Teachers and Teaching: Time and the Creative Tension [1st ed.] 978-3-030-24669-3;978-3-030-24670-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
The Aroma of Time: An Introduction (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 1-51
A Vocabulary of Time (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 53-78
Time and Intuition (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 79-105
Beyond Chronic Pedagogy: A Conversation (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 107-129
Freeing Time: A Propositional Calculus (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 131-157
Teacher, Time, and Biographical Praxis (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 159-186
Time and the Creative Tension (Kaustuv Roy)....Pages 187-203
Back Matter ....Pages 205-211

Citation preview

Teachers and Teaching Time and the Creative Tension k aus t u v roy

Teachers and Teaching

Kaustuv Roy

Teachers and Teaching Time and the Creative Tension

Kaustuv Roy Azim Premji University Bengaluru, India

ISBN 978-3-030-24669-3 ISBN 978-3-030-24670-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

My generation grew up during what might be called the second wind, or even last gasp, of two overarching and magnificent cultural delusions. The first of these was the supposition that an independent cosmic totality was available for human contemplation. The second was that this contemplation would yield the last remaining “secrets” of nature—witness, for example, the twentieth-century race for the ultimate “fundamental” particle, and the efforts to build ever-bigger cyclotrons and atom smashers. I say last gasp because the untenability and contradictions of these assumptions were becoming more and more apparent even during their tenure. Even so, it did not deter the high priests of techne from strenuously maintaining the historically established distinction between mind and matter—subjectivity and objectivity—and the scientific culture from continuing to imagine that an extremely privileged and esoteric group would ultimately be able to get the breakthroughs beyond the human predicament. Funnily enough, the rampant but invisible humanism that gave faith to these beliefs and occupations was contrary to the spirit of the endeavors themselves. But there was another thing that silently supported the cause of scientism and technologism. It was time—the loom on which the narrative was spun. The background support or canvas upon which these phantasms were played out was time, or rather, a particular configuration of time that had taken hold from around the seventeenth century. This “time” was synchronized and universalized to become the invisible background coordinate of everything external. It is not that doubts were not expressed or important discoveries were not v

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made about the puzzling nature of time itself that challenged existing conceptions, but these were overrun by the scientific-technological juggernaut. But by the closing decades of the twentieth century, as the technologistic euphoria was starting to wear thin, an intellectual fatigue had crept in and begun to question those very assumptions that had been pushed to the background. It was becoming clear to many, although not openly admitted, that there was no ultimate secret of nature to be found through science alone, and the successional model of time may have boxed in science rather than made it more creative. One had to back up and look again to see where and at what junctures we might have brushed aside possible openings to a different perception. The present book is about backing up and looking again, specifically in the educational domain. And one of the first things we come across in carefully looking again is the inherent limitation in the human conception of time. Time as the enemy of the species is nowhere more obvious than in the field of education. Time as mechanical succession has been the peg on which the matrix of learning has been hung to its detriment. All the while, other, albeit less obvious, conceptions of time have been available with their alternative (and more creative) ways of constituting reality. It is to bring these alternative modes of time and constitution to the attention of the education thinker and practitioner that the book is written. The hope is that it will provoke a fresh debate on the question of time in teaching as well as teacher lives and at the same time make us more willing to open ourselves to experimentation with newly gained intimations. Bengaluru, India

Kaustuv Roy

Acknowledgements

A book is the collected interchange between many souls, and numerous are the authors and works on which it depends. Out of these, close contemporaries and living authors necessitate special mention. One such group of scholar-writers is Ivor Goodson, Richard Butt, J. G. Knowles, and co., who have given us a sustained glimpse into teacher lives through their research without which the praxeological part of this book would have been impossible. I am also indebted to Jimena Canales for her thorough and insightful work on the Einstein-Bergson debate.

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Contents

1 The Aroma of Time: An Introduction 1 2 A Vocabulary of Time 53 3 Time and Intuition 79 4 Beyond Chronic Pedagogy: A Conversation 107 5 Freeing Time: A Propositional Calculus 131 6 Teacher, Time, and Biographical Praxis 159 7 Time and the Creative Tension 187 Index 205

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CHAPTER 1

The Aroma of Time: An Introduction

Let us begin with a thought experiment and imagine an archaeological site in which we ourselves are implicated. Aggregates of time compressions of the past, we find ourselves all of a sudden in the contemporary moment, enabled to reflect on our presence in the world by means of a certain temporal asymmetry—a lag—between perception and perceived, and thereupon, between one image (ourselves) and another (the world). The world appears not as coeval, but to be prior to us, as already there, awaiting cognition. This asymmetry arouses our curiosity and presses upon us to find out more, to attempt to dig our way past the awkward weight of little understood archaic residues, images, encrustations, and cultural debris—the temporal deposits of any archaeological site—that are entangled in us giving us a sense of burdened unfreedom. Besides, there is the nagging feeling that freedom from encumbrance may lie just ahead, temporally and spatially, as we continue to be bombarded by incoming sensations. But how might one rise past the stream of current perceptions to a plateau from where to seek bearings—a seemingly perennial task before us? One may not, indeed, one cannot in the ordinary sense, for perceptions are not my perceptions—they too are prior to me, just as the world is. “I” am merely a locus, a contingent site of their pre-temporal appearance. One simply cannot get ahead of time, as “I” discover, to find out about the world—in fact, I am always falling behind, and things are sliding off into a past. That fact leads us to search for a logical starting point for finding out about the “world” as it is, which insistently points to the conundrum of time (of past and future). © The Author(s) 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9_1

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It leads us to the fact that the primary unit—apperception or a temporal lag—ought to be the principal focus of our reflexive efforts about our condition, rather than the world. But the buildup in self-understanding or the historical arrangement of temporal sedimentation in the psyche is unused to this extraordinary truth, with the result that it becomes the victim and carrier of a fundamental error—the error that establishes the primacy of chronic arrangements over the ontological character of time itself. Befuddled by the interminable succession of “nows,” we sink into the bog of external time—a temporal order we ourselves have imposed upon the world, as we shall see. Consequently, my archaeological struggles tend to become distended and misdirected, struggling against my own impositions and orderings. As a kind of allegory bearing on the educational situation, the little thought above nudges us head first into the deep end of our inadequacies in relation to it. Also, we realize that the above alludes not just to pedagogy but to all agogos—there is little distinction here between the adult and the child, between teacher and taught. The entire situation requires a new orientation, a need to go back to first principles. Pure sensation is prior to temporal organization and hence in a different dimension than the time of the clock or chronometric succession. In general, education confuses the two, ensconced as it is within the preponderance of the cultural belief system. A clear differentiation is pedagogically called for between phenomenological-ontological time and time of the clock— the one creational and the other mechanical. Time produced knowledge, we know, brings control over the organizing of phenomena, but it does not lead to emancipatory understanding precisely because it is the stuff of contingent succession that reveals nothing about the relation between perceiver and perceived. Should not then probing into the conundrum of time, not merely formally but experientially, be a foundational task of education? Should not the wonder of temporal perception beg for educational attention? If yes, then such a task itself suggests to us the conceptual framework within which the problem of time must be ideally considered. That framework is the phenomenological, or the consideration of the essence of experience. Time must be understood through the experience of time and not through the succession of events. The central problem of phenomenology, as outlined by Husserl himself, is eidetic reduction—a way of returning to the “things themselves” beyond all interpretation and synthetic representation. It is the apprehension of a certain essence prior to

