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.
