcoming cognitive splitting will be a long and varied enterprise. Toward that end, I have argued here that integrating the ‘arts’ of knowing and being with the techno-sciences is indispensable to address and begin to turn the ship of learning toward the port of epistemic and cognitive wholeness. Fluent in noetic literacies of the arts and humanities, we come to the furthest reaches and the deepest sources of knowing and knowledge, noetic and ontic, as expressed in the interior and exterior life quadrants of individuals and groups (Wilber, Integral Theory) in a total field of wholeness co-arising. Thinking in noetic states of embodied cognition in the arts, we know, and we are nondual consciousness of wholeness, referred to in depth psychology as the archetypal Unus Mundus (i.e., One World), the foundation of matter and spirit underlying opposition and fragmentation. The ultimate goal of healing education is relational living in a democratic society as integrated people with a new humanity of noetic intelligence and the intuitive wisdom Spinoza termed ‘beatitude’, an ontological intimacy of embodied awareness with conscious nature, a participatory reality of self and the world. We must be the healing.
As a professionally trained folklorist recently retired after over 35 years in higher education, I shall focus my thoughts here upon salient ideas and images that help me define and better understand my university-based career as a teacher and senior administrator. What follows here is not an academic article in the normal sense, although quotations, references to scholarly works, and footnotes can be found. What follows is not entirely original, as I borrow freely from predominantly folklorists who were my professors and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania and whose works and visions have significantly shaped my own, although in unpredictable ways. I muse freely upon their writings, recollections on and conversations with them, inspiring lectures, and conference notes scribbled on faded paper sheets – some going back 45 years.
The ‘context’ for the details brought forth in this ‘text’, after anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, is in part invisible, mental, and infused with unusual ideas that envelop and color concepts and personally meaningful events. The context fuses with my professional yearnings, life-changing meetings, and moments of non-discursive learning, – all enveloped by emotional affect. The affective apparatus of my project is used to tell a story that formulates experiences, insights, and images as a personal way of ordering and drawing meaning from my life. I bring discrete ideas, images, methods, and memories into a set of intimate association as part of a meaningful context that is part historical, part psycho-emotional.
This novel memoir shapes those associations into personal learning and meaning. As to the question of accuracy, I look to Aristotle who distinguished two means – counting and sculpting. This text in its emotional and psychic accuracy is my personal ethnography, a ‘sculpting’ of experience, an argot of soul. It serves as a ‘science’ in the realm of the affective, the indefinite, the imaginal, and the undefinable. I want my text to present rich images, so as to be a transit to other life experience, my own and that of others, communicating the conservative nature of my subversive work in folklore.
My research into the folklore of high strangeness ran against the grain of the discipline’s conventions by considering the question of reality behind truth-claims of experiences of the deep weird. In addition, my research on noetic trans-rational knowledge critiqued the discipline in particular and higher education in general, as education is currently centered on the techno-sciences of STEM curricula. Even as a student of the informal folk arts and their performance in context, I held positions of professor of humanities and chair of Liberal arts at The Juilliard School, an elite arts conservatory and later served as Dean of The School of Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University, responsible for formal MFA , MA and BFA programs focused on art and consciousness. Finally, it is worth noting, that while I am not an analyst, I am a strong Jungian studies advocate who studied and taught at the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, New York. The point of tension here is that folklore looks to cultural specificity and variation; Jung, on the other hand, sought the common ground of the human mind inherent in systems of interest to folklore: mythology, alchemy, fairy tales, ritual, healing, shamanism, and indigenous wisdom systems.
Among the images woven into the warp and woof of this text are those related to margins and amalgams. I hope to make it obvious to any reader that I have served the academy as a scholar-teacher-artist straddled on the ‘edge’ of academic disciplines – poetry, literature, mythology, comparative religions, philosophy, depth psychology, arts education, art making, folklore and folk life – and teaching, administrating, and accreditation. My story will make clear in ways affective and factual, how my research, scholarship, and professional employment placed me outside the center and to the far frontier of the discipline. It is from that frontier I have throughout my career sought to think and work creatively on the edge of meaning.
Introduction
As an academic field of study that arose out of the nineteenth-century cross-currents of romanticism and European nationalism, folklore and folk life is to be understood as a border phenomenon. This is so, first, by nature of its discrete discipline. Folklore lies “betwixt and between” the humanities and social sciences. It mediates spheres between knowledge and understanding, observation and participation, and discovery and creation. Secondly, folklore’s intermediate position is also based upon its intellectual history, since folklore’s historical focus first landed between so-called ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘educated’ peoples; preindustrial, industrial, and postmodern groups; colonizers and indigenous peoples; and scholar-teachers and artist-practitioners.
Folklore lies on an ontological frontier. As an academic discipline, folklore is balanced between fact and fiction; the known and the unknown; objectivity and subjectivity, the personal and the cultural; the concrete and abstract, and product and process. It reveals ongoing traditional sequence and pattern amidst simultaneity and creative emergence. Folklore exists on a discernible perimeter by nature of its methodology. The discipline holds ground between science and art, utilizing data that is quantitative and qualitative, metaphoric and denotative. The study-objects of folklore include abstract field laboratory reports, material cultural artifacts, and art.
Folklore traffics along a buffer zone by nature of its primary value relation. Decisions as to which objects to study and how to explicate them result from by knowing what value-relation is at stake (Glassie). The essential value-relation for folklorists is the aesthetic (self) and ethical (others) relation. Folklore always, in various ways and to various degrees, links individuals and groups. People seek the satisfaction of their senses through aesthetics. People seek concord through the ethical ordering of social life (Glassie).
Artifacts (objects) and communication acts (behavior) that provide pleasure for the self without a connection to others isn’t folklore, serving rather as a definition of individual genius in art history. If a material product or communication process provides pleasure for the self and connection with others, it’s folklore. So, the storyteller or basketmaker fashions a personal version of a tradition’s collective style (Glassie, Spirit, p.95). * (ftnte: Goldstein argued for the need to distinguished between ‘folklore’ in the historical sense as collected objects, ‘folkloric’ on the performance sense as behavior, and ‘fokloristics’ as the human science that studies folklore).
Folklore has formed part of the ground of my professional authority. Trained at the University of Pennsylvania, I earned my PhD in 1984. I entered Penn’s doctoral program in 1980 with an MA in English literature, and so I would join my background in the humanities to the social sciences, as folklore itself is a humanistic social science. At Penn, and throughout my career, I researched and taught university courses on folk fairy tales, cultural beliefs, customs, rituals, legends, first personal narratives (memorates), stories, and anomalous experiences to disclose the creative process used by people in ways that they do. I have sought to learn if the creative intentions inherent in stories, performances, and all forms of cultural expression reveal a common basis to the human mind (Freud, Jung, Campbell) and its embodied experiences across the world.
As a folklorist who is humanist committed to the study of folk and popular belief systems, I am deeply interested in questions of personal and communal meaning. I have asked myself, ”What significance do supernatural folk and anomalous popular beliefs and experiences have in peoples’ lives? Do they integrate them or not into their attitudes, beliefs, and world views? Do personal supernatural or psychic events serve as sources of growth, understanding and well-being or are they detrimental to health and social living? My interest in shared values, group cooperation, unique humanity, and cultural struggle necessarily occurs at the interface of borders, margins, and edges.
Folklore as a Humanistic Social Science
While English speaking people make distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities, they are both referred to as ‘sciences’ in German – Naturwissenschaften (i.e., natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (i.e., sciences that are general in nature, such as math, logic, ethics, religion – the humanities). This classification stems from the word wissenschaft translated as ‘knowing’ and ‘making’. While ‘science’ in that context is understood a rigorous process of knowledge generation, each perspective has its unique methods, injunctions, and professional standards to generate knowledge.
Statistics are not favored by folklorists. Texts are our version of statistics, containing tale types and motifs. The issue with statistics is that one can stand safely behind the data data and thereby distance oneself from the contradictions inherent in the work. Folklorists are themselves written into their ethnographic texts. Transcriptions of an event must be exact enough to be comprehended as an ‘event’. It is the accuracy of the text that convinces people by a sense of its wholeness. Arguments center around textual interpretation of transcripts, translations, and not statistics. Texts are our rhetorical event (Glassie).
In truth, there are many ‘sciences’ – some dedicated to subjectivity, intersubjectivity, objectivity, and inter-objectivity. They all make substantive contributions to knowledge (Integral Ecology, p.43). Natural sciences do not acknowledge, must less study, selfhood, interiority, culture, and morality, since sensory empirical inquiry is best suited for study of material phenomena, not for personal (subjective) and cultural (intersubjective) factors (Int Psyc p.23). The humanities handle historical and theoretical forms of knowledge that disclose the contingencies of existing social arrangements and inspire people to become their own best authorities by rigorous critical and noetic thinking (Rojcewicz 2021). They engage in qualitative human science research and sense-making of the issue of our humanity. When considering the social and human sciences, the fundamental issues are culture and humanity.
The humanities are more concerned with product, content, and artifact. The social sciences are more concerned with process, production, distribution, and consumption. Literary scholars study humanity in its multiple manifestations through texts (i.e., artifacts). Social scientists study humanity in the real time of social experience (i.e., socio-facts). The quest of the social sciences is knowledge sought by methods and theories that impose categorical schema (i.e., paradigms) from outside a context and then abstract elements from a range of cases that are then analyzed in a more or less statistical way. The quest of the humanities is to uncover purpose and human understanding sought by methods that include, among them, metaphor and story. The goal is to learn as much about a particular phenomenon analyzed holistically (Glassie). Rather than using holistic models, the social sciences use probability models. Both approaches study culture and so both are necessary. These discrete but related, separate but not separated methods of study prevent the splitting of folklore into either an object to be collected, or a process of communication to be studied; folklore is indivisibly both.
Scholarship Is Not Proof
Fortified with our method, folklorists take to the field where in the living laboratory of specific cultural settings, we conduct our field study of others, write up our ethnographic notes, produce our scholarship, and in some cases teach or otherwise share our findings with others in places like institutes, cultural centers, or museums. No one ethnography captures the entirety of truth of a people and their lives. Each provides a viable but partial slice of their reality. Our scholarship is never proof, so much as a passage linking the concrete with the abstract, and the human with the more-than-human worlds of experience. Scholarship is never dogma to be uncritically swallowed, so much as information upon which to carefully chew. We call on colleagues to evaluate, improve, and extend our findings toward richer and more nuanced portrayals of how people creatively struggle in a difficult world. In that way, folklore is an indirect form of social change.
Because it aspires toward the unknown, folklore is a preparation endeavor; a dismantling of classicist concepts regarding hegemonic principles and universal values. Our scholarship serves as foot stones to be stepped over, rather than a sacrosanct platform to be held forever firm. Folklorist who are artist-intellectuals commit to the purpose of keeping issues open and contested, so that we need not become removed from the varieties of life. We are impelled by the soul of our discipline to make known the unknown, filling in with rich life experience, if not with answers, the gaps in our understanding of cultural peoples, often unheard and oppressed.
To make one’s way forward along the twisting road of the human adventure means, in part, to openly acknowledge knowing you don’t know. In this way, we can with humility avoid inflicting suffering upon others by claims to certainty and control. Folklore is rich in noetic content and practices that are non-discursive, experiential, aesthetic, intuitive, informal, tacit, non-rational, indigenous, and quickly rendered invalid by the dominant culture on the grounds they lack scientific verifiability. Folklorists recognize that for centuries healers in traditional societies and shamans of indigenous cultures trafficked in wondrous unknown realms, mapping realities between human and more-than-human worlds, gaining insights used successfully for restoring health to the afflicted through their visions, trances, ecstasies, dreams, psychic journeys, and insights into nature.
For many good reasons, logic and reason are among the most celebrated of human faculties, but they are not the only ones of value to life. The creative spirit becomes ‘demonic’ when it’s confined to narrow areas of expression. Often we need to enlarge the portal of the mind to what is mysterious, unpredictable, and indeterminate on the edge of meaning, beyond the altar of the calculable and measured. Folklorists strive to engage in open conversations with multiple and diverse others, wherein the paradoxes of culture might be effectively framed within the soul. We avoid both bitterness and solipsism through group commitment and praxis, not because we believe we have absolute answers or know what is right but by learning things of value from diverse, unfamiliar peoples.