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applying external coordinates. Hence, we might even say that the central problem of phenomenology is also the problem of time since to reach essence we must deconstruct time. Subjectively, time, as Augustine had observed, is a source of great perplexity, besides being a central problem of metaphysics.1 But this puzzle is deflected, historically suppressed by the arrival of the subject who begins to focus mainly on sequentiality and succession, ordering and control, with a strong propensity toward establishing control and fiefdom.2 We do not remain focused long enough on the nature of temporality for it to be able to disclose itself, to cast its subtle light. We simply take it for granted and move on. “Descartes and particularly Kant detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the act of relating as the basis of relatedness.”3 The constitution of the experiencer as a temporal construction got buried in the process of establishing the primacy of the subject. In other words, these thinkers unwittingly fell into the “chronic” trap—the temporally emergent self attempting to sit on judgment on something which is of a qualitatively different order. “It is understandable, in view of this, that Husserl, having accused Kant of adopting a ‘faulty psychologism’, should have urged, in place of a noetic analysis which bases the world on the synthesizing activity of the subject, his own ‘noematic reflection’ which remains within the object, and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity.”4 For Kant, reality is the noetic or intellectual synthesis of sense perceptions produced in the subject. Husserlian phenomenology rejects this psychologistic 1 Augustine writes: “What then is time? If no one asks, I know: if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know. But at any rate this much I dare affirm I know: that if nothing passed there would be no past time; if nothing were approaching, there would be no future time; if nothing were, there would be no present time.” St. Augustine, Confessions (Transl.) F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 271. 2 The scriptural warnings against worldly wealth accumulation are also a warning against the things of time. Thus, the Apostle Paul, in his epistles, makes a distinction between Chronos (time of the world) and Kairos (messianic time). 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002/1945), Preface, p. ix. 4 Ibid., p. x.

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interpretation and offers in its place a noematic reflection. Noema does not synthetically reside in the subject (observer); rather, it is the sensus communis drawn together in the object. Merleau-Ponty clarifies: “Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts, and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘inhabit’ the ‘inner man’, or more accurately, there is no inner man…”5 Reading Husserl in a radical manner, Merleau-Ponty gives us the most penetrating understanding of the phenomenological approach. The world as such is not within our purview that we can specify laws about it. Rather, we (the sensory agglomerate or microcosm) can come to be in co-relation with some aspects of the macrocosm and be in reflective resonance with it. What we call the world is the unknown “field” which supports thoughts and perceptions like a medium supports a precipitate. The medium is presupposed by the precipitate which cannot conclude anything definite about the medium itself. And then Merleau-Ponty makes that poignant statement refuting the existence of the “inner man” in the context of world-making that takes phenomenology beyond humanism, making the humanist/post-humanist debate an empty exercise where phenomenology as method is concerned. In the final working note, written two months before his death, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “[My work] must be presented without any compromise with humanism, nor moreover with naturalism, nor finally with theology…”6 Contrary to the oft-held view, the basic unit of analysis in phenomenology is not human experience, but experience; not human perception but perception. The human is a post hoc label granted to itself by the species, which then uses it reflexively for self-description in a disingenuous manner. From the point of view of the present volume, this discontinuity with humanism is an extremely important realization, for the discussion of time requires us to cross over into zones where time must be approached immanently, from within, shorn of the assumption of a transcendental observer. This “within-ness” is not the inwardness of a pre-given self, 5 Ibid.,

p. xi. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Transl.) Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 274. 6 Maurice

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but an autonomous duration that relates to the movement of the sensory-perceptual complex. What then is the connection between outer time and inner time? Each perceptual moment, the world rolls in and out of us again, akin to the tides, leaving some residue. This “tidalism” maintains the viability of the organism. As the world enters us, it creates sensory disequilibrium, with any one sense usually predominating. With the world leaving us, the senses fall back toward equilibrium. Although the “tidalism” is chronocentric or linear in time from the above point of view, the inner multiplicities that are set off are not, for these are intensities or qualities that are not embedded in a succession of moments; the inward collapse with each round is a-chronic because there is no observer within, defining the sense of succession or a movement of synthesis. The expansion or contraction is in a non-temporal dimension. This requires further explanation as follows. The notion of time presupposes change: Time is experienced as a measure of change—growth, decay, movement, etc. But the idea of change itself presupposes multiple observations at different points held simultaneously in consciousness. Therefore, we can say that time requires the idea of time. In other words, I can only know that something has changed because I imagine myself as observer at the beginning and at the end of the change sequence simultaneously. We change frames covertly, without realizing we have done so. That is to say, at any moment there is only a totality in which there is no time.7 It takes multiple observers rolled into one or multiple observation points driven into an imaginary singularity to make the narrative of change or the passage of 7 But what about aging, don’t we all experience changes upon our bodies with the passage of time? In terms of our analysis above, one can only experience a single state or inhabit a single frame at any point, with no intrinsic connection to any other state or frame. Hence, “aging” requires an external observer’s point of view; the transition from one frame to the next can only be observed from the outside. One cannot experience aging from within. In the final volume of Marcel Proust’s great work À la recherche du temps perdu or Remembrance of Things Past, there’s a famous party scene where the narrator, who’s been living outside of Paris, away from his friends, for a long time, is invited to a party and it’s a chance to catch up with old friends. And he has a terrifying moment where he arrives and he looks around, he sees gentlemen with snowy hair, ladies who are leaning on canes, and he simply doesn’t understand where all his friends are. And suddenly he realizes that actually his friends are all in the room. It’s just they’ve become old. The Buddha understood this principle well when he pedagogically postulated that compounding the frames and producing synthesis (continuity or permanence) are at the root of sorrow (dukha). He seemed to suggest that the compounding could be ended.

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time possible. For example, if one uniformly moves with the river, one cannot detect the change of position of the water and hence cannot infer or project lapse of time. In actuality, only through the comparison of data between multiple observers positioned outside the river (of experience) can movement or lapse of time be detected. Does this mean time is an illusion? That would be too simplistic and naïve, and would not explain our persistent sense of it. Our task here will be to pedagogically and deconstructively develop the understanding that more than being an objective measure of outer succession, time is a qualitative relation between subject and object. The precise nature of this relationship and its pedagogical consequence is the matter at hand. Also, it is not just a question for philosophers, scientists, or other experts; I will be at pains to point out that there are major existential stakes for all in this question of the nature of time. How narrow or wide existential possibilities become depends on our view of time. One thing is immediately put under doubt—the commonsense notion that time is merely homogeneous succession. If time is essentially a relation, then its experience must be heterogeneous, with homogeneity being a superimposition on the actual phenomenological and existential experience of duration. Let us note at the same time that the latter does not refer to the psychological experience of time but to the totality of the present. This is philosophically at the core of the book. Its proper illumination helps to release us from the oppression of homogeneous and mechanical time that has taken hold of the modern consciousness and instead bring about a new balance. However, it is a long road from merely knowing the principle of the thing and making it the stuff of our consciousness. Therefore, the development of intuition toward a kind of preparedness becomes the praxeological task of the book. Let us return to the question of the discrete states or instantaneous frames of totality that continually slip into the past. Seen from the durational point of view, these are by no means dead or mechanical totalities, but dynamic ones with internal duration, something to be discussed extensively in the book and especially in the section on Bergson. The inner dynamism is confused and mixed up with the outer succession to produce a non-liberating order of time in which civilization, and consequently education, becomes trapped. Hence, the desperate need for a different intuition, something that will allow us not to waste time, literally and metaphorically, in a temporal cul de sac. The question arises: Are there other areas that we can aesthetically draw upon with regard to a

