Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                           January 30, 2015

Noetic education is my holistic critique of higher education and borrows salient points of view and practices from the arts and humanities, cognitive psychology, aesthetic education, systems theory, and the learning sciences. The fundamental point is that wholeness of being is healthier and more optimal than the narrow human development presently achieved by the fragmented nature of the academy, based too often on economic rationality, a disconnect between faculty interests and student needs, a shattered curriculum, and uncertain social purpose.

To properly educate a person requires attention be given to mental, physical, social, professional, and spiritual needs. It is essential to human wholeness that higher education nurtures the human spirit and its search for inner sense, leading to intellectual, psychological, and moral well being. When we learn to think with disciplined feeling, we relate to subject matters in terms of the human spirit, liberating ourselves from bondage of mindless habit, mechanized thinking, and fragmented talents. Noetic learning awakens a spirit of one’s entire being.

“Noetic,” from the Greek word nous, suggests multiple ways of knowing. Rooted in an epistemology of cognitive wholeness, Noetic education links objective and subjective learning. The analytical disciplines of higher education do not by themselves derive our full development. Noetic educational theory and practice enlarge the notion of intellect beyond instrumental reasoning to include perceptions of the body, since thinking and perceiving are not mutually exclusive. We need holistic systems that wed analytical skills of science, heuristic skills of the humanities, and expressive values of the arts. In that setting, abstract reason joins embodied intuition in service of mind-body-spirit liberation, expanding human consciousness.

Higher education suffers from limits of its rationalistic virtues. Learning unto wholeness means moving beyond seeing intelligence strictly as analytical efficiency and learning only in terms of what can be assed by tests of strict quantification. I do not propose, however, that we abandon the fundamental human project to grasp the world in rational terms. I do propose that we augment that project by adding tacit subjective knowledge, including self-reflection and contemplative practice. The goal is to achieve an intellectual pluralism that makes available to the mind more than objective logic, not less, and thereby implicating reason in creative expression, personal transformation, and ethical responsibility. Shall we finally implement programs of expansive knowing or continue to support impaired development?

An all-sided mind capable of thinking with the heart can escape the shackles of limited cognition. I advocate thinking that includes empathy with people, things, and events; I advocate feeling that includes a conscious and disciplined valuing of experience. At the heart of Noetic educational theory is practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritative systems, freedom to creatively direct the human spirit and mobilize social action, freedom to become one’s own intellectual and artistic authority. Imaginative thought constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, freely moving awareness through states of being.

A society that values cognitive freedom needs necessarily to support innovative forms of holistic education required of an informed citizenry capable of effective decision making and evaluation of competing claims to truth. Our humanity flourishes by creatively organizing experience in multiple ways. Noetic literacy integrates conceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual/transpersonal frameworks to help us assess events, synthesize knowledge, and gain insight into our personal and social humanity.

Noetic education advocates for continuous learning that touches the furthest reaches of being. Our personal evolution requires we learn from books and from one another as part of lived experience. Experiential learning enhances the endowed faculties of our humanity – reasoning, perception, judgment, moral preference, and intuitive discernment. Instrumental rationality and book learning by themselves partially educate a person, dividing the unity of critical and expressive knowing. From experiential knowing we learn that human intelligence is not simply a matter of how much can be grasped from books but how deeply we think and how responsibly we act when it is unclear what is to be done. It involves the integration of types of knowing with which to fashion a healthier self, capable of addressing intractable personal, social, spiritual, and ecological issues. As such, we may come to learn how to love, untying knots in the human heart.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                             January 20, 2015

Where does holism fit in the discussion among postmodernists relative to the idea of universal values, reason, truth, and reality? Is holism a form of postmodern theory and practice or a force counter to it? Is holism a modernist system of thought or an advance on it?

To answer these questions, we must first distinguish between modernism and postmodernism. The single greatest distinction here can be found in their different conceptualizations of truth and knowledge. Modernists retained the notion of an objective and discrete reality existing prior to human experience. They held to the universality of reason and progress on behalf of the enlightenment of humanity and sought unchanging values across borders of time, space, and culture.

Postmodern deconstructionist scholars have altered the Enlightenment notion of truth as beyond critique. They maintain a view of truth as social agreement within various cultural traditions. In an attempt to include the many view points and voices previously isolated or ignored by modernism, postmodern thinkers reject the modernist hierarchy of truths and certainties, favoring difference and multiplicity of equally valid but partial perspectives. This point of view is variously referred to as multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism, or heteronomy. Enlightenment reason is replaced by postmodern reason, a pragmatic, socially learned process for individual and collective action.