Folk culture and folk consciousness aren’t quantitatively provable. Folklore moves toward what is unproven, affective, emotional, and psychic, seeking to explore what the nineteenth-century founding member of Britain’s Folklore Society Edward Sydney Hartland once called “the mental and spiritual side of humanity.” Folklore ‘s vocation then was “To reconstruct a spiritual history of man…as represented by the more of less inarticulate voices of the folk.” (Alexander Haggerty Krappe, p.xv, The Sci of Folklore). Folklorists sought to analyze unrecorded traditions, so as to “reveal the common life of the human mind,” apart from its recordings in formal and official cultural records.
Embracing the Unknown
By making their way toward deeper insight into what it means to be a human being among cultural men and cultural women on this more-than-human planet, folklorists rejects logical positivism and utopianism, as both are aberrations (P. Berger). Positivism and utopianism are short-cuts, easy ways out of messy cultural complexity. Both provide psychological relief by offering to move us outside the tension of opposites inherent in everyday life. Moving willingly toward what is unknown includes seeing one’s work as an attempt to honor common or disenfranchised peoples and their cultures through their texts, performances, nonverbal documents, and material artifacts, as tangible evidence of their creative consciousness, seeking to prevent their slippage from historical awareness.
Taking inspiration from Hartland and Krappe mentioned above, I have throughout my career eschewed both logical positivism’s claim that that only those thoughts and experiences that abide by analytical proof and number-based logic are worth entertaining, and as such constitutes a dismissal of much of folk and indigenous wisdom. * (PMRon noetic literacy). Many times in my life I have learned or come to understanding through left-hand paths of cognition. I have rejected any utopian vision of an ideal society that views cultural paradox, oppositions, and contradictions as aberrations to be ignored. My research of UFOs, Men in Black, fairy lore, the devil of tradition, and the continuum of human encounters of high strangeness, as well as my challenge to STEM curricular and practices via noetic trans-rational learning, position me toward a vision of what Glassie once referred to as an ‘intellectual outlaw’.
Folklore moves toward the direction of what is unknown but important in oneself and others. What folklore knows is a movement that human beings traditionally make through their expressive lives. Such knowledge requires an onto-existential pivot toward the mysterious issues of being, creativity, and un-concealment of self and cultural others.
Folklore’s Early Days
Folklore was a new field of learning in the nineteenth-century when antiquarians in England and philologists in Germany began to closely examine the ways of the lower economic classes. Awareness of folklore was closely associated with the nineteenth-century intellectual currents of literary Romanticism and political nationalism. This was a time of the “glorification of the common man.” From the French Revolution, “the people” as a mass conception emerged. Theorists of law, literature, language, customs, folksong, and folktale advocated for the doctrine of the spontaneous growth of folklore “from the heart of the people.” In law, Frederich Karl van Savigny (1779-1861) asserted that law is something that grows by sheer power unfolding itself in human miscengenated conscious states. * (ftnte)
In language, Jacob Grimm, a student of Savigny, held that language is born from the soul of primitive society and therefore has a social emergence. Grimm advocated for a “common language family heritage,” meaning folktales were an inheritance from a common Indo-European antiquity. A distinction deriving from Grimm’s view arose between the literary kuntspoesie, that is the artificial products of an individual and the naturpoesie that is, the spontaneous creation of the people that is folklore. * (ftnte) Despite its critics, language was viewed, as by the psychologist Wundt, a s a product of a communal mind.
This remained the orthodox view from the nineteenth-century to circa 1940 in England and America. A decline in this view occurred in the wake of more reserved thoughts about human nature and the waning of the Romantic passion for Hegelian sociological notion of a collective ‘over-soul’ and a psychology of humanity ‘en masse’. Nineteenth-century England underwent influence from the “cultural evolutionists” who maintained that humanity evolved in a single, unilateral evolutionary path of three stages depicting humans from a racist perspective as 1) ‘primitives’ or ‘savages’ (i.e., indigenous peoples like the Australian Aboriginal); 2) ‘barbarians’ or peasants (i.e., folk); and 3) sophisticate or ‘civilized’ (i.e., Victorian Englishmen – cf Krappe, pxvii-iii). Cultural evolutionists held that all humans evolved through those three stages. It was believed then that the ancestors of nineteen-century Englishmen must have been savages, like the Aborigines. That supposition was crucial to folklore, since it arose during the stage of savagery.
As peoples evolved into the stage of the barbarian, they left behind their folklore. Humanity evolved, but folklore devolved. From the cultural evolutionist view, decayed fragments of folk speech, manners, customs, and art were passing out of existence. What ostensible ‘fragments’ remained in civilized times became known as ‘survivals’ and the “last leaves of tradition.” * (ftnte: It was once believed that folklore thrived best among isolated, homogeneous and uneducated societies, but in addition to ‘survivals’, much folklore appears today as ‘living traditions’ of interest groups in high states of sophistication and education, such as university professors and corporate leaders.) Those fragmented ‘survivals’ required a process of historical reconstruction and comparative method in order to attempt to understand them. The technique of studying a European custom was to seek the fuller form presumed to exist in savage culture, past and present. This theory also explained why folklore was believed to exist primarily among the peasants or folk, one step above the savages and removed from ‘civilized’ Victorian Brits. ‘Folk’ was the mean term or the intellectual link between civilized and primitive evolutional stages.
During this time, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began publishing their influential “Household Tales” (1812) and the multi-volume “Teutonic Mythology.” The word they used for their study content was volkskunde. The Grimm laid down the early scientific foundations of folklore in the West. The word ‘folklore’ was later coined in 1846 when an Englishman William John Thoms (using the name Ambrose Merton) sent a letter to the journal “Athenaeum” suggesting the term replace “popular antiquities” and “popular literature.” And so, the word “folk- lore,” understood as the “accumulated traditional wisdom of the peasants,” took hold in the public imagination.
British nineteenth-century folklorists engaged in a creative flurry of theory, philosophical discussion, and high order polemics (Dorson, in Zumwalt, Am Folkl Schlorship p.11). Folklore was then a rich, multi-disciplined ‘chaos’, integrating numerous methods and approaches, openly engaging broad questions of whither and whence humanity. However, refraining from the central folkloric mode of interpretation through the coordination of multiple theories with our study-objects (e.g., ballads, customs, stories) and field methods, on the one hand, and goals and philosophical methods, on the other, folklore, during my time at Penn (1980-1984), drifted close to becoming a single discipline, threatened from within by a comfortable, near static efficiency.
Glassie voiced concern that folklore had unwittingly lapsed from its courting of the unknown. Still, in the 1970s, the discipline received vitality of depth and breadth by looking to cultural anthropology’s interests with acts of performance in cultural contexts. * (fnte Paredes book). As a result, folklore’s moribund concern for origins and definition was replaced by a concern for functions through performance studies. That is, folklorists now asked what did a folktale mean and ‘do’ for members of the community among whom the tale was found and when it is told artfully in small groups (Ben-Amos). Nevertheless, discussion regarding the multiple aspects of the definition of folklore – oral tradition, circulation, versions, etc., – still dominated. Folklore had matured as a stable professional field of study but was no longer frightening.
Becoming the Other – Jean Paul Sartre
Three folkloristson Penn’s faculty in the Department of Folklore and Folk Life played material roles in supporting my movement toward the unknown that lay out the center and beyond the margins of the discipline, removed from the seduction of safe efficiency. Henry Glassie introduced me to the works of Jean Paul Sartre, particularly “A Plea for Intellectuals” and “The Progressive-Regressive Method. Sartre’s work and Glassie’s insights showed me that the essence of “the folk” and all social science is ‘culture shock’, an existential fear of displacement into the unknown.*(ftnte: Recently, I’ve authored an article capturing the meaning of Sartre’s work to me as a folklorist and human being – Rojcewicz 2025 in press). As Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of conscious self-comprehension by “becoming an other” requires active social participation, it overcomes self-alienation caused by the fear of losing ones’ identity vis-à-vis encounters with others. The ‘other’ is understood as whatever is ‘not-I’, that is to say, different people, perspectives, institutions, alliances, causes, relationships, or the more-than-human world of nature.
Sartre holds that is only through choosing open, intimate encounters with those with whom we have issue that we learn to trust and affirm them in ways that enable them to be themselves and use their voices that may move our views and our sense of authority, control, privilege toward a responsibility for others. Being responsible for others and for all humanity means assuming people’s needs and a willingness to be called to account for them. It requires we surrender our desires in defense of Others with no certainty of the outcome resulting from our opening up to them. As such, our intentional choosing to live out the roles of others as our social projects result in our own differentiation and integration, enlarging our capacities for self-transformation and social change.
Sartre purports that everything across society must be subjected to ongoing interrogation, including the project that is oneself. That is to say, the progressive-regressive inquiry of Artist-Intellectuals, and all who work in good faith, reveals not only positive attributes about themselves but also points to where they act complicit with racism, sexism, colonialism, and xenophobia. Sartre (1974, 249) avows, “The intellectual’s labour will come to nothing, even if he demonstrates the aberrant character of racism, unless he constantly returns to himself to liquidate the traces of racism within him leftover from childhood, by a rigorous investigation of the ‘incomparable monster’ that is his self.”
The life of the other must challenge us. Assuming responsibility for others means we respect, safeguard, and learn from the singularity of people despite the risk of ontological shock of identity loss. Folklorists utilizing Sartre’s progressive-method of becoming the other is akin to American anthropologist Franz Boas’s vision of fieldwork as a means of “overcoming our separation” from others with whom we share the earth. Like our very selves, the other comes into being only when affirmed and welcomed by our actions.
Assuming new roles to live as our social praxis, as explained by Sartre, leads to questions of great relevance as to how one studies people. Studying people is different from methodology; its approach is more akin to literary criticism. The genre of literary studies that focuses on individuals is biography and biographical information cannot be imagined outside social life set in time and space. And so, biography addresses issues of social structure, geographical location, and information about character and the human psyche. Sartre wrote a multi-volume biography of Flaubert since Flaubert was radically other than Sartre who sought to enlarge his self-consciousness by assuming the strengths and attitudes of the French novelist. Sources of our study of people, following Sartre, should proceed from our needs, as Sartre chose Flaubert whose taciturn, fastidious nature was polar opposite to Sartre’s social action and intellectual confidence. Sartre’s biography project was a dialectical engagement with Flaubert as an other.
Sartre’s dialectic operations of the progressive-regressive method assume everything carries their opposite, and that this tension of contrasts leads to further change. When Flaubert declared, “I myself am Madam Bovary,” Sartre (1968, 141) saw him acting to “metamorphose himself into a woman artistically,” and thereby overcoming his historical conditions of a petite bourgeois male and refusing misogyny in favor of a richer human possibility (Sartre 1968, 147).
Intellectual Outlaw
My literary studies background (BA and MA degrees) deepened my love of words expressed as texts and the scholarly criticism that engenders meanings. My folklore and folk life studies opened my eyes to the art of small group performance of non-literary texts to audiences that serve as their immediate cultural critics. So, with backgrounds in literature and folklore, I see myself as a amalgam, a humanistic social scientist. The humanities and social sciences likewise focus their primary attention upon humanity. Humanities scholars in literary studies focus upon humanity in its multiple manifestations through texts (artifacts). Scholars in the social sciences study humanity in the realtime of lived experiences (sociofacts). As a poet and folklorist, I’ve been much influenced by Henry Glassie, whose scholarship reads like so many ostensible prose poems on previously unexposed aspects of culture and the human condition. His scholarship is the study of people and their creative expressions in the U.S., Ireland, Appalachia, Afghanistan, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh.