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different intuition of time? That is to say, are there different domains in which the concern with temporality is similarly expressed? An innate phenomenological resistance toward the mechanical temporal order is often found in the literary sensibility that variously describes the experience of a different order of time. Often it is almost as if poetry itself gets it cadence and rhythm from a dual sense of time. Take the case of Tennyson’s famous poem “Crossing the Bar.” It can be read as a challenge to time as a uniform construct. Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.8

Against the celestial cycle of the setting of one star and the rise of another—the rise-disappearance-rise of an eternal rhythm—the poet awaits that final call from beyond the horizon of time. At the instant of departure, the sand bar built up through a temporal aggregate must remain frozen into stillness; otherwise, it will mar the slipping into the timeless. The fullness of eventide signifying the reaching of maturity, leaving no room for froth or chatter, is acknowledged as something that had emerged for a time and now ready to return to that which is beyond chronicity. In other words, time emerges as the horizon of being, before it collapses inwardly into infinity. Again, beyond the twilight or 8 The poem can be found in the public domain at: https://poets.org/poem/ crossing-bar.

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transition lies the pure darkness—in the absence of all light (as information), there is no succession measure called the time-event. By repeating that there must not be any moaning or mourning when the horizon of being is withdrawn and time collapses, Tennyson seems to be making light of chronic temporality. In the Memoir of his father (vol. ii, p. 366), Lord Tennyson gives an account of the writing of this poem: “‘Crossing the Bar’ was written in my father’s eighty-first year, on a day in October 1889 when we came from Aldworth to Farringford. Before reaching Farringford he had the moaning of the bay in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said, ‘That is the crown of your life’s work.’ He answered, ‘It came in a moment.’” Even in the account of the poem, there is reference to time—“it came in a moment.” Its entirety presented itself to the poet’s consciousness in a sudden revelation. Chronological time is not credited for its production; rather, its essence appears in phenomenological time. The subject of time is a central theme for much of modern and postmodern literature. Writer after writer struggles to break free of time as uniform succession and reconstitute temporality as subjective experience, in a heterogeneous manner. Commenting on the characterization of time in postmodern literature, Tatyana Fedosova observes: [Time] is perceived differently by different people. Writers pay special attention to the personal experience of time, describing various temporal experiences. P. Rosen (2001) compares modern temporality to a battlefield: Modern temporality is like a battle terrain on which the disordering force of time struggles with the need and desire to order or control time. In literature of the given direction there is a tendency to the so-called narrative chaos. Writers intentionally break off a chronological narration with reminiscences of characters or prospection. Thus, U. Eco (2007) in the novel Baudolino constantly devotes the reader into what will occur to this or that character in the future. For example, Nikita has seen his own death, Baudolino relates that he has killed the murderer of king Frederick Barbarossa when the king is still alive, the story of Baudolino looks as fragmentary as the novel’s characters, etc. This device creates the effect of an intrigue, internal tension, and unexpectedness.9

In other words, time is the true subject of these novels. By destroying the conventional, chronological narrative sequence, the foundations of 9 Tatyana

Fedosova, “Reflection of Time in Postmodern Literature,” Athens Journal of Philology, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 77–87.

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a time-driven and time-manufactured consciousness are shaken to the core, opening up the psychic order to other possibilities of organizing reality. The author continues: Tony Morrison’s novel Jazz also abounds in reminiscences and lyrical digressions. The heroine Violet tries to put together evidences about a dead girl Dorkas who was her husband’s mistress. In the novel, there is a returning from the present to the past, to the moment of the girl’s funeral where Violet created a scandal: She is awfully skinny, Violet; fifty, but still good looking when she broke up the funeral (Morrison, 1970). Throughout the novel, Violet wants to restore the past in order to learn and understand why Dorkas attracted her husband. The [simultaneous] presence of two temporal planes is expressed by the use of two verbal forms – the present and the past tenses.10

There is resistance to the linear, one-way arrow of time, and a visible struggle against it as the sole representation of temporality. Rather, the subjective construction of time seems to be contingent on pressures, affective intensities, existential crises, catatonic states, the search for meaning, expansions and contractions of consciousness due to abrupt change of relations, and a host of other factors that alter the inner sense of duration, often bringing it into conflict with mechanical time. Through all of this, the rebellion against the historically imposed uniformity of time is powerfully visible. As we approach limit experiences, time seems to liquefy under pressure, and the homogeneous succession of instants that is so vital to industrial society seems to be less and less important; the temporal order gets more and more nonlinear and replaced by a psychic-somatic or embodied quality. With respect to time, the literary world of experience appears like an existential “black hole” at the edge of which conventional time falters, and alternate relations appear that seem more meaningful and existentially viable. It should not be surprising then if it is claimed that the tension between the official-formal time and the phenomenological heterogeneity of duration ought to find its reflection in education; that is, it should lead to the need for a serious inquiry into temporality and the eventual realization of a shift in pedagogical meanings derived therefrom. As such, time figures dominantly in education, as a series of governable instants, 10 Ibid.

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reflecting civilizational obsessions of control and separation. It begins to appear as an external and independent dimension rather than being understood as the product of the organism’s psychosomatic becoming. Thus writes Dwayne Huebner, a noted educator, elucidating in a Heideggerian light: “Time is not a dimension in which we live—a series of ‘nows,’ some past and some in the future. Man does not have so many ‘nows’ allotted. He does not simply await a future and look back upon a past.” And further, Huebner adds: The very notion of time arises out of man’s existence, which is an emergent. The future is man facing himself in anticipation of his own potentiality for being. The past is finding himself already thrown into a world. It is the having-been which makes possible the projection of his potentiality. The present is the moment of vision when Dasein, finding himself thrown into a situation (the past), projects his own potentiality for being. Human life is not futural; nor is it past, but, rather, a present made up of a past and future brought into the moment. From his finite temporality, man has constructed his scientific view of time as something objective and beyond himself, in which he lives. The point is that man is temporal; or if you wish, historical. There is no such “thing” as a past or a future. They exist only through man’s existence as a temporal being. This means that human life is never fixed but is always emergent as the past and future become horizons of a present.11

Huebner asserts that although time emerges out of the very processes of human existence, it is mistakenly experienced as something objective and independent, and this warped understanding brings forth a distorted world. In reality, there is no tangible past or future as such. The human is forever emergent, but when the potentiality for being is projected along a fictitious futurality, an illusion is created about an existence-to-come. Education is ensnared in this illusion of a progressive illumination—an illusion that results in the sacrifice of the present for an imagined future. This is one outcome of the one-sided adherence to the spirit of science which promises progressive knowledge toward emancipation. This is not a reflection on science or the scientific spirit, but rather on education which has never recognized the responsibility or realized the capacity to hold its own in a balanced manner among the many ways 11 Dwayne Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26:S1, pp. 324–331, https://doi.org/10.1080/00405848709543294.