It is helpful here, perhaps, to discuss the two discrete but related brands of the postmodern project. Lacking a singular definition of postmodernism, scholars isolate two different forms: constructive postmodernism and deconstructive postmodernism. A characteristic of the two postmodernism is their kinship and their singularity. The kinship lies in their mutual efforts to respond to challenges of cultural renewal. I will address the singularity of difference below. I assert that our holistic theory and practice must be a form of constructive postmodernism. But what is meant by the term?

David Ray Griffin coined the term constructive postmodernism. For Griffin, constructive postmodernists seek to transcend and include aspects of the modern worldview by “constructing a unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions.” The critique of modernism championed by Griffin and other constructive postmodernists is not so radical as to preclude development of a new worldview of wholeness, consisting of the revision of some modernist beliefs and practices, such as the privileging of abstract reason above other cognitive modalities. Constructive postmodernists endeavor to salvage what is most worthwhile in modernist values of truth, rationality, selfhood, and historical meaning, integrating them with revisions of premodern values, including Spirit and a conscious natural world.

Therein lies the aforementioned disjunction between constructive and deconstructive postmodernism. Seeking to avoid radical individualism and relativism, constructive postmodernists place significance upon intersubjectivity, cooperation, and elements of the perennial philosophies of the premodern worldview. Constructive postmodernists usually refer to Alfred North Whitehead’s “process” cosmology as the source of their unequivocal rejection the mechanistic worldview of modernity and their primary inspiration concerning the project of interdependent wholeness of multiple perspectives. Whitehead’s process orientation moves away from dualism and determinism toward synthesis, interdependence, and dialogue.

Deconstruction scholars seek the disestablishment of traditional centers of power and authority, positing a notion of multiple “truths.” They seek to indicate that philosophical texts do not mean what they seem to mean, do not mean what the author intended, and in fact possess no discernible meaning at all. Deconstructionists aim at showing how the attempt by traditional philosophers to use language in such a way as to get beyond language and arrive at some translinguistic, transcultural, and transhistorical perspective ultimately fails.

To answer questions I raised earlier about holistic theory’s relationship to modernism and postmodernism, let us say that insofar as holism posits a fundamental unity of the universe and seeks meaning, it is related to modernism. However, in its attempt to move beyond modernist hierarchy and absolutism by honoring multiplicity and difference, holism is part of postmodernism. Even as it values scientific reasoning through analysis and inquiry, holism also prizes intuition through contemplation and subjectivity as means of realizing value from the world’s interconnectedness, and so it is a force that augments the rationalism of modernism.

Holism seeks to better understand the relationship between our higher self and Spirit within the contexts of culture and cosmos. It attempts to restore the link between ethics and behavior through engagement, relatedness, and cooperation. So, as it posits the interdependence of life, seeks a new unity of humanity and nature inclusive of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions rejected by deconstructionists, and values human wholeness through embrace of multiculturalism and multiple intelligences, holism is a form of constructive postmodernism.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                           January 15, 2015

Too often in our work, as in our life, we suffer overwhelm, confusion, or hurt. During such times, we can find fortification of our body-mind-spirit by wandering in the woods, listening to a soundscape of insects and birds, or gazing at the immense night sky. By giving ourselves over to the magnitude of nature, we distance ourselves from our cares and realize something of our deeper selves.

Rilke knew, “If only we could let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong…” Similarly, Gerard G. May in The Wisdom of Wilderness understands that learning in life and on the job means being willing to be cope-less. This doesn’t mean that we surrender our wits, or retreat into a desperate quietism. It means, instead, that we be present to life without artificially forcing issues into resolution. It means that to achieve a healthy relationship with our or another’s nature, we dim the ego’s glare of demands, enter the softer light of not-knowing, and attend creatively to what arises from the depths of being.

This inner harmony via education by nature is fundamentally a capacity for freedom and love. In this way, nature is a curriculum for learning survival skills and values. Walking among towering sequoias or along a shoreline of the majestic sea, we live more fully present to life, moving our awareness past emotional defenses, mechanized thinking, or conditioned behavior and closer to wellsprings of creative possibility.

Knowledge by presence means we are available to the transformational energies of life, embracing non-defensive openness, flexibility of thought, wonder, and a willingness to be changed by self-inquiry. We achieve healing from powerful entrainment, as our mental, physiological, and spiritual pulses synchronize with nature’s rhythms to create a new and sustainable peace within us. The practice of this wholeness constitutes a sacredness, a seeking of spirit profanely, regarding earth with respect.