While engaged with creating a dissertation proposal, I had a transformational conversation with Kenneth S. Goldstein who was Chair of the Department. Kenny asked me if I had locked down a dissertation topic, and I told me I had. Months earlier, I enrolled in a course in “Folklore and American Civilization” taught by Richard M. Dorson who was a highly renown Visiting Professor from Indiana University, Bloomington. Dorson passed out some prompt topics for the course research paper, and on the list I found “UFOs as American Folklore.” Despite never having thought in a positive way about the UFO phenomenon (wasn’t it all too kooky?) at anytime in my life, I nevertheless landed there on the topic for Dorson’s course research paper and eventually my dissertation.
When I informed Kenny of my topic selection, he immediately asked if I intended to address the issue of whether a reality existed behind the belief. I told him I was simply going to collect personal narratives of UFO experiences and look at them in regards to motifs and narrative typology. I could read disappointment on his face. He said the discipline needed to explore the ontological basis for belief materials and their related traditions. He put his hand on my left shoulder and with his warm smile said, “You can do it, m’ boy.” With a week’s deliberation, I told Kenny I decided I would take up the reality issue. Soon after, Kenny introduced me to the work of David Hufford, a faculty member in the department whose acclaimed folklore fieldwork and scholarship focused on an experience-centered approach to the study of belief (Hufford). To my good fortune, David’s dissertation load wasn’t full, and he agreed to chair my committee.
Whereas nineteenth-century folklorists moved daringly toward unprovable entities and alternative realities, such as banshees and fairy realms, folklorists of the 1980s, and I suspect some today, shied away from the bold question of why, when confronting the perplexing phenomenology of extraordinary folk beliefs and encounters on the basis that such claims to truth “lack strict scientific verification’.” As I conducted folklore research and published articles on extraordinary encounters with phenomena of high strangeness throughout the 1980s and ’90s, I faced the rigid disciplinary position that folklorists should restrict their involvement with anomalous lore to “narrative studies and contexts.” It was absolutely assumed that folklorists were “unprepared to address directly” the reality issue of anomalous claims.
This prohibition in my view was highly hypocritical, since folklorists studying every other folk genre were allowed and expected to consider the question of the reality of their subject matter. For examples, folklorists studying folk food ways were expected not only to collect recipes, but also to sample the food. Folklorists studying material culture were expected to visit standing houses, sheds, and barns depicting folk vernacular architecture. During invited presentations and in my scholarship, I made the claim that it was incumbent upon folk belief scholars as humanists to use our knowledge concerning truth claims to help our informants distinguish between things ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ (Abrahams 1986, p.65 in Turner & Bruner).
Blinded by the discipline’s injunction against examination of the question of reality behind truth claims, as well as their own belief (cf., Hufford on reflexivity)) that anomalous folklore is not credible knowledge, most folklorists left out of consideration the the folk who are often overwhelmed or pained by their experiences. From the position of applied folklore, it is our ethical and professional responsibility to help our informants see themselves through such aftermath, whether they result from veridical anomalous encounters or from attachments to illusions or misperceptions (William A Wilson 1988, p.166). I pushed back on both the prohibition of folklore against a consideration of the question of reality behind anomalous truth claims and positivistic and reductionist thought of society – the position that only a physicalistic view of reality is credible and that only instrumental reason can disclose what is true. I became a ‘minor irritant’ to the discipline by interrogating disciplinary norms regarding folk belief studies (J of UFO Studies).
Folklore begins to subvert when it applies to social conditions its unique way of seeing the world and adhering respectfully to the worldview of others we study. This is true regardless of whether a folklorist intends to subvert. Folklore must necessarily be at odds with its discipline, as folk life experience is larger than our ‘folkloristics’ * (Goldstein). Still, we witness the existence of the “false scholar” who adds to our cultural storehouse of knowledge without questioning the conventions of his discipline or the values of his society (Glassie, Ballymenone). Those who are “true scholars” learn some positive and some negative things about themselves through their careful considerations of the lives of others.
In Glassie’s view, scholars who study humanity serve their own societies by arguing in their scholarship for their own definition of humanity. Glassie’s definition is open, inquisitive, capable of appreciative inquiry and self-critique. When cultures, for whatever reasons choose to constrict themselves around a narrow vision of what constitutes humanity, some scholars push back against the dominant, tightening view, believing there is still much more to learn and know. I saw myself then and still today in that role, pushing back on behalf of people who report personal confrontations with UFOs, angels, devils, Men in Black, and fairy entities. This does not mean I have to agree with an informant’s beliefs, say about the extraterrestrial nature of ‘flying saucers’. It does mean, however, that I do not a priori dismiss or ridicule them.
The moment Glassie used the term “intellectual outlaw,” I immediately felt a deep resonance. Hadn’t I always enjoyed seeking to learn by means of what is ‘deviant’, distasteful, and bizarre? The fantasy vision of myself I long held depicted me as thinking at the limits of academic disciplines, an ‘outlaw’ snatching truths from all scholarly categories, moving conventional perspectives out toward the borders where no knowledge is excluded. I privately saw myself as one who questions narrow definitions of creativity, breaks reductive models of reality, and openly admires people who live differently. As such, I was an annoyance to many, even as I built bridges between oppositions. A generalist, I recognized no ultimate incompatibility between the arts, sciences, and humanities. To implicate my somatic intelligence, I taught, wrote, and showed up in life powered by heart-felt reason. Pursuing an epistemological wholeness, my metaphoric and rational faculties granted me an unified sense of the multiplicity of life. My failure to achieve that imagined status beyond small deconstructions is a simple matter of not having the “horses to pull’ my professional cart.” (ftnte: One folklorist who most certainly had powerful horses pulling his cart was Alan Dundes who rocked the discipline with his abiding commitment bringing Freudian psychodynamics to his folklore studies).
The discipline of folklore is a humanistic social science that interrogates existing conditions through its description and analysis of cultural accomplishments of people who might otherwise be forgotten or mistreated. Folklore asks us to consider whether we think we’re superior to people not holding incumbency status of what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘good’, and whether it is not possible to learn from societies whose values, practices, economies, arts, and norms do not reflect our own. Folklore also asks us to know ourselves and bracket our understanding when engaging others in their cultural settings, so as not to miss the unfamiliar (Glassie). Folklore points to pressure points in dominant society.
Today’s political climate threatens scholars and academic disciplines that study those pressure points – ethnicity, immigration, gender, colonialism, political refugees, NEA support, international student enrollment, and DEI. Grant money is cut off. Renowned faculty members are leaving U.S. universities for schools in other countries. Foreign science organizations plan now to employ U.S. scientists fired from federal jobs or who had their research stopped due to the administration’s withholding of grant funding.
The crisis demands our performance of the noble role of folklorists as irritants to the body politic, through scholarship supporting those who are impeded or ‘othered’. Folklore subverts hatred by adhering respectfully to the worldview of those we study. We must teach and write in ways people realize society is makable, reality flexible. We must act meaningfully to overturn the xenophobia and racism that dehumanize people. Through a via negativa, that is, an improvement by subtraction, folklorists contribute to positive causes through careful considerations of the lives of others. This moment calls for nothing less.
All folklore, according to Henry Glassie, leads us at the end of the day to consider the question of superiority. The ugly argument for superiority fossilizes into nationalism, borders, asylums, xenophobia, racism, holocausts, mistreatment of people in gender transition and people with disabilities. So, folklorists, or perhaps some small number, must necessarily be at odds with their discipline and society. Folklore’s intellectual outlaws stand ready.
(To Be Continued): work Jung / and Artist Intellectual
Current social unrest across the nation raises some philosophical and pragmatic questions fundamental to culture, politics, morality, and human relations. Two such pertinent issues raised are whether politics transcends morality or whether morality transcends the laws of the state?
If morality transcends politics and the laws of the state doesn’t that mean that our laws are weak and that anyone can break them, if one’s conscience so instructs? One might think here of the figures of Socrates, Antigone, Thoreau, and other morally propelled individuals of Western culture. If morality transcends politics does this lead to a loose society wherein people do not respect law or authority?
However, if politics transcends morality, does that mean that politics is a unique condition of life, a model of how to live with and among others? If politics transcends morality because people will not live by and be constrained by moral principles, does that mean morality is mere expediency of self-advantage and non-existent as a transcendent guide of behavior? If morality does not effectively apply to politics, then to what does it apply and why? What might effectively serve both the pragmatic order of the body politic and abstract individual values? What lived experience and quality might help forge a mind disciplined to be simultaneously more abstract and more concrete?
Alfred North Whitehead asserted that a “sense of style,” what he saw as the last acquisition of an educated mind and pervades one’s entire being, was essential. Style is intimate with knowledge and power. In “The Aims of Education,” Whitehead pointed out, “Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power.” Style, across all human sectors – science, literature, art, social engagement – is about accomplishment and constraint. In the arts, for example, a performer gives oneself to the generic constraints of a metier, while simultaneously satisfying one’s personal goals and aspirations. As Whitehead knew, “With style your power is increased, for your mind is not distracted with irrelevancies, and you are more likely to attain your object.” The style of everyday life among others and the earth in community calls for citizens to live aesthetically as unique works of relational art.
Nietzsche, in “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” makes distinction between “institutions for teaching culture and institutions for teaching how to succeed in life.” Once dedicated to broadly developing the personal and social self, education today enhances the appetite for material consumption, and in this context, almost everything is measured by a cost-benefit analysis and leads to cultural and epistemological conformity, the commodification of consciousness, and the flop house of alienation. The arts and humanities are denigrated by some as ‘anti-disciplines’ whose only value is to stimulate the established sciences (E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature). Despite having a philosophy degree and a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory from a quality German university, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, sees no present value in a classic liberal arts education in a techno-scientific era. Recently, at the Davos economic conference in Switzerland, he confidently declared, and without a sense of misfortune, that AI “will destroy humanities jobs.” Folk and indigenous wisdom traditions, even less regarded than the humanities, are frequently considered feckless to enhance life success and so do not count as significant.
In our techno-financial society, “the educational ideal is the intelligent and skilled technician, not the intellectual and scholarly academic or layperson of yesteryears.” (Rahman, “Betrayal of Intellect”). Commercialism impersonates intelligence. Profitability, efficiency, and career preparation overcome knowledge and truth. Students are valued as ‘consumers’ and faculty as ‘employees’, rather than engaged members of shared learning communities. The neoliberal market model promotes the flawed notion that the consumer alone speaks in the name of education. Within that model, the power of earning belittles the pursuit of learning. Long term capital gain is the premier goal.
When people are treated as instrumental means to others’ ends, they are dehumanized, removed from their caring, devoid of spontaneity, and crippled as to what is integral to themselves and others. Treating nature as an exploitable ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger) of raw materials and people as essentially transactional tokens gives impetus to kleptocratic leadership. In this context, education undergoes a degeneration of institutional Being and underserves culture. In addition to skilled technicians and titans of capital gain, a salutogenic culture requires artist-intellectuals. Nietzsche stated, “This is the basic idea of culture insofar as it assigns only one task to every single one of us: to promote inside and outside of ourselves the generation of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, and thus to work at the perfection of nature.” He understood that by increasingly adapting itself to the techno-economic needs of the age, education abdicates its authority to guide the age.
I find the thoughts of poet David Whyte on ‘freedom’ as necessarily compensatory to today’s widespread association with radical personal autonomy:
“Today, ‘freedom’ tends to mean lack of constraint and therefore, lack of relationship. One is held to be most free when ‘nobody can tell me what to do’ – and ‘I can do what I want.’ This implies a person is most free when least connected with others and the larger community of beings within which humanity finds our place.”
Holding such a view of freedom fragments the most creative, and unique aspects of one’s intrinsic being. It causes an ontological splintering of one’s personal ‘genius’. The word ‘genius’ is from the Latin and refers to the spirit of a place that renders it unutterably itself. One’s inherent ‘genius’ is the embodiment of one’s unique spirit in creative engagement with the world. Whyte’s position implies that people are truly free only when connected with others and the community of human and more-than-human world. Freedom is consubstantial with relational care and understanding of others.