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of viewing the world; instead, it has capitulated to the seduction and power of a uniform world view. The outcome of this single-track thinking, and the promotion of a single worldview, has ensnared education in apparatuses of time and measurement to the point that almost everyone believes that education consists in a time-controlled acquisition of measurable variables. The advent of psychology especially psychometrics has firmly institutionalized this notion. The essence of measurement is time; it is the movement of a variable or its synthesis in time. By implication, it means that the essence of education as it stands today is conformity to chronic time. Witness the following—learning is administered by a function of time; competencies have to be demonstrated in time; the school routine is bound by a strict division of time; the curriculum is time-bound; the passage between levels is temporal, and so on and on. The matrix of the educational effort without doubt is chronicity. We have to spend a moment reflecting on the implications of this situation. Measurement, which depends on time, entails reducing everything to laws and calculability. Measurement by its very nature and character is deterministic, and hence cannot in principle contribute to the project of emancipation or freedom. And from this one may reasonably conclude that there is no inner directive toward existential freedom in the measured approach to education as it is currently found. It is a frightening thought but the logic is incontestable. In the contemporary age, there is much talk of freedom; its promise is enshrined in many modernist institutions and foundational narratives. But ironically, the most basic sociocultural effort in almost all societies—education—has its face turned away from the possibility of existential emancipation by the very nature of its structure and direction. An inquiry into time compellingly reveals this incongruity. We have then to ask about the nature of an alternative direction that is being alluded to in the above lines. In other words, if the model of education based on temporality as external succession, or chronicity, is rather impoverished and one-sided, one that denies freedom as a fundamental character of existence, how shall we begin to consider the possibility of a different bearing? It happens that to acknowledge a fresh perception or recognize a new order of disclosure, the biggest hurdle that presents itself is not necessarily the difficulty of the new conception, but the stranglehold that the current wisdom—the ensemble of habits of thought, ingrained perceptions, and cultural root metaphors—exercises over the existing manner of thinking about reality. The recognition of

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this fact and a degree of openness or willingness to admit the heretofore unthought are the primary conditions for bringing about a change in the direction of psychophysical and mento-emotional effort. A shaking of the foundations of habitual thinking therefore becomes necessary for anyone seeking redemptive or liberatory praxis. This brings us to the other key aspect of our discussion to follow, which is the possibility of educated intuition, and that is the principal mode by which one becomes aware of this different bearing. Educational emphasis, as it has evolved over the decades, especially in the Western mainstream context, is largely centered on a second-order approximation of methods borrowed from the empirical study of reality which is otherwise known as science. In other words, general education is mostly a restricted and reduced level study-of-the-study of what we know as the outer world. Again, to put it differently, it is a second approximation of an approach that has proved quite successful in dealing with external reality. It might be worthwhile to begin with a word about the method itself and its natural limits. The scientific approach is successful only in dealing with parts of reality at a time, which it conceptualizes and technologizes. There can be no law of the totality since it involves the lawmaker itself. Since the empirical—phenomenal—experience is necessarily timebound and fragmented, and not to be had all at once, its study is also in parts and cannot be summed up in any meaningful totality. Besides, such a process can only study (measure) different energy states, their mutual conversion, and modes of convertibility in time. Anything beyond this is outside the realm of the scientific method. However, since we cannot make direct sense of the world in an additive or incremental manner—the whole is not sum of the parts—science cannot help us to make meaning or give a glimpse of the necessity of things. But education is precisely the making of meaning—to understand how things add up to a meaningful existence. Therefore, from the above analysis, we come up with the startling disclosure that education and its dominant method are fundamentally at odds with one another. This is not to fault science or show up its shortcomings, but to understand its epistemic limits, and to become warned that a blind and exclusive following of this method in education is fatal. The primary means of contemporary education are studies of causality and succession—pale reflections of the scientific method. If neither of these means is adequate for what we need to achieve through the educational effort, then we must look elsewhere. If rational conceptualization cannot be the preferred method

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of studying the active life (education), or at least the exclusive method, how shall we conceive of an alternative? This is the question with which the book is concerned in opening up the issue of time and temporality. This “elsewhere” of conventional thought lies in the development of a new vehicle of perception called intuition as philosophical and phenomenological method that balances the rationalization habit. Intuition is distinct from the conceptual. The concept studies a distinction, or a difference that makes a distinction. Intuition does not concern itself with differences or a succession of changing states or their mental representation through rational categories. While science looks into the isolatable fragment, intuition concerns itself with the actual living process. While science inquires into movement as an attribute of objects, intuition locates itself within the indivisible movement itself that is primary. Science assumes time as empty background dimension; intuition reveals to us the other side of chronicity, which is duration. Intuition is the pedagogic relation with that which en-dures. The models of reality within which the contemporary mind functions in order to comprehend the world make intuition something alien and esoteric. Therefore, it would take an immense mental effort to turn away from the representational model and situate oneself within active time. Transporting us from the habitual way things are comprehended as mechanical succession to the phenomenological sensation of duration is the action of intuition. Intuition experiences reality before it congeals into concepts, that is, before the mind closes over and casts its temporal and spatial dragnet over perception. Thus, there are two distinct modes of apprehending reality— categorical conceptualization and intuitive situatedness. The former we are familiar with; the latter opens the door to a new way of apprehending reality that offers a necessary balance. What remains perplexing in the first mode of awareness is answered by the second mode. The movement of life in us is continuous, and this continuity cannot be grasped by the intellect. The latter can grasp reality only frame by frame, in a discrete manner. But we cannot get to the meaning and essence of life frame by frame just as we cannot really understand a cinematic film by looking at it frame by frame. Despite immense success of frame-by-frame analysis of phenomenal reality, we do not get the taste of life in their summation. The continuity of life is always greater than the sum of the conceptual parts to which we conventionally reduce it. We have to know life as succession of states in order to organize action, but we also have to

