Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Bainbridge Island, WA
… 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
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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.