Unless you are at home in the metaphor…unless you have had your proper education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. – Robert Frost
It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday for lack / of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams
We know more than we can say. – Michael Polanyi
Noetic literacy offers schools a pathway to direct, unmediated learning experiences and subject-object unity that integrates polarized perspectives (Kirk J. Schneider, Polarized Mind, 2013). Noetic consciousness is rich in archetypal structures and symbols of ‘wild’ or ‘far-out’ mythic, folkloric, ritual associations, and artistic transformations carried forth by hunches, intuitions, visions, epiphanies, revelations, performances, and dreams. Because noetic literacy with a healing education involves tacit, personal knowledge of informal and non-dual states of consciousness that are ostensibly ineffable, educators encounter significant challenges to their teaching and scholarship when using a “linear, argumentative, and critical style” (K.E. Lorena, Subjective & Aesthetic Interface, An Inquiry into Transformed Subjectivities,” Academia.edu, 2013).
The challenge for scholars comes from the need to disclose the fluid, both/and nature of noetic consciousness when using academic prose and its binary either/or logic. Noetic consciousness constitutes what Ken Wilber (Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality 1995) refers to as “vision logic,” a form of cognition that “can hold in mind contradictions, it can unify opposites, it is dialectical and non-linear, and it weaves together what otherwise appears to be incompatible notions.” Noetic understanding is not a ready-made science but a perspicacious knowing, an intuitive insight that cannot be well communicated by conventional means.
This essay asks whether logical discourse and related natural science procedures constitute the one and only valid language to describe meaning making structures and events of the human life-world. When addressing non-discursive, perspicacious understandings, scholars have professional access to and training with only discursive language. What might be lost, missed, or otherwise modified when we exclusively utilize logico-scientific language for lived experience and phenomena ostensibly mythopoetic in nature? A new language of logos-eros and concept-image that is capable of addressing the omnijective (i.e., objective and subjective) qualities of noetic understanding must ultimately be employed by scholars as artist-intellectuals writing about cognitive diversity and epistemological pluralism, and ineffable phenomena of the psyche.
It must be understood that I do not present in my healing education initiative and human completion project noetic principles as definitive rules or formulae. This is not possible, as the mythopoetic nature of noesis defies separation through language-use into discrete constituent elements (i.e., ontic knowledge) and cannot be fully disclosed as self-evident by logical exposition (i.e., apodictic). Paradoxically, this essay, at least in very small part, is an ontic and discursive language-construct yearning to explore noetic, supra-rational knowing and the nature of consciousness transformation beyond self-actualization. Academic language is significantly different from and less accurate when describing the phenomenology of noetic consciousness. Here lies the issue of translatability. What do I mean by this?
Scholarly works are generated, contested, and disseminated within discursive disciplines and their technologically tacit knowledge. The academy’s language of knowing originates and is negotiated within dominant academic models, which today means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The expected language of academic knowing is rational, disinterested, objective, and ‘value free’ and characteristic of number-based sciences. The position of ‘semantic positivism’ (Philip Wheelright, Metaphor and Reality, 1968) has it that all viable research inquiries must proceed in a scientific manner, using logico-scientific language. On the other hand, the natural ‘language’ of noesis is ‘poetry’, and it addresses an omnijective ( i.e. unity of objectivity and subjectivity) reality that embraces supra-rational, numinous, spiritual, and ethical elements.
The language of noesis speaks of and to the emotional effect of dreams, visions, revelations, intuitions, altered states of consciousness. It is wisdom of nothing less than everything – specters of high strangeness, deep obfuscation, argot of soul. In my conceptual framework on noetic learning experiences, the ontic and poetic languages of concepts and images, numbers, and symbols must cooperate in mutual service of overcoming subject-object divisions. The language of academic apodictic knowing can touch the soul of mind; but it is the poetry of noesis that touches the soul of soul. It is certainly the case that my present explorations of noesis only begins to address the issue of scholarship that synthesizes mythopoetic language (see my “Even God,” Academia.edu, 2025) andacademic parlance, something akin to Schoenberg’s sprechstimme, a voice between logos and poesis, image and concept, speech and song.
The increasing global mental health crisis reveals various acute and nuanced forms and degrees of ontological disorientation. Human fragmentation and polarized awareness results from one-sidedness, specialization, subject/object splits, kleptocratic leadership, and Othering of people and cultures different than us, all resting upon a dualistic logic of either/or thinking. Education leaders and allies across all sectors of life must cooperate within a renewed human completion project, if we are to re-establish a salutogenic democracy and relational social engagements. Might we collaborate in the conceptualization of what it means to be human and carefully fashion a model of a preferred humanity that may serve as prologue to the future? The story of developing an ideal person through education and cultural values can be read long through history and wide across cultures. Some discussion of several examples is in order here.
In ancient Greece, for example, Hippocrates and Aristotle emphasized the indivisible relation of body and mind. The ideal person was envisioned as someone possessing a harmonious physical, mental, and emotional whole. The principle of the ‘Golden Mean’ or mesotes is the foundation of Greek moderation and balance. Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics) defined ‘virtue’ as the intermediate expression of emotion and actions between the extreme of too much (excess) and the extreme of too little (deficiency). In addition, Plato’s mentions gnostikoi (gnosis) and gnostike episteme in his work Politikos (258e-267), where it stands for a noetic form of a higher intelligence. The most capable political leaders were expected to possess unique, perspicacious knowledge demonstrative of the ability to rule effectively. In addition, gnostikoi was also a tell-tale trait of the ideal learner at the Platonic Academy that required a high cognitive prowess to successfully make one’s way through its challenging curriculum.
L’uomo universale refers to the all-sided or whole person of Renaissance humanism who possessed innate potential to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world through diverse knowledge and skills, including literary training of the imagination and practical morality. Renaissance humanists maintained that the Beautiful, the Good, and the True constitute real dimensions within each individual (Aristotle) at each stage of development and were considered premier virtues toward which a life should be directed (Plato). To the extent that a person enhances their creative self-expression, conducts themselves with virtuous rectification in ethical relation to others in society, and honestly and accurately knows the physical world, they were said to have elevated their humanity by realizing beauty, goodness, and truth within them. L’uomo universale provided the heightened image of an individual flourishing, as a result of a synthesis of self (Beauty), culture (Goodness), and nature (Truth). The intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical versatility sought by Renaissance thinkers and artists enculturated the body-mind-spirit and disciplined the imagination.
The notion of a person ‘completed’ through cultural training and educational learning can readily be found in the Eastern world. In Sufism, for example, the completed person is the Pir who provides baraka or ‘grace’ to the community (Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart, 136-7). The Ch’un Tzu of Confucianism (The Great Learning) is the morally superior person in possession of ren, ‘humanity’ or ‘benevolence’ that is an inherent trait that must be developed socially among others. Buddhism (Dhammapada) values the Awakened person balanced between suffering and liberation, awareness and ignorance, joy and pain. Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita) prizes the achievement of moksha or spiritual emancipation that results from following the appropriate life path: jnana yoga (knowledge), bhakti yoga (loving devotion), karma yoga (action), and raja yoga (meditation). In Christianity, the integration of body-mind-spirit defines the ideal individual. The purpose of a complete Christian is to live in a state of shalom – a state of peace and justice reflecting God’s reign. Shalom is Hebrew for ‘peace’, but it also conveys the values of wholeness, completeness, well-being, and safety. The complete individual of Judaism (cf. Talmud) is a holistic union of divine soul and material body created in the image of God (b’tzelemb Elohim).
It is difficult today to find school curricula given to training learners in the intellectual, social, and ethical virtues of human wholeness. This is as understandable as it is sad, given that current education reflects the larger consumer culture that values continuous self-indulgence of immediate excitement, stimulation, and sensation. One can sight an early Western case of the Cistercian, founded by St. Benedict (480-543 CE) for whom the monastery served as a ‘school’ for the service of the divine. Zaleski (“Search of Paideia,” Parabola, Spr. 2003, p.46) asserts that the “…aim of such a school is to ‘apprehend reality as it fully and really is,’ in order to transform and liberate the truth in each person.” Cistercian monks willingly underwent the education of the new human, seeking transformation of consciousness of wholeness. Along similar lines, the Jesuits employ a holistic approach to life and learning involving Cura Personalis, understood as the sacred care for the whole person. According to Philip Zaleski, “The classical Greek idea of Paideia, of cultivating perfection through disciplined training of intellect, body, and heart, in order to produce a new human governed by divine wisdom, has virtually disappeared.” Sacredness is the practice of the awareness of wholeness, a respectful approach to the world (Palmer, Heart of Learning, 11). A more recent educational attempt to realize the Paideia concept was Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Program K-12 (1984) which in Zaleski’s view was undeniably valuable as a comprehensive orientation in the arts, sciences, and humanities, but in Zaleski’s view, “failed completely to include moral instruction and, most tellingly, the training in the inner life” (Zaleski, Paideia,” Parabola, Spr. 2003:46).
Today’s schools featuring dominant STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curricula are even further separated from even Adler’s imperfect efforts, in large part due to the distinct traits of scientific methodological reductionism. Its manner of reasoning rests firmly upon dispassionate observation and a common-sense basis of knowledge. Scientific method is atomistic, breaking things down to its constituent parts. It is rational, pragmatic, and empirical. With the value of objectivity as its methodological cornerstone, science assumes a world that is “fixed and absolute, and so it is possible to separate observer from the observed and the measured” (Feyerabend, Farewell, 5, 8). Its dualistic logic can be found in Aristotle, “A thing cannot be and not be at the same time.” And so, oppositions like ‘animate/inanimate’ became solidified in ‘definition’ and accepted as true reality. STEM’s technological savvy and quantitative focus seriously undervalue the cognitive imagination as found in the arts and humanities, whose holistic logic is an antimonial both/and, the basis for noetic literacy and all-sided cognition.
Education at all levels must purposively heal itself of the ‘illnesses of one-sidedness of operations, values, disciplines, structures and processes, reflected in accelerated, ‘advanced’ programs in elementary and high schools and career-focused STEM specializations in colleges and universities. STEM arises from a ‘theology’ of materialism; it enshrines logic and calculation, ‘idolizes’ objectivity, privileges exterior life over interior life, and projects a flatland view of reality devoid of interiority and spirit. The goal of my healing education project is creation of a learning environment that recognizes and nurtures the natural and human sciences that together can serve human completion. It seeks learning experiences that link the wisdom of noesis to the wisdom of logos, overcoming their current split and deoptimization of human potential.
Sartre’s Progressive-Regressive Method of Self-Realization
Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Bainbridge Island
ABSTRACT
Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of self-comprehension is discussed as a counter to the dehumanizing effects of Othering. It resists the demonization of marginalized people considered inferior or deviant by dominant groups, as well as the consequent minimization to the self-awareness of hegemonic in-group members. Selfhood requires Otherness; no one realizes self-consciousness without progressive-regressive dialectical acts. Sartre’s phenomenological method of an ongoing progression toward and identification with the subjectivity of the Other and the regressive return to an objectified self is a dynamic interaction between the existential conditions of solitude and community, resulting in a transcendence of self and an existential intimacy with the Other. For Sartre, self-realization and the manifestation of one’s identity are dependent upon a dialectical manner of living the concrete human relation that temporarily unites and mutually transforms self and Other. In Sartre’s view, we make real our subjectivity and give meaning to our essence by choosing throughout a lifetime to live various roles of Others as engaged projects and thereby transcend our social situation, liquidating our needs (i.e. inhumanity), and enlarging our humanity. By engaging in projects of concrete resistance to Othering, we likewise acknowledge the worth of Others who are indispensable to our own existence and knowledge of ourselves in a field of possible social outcomes for which we bear ethical responsibility. Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of conscious self-realization requires empathic engagement with Others, and as such, it is an antidote to self-alienation caused by fear of losing ones’ identity vis-à-vis live social engagements with Otherness – e.g., people, groups, perspectives, institutions, alliances, causes, relationships, etc. As a result of intimate social encounters, Others are free to be themselves and use their voices in ways that may threaten our views or our perceived sense of authority and control. As such, live encounters with Otherness are generative engagements resulting in human differentiation and integration that enlarge our capacities for self-transformation and broad connectedness through the praxis of concrete projects in society.