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grasp life as primordial continuity, which is duration. When the poet or the artist challenges time as succession, they are intuitively demanding an awareness of the possibility of this dual perception. We cannot derive movement (wholeness and meaning) from integrating the fragments; the attempt of science and conventional philosophy in this direction thus ends in futility. Totality cannot be derived from the sum of the parts, and reality always escapes us when we approach it through the parts or their succession and synthesis in time. The effort to lodge ourselves in movement itself is a negative one. It means giving up taking mental “snapshots” or conceptual frames (for a time) in order to focus on the movement of psychophysical consciousness itself. It is possible to do this because we ourselves are nothing but this movement; it is not something outside of us. We have only to take our eyes off the outer events and concentrate fully on the movements— of thought, feeling, sensation, and physical impulses. Gradually, a new order of perception emerges that is aware of movement qua movement. We become phenomenologically conscious of the uninterrupted flow of our lives. There is nothing spiritual or mystical about it. Nevertheless, this perception cannot be translated in terms of image or representation, nor can it be grasped conceptually. It can only be experienced by situating ourselves within movement. This is probably its greatest difficulty. The modern consciousness is used to everything pre-packaged in conceptual terms; it is uneasy with anything that must be experienced to be understood. Experiential understanding is considered primitive and inferior to intellectual or conceptual understanding. This is one of the pernicious outcomes of the body/mind separation. But here experience is essential to go beyond time as succession to time as duration. In other words, the body/mind split must be healed in our effort to attain to this purely qualitative dimension. In what shape can any of this meaningfully reach education and pedagogy? Obviously, praxis requires effort or conatus. This conatus must take the shape of a conscious intent toward gradually developing a new center of perception. In other words, the first step is the recognition that phenomenal consciousness, or the natural bent of the mind toward the outer, is existentially and vitally incomplete. This introduces a hesitation, a skepticism or pause, in the processes which otherwise go on in an unbroken chain. Once a link in the chain is interrupted, a new path, however narrow, is opened up leading to a new domain, awaking a fresh potential. The most important thing is to not consider this as something

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exceptional or something like an extra or an add-on. From the beginning, we approach it as the inevitable other side of the phenomenal effort. The existential conatus is incomplete without making this inroad into everyday consciousness. Rather than expansion in the content of consciousness, it is the movement of consciousness itself and its awareness that is at stake here. Such recognition changes the very limits within which education takes place. There is a different emphasis, a distinct language, an emergent atmosphere that guides the conatus. The above must not be confused with individual attainment. In pure movement, there is no individuality; rather, individuality may be an epiphenomenon, a shadow that is projected out of movement. The development of intuition makes this clear. Intuition is not my intuition, or yours. It is simply the plane of intuition; one is immersed in it. This is the second difficulty. The contemporary age has learned to associate conatus with individuality and the reward system. It has no instinct for life or existence as a whole. Division and difference are its main mantra. It has forgotten the elementary fact that if there is any ontological truth to division, then there must be truth to ontological unity—both sides are needed for completion, just as for the idea of good to have any validity there must be the idea of evil. The two sides are needed to complete each other. Individuality appears out of pure movement; it has to be reinserted into that pure movement in order to complete the cycle. This is the preparation for the birth of intuition. The third difficulty that is in the way of considering something like pure movement as the inevitable other side of the “real” world is the hardness or concreteness with which present reality is apprehended. We are taught to view reality as a given uniformity or fixed system, and not as something in creative production. That is to say, organized knowledge refuses to consider the possibility of a creative side of reality. Determinism is built into the very veins of our conceptual schemata. Where causal laws have not been found, it is taken to be a case of insufficient data, or at worst, ignorance of some hidden variable. There is little recognition of the possibility that all parts of existence may not be covered by causality. How do we then account for creative freedom and originality? The fragment or part reality is obviously determined by the fixed laws that gave birth to its fragmentary production in the first place. Hence, the entire visible spectrum of reality made up of determined objects is not able to accommodate any sense of spontaneity or creative freedom. It bespeaks of a rigid determinism. It is only when we

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consider the totality of the undivided background or movement that it becomes possible to think of creative freedom. In other words, the latter exists as a quality in the other mode of apprehension, that is, in primordial continuity, which is duration. Thus, each determined object is rigid in itself, but is a limited expression of creative freedom in the manner in which the totality entered into its production in the first place. An artifact may be a concrete expression of an artistic process, but the process itself escapes the artifact. When duration or change or movement externalizes itself in a specific expression, it exhausts itself in the object, and the latter remains behind as a symbol or artifact or trace of the originary creative movement. The discrete, monadic object must be ameliorated by means of intuition in order to turn our face toward living activity, or the movement of perception itself. It is a matter of intuitive awareness and its incessant practice. Durational praxis, the pedagogy of its approach, and its existential situatedness are thus the primary concerns of the present work. It bears remarking that in front of time all are children, and hence, the term pedagogy as is used here has a wider connotation than the conventional. Let us turn next to the principal thinkers considered here and on the basis of whose work the present book rests. The first of these is Henri Bergson, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century who grappled head on with the problem of time and its experience. The task of minimally grasping Bergson’s position is best served here by revisiting parts of debates in which the philosopher was involved. Bergson’s position on time and temporality led to famous confrontations with equally famous thinkers such as Einstein in the early part of the twentieth century, resulting in extraordinary intellectual disputes and deliberations that have unfortunately gone out of public memory today.12 On April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations and anticipations. Thanks to him, we now know that to act on the future one needs to start by changing the past. The meeting had been planned as a cordial and scholarly event. It was anything but that. The physicist and the philosopher clashed, each 12 This is the reason why the hermeneutic method of revisiting again and again the source deliberations and source events is so vital for education.

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defending opposing, even irreconcilable, ways of understanding time. At the Societe francaise de philosophie—one of the most venerable institutions in France—they confronted each other under the eyes of a select group of intellectuals. The “dialogue between the greatest philosopher and the greatest physicist of the 20th century” was dutifully written down. It was a script fit for the theater. The meeting, and the words they uttered, would be discussed for the rest of the century. The philosopher’s name was Henri Bergson. In the early decades of the century, his fame, prestige, and influence surpassed that of the physicist—who, in contrast, is so well known today.13

What exactly was at stake? Bergson insisted that time could not and must not be understood through the exclusive lens of science. He maintained that time (change) was a lived dimension that could only be understood philosophically and phenomenologically. Science could not address active life, and hence, the Einsteinian notion of time as expressed in relativity theory was an illegitimate appropriation that led to the grafting of metaphysics on science. “What Bergson wanted to say was that ‘all did not end’ with relativity. He was clear: ‘All that I want to establish is simply this: once we admit the theory of relativity as a physical theory, all is not finished.’ Philosophy, he modestly argued, still had a place.”14 Einstein’s reply was swift and sharp: “Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes” (there is therefore no philosophers’ [concept of] time). He further pressed: “There remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist’s.” This was completely intolerable to Bergson who wrote a whole book refuting Einstein’s position on time. This intense struggle between philosophy and science was unusual and marks an extraordinary phase in our understanding of the inherent nature of succession and change. Against the backdrop of the present examination and discussion of a different order of time carried out in these pages, it may be hazarded that Einstein’s dismissive assertion during his face-off with Bergson will turn out to have been impulsive. His insistence that “there is no philosopher’s time; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist” would seem to have been hasty and an intellectual

13 Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 3. 14 Ibid., p. 19.