Key Words:
Becoming the Other, progressive-regressive method, project, self-comprehension, praxis, dialectic, Artist-Intellectual
1.Introduction
We perform our life’s work not in a vacuum, but in a social theater of inescapable mutuality. We conduct research to nudge information toward meanings and meanings toward values to live by. We scholars are citizens, beholding to society. And yet, if our research is to show good faith, it must honestly perplex and disrupt social conditions as part of a critical endeavor, necessarily joining our work to that of Others. My project here is a phenomenological reading of Sartre’s influential essay, “The Progressive-Regressive Method,” supported by several of his related writings, wherein I unpack how Sartre’s dialectic enterprise discloses self-comprehension, the volition and intelligence of Others, and a future of social possibilities better than the past. I reflect upon Sartre’s phenomenological vision of a human being in which identity transcends and includes Others in the broadest sense. I conclude with a discussion of the Artist-Intellectual whose method against personal arrogance and social cruelty is a progressive-regressive reach toward that which is preferable in life.
The phenomenological study of the Other has engaged the thinking of some of the Twentieth Centuries most capable and creative minds, including Martin Buber (1878–1965), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), and Paul Ricoeuer (1913-2005). They opposed the Enlightenment’s presupposition of a radically autonomous self, which, as it later manifested in the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the materialism of the nineteenth, separated humans from one another and art from life, in favor of a philosophy oriented towards a intersubjective self that is relational to the Other. Sartre understands self-comprehension as a result of placing oneself in positions of Others and engaging their roles as projects in the world. Sartre’s phenomenological method of an ongoing progression toward and identification with the subjectivity of the Other and the regressive return to oneself results in both a surpassing of the conditions of the self that includes knowledge of the Other.
As Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of conscious self-comprehension requires active social participation, it offers an antidote to self-alienation caused by the fear of losing ones’ identity vis-à-vis encounters with Others – that which is not-I, whether understood as people, perspectives, institutions, alliances, causes, relationships, or the more-than-human world of nature.[1] It is only through choosing open, intimate encounters with those with whom we have issue that we learn to trust and affirm them in ways that enable them to be themselves and use their voices that may influence our views and our sense of authority, control, and privilege. As such, generative engagements with Others result in our own differentiation and integration, enlarging our capacities for self-transformation and social change. Being responsible for Others and for all humanity means assuming people’s needs and a willingness to be called to account for them. It requires we surrender our desires in defense of Others with no certainty of the outcome resulting from our opening up to them. Assuming responsibility for the Other means we respect, safeguard, and learn from the singularity of people despite the risk of ontological shock of identity loss. Like our very selves, the Other comes into being only when affirmed and welcomed by our actions.
2. Perspective Taking and Trans-existential Integrity
Diverse views that are cultural, philosophical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic inform broad understanding and social connectedness, two values essential to counter all forms of Othering. How can we understand the perspectives, values, aesthetics, judgments, and actions that originate from people different than ourselves? Our socially constructed identities are necessarily hybrids that require that we regularly cross social and cultural borders. For example, James L. Winchester (2002, 8) reasons, “We must often cross gender borders to communicate with our spouses and generational borders to communicate with children and parents.” To develop and maintain the skill of perspective taking, it is essential to study people in the life-worlds of their respective communities and cultures.
The widespread absence of multiple-perspectives literacy today leads to the Othering of various groups: black, brown, and yellow bodied people, anti-vaxxers, pro-maskers, climate change deniers, pro-lifers, opposing political parties, gun lobbyists, and gay, lesbian, and transsexual communities. Possessing a wide repertoire of true but partial worldviews is an integral human value essential for effectively navigating an indeterminate world where understandings of truth and reality are deeply complex and fervently contested. Strategically engaging in projects across socio-cultural borders influences and is influenced by different peoples and cultures, bringing one a step closer to transcending bigotry, sexual minority harassment, neglect of the disabled, nationalism, economic chauvinism, sexism, and xenophobia. Perspective taking and cultural literacy require we understand diversity and inclusion in the broadest terms. The fact of the matter is that human beings possess fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships that can serve as starting points for understanding Others. Scientists who study the genome find no biological basis for race. Sharon Bagley (2003) reports, “Geneticists find that when they add up the tiny genetic variations that make one person different from the next, there is greater difference within races than between races.”That fact makes it prohibitive to disdain people, causes, or alliances as outliers on the assumption that they are not our kind.
Linguistic anthropology points to the existential relationality understood by various peoples. For example, an existential intimacy of self and Other is implied by the African Nguni word ubuntu – “I am because we are” (John S. Mbiti 1969, 219). In ancient Nguni philosophy, a newly born child is not a person. People are born without ena or selfhood, and “instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time’’ (Abeba Birhane, 2017). Ubuntu points to a common human condition and communal inter-connectedness. In that African conception of knowledge and ontological understanding, one’s full humanity can only be situated among Others and is never an abstract, isolated entity (Moeketsi Letseka 2013). Elsewhere, Koreans prize the communal, good-fellowship of sansaeing (conviviality) and Pilipino elders encourage the young to manifest kapwa-tao, which in Tagalog means “as human beings we must respect each another because we need each other” (Ramathate Dolamo 2013). The Japanese word Ningen means that our human condition can only exist ‘between or among people’. It points to the fact that one cannot realize full humanity alienated from Others. Similarly, the traditional Chinese principle of jen signifies inherent human benevolence that comes into being only as a result of social interactions (Smith, 1995:110). A final example of the existential intimacy of self and others comes from Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hahn (1987) who puts forth that healthy intersubjectivity emerges when self-regarding impulses are modified by knowledge that we are simultaneously intrapersonal (subjective) and interpersonal (social).He refers to this human condition as ‘interbeing’, an existential state that transcends tribalism and the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy at the core of Othering.
While our human condition is trans-existential, it hardly guarantees racial, social, religious, or political harmony; it quite often stimulates dissent. Dissent is kin to cultural and conceptual diversity. A diverse community is never without conflict; it is a place where opposing perspectives offer opportunities for learning and self-comprehension. A clearly stated ‘no’ may successfully launch a conversation about what constitutes someone making a positive commitment in a context of contested issues. As such, dissent is a form of caring and not a form of resistance. People can let go of doubts that lead to anger and violent resistance only if they can name and express them. Voicing dissent may lead others to discern alternatives as to how we currently see, structure, and value things. Without the possibility of ‘no’, a response of ‘yes’ is meaningless (Bloch 2005).
To be a healthy ecological system, communities require limiters and inhibitors of difference to grow and sustain themselves as vibrant interdependent entities. It is the case that there can be neither lasting transformation without inclusiveness nor holistic learning without difference. Diverse communities provide historically slighted groups meaningful assurance that ‘community’ is a true and authentic value of collective membership and ownership with plans for implementation of inclusion and redress of grievances and not code for racism, colonialism, chauvinism, or xenophobia. In communities where one group wields authority that prevents consideration of divergent possibilities and information from different sources, we witness unhealthy social systems. Homogeneity too often means an autonomous part of the system subverts difference and traumatizes the whole. Political systems that control information flow and entrench the authority of one group become autocratic, dictatorial, or fascist. Difference and dissent are essential to sustainable healthy community growth.
Consciousness is a balance of differentiations and integrations by which we grow. John Stuart Mill (1974) contends that any position, even if correct, is but ‘dead dogma’ until one has to defend it against someone who believes the opposite just as fervently. Likewise, the Colville tribal people from Okanagan esteem a perspective referred to as En’owkin, understood as “Give me viewpoints opposed to mine to increase my understanding.” Okanagan people are expected to adeptly include the concerns of others within their own perspectives, grasping, to the degree possible, how others may hold opposite positions. While it may be that everyone in the tribal community will never wholly agree on issues, it does help ensure that everyone is fully informed of what it will take to find a path forward and what each person will have to either concede or offer to get there (Fenton 2013).
The point has been made here that willing, active engagement with differing perspectives and views is essential to the health of our indivisible personal and social being. James L. Winchester (2002, 17) warns, “It is foolish to ignore any of the viewpoints accessible to us, but particularly when crossing cultural borders into poorly understood terrain, we should exercise extreme caution about our ability to understand others better than they understand themselves. We will not understand very much at all if we do not leave behind our assumptions of superior knowledge.” On the other hand, when communities define themselves as isolated enclaves of unchallenged views, they become the antithesis of diverse communities and can lead to ‘enclave extremism’. For as Cass R. Sunstein (2007), Law Professor, University of Chicago purports, “There is the general risk that those who flock together…will end up both confident and wrong, simply because they have not been sufficiently exposed to counterarguments. They may even think of their fellow citizens as opponents or adversaries in some kind of ‘war’”. How does such antagonism come to be?
3. Individualism and Othering
Seeds of Othering may be said to lie within the complex view of individualism. For example, individualism is a cornerstone of American culture, “forming a constellation along with analytic thinking, methodological individualism, and free market capitalism” (Montouri 2022). Consider the libertarian notion of people as independent stand-alone agents who make their own choices in all things and whose personal freedom comes before allegiance to others in community. Libertarians are united by a belief in a personal liberty of conducting their lives as they wish, economic freedom, as well as a fundamental distrust of group and government authority. While it is true that discrete individuals working free of group constraints and reluctant to compromise personal values for the collective welfare lead in some cases to innovation and entrepreneurship, it is equally true that isolated individuals working alone lead to finding oneself wanting, lonely, doubtful, and disquiet. Nevertheless, some people are quick to value the individual’s subsequent alienation above imperfect community, misidentifying social retreat for freedom.
It is painfully true that historically disenfranchised and oppressed groups around the world have at times experienced ‘community’ as code for paternalism, imperialism, colonialism, or domination by any other name. Fascism in the twentieth century make many today understandably suspicious of the values, practices, and institutions of dominant groups. Rich, multiple perspectives and voices that are cultural, philosophical, political, religious, economic, gender-based, and aesthetic may serve to counter, repressive hegemonic systems. James Madison long ago observed in the Federalist Papers that multiple factions in the United States serve to neutralize one another, thus preventing political extremism. Sartre (1968, 87 fn., 1), in the spirit of Marx states, “Thus the qualities of external determination and those of synthetic, progressive unity which is human praxis are found inseparably connected…” but “that this wish to transcend the oppositions of externality and internality, of multiplicity and unity, of analysis and synthesis, of nature and anti-nature” is assuredly no easy task.
Another view of individuality leading to contestation among individuals and groups is referred to as ‘Identity Politics’. To decenter Western cultural dominance and include the myriad voices of the world’s culturally disenfranchised peoples, some scholars, at least since the 1980s, have promoted the value of ethnic and racial difference as antidotes to European hegemony. However, in doing so, some have uncritically privileged difference among peoples for its own sake. Advocates of identity politics, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), presume that divergent worldviews are ultimately incommensurate and that identity is an ahistorical product of a group. From that perspective, no one exists or can be studied as if independent from the collective. In its extreme, identity politics confuses individuality and self-determination for separatism; it leads to cultural narcissism and chronic ethnocentrism. According to Cornel West,” African-American studies was never meant to be solely for African Americans…It was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American, because people of African descent in this country are profoundly human, profoundly modern, profoundly American. And so to the degree to which they can see the riches that we have to offer as well as see our shortcomings, is the degree to which they can understand the American experience ” (1991, 32-3).
Some postcolonial and critical cultural-studies scholars attempt to counter the confusion between self-agency and group autonomy by arguing that traditional divisions among peoples are not absolute. Race, class, sexuality, and gender are unstable categories whose nature and influence are not fixed. Holding a facile conception of self, proponents of identity politics fail to grasp that we have fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships. Our multiple identities and inner diversity are starting points for understanding others. Trin T. Min-ha asserts that the presumed borders between you and he, she, me, we, and they overlap and are porous (1989, 94). Similarly, Gregory Bateson asserts, “It is nonsense to talk about ‘dependency’ or ‘aggressiveness’ or ‘pride,’ and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in something or other inside a person” (Nakagawa 2000, 36). As such, the dialectical self is a hybrid composed of familial, cultural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal properties. We are by nature empty of an independent existence. Since we necessarily contain many cultural and group identities simultaneously within ourselves, we are compound, inter-relational beings linked inexorably to multiple Others.
Being devoid of an isolated self also means we live potentially open to connections, a precondition for such human values as love and caring for others. Living engaged relations of love alter the self-structure of the lover and the beloved. Martin Buber (1958) identified the archetype of love as an “inclusive relationship where the ‘I am’ neither loses its identity nor prefers self-interest to the interest of others.”When we are in love, we are and are not ourselves. Unconditional love is a state of self that is not contingent upon conventional value-defining norms of the ego. As such, love opens the silos of ordinary consciousness, allowing for new ways of being to emerge that bridge the intrapersonal and interpersonal, private and public domains of selfhood. This paradox of love – that mirrors the paradox of selfhood – is a condition by which one is distinct but related, separate but not separated from the Other as a beloved. This is widely known but scarcely understood. Eric Fromm (1956) provides guidance, “Loving is unified separateness,” and affirms, “We can love as equals only because they are different from us, not because they are the same.”Sounding like Sartre, Fromm confirms loving relations as a quest for self-consciousness, a mysterious communion of individual with Others. As such, love is a project of creative receptivity.
For our concrete human projects to be as transformative as love, the boundaries between self and Other must be seen as semi-permeable, so we can deeply engage Others, forming powerful intersubjective fusions by which to leverage understanding of ourselves and people forward and upward. This action presupposes a social courage by which we risk our belief in a discrete self in order to achieve social intimacies, taking full responsibility for our part in deep, if only momentary, integrative contacts with Others who may or may not reciprocate. Concretizing consciousness of our inter-relational being through our actions and commitments is a counter to prevalent cultural fears of ego-loss or domination by Others different from us.
4. Becoming the Other, Comprehending Oneself
Jean-Paul Sartre, identified with twentieth century dialectics, borrowed the terms ‘objectification’, ‘progressive-regressive method’, and ‘becoming the other’ from the master of dialectics, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In “Existentialism is a Humanism”,[2] Sartre expresses the problem of human consciousness, declaring, ‘existence precedes essence’. By this, Sartre means there is no a priori concept of humanity. Humanity is an existence that chooses an essence. Sartre proclaims, “In this sense we may say that there is a universality to man; but it is not given, it is perpetually being made. I build the universal in choosing myself.” With this pronouncement on our human ontology, Sartre unilaterally unseats Plato’s ideal forms, the Judeo-Christian notion of God,[3] and Hegel’s Absolute Idea. Sartre (2003) approaches the problem of consciousness by distinguishing between two states of being: being-in-itself (i.e., l’etre-en-soi) and being-for-itself (i.e., l’etre pour-soi). Being in-itself describes the ontological state of a concrete object that appears stable and secure but is unconscious of itself, unable to alter its fixed being, and inherently devoid of meaning. Being-for-itself refers to a person as a conscious subject. It means the phenomenological experience of our self-consciousness is incomplete and non-determined; we must constantly invent ourselves out of nothingness. As much as we try, we can never possess our being, as we do any object. For an unconscious ‘object’, there is no problem of existence, but as conscious ‘subjects’in human reality we ask, ‘Who am I’?
Sartre, following Hegel, avouches that self-comprehension is a social process and not a mental one.[4] Each human being is in a constant process of becoming, and so the identity of an individual can never be defined by absolute values. Because we realize ourselves only by interacting with Others – to be understood as everything that is not we – they are not to be dismissed or maligned. We are inherently indefinable beings moving toward reciprocal relationships in the world. It is through our social engagements that we effect the integration of self-comprehension and experience degrees of personal coherence. In “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre proclaims, “I can obtain any truth at all about myself only by way of some other person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, and so is he just as much regarding my knowledge of myself.” In this intersubjective world, “man decides what he is and what others are.”
We can better grasp the intersubjectivity we share with Others, if we recognize that in order to be, say, courageous or loving, we must act courageously or lovingly. It is not enough that we should think we are courageous or loving. If we are to be honest, we must perform honesty in our personal and public life. Comprehension of our self-consciousness is not a result of abstract reasoning or philosophical thought but a product of our engaged activities in the world. For Sartre, there is no reality but the concrete actions we choose to realize in the world. Realizing who we are, for Sartre, is always a dialectical way of living – in struggle or complicity – the concrete human relation that unites self and Other (Sartre 1968, 11, 156).
In the process of affirming the Other, we simultaneously discover and affirm our needs. For Hegel and Sartre, comprehension of the self is a matter of placing ourselves in the position of Others and thereby assuming their roles. Sartre (1968, 107) maintains, “Our roles are always future.” They appear to us as acts to perform, problems to solve, decisions to decide, commitments to keep, or talents to live. By assuming new roles, we engage ourselves in a process of transcending our present condition, a future to be created. By living selected roles of Others as concrete social projects, we display “an oriented life, an affirmation of our human essence through action”(Sartre 1968, 108). Through praxis, objective knowledge is acquired through dialectic of living-as-a-human in society.
The nature of our existential condition is manifest by what Sartre refers to as ‘the progressive-regressive method’. In living day to day we necessarily project ourselves outward into the world, temporarily alienating ourselves from our thoughts and feelings. We invest our emotional, intellectual, and creative energies into our work projects, referred to as praxis. Through praxis, we realize in and through our projects a certain revelation of the Other, and so, knowing is itself an act of praxis (Sartre 1968, 92). We are subjects insofar as we consciously direct our own projects based on our needs, and objects insofar as we submit to the action and nature of the Other (Sartre 1968, 128). Our historical conditions vary, but what never varies is the requirement to exist in the world, to take up work there, and engage different people. While it is impossible to discern a universal human essence, Sartre (1968, 39) insists that the progressive-regressive activity is the universal human condition that is not provided us but rather is what we perpetually make through projects that engage the world.
The word ‘project’ is a key concept at the core of Sartre’s philosophy and should be understood as both a verb and a noun. As a verb, ‘to project’ oneself into an Other means we move away from our private selves and progress outward into society. The ‘Other’ may be a job, artwork, institution, activity, cause, alliance, or person. As a noun, one’s ‘project’ is one’s work, commitments, relationships, or alliances. We willfully choose our work projects based on our felt needs in a world of scarcity (Sartre 1968, 91). We recognize the lacks (i.e. inhumanity) we possess and attempt their liquidation through our work, relationships, and meaningful events in the world. Through praxis, we reinvent ourselves and define new realities.
Sartre (1968, 150) purports, “Man defines himself by his project.” By projecting ourselves outward into some Other in a specific situation, we temporarily leave behind the inner contradictions of our existence through the dialectic of interiorization and exteriorization. Our thought, however, must ceaselessly turn back on itself in order always to apprehend itself. Removed from ourselves via projection, we can view our strengths and lacks more objectively; we see ourselves as Others do. We unveil our hypocrisies by that observation and self-assessment. The transcendence of our contradictions comes from the perpetual reversal of perspectives in the dialectical operation of interiorizing the Other and re-exteriorization our interior life. Concerning this relational give-and-take process, Sartre (1974, 248) declares, “the self is referred to the world and the world is referred to the self.”
5. Progressive-Regressive Method of Realizing Self-Comprehension
It has been established here that our self-comprehension is simultaneously progressive toward the Other and regressive toward ourselves (Sartre 1968, 154). This progressive moment of engagement with another consciousness or condition is not permanent, however. Within moments, we regress by coming back to our previous condition. This return is essential, since failure to do so is a form of pathology, as if actors would believe they are the characters they play. We return to ourselves, yes, but it’s a modified self. In the words of Derek Attridge (2020, 29), “We bring the new into being by refashioning the old rather than jettisoning it.” The ongoing process of our self-comprehension involves a reflexivity of self and Other in the sense of our ‘pausing’ after each back-and-forth of the dialectic to interrogate us. At a distance from ourselves, we are better able to consider who we are and who we are becoming. In effect, we walk in the Other’s shoes through a concrete activity, gesture, relationship, or commitment. We sense that our internal world is shared and that our mind resides within the Other. We freely change ourselves by taking on new thoughts, strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions. We enlarge our consciousness and expand beyond our needs toward some potential at the dynamic intersection between self and sentient Others and interior and exterior lived experience. The dialectical process continues.
Within seconds, we again project ourselves outward through our work and again return to a renewed self. It is this ongoing dialectic process that results in the perpetual recreation of who we are and who or what Others are (Sartre 1968, 154). In this way, we simultaneously realize ourselves through concrete actions and define humanity. While this may sound abstract and overly academic, this process is nothing more than our daily life as we live it in its total movement and arc, gathering in its sweep our neighbors, environments, and history into a unified experience (Sartre 1968, 155). We fulfill our felt needs not by simply turning inward but in paradoxically seeking outside of ourselves a goal that is our possible liberation. Objectifying ourselves through praxis involves the recasting of our given condition, and so it is a negation of alienation, a moment of a past surpassed and a process of past-surpassing (Sartre 1968, 92, 100). This surpassing of our situations is not an instantaneous movement but an extended work. The generative engagement of self and Other produces a new self and a different Other.[5]
That last statement needs explanation. The intermittent fusion of self and other carries enormous transformational potential not only for us but also for the Other. Let us consider how our inter-relational condition is objectified and transcended in an educational setting. For example, say, that over the course of an academic semester, faculty members project themselves with great energy into their students’ learning processes. The instructors grasp something of how students think, learn, and fail to learn. They use this knowledge to employ effective pedagogical strategies and design complex learning spaces in which to actively engage students. The cumulative result of the ongoing dialectical back-and-forth passage between teacher and student triggers learning in the students’ minds. This assumes, of course, that the faculty member’s intention of commitment is greater than possible student indifference or unwillingness to learn.
Conversely, teachers can also be affected by students’ ongoing progressive-regressive realization of their own self-comprehension. Consider as an example, new assistant professors who place themselves in the learners’ role over many months, or even years. If the students are consistently hostile, bored, or resistant to instruction, the professors’ praxis will likely be shaped along the same attitudinal lines. Parker Palmer (1998, 72) understands well this dialectical dance with students, “My sense of self is so deeply dependent on others that I will always suffer a bit when others refuse to relate to me.” As such, instructors may lose commitment to purpose and referencing a personal teaching incident described by Palmer (1998, 71), they may simply “make peace with the class by giving up on it”. Instructors may no longer diligently prepare their classes, becoming indifferent to their students’ learning needs. They can either continue teaching as such, transcend their condition by engaging enthusiastic students in the future, or perhaps leave education altogether. If they perceive their students as existential threats, the instructors may try to realize themselves by using their authority to dominate the class, but in this they fail.
On this point, Hegel is helpful. In “Lordship and Bondage,” Hegel (1977) asserts that only when self-consciousness is fully reflected and recognized in another’s self-consciousness will it be fulfilled as ‘free’ and ‘self-determined’. In the first stage of the encounter between the master and the slave, the master attempts to realize himself and gain recognition through domination of the slave. The existence of the slave as another consciousness is seen initially as a threat to the self-sufficiency of the master. Hegel suggests that only by ‘risking’ life vis-à-vis another is freedom possible. In the public mind ‘freedom’ is often understood as the absence of limiting restraints, and as such, means lack of relationship. That sense of freedom is expressed when people assert, I can do anything I want. Such radical autonomy leads to estrangement from self and community. For Sartre, however, our need to establish our essence through social engagement means we are freest when deeply engaged in relationships that portray and disclose our being. If we fear the Other and attempt to destroy our ‘nemesis’, we cannot succeed in gaining the recognition we need to assert ourselves as free, self-conscious beings. Rather, we have, in effect, enslaved ourselves.[6]
In regard to the student-professor example discussed previously, the need to learn confers on the students a substantive relationship with the professor. At the same time, professors are paradoxically dependent on the students for their own existence. A teacher’s inward and invisible sense of identity becomes concretely known only as it manifests itself in ongoing encounters with students (Parker 1998, 63). To achieve an existential intimacy of learning, an instructor must seek to recalibrate the alienated relationship between student and teacher, generating creative permutations of self beyond hyper-individualism, capable of relational exchanges with Others. If they do not know themselves concretely as teachers through their students, teachers do not know their students and, therefore, cannot help them learn. Professors need and are dependent on students in order to orient their life and affirm their human essence through acts of instruction. It is by noetic recognition (Rojcewicz 2021) of themselves in and through students that professors realize themselves as free and self-determined beings.