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overreach.15 The older and more mature Einstein did hint at something like this later in his autobiography in which he spoke of an “original sin” his theory had committed. The admission did not directly relate to the face-off with Bergson but conceded something fundamental that Bergson among others had noticed and raised early in the debate, the admission of which at the time might have changed the very nature of the debate. The young Einstein had dismissed the possibility of an ontological time that was different from that of the scientist by treating sense impressions as a given. That is to say, like all of science, the observing consciousness was treated as an inert background to the phenomena under study and filtered out of consideration in the process of constructing an “objective” theory. Einstein described his contribution to physics as one that had ostensibly taken “sense impressions” as a point of departure to understand more complicated “ideas,” revolutionizing our theories of time and space. Yet toward the end his life he no longer believed that these basic components—sense impressions—could be clearly distinguished from the rest of the theoretical structure he had painstakingly built. Einstein confessed that there was “no such thing” as a clear distinction between physical “sense impressions” and mental “ideas.” But believing in their distinction was a necessary “metaphysical ‘original sin’” without which we could not advance knowledge. If science did not stand firmly on a solid empirical ground, from where did it draw its power? Mathematics and logic, unless firmly connected to empirical observations, would remain empty abstractions.16

Science deals with sense data without considering sensation, always presupposing an ideal observer in the background. Herein lies the central problem that dogs this view of reality. But the argument is often heard: What about recording instruments, photography, etc., that do not require human observers? A moment’s reflection would make it clear that the problem is not overcome by merely replacing organic observers by instrumental ones, for there must be someone that makes sense of the 15 Psychological

time must not be confused with ontological time. No one doubts that we experience the lapse of an hour differently depending on our psychological condition and state of being. This is trivial and is not the question at stake. The question is: Is there an inner time that is as real as outer time? 16 Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 346.

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recorded data in turn. Attempts to do away with sensation thus lead to an infinite regress. Science advances its agenda by simply ignoring the problem and writing the sensor (organism or instrument) into the text by assuming an imaginary ideal observer (objectivity without subjectivity), as admitted by Einstein above. He wrote that he could only proceed by committing an original sin—that is, by maintaining a strict distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, or mind and matter, that ultimately turns out to be philosophically indefensible. But the attempt to “save” science often assumes zealous proportions, and while it may be granted that fictive constructs are frequently necessary for theorizing about the world, education can ill-afford to forget what was submerged in arriving at majoritarian conclusions about reality. In equating the world to our assumptions about it, we close the doors to new and heterogeneous ways of thinking and being in reality, which is the true peril. Returning to the controversy, in framing his famous Relativity Theory, Einstein had made a distinction between local events (those which could be directly observed) and distant events (those which could only be mentally deduced), as though sensory data was immediately revealed as distinct from that which required mental deduction. To put it differently, in order to frame his theory, Einstein had to assume a qualitative difference between local simultaneities and non-local ones. Let us describe the problem in his own words: If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time.” We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o’clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.” It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of “time” by substituting “the position of the small hand of my watch” for “time.” And in fact such a definition is satisfactory when we are concerned with defining a time exclusively for the place where the watch is located; but it is no longer satisfactory when we have to connect in time series of events occurring at different places, or—what comes to the same thing—to evaluate the times of events occurring at places remote from the watch.17 17 Albert

Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” in The Principle of Relativity (London: Methuen, 1923).

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The above passage shows that Einstein evidently thought that the simultaneity that was immediately revealed to the senses in the local neighborhood of the event was adequate, and the difficulty was with events at a distance from the clock. In order to overcome this difficulty, he proposed the following “imaginary physical experiment,” thus establishing a pure difference between the sensory and the conceptual within his theory. I include another lengthy quote to clarify Einstein’s thinking on this point. We arrive at a much more practical determination along the following line of thought. If at the point A of space there is a clock, an observer at A can determine the time values of events in the immediate proximity of A by finding the positions of the hands which are simultaneous with these events. If there is at the point B of space another clock in all respects resembling the one at A, it is possible for an observer at B to determine the time values of events in the immediate neighbourhood of B. But it is not possible without further assumption to compare, in respect of time, an event at A with an event at B. We have so far defined only an “A time” and a “B time.” We have not defined a common “time” for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the “time” required by light to travel from A to B equals the “time” it requires to travel from B to A. Let a ray of light start at the “A time” tA from A towards B, let it at the “B time” tB be reflected at B in the direction of A, and arrive again at A at the “A time” t’A. In accordance with definition the two clocks synchronize if tB −tA = t’A −tB. We assume that this definition of synchronism is free from contradictions, and possible for any number of points; and that the following relations are universally valid:— 1. If the clock at B synchronizes with the clock at A, the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B. 2. If the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B and also with the clock at C, the clocks at B and C also synchronize with each other. Thus with the help of certain imaginary physical experiments we have settled what is to be understood by synchronous stationary clocks located at different places, and have evidently obtained a definition of “simultaneous,” or “synchronous,” and of “time.” The “time” of an event is that which is given simultaneously with the event by a stationary clock located at the place of the event, this clock being synchronous, and indeed synchronous for all time determinations, with a specified stationary clock.18

The separation of the sensory and the conceptual had upset many thinkers including Alfred N. Whitehead who otherwise agreed with the 18 Ibid., the entire text is available in the public domain at: https://www.fourmilab.ch/ etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf.

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observational results of Einstein’s theory, but who felt that this separation was arbitrary and had great consequences for the physical interpretation of the theory. The reason why Whitehead opposed Einstein’s conclusions, Northrop explained, was because he [Whitehead] was unwilling to differentiate that which was sensed from that which was deduced mentally. Whitehead refused “to distinguish very sharply between the very limited part or aspect of simultaneous nature which is disclosed in direct sense awareness and the concept of simultaneous nature as it is prescribed in one’s deductively formulated scientific theory.” The philosopher criticized Einstein’s successes as residing in an essential “fallacy” that he named “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It referred to the tendency of establishing a strict distinction between “sense impressions” and “ideas.” Whitehead, like Bergson before him, believed this distinction could never be absolute; that we could never establish a fixed boundary between matter and mind. This fallacy, continued Whitehead, led to the “bifurcation of nature” that divided the universe into two main categories, one physical and material and the other psychological and mental, forgetting what lay in between them, their connection, and their constant interplay.19

Whitehead, as reported by his student Northrop above, referred to the distinction between the sensory and the mental as “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” “In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead (1953/1925) critically discusses the historical development of science and its larger impact on our civilization and culture today. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness (FMC) is a notion central to his analysis, both of the process of inquiry and to the general sustainability of quality of life. The realm of the aesthetic, of patient and sensitive attention, the full range of immediate bodily feeling, and the variety of real values revealed therein, turns out to be both the victim of and the remedy for the FMC. As Whitehead says: ‘Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.’”20 Sensitive attention and attention to the senses are acutely important in developing the direction of scientific inquiry (or any other intellectual pursuit) toward wholesome existence. Pedagogy must remember this 19 Canales,

op. cit., p. 340. Edward Thompson III, “The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry,” Interchange, Vol. 28, Nos. 2–3, 1997, pp. 219–230. 20 H.