Similarly, Sartre professes in “The Progressive-Regressive Method” essay, “it is the sick man who needs a doctor.” Sickness confers on the doctor a profound connection with people in society who suffer, are in physical danger, and consequently need medical attention. This connection is both social and material. It is social because society decides its sick and its dead; it is material because sickness is a manifestation of physical life, of needs, and of death. The doctor-patient connection engendered by the sickness is “a bond even more intimate than the sexual act” (Sartre 1968, 106, fn. 5). The intimate bond is realized by the project of medical “activities and precise, original techniques engaging both persons” (Sartre 1968, 103-4, fn. 6).
In the progressive-regressive process of committed living, we perpetually go beyond the condition of our lives by assuming over a lifetime the roles of Others. We determine our identity and our life situation by transcending them, realizing ourselves through the praxis of work, in the forms of relationships, gestures, commitments, and various projects. We comprehend our consciousness through acts that concretize our subjectivity; our abstract inner lives become objectively real. Our consciousness-defining projects – say, writing a novel or book of poems – give social form to our ideas, feelings, and materials. In that case, ideas and feelings are who we are as authors, externalizing our expressive talents in the material of language (Sartre 1968, 115). Through a writing project, our aims, aspirations, and goals take objective form and produce consequences in the conditions of society. It is through writing that our unformed potentials become substantially real. The writer and the written mutually contribute to and influence one another. By objectifying our subjectivity, we enter society, stepping out of our isolation from Others.
6. Creativity through Self-comprehension
To better understand how objectification overcomes existential self-alienation, let us take a literary turn. In Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway continually concretizes her inner life of emotional needs through social relations, cultural life, and well-planned society affairs. Clarissa’s life situations oscillate between happiness and anxiety, hopeful expectations and foreboding of doom, self-satisfaction, and self-contempt. She is reserved, emotionally shy, and reluctant to assert her agency. “She had a sense of the comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people to bring it out…” (Woolf 1985, 118). She loves London’s cultural activity, urban energies, and its numerous gardens. From her need to be more outgoing and self-assured, Clarissa projects herself wholeheartedly into city life and her associates and friends, and thereby, undergoes moments of expanded comprehension and intimate connection with social and natural environments.
“…on the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home: of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of the people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself “(Woolf 1985, 12).
To know Clarissa, others must seek out the people, places, and events that define her. Clarissa’s well-healed parties are her social projects. Her commitment to the community is to gather Others together in order to realize themselves in her, and in turn, herself in them. Her high society affairs are means by which she takes raw youth, wakes them up, and sends them into life (1985:116). She has a gift for inviting guests and artfully positioning them in conversation in different rooms, as if designing a garden or arranging a floral bouquet. Clarissa has noetic ability for comprehending herself and others through her parties. “Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of somehow being not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; and much more real in another” (Woolf 1985, 259). Taken as a whole, Clarissa’s parties are her work objects, her praxis. Her social gatherings constitute what Sartre (1968, 100 fn. 5) refers to as a creative ‘work without an author’. Her parties open her consciousness and identity to the collective wisdom of Others beyond her own agenda. She tacitly comprehends that living life through her projects at the border of the private and the public gives reality to her and simultaneously also makes her vulnerable to ridicule, should her parties flop. The consequence of self-comprehension for Clarissa, as for us, is creativity.
In both art and artful living, creativity emerges from collaborative encounters with people, causes, concepts, images, objects, or aesthetic visions. From this ongoing encounter and re-encounter, creative change comes to the subject and the object alike. Sartre (1968, 100, fn. 5) points out that in the progressive-regressive passage “individuals do not collide like molecules, but that, upon the basis of given conditions and divergent and opposed interests, each one understands and surpasses the project of the other.” Through consciously choosing projects to answer our needs, we participate both in our ongoing transformation and the world coming-to-be. This joint action between self and Other in a cultural context is arguably what existential psychologist Rollo May (1975, 50) had in mind, “We can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon” and “can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person.” Our inner landscapes and social relations are re-structured in the social performance of our creative projects. This is why the Other is indispensible to our identity and the transcendence of our historical condition toward larger personal and social possibilities. The objects, relationships, and events we create from our felt needs, as life-defining projects, are signs of the perpetual formation and reformation of ourselves. We are signifiers; we assign meanings and values to life. Our projects and those of Others are significations revealing the conditions of people and their relationships across the fabric of society (Sartre 1968, 102, 156). The purpose of our praxis is to learn from and about Others; we seek to learn humility and cooperation antithetical to Othering.
Sartre assumes a radical teleology (i.e., purposefulness) that is social rather than metaphysical. We give our life meaning and purpose by strategically choosing engagements with Others from the portfolio of our needs in a world of scarcity. We are the product of those engagements (Sartre 1968, 92) and therefore, indolent or cavalier acts are to be eschewed, for they may define our essence in ways that only enhance our lacks (i.e., inhumanity), determine a miserable destiny, and contribute negatively to society.[7] By our actions, we define who we are and simultaneously define humanity. Sartre (1968, 125-126) lays emphasis on human freedom and choice, and so necessarily rejects the Marxist ‘big laws of history’ hypothesis that reduces human acts and art to symbolic or mechanistic manifestations of unyielding universal laws. While our projects may be influenced by specific conditions of history that furnish a direction and material reality to our lives, they remain individual acts of freedom that transcend social conditions.[8]
For example, Sartre took on as his personal project writing a three-volume biography of Flaubert. Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert, enriched by phenomenological, psychoanalytic, symbolic, and cultural considerations, “takes into account human need, frustrations, and ambitions” (Harcourt 1960). Why did Sartre choose Flaubert as his project? Sartre saw Flaubert as contrary in every way to himself. “Flaubert represents for me the exact opposite of my own conception of literature: a total disengagement and a certain idea of form, which is not what I admire…” (Cohen-Solal 1987). The biography of Flaubert as Other to Sartre allowed him to question all aspects of himself. Flaubert was an aesthete, taciturn, self-doubting, innocent, awkward, and fearful of death. He was an average student, easily humiliated by the success of his fellow students and his brother’s academic prowess. Fastidious by nature, Flaubert could spend days rewriting the same sentence of prose fiction (Sartre 1968, 140-5). He was largely disengaged from socio-political conditions.
Sartre, on the other hand, was a gifted intellectual, confident, assertive, gregarious, and opinionated. For him, death was an absurdity. An energetic social activist, Sartre urged associates to join him in solidarity and common political cause with union workers. When we chose to become the Other and take on qualities we ourselves lack, like Sartre choosing Flaubert, we expand our mental understanding and emotional possibilities. Realization of what is possible in life comes not from private dreaming or conceptualizing but from creation of a concrete reality of relationships work projects and social events for which we are ethically responsible. Sartre’s notion of praxis is an ethic of action and not of abstract moral reasoning. As a writer-philosopher, he sought liberation and freedom. Of Sartre, Harcourt (2021) proclaims, “And thus, the project of the engaged writer, of the engaged intellectual, or more simply, of the engaged person must be to transform society, to work toward a just society.”
7. The Artist-Intellectual: work objects, methods, and goals
Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of self-comprehension offers an antidote to present day racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all forms and manner of Othering. The ongoing engagements of synthesis between self and Other required by our projects are foundational to personal morality and a social ethic of care. As an interaction-based ethic of self-comprehension, the progressive-regressive method of social engagement counters and reverses the reductive notion do as I do and be as I am. By assuming roles of socially disenfranchised or politically incompatible Others, we step back from our bias and privilege and into much of what we previously devalued or dehumanized. In that moment, we question our life and worldview, pushing back limits of our stereotypical perceptions and expanding awareness of the human condition. By choosing to launch projects of concrete resistance to colonialism, racism, misogyny, and ecological abuse, we can realize what is good, beautiful, and true in different races, genders, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and nature as acts of personal liberation and social transformation.
It has been argued here that we gain truth about Others and ourselves through engrossing dialectical encounters. Through acts of existential intimacy with different people and opposing perspectives, we encounter their singularity and avoid the self-righteous belief that we alone hold precious principles or traits not held by other individuals or groups. The fact of the matter is the Other is our existential ‘teacher’ who helps us move beyond our social conditions, giving shape to our essence and defining a purpose. In dialectical logic, “We are what we make of what others make of ourselves” (O’Donohoe 2005). We assume the role of ‘apprentice’ as we seek to comprehend our personal and social worlds in ways that counter colonialism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia. Because there is no certainty of outcome in giving oneself to the Other to affirm our human essence, the dialectical process of becoming self-consciously aware involves emotional, intellectual, and ontological risks and requires commitment, courage, authenticity, and good faith.
Dialectic operations of the progressive-regressive method assume everything carries their opposite, and that this tension of contrasts leads to further change. When Flaubert declared, “I myself am Madam Bovary,” Sartre (1968, 141) saw him acting to “metamorphose himself into a woman artistically,” and thereby overcoming his historical conditions of a petite bourgeois male and refusing misogyny in favor of a richer human possibility(Sartre 1968, 147). By virtue of his engaged literature biography of Flaubert, Sartre creatively asserted freedom over how he would show up in the world and recast himself concretely as an artist and intellectual. Sartre externalized himself in the materiality of language through his Flaubert biography. The projects of Flaubert via Emma Bovary and Sartre via Flaubert point out how creativity unfolds in the field of possibilities from our socio-historical exchanges with Others (Montouri and Purser 1995), configures our perspectives, and displaces us from subjective zones where our personal and cultural perspectives lay. In “A Plea for Intellectuals,” Sartre (1974) discusses diverse models of possible living as an intellectual from which to fashion a creative life of inquiry, self-reflection, ethical action, and deep purpose.
One possible permutation of the self to be made evident by praxis is that of the Artist-Intellectual that Sartre (1974) distinguishes from the intellectual as historian and intellectual as technician. The intellectual as historian is a collector of ideas. Historians love the objects of their study — chronicles, travel logs, letters, and various other documents needed to tell a story of the directly unknowable past that meets the present needs of a professional community of historians. We need intellectuals as historians, of course. A possible problem, however, is that their object-love may lead to a dangerous insularity, a self-satisfied retreat from the world situation. Secondly, the intellectual as technician offers a valuable but different model of showing up in our world of complex change, racial and viral pandemics, brute nationalism, and climate change. Technicians, as practitioners of pragmatic knowledge, love their methods of study — efficient, cool, theoretical, and pure. Research methods, however, can be fickle, faithful only in a theoretical, unchanging setting. Method-love is no advance over object-love, and so another move is needed — the Artist-Intellectual.
Artist-Intellectuals may be artists in the generally understood sense of one who writes novels or plays, paints, dances, sculpts, etc. Sartre was himself a philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. It is the ongoing recreation of oneself through the progressive-regressive method that forms an intellectual like Sartre into an artist. That is the necessary condition. The sufficient condition, however, requires that Artist-Intellectuals possess awareness of the relationship of their goals (i.e., the whyof their work) to their study objects (i.e., the what), and methods of inquiry (the how). Why one studies connects one’s projects to purpose, values, and ethics. Artist-Intellectuals set and adroitly arrange and rearrange the relationship of their work objects, methods, and goals to desired outcomes at the level of concrete social events. They know that the same strategic approach to an issue may not succeed from one socio-historical situation to another. The historical setting may require them to creatively chose and apply appropriate alternate methods of inquiry to selected objects of study in order to discern solutions to social issues consistent with goals. This is not to say they can control the world or always find solutions. This is to say, however, that Artist-Intellectuals move fearlessly toward unknowns as opportunities to un-learn what has led us into current dilemmas, displaying radical vulnerability and creative responsiveness to what emerges in the social theater.