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important lesson as it attempts to extract meaning from learning and not treat knowledge as something independent of organic existence. Ignorance of this aspect has led to an irreparable fracture and driven a wedge between mind and matter. The fact that the two are in reciprocal relationship and neither exists without the other must be a central insight of education. This all-important fact changes the basic orientation of all teaching and learning which so far has pretended that we are talking about an independent reality. A particular insight that Bergson wanted to defend contra Einstein was that there could be no fixed boundary and therefore no essential difference marking when local events ended and distant ones arose, or between physical ones and mental ones. How powerful was his critique? In the eyes of some, it was so powerful that the entire basis of “empirical” science was called into question. Initial criticisms launched against Einstein for drawing an unnecessarily sharp distinction between the local and the distant grew into a much more damaging argument. They were soon connected to a broad critique of the claim that knowledge was built up from a firm basis of sense-data and extended mathematically, logically, and rationally.21

Why is this distinction between the local and the distant so important, and what is its connection to the present discussion, or to time? A decision about what is far (non-local) and what is near (local) would affect our understanding of what is now or what is later (i.e., time as mechanical progression, in general). For Bergson, time is spatialized; that is, our sense of space determines our idea of time, changing “according to the point of view, the terms of comparison, the instrument or perceptual organ.” Einstein, on the other hand, had privileged a certain naturalized or colloquial way of thinking about the near—he had assumed a physical definition of nearness (local simultaneity) as distinct from a mental definition of distantness (non-local simultaneity). It is not as if Einstein was not aware of the difficulty hidden in this procedure. Back in 1905, there is a footnote in his paper which acknowledges the “inexactitude that lurks in the concept of simultaneity of two events at approximately the same place.”22 But he chose to ignore this problem and overcome 21 Canales,

op. cit., p. 343. Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” originally published in German as “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik, Vol. 322, No. 10, 1905, 893n1. 22 Albert

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it through an abstraction. Einstein wrote “It is essential to have time defined by means of stationary clocks in the stationary system, and the time now defined being appropriate to the stationary system we call it ‘the time of the stationary system.’”23 Having privileged the local frame, one could then calculate the order of occurrence of distant phenomena through translation, taking into account speed of light, etc. While this helped to proceed with calculations without complicating the matter, to philosophers such as Bergson the argument was unsustainable, because it took sensed reality as immediately given and extended it by means of abstractions and mental calculations. In other words, it substituted quantity for quality. I think that there is an important lesson to be learnt here that ought to be carefully reflected upon by educationists—it concerns the extent to which we overcome lived realities by means of abstractions. Unlike science and the scientist who are under pressure to formulate theories and laws, educationists must not be in a great hurry to reach closure, for the world is in eternal becoming, and this perpetual emergence needs to be registered and pedagogically communicated as an ontological truth. We might even go so far as to say that formulated knowledge and education are on two different tracks and must not be confounded. Formulated knowledge often recovers from its errors, but the fractured legacies it leaves behind in the socius are often deeply damaging from which the world cannot easily recuperate. According to Stengers, modern physics had recently “rediscovered time,” showing how “it will never again be able to be reduced to the monotonous simplicity” that Einstein gave it or to a simple “geometrical parameter that allows calculation.” Chaos theory and quantum mechanics proved that time was much more than Einstein had wagered. Physics, today, no longer denies time. It recognizes the irreversible time of evolutions toward equilibrium, the rhythmic time of structures whose pulse is nourished by the world they are part of, the bifurcating time of evolutions generated by instability and amplification of fluctuations, and even microscopic time, which manifests the indetermination of microscopic physical evolutions.24

23 Ibid. 24 Canales,

op. cit., p. 351.

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The root of the difficulty is of course the entrenched assumption that the phenomenological aspect of things can be entirely by-passed and the world grasped purely in intellectual terms. This strengthens the belief that concepts by themselves are enough, and the corresponding development of the sensory complex need not accompany it. All dogmas, including scientific dogma, position themselves in the lag between concepts and the senses. While modern physics might have “rediscovered” time, the stamp of the physical interpretations and their corresponding social impressions left behind by the scientific attitude to time of the earlier regime have long since entered into the world system of thought and cannot be reversed so easily. This must be kept in mind while harping on the scientific attitude in education. To the extent that the scientific attitude bespeaks of a non-dogmatic openness, it is certainly helpful, but when it comes to conclusions about actuality (physical interpretations), one must keep in mind the alternate visions that are available together with the bottomlessness of cosmic conundrums. In other words, even while accepting empirical generalizations at one level, one must pedagogically remain wary and skeptical at another with regard to the meanings they hold for lived life. Divisions between Einstein and Bergson, between science and philosophy, and between opposing notions of time remain much vaster than the actual conflict between the two men. They precede it and surpass it. Calls for abandoning and moving beyond these dualisms have spread far and wide. “Things that talk,” “intangible things,” “material semiotics,” and “epistemic objects” are all labels used by contemporary scholars to capture the in-between territory of dualistic dichotomies. What happens if we get on with the job of doing the thing and reread the debate in ways that no longer accept the binary terms associated with Einstein and Bergson as self-evident and inevitable? What happens to our understanding of science and of history if we shelve these binary categories—such as objectivity-subjectivity and nature-politics—and study instead how these categories strengthened at certain moments? For one, the outcome of the Bergson and Einstein confrontation no longer appears as clear-cut as before.25

Experimental results are one thing, but when it comes to their interpretation as to the shape of reality, the dichotomies and oppositions

25 Ibid.,

p. 358.

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must be pedagogically scrutinized not in order to arrive at some “right” choice between alternative explanations but to work out the possible consequences of each competing view for our lives. The problem of time is too important to be allowed to come to rest along the lines of a single dominant view, no matter whose view that happens to be. The effort should be to get away from homogenizing explanations to multiverses in which plural understandings are possible depending on which category was emphasized. Rather than insisting on one correct explanation, pedagogy must help us to simultaneously hold in consciousness opposing views. The plural nature of things presented to consciousness is repeatedly noticeable in multiple domains of inquiry stretching from the wave-particle duality of light all the way to the experience of a sixth sense (in some pre-secular traditions) that allowed practitioners to distinguish between a gross reality and a subtle one as the circulation of forces.26 Against this realization, the fact that time itself would manifest in a double aspect need not come as a surprise, even if it is startling as an idea. Each thing belongs to two orders—the order of contingency and the order of necessity—and time cannot escape this basic duality. Once the plural aspect of each thing in general is inwardly acknowledged, it becomes easier to understand that time itself may be experienced thus. In the phenomenological awareness of the dual aspect of existentials is a fundamental kind of wisdom, as well as ontological freedom, that takes away the hopeless one-sidedness in which modern secular education is mired. We have gotten used to the barrenness of social life, having adjusted to its aridity over generations, so that anything more is today viewed with suspicion. The idea that freedom is not political but ontological, and therefore phenomenologically experienceable, sounds strange to the modern ear because the contemporary mind thinks problems in political or historical terms alone. The possibility that the historico-political construction of our problems is itself a consequence of the narrowing down of our vision through dualities and dichotomies seems to have gone out of view. For pedagogy then the work is clear. It is to bring back into focus the plural aspect of existence in as many ways

26 In the Sanskritic traditions of early India, there are references to sthula sharira (gross body) and sukshma sharira (subtle body). This distinction becomes especially important in practices of the Tantra School.