For Artist-Intellectuals, creativity is first a matter of intention – giving to and communicating with Others to grasp the humanity behind their projects and secondly of response – freely taking Others into oneself and moving outward through their roles to learn how they negotiate the world we share. Henry Glassie (Barefoot 2011) upholds that engagements with Others are means for “joining in appreciation of their creations, in hatred of forces that thwart them, overcoming our separateness in a oneness of humanity.” The praxis of Artist-Intellectuals is action of thoughtfulness, to be understood here not as a pursuit of irrefutable logic but rather as a commitment to avoid the bad faith of self-deception in favor of acts of authenticity. Just as artists address and surpass their conditions by concretizing their subjective vision with the materiality of words, stone, canvas, paper, movement, and melody, so Artist-Intellectuals form and reform personal and social conditions through the dialectic of living as engaged people in society, ethically linking their praxis to alliances, associations, and values that include and transcend conditions of reality. The progressive-regressive dialectical reach toward that which is preferable in life is a body-slam against banality and cruelty.
The Artist-Intellectual is conscious of the repositioning of ontological boundaries. The creative give-and-take of their dialectical projects allows the outside world to be inside, while simultaneously entering its situational beingness in the world, conflating social and personal distance, opening channels of possibilities, sharing diverse voices, and inspiring action. If one cannot respectfully enter the life of Others and identify with them so as to recast our personal prejudices, values, and lacks, then our life’s work is hollow and humanity diminished. As intellectuals, our projects may add beneficially to the knowledge of our disciplines, but failing to question our personal biases and practices, or those of our academic and social communities, we work ultimately in bad-faith[9] as inauthentic intellectuals, mere ‘watchdog thinkers’, who Sartre (1974, 252) puts forth as “created by the dominant class to defend its particularist ideology by arguments which claim to be rigorous products of exact reasoning.” Artist-Intellectuals, on the other hand, choose liberating projects that question both themselves and existing historical conditions and thereby operate in good faith.
Sartre purports that everything across society must be subjected to ongoing interrogation, including the project that is oneself. That is to say, the progressive-regressive inquiry of Artist-Intellectuals, and all who work in good faith, reveals not only positive attributes about themselves but also points to where they act complicit with racism, sexism, colonialism, and xenophobia. Sartre (1974, 249) avows, “The intellectual’s labour will come to nothing, even if he demonstrates the aberrant character of racism, unless he constantly returns to himself to liquidate the traces of racism within him leftover from childhood, by a rigorous investigation of the ‘incomparable monster’ that is his self.”
Transcending dehumanizing perspectives in order to move ‘toward the field of possibles’ (Sartre 1968, 93) through creative projects is essential to the Artist-Intellectual as a true scholar. The progressive-regressive method of making real our human and social possibilities creates value in service of personal and social critique. Criticism that doesn’t degenerate into cynicism refuses to settle for less than the possibilities of what might be.
8. Conclusion
Projects that overcome social conditions that facilitate Othering will not come in accidentally through the backdoor. We must actively affirm and change the world as a commitment to ethical action, dependent upon a dialectical way of living. Because it is through our works we define ourselves and objectify values that people may live out concretely in their own lives, Sartre (1946) has it that we are ‘obliged to perform exemplary acts’and bear responsibility for Others. Each of our acts creates images of human possibility and value that, by choosing them, we deem them “valid for everybody and for our whole age.” We must constantly ask ourselves, “Am I really the one who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?” Assuming responsibility for the Other means we respect, safeguard, and learn from the singularity of diverse people, despite the risk that they may not open kindly to us. We disclose the essence of one another, not through conflict but through being-with-others in community (Sartre 2003, 435).Our being-for-others precedes and is the foundation for being-with-others (Sartre 2003, 436). Our ethical responsibility for those with whom we are existentially connected is pre-requisite for social concord and requires we stand up against racism, eco-madness, misogyny, binary gender oppression, refugee abuse, and all forms of xenophobia on behalf of the common good, despite intimidation from powerful actors. Our existence and identity require engagements in the world to serve as exempla for humanity. Our ethical choices are analogous to fashioning a work of art, since art, like ethics, presupposes free acts of subjectivity, will, decision-making, and choice. Our goal as fully engaged citizens is to artfully disclose our situated freedom to live ethically with, for, and on behalf of Others.
9. Acknowledgments
I extend appreciation to Henry Glassie, PhD for rich conversations concerning Sartre’s works; Scott De Francesco, PhD for his insightful comments on earlier draft of this work, and Richard Rojcewicz, PhD for permission to use his unpublished translation of Sartre’s 1946 essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” and his pertinent thoughts provided in emails of 10/28/23 and 10/29/23 concerning Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I am grateful to Amy Victoria Dachs for her encouragement and support during the research and writing of this project.
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11. Endnotes
[1] Continental philosophers have not recognized non-human entities of the biosphere as
Others that make moral claims upon us, focused only on humanity. Emmanuel Levinas, as noted by Michael Zimmerman (2003), further limits the Other to members of one’s affiliated group and, therefore, excluded Palestinians as morally significant beings. See The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 294-295. Sartre doesn’t directly address the issue, but I see nothing in his work that precludes projects involving sentient nonhumans as Others who make moral claims upon us.
[2] All references to Sartre’s essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” come from the unpublished translation by phenomenologist Richard Rojcewicz, PhD, Point Park University (retired.) Used by permission of the translator.
2 All references to Sartre’s 1946 essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” come from the unpublished translation by phenomenologist Richard Rojcewicz, PhD, Point Park University (retired.) Used by permission of the translator.
[3] For Sartre, “God’s existence is not the issue. Man must find himself again and persuade himself that nothing can relieve him of himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.”
[4] Sartre’s WW II experiences of conscription, detention in a German prisoner of war camp, and involvement in the French Resistance constituted powerful concrete experiences that led Sartre to see his existentialism in terms of social engagements and not in purely intellectual terms.
[5] The progressive-regressive method is recognition of our interdependent human condition. This reciprocal mutuality in which a subtle sense of self emerges from engagements with other beings is frequently recognized in Buddhist philosophy as the ‘dependent co-arising of self and other’.
[6] It’s worth noting Sartre took the opposite position earlier in Being and Nothingness (BN), holding instead that human interaction culminates not in mutual self-recognition but in binary opposition wherein one contesting party becomes a free subject, while the other is reduced to an object imprisoned by ‘the gaze’ of the Other. However, Being and Nothingness is in places so exaggerated and contradictory that it’s difficult to know if it’s meant to be taken on face value. Either Sartre’s ideas evolved, or he simply expressed himself in his later writings in a more direct way.
[7] In “Existentialism is a Humanism” Sartre states, “Tomorrow, after my death, certain men may decide to establish fascism and others may be cowardly and muddled enough to let them do it. Fascism will then be the truth of man, so much the worse for us.”
[8] From 1932 and 1962, France engaged consistently in war, except for a few months, involved in the German occupation and colonial fighting in Indochina and Algeria. In a 1975 interview, Sartre acknowledged that the wars engendered significant changes in his thinking and material reality that moved him to social activism. Sartre reflected in a 1969 interview, “I was not made for politics, and yet I was remade by politics so that I eventually had to enter them.”
[9] As we are ‘condemned to be free’ with nothing beyond us to hold on to, some choose to deny or overlook ethical responsibility for oneself and humanity. Sartre considers anyone who invents a form of determinism to disguise their freedom is wrong and is a coward. We witness this fleeing from freedom when someone complains that making a free choice was impossible since ‘circumstances were against me’. By assuming this more sinned against than sinning attitude, they are in Sartre’s view inauthentic and live in ‘bad faith’. Conversely, those who accept responsibility for their freedom and do not make excuses for their life display authenticity and live in ‘good faith’.Abstract (322 words)
Too often today what is valued in schools is ‘learning’ understood as the expedient manipulation of information handed down from books or delivered by teachers in order to exploit life for economic, professional, technological, career success, status, or power. As such, knowledge is ready-made and learning an externally driven affair, the mere reception and storage of facts or skills. In that way, schooling does little to enhance discernment and self-agency. Our schools must necessarily experience their own cognitive dissonance by coming to recognize the error in things they currently, or have longed believed, to be true, like the universal superiority of calculative reason over intuition and perspicacious knowing. They must recognize truths in suprarational systems of art, folk, and indigenous knowledge that they’ve rejected as false and superfluous to knowing reality. Deep holistic learning, on the other hand, is an active, arduous process of choice and decision-making, requiring rational and suprarational knowing in specific contexts. Authentic learning is a project of human completion, an existential intimacy of embodied cognition and intrinsic being.
Individuals carry an existential obligation to make apparent in the world their implicate Being whenever and wherever they speak, listen, learn, teach, or act. Manifesting our essential Being through education requires that we link the techno-sciences with a noetic literacy of learning in the arts and humanities, a fluency in ways of perspicacious knowing that are aesthetic, nondiscursive, tacit, implicit, informal, and intuitive, allowing us to ‘read’ and interpret competing claims to truth, discern veiled realities, and show up in novel ways at deep purpose in all that we do. This existential obligation requires we ‘see’ as an artist, ‘listen’ as a mediator, ‘think’ as an intellectual, and ‘touch’ others affectionately as a lover. An artist-self seeks the deep unseen; the mediator-self seeks peace and concord; the intellectual-self seeks truths and meanings; the lover-self humbly seeks the beloved. Acting upon those generative existential responsibilities engenders important healing permutations of self – personal, professional, aesthetic, social, spiritual. We become who we have always been but never realized but for the fragmentation of our implicate identity that results in our living in ‘bad faith.’
An existential turn in our schools away from fragmentation of mind/body, subject/object and toward personal authenticity and ‘good faith’ must, in addition, also be an ontological turn toward disclosure of Being through diverse curricula and pedagogies of meaningfulness and human completeness. As such, learning is valued as a whole-person victory that extends beyond the self to other selves through necessary resources engaged at a distance – human, technological, literary, communal, cultural, etc. However, when students merely receive and accumulate information or imitate skills without broad development of nonscientific aesthetic perception, intersensory reasoning, body-mind discernment, or moral preference through responsible acts in the world, they do not enhance what John Stuart Mill referred to in “On Liberty” as “the distinctive endowment of the human.” That troubled way leads to broken people.
Polarization and splitting reflect a dualistic logic between learning delivered from the outside and learning as an inner achievement and transformation. It is time now to turn to holistic, integral education. What is at stake is nothing less than healthy human development and social concord. When people are fundamentally split body from mind, and feelings from thinking, they suffer impairment of their consubstantial Being that can have lasting effects. A healthy society needs its citizens to be literate beyond language-based and number-based knowledge in order to support vital diversity of objective and subjective thought and expression. To this end, schools must develop curricula and co-curricular offerings that enhance more than instrumental and financial reasoning. Schools must be more than a recruitment agent of career preparation and employment. They must regain their footing as a premier agent of broad learning, capable of guiding people toward all-sided human completion and ethically responsible living with others and the one earth we share.
We stand in a critical place at an auspicious time that requires our appropriate and just measure of response to the epistemic and cognitive harm caused by human and cultural splintering. We must decide immediately whether to continue to support education’s numbers-based model of partial growth over human wholeness. We must critically engage the forces that polarize what should be a healthy bond between inter-sensory, intuitive awareness, and calculative thought. Unfortunately, education’s current cognicentric commitment to abstract, calculative reason as the only legitimate path to knowledge makes human fragmentation acceptable, human impairment permissible, and educational trauma inevitable. Ending the wounding of the integral nature of atypical, noetic, and neurodiverse learners caused by the present educational system is society’s dire responsibility. Failing in that, education presents, causes, and perpetuates its own pathology at the expense of a healthy nation.