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and through as many avenues as possible—the intuitive, the affective, the corporeal, and the rational. When all of these are working together— cooperating—then we might experience a moment of freedom—a sudden reorientation toward the Open—that take us beyond ourselves. But these can only work together if we are able to fundamentally rock the boat of time in our psyche. Disturbing entrenched ways of viewing time disturbs the sequences that constitute the compositions which we know as ourselves within specific configurations. Beyond the specific configurations and constituted compositions lies the open matrix from which reality emerges continually. By disturbing the temporal coordinate of experience, we open the door to the other, that is, to that which is beyond the contingencies of chronic time. According to Meister Eckhart, the famous thirteenth-century Christian preacher and mystic, “time is the greatest obstacle in the approach to God; and not only time, but also temporal things, temporal affections, even the aroma of time.”27 Further, in Sermon One, Eckhart cites Augustine to bolster his case that the potential for the birth of the timeless is always present: “Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’”28 The timeless must take birth in time, amid the temporal— thus is redemption thinkable. Through the pages of the book, we have discussed how such a potentiality for the experience of necessity can and must exist side by side with the temporal. Time is what stitches together sequences into a reality; time is also memory that builds and keeps the psyche busy with temporal things. In other words, ordinary time that is the basis of contingent reality draws a veil over necessity, in the same way as surface disturbances on water hide what is beneath. With adequate preparation and understanding, this veil may be ruptured at an opportune moment. From the angle of orienting toward this opportune moment, we have to overcome our facile use of language, thus paying greater attention 27 Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988), f201. 28 Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Transl.) Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1979), p. 29.

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to the manner in which our consciousness receives or posits the world. We have to learn to draw back from our usual commitment to the world-as-spectacle and try to derive the essence of the precise relation in which we exist from moment to moment with respect to the outer. In other words, the specific form of illusion spawned through the world-as-spectacle attitude must be rejected as a pedagogic step toward creative-durational awareness. From the perspective of phenomenology as method, an eidetic reduction becomes necessary. Merleau-Ponty illuminates for us the Husserlian approach: Every reduction, says Husserl, as well as being transcendental is necessarily eidetic. That means that we cannot subject our perception of the world to philosophical scrutiny without ceasing to be identified with that act of positing the world, with that interest in it which delimits us, without drawing back from our commitment which is itself thus made to appear as a spectacle, without passing from the fact of our existence to its nature, from the Dasein to the Wesen.29

Eidetic reduction is reduction to eidos (Gk. shape), that is, intuiting the essences of things as distinct from being merely conscious of their ordinary presentation to consciousness. A phenomenological effort is necessary in order to move from the contingent or accidental appearance of things to their inner necessary structure. To do this, we have to first stop identifying with the manner in which we generally make sense of the world. In other words, from the thrownness and contingent nature of our relations, we must acknowledge and move toward necessity. But it is clear that the essence is here not the end, but a means, that our effective involvement in the world is precisely what has to be understood and made amenable to conceptualization, for it is what polarizes all our conceptual particularizations….Whatever the subtle changes of meaning which have ultimately brought us, as a linguistic acquisition, the word and concept of consciousness, we enjoy direct access to what it designates. For we have the experience of ourselves, of that consciousness which we are, and it is on the basis of this experience that all linguistic connotations are assessed, and precisely through it that language comes to have any meaning at all for us. “It is that as yet dumb experience … which we are 29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Transl.) Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), pp. xiv–xv.

28  K. ROY concerned to lead to the pure expression of its own meaning.” Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the open quivering fish and seaweed.30

The point, however, is not merely to touch essence or a teleological finality. The one who dives beneath must surface again, this time with a more creative bearing toward the lived world and a more responsible attitude toward language and concept that describes it. In other words, duration and time, aion and chronos, must be acknowledged and pedagogically linked. One must learn to continually dive and come up from the depths with the open, fluid relations that on the surface must quickly solidify according to its own nature, producing the frozen immobilities of the known. In this dialectic, the common fallacy that in dealing with the world we deal with an independent reality falls away. The way becomes open for another kind of luminance to inform conceptualization, and “despite the normal exteriorization of our feeling of duration into a ‘spatialized’ time, the mind, being more than the intellect, is still capable of apprehending universal becoming in a vision in which what was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion.”31 Further, giving us a praxeological direction derived from Bergson, the writer continues, It is possible to “reascend the slope of nature” and, by a concentrated effort of attention, by “intuition,” to contact directly, deep within, that concrete duration which is “the very stuff of our existence and of all things.” Bergson well understood, then, that it is our practical routine that has militated against a renewal, or deepening, of our perception; that “our senses and our consciousness have reduced real time and real change to dust in order to facilitate our action upon things.” Nor, certainly, does he condemn positive science for not being concerned with duration (even though that is its inspiration), since “the function of science is, after all, to compose a world for us in which we can, for the convenience of action, ignore the effects of time.” What he deplores, however, is the tendency

30 Ibid., The internal quotation is from Husserl, Meditations Cartesiennes (Transl.) Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Colin, 1931), p. 33. 31 Leon Jacobson, “Translator’s Preface,” in Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity with Reference to Einstein’s Theory (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), pp. v–vi.

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29

of science, and philosophy, to mistake its conceptualizations of reality for reality itself….Bergson’s major works are directed with the ultimate aim of clearing the path to vision.32

We cannot measure duration because it is an indivisible flow and has no measurable parts. “Civilized” man has become used to projecting duration on the outer plane, that is, on the spatial dimension. Hence, we measure the immeasurable by spatializing it—measuring time through movement, such the movement of the clock or the motion of planet, and due to the overpowering weight of practical concerns no longer bother about real duration. Unfortunately, acting upon the things of the world has taken precedence over everything else, and we have lost our intuition. Now, a concentrated effort of attention is necessary to regain the intuitive pathway to a pre-thingified world. What has become hardened in consciousness through neglect can be “warmed” and made fluid again. Without this fluidity, reality is experienced as immobile, unhelpful toward the interests of redemptive life. We do not blame science for being overly concerned with the practical dimension of life; what we object to is its tendency to confuse its conceptualizations with reality itself. Immense success in dealing with the things of the world says nothing about reality itself, for the latter does not appear in consciousness but is its very underlying matrix. Let us expand on this a little more: According to Bergson, our conceptual thinking, as well as its linguistic expression, is “molded” upon a world “already made.” But our intellect, in thus reflecting the world, only serves to mask reality itself, that is, the world “in the making,” in short, real time or duration. Now, given the goal and method of science, physicists, at least as much as the rest of us, live in a world already made and not in the making, a world, therefore, in which what is most concrete—time and change—is only superficially experienced. “Let us become accustomed,” Bergson urges, “to see all things sub specie durationis: immediately in our galvanized perception, what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again.”33

We are entirely possessed by a world already made (objectified); thus, we become unmindful of the emergent world or the world-in-making. The 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.,

pp. ix–x.

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scientist, like the rest of us, lives and measures the finished world and is not concerned with addressing that which lies behind the patterned immobilities, which is duration, or that which endures. When we train ourselves, that is, develop our intuition to see all things under the aspect of duration, a new movement begins that stretches us beyond ourselves. Our existential problematizations and their solutions, which had so far been defined and conditioned by object relations obtaining within the political and the technological spheres, now present themselves differently before us. In our “galvanized perceptions,” a new hope awakens that is independent of the prevailing conditions. It is not something science or technology or politics can bring about. It is an ontological hope born of contact with duration, which is creative becoming. For education, this is an entirely new canvas on which to map out possibilities. Starting with the development of intuition, a new language must be created that opens out toward vision. Time that was blanked out of view and pushed to the background of consciousness becomes a topic of discussion and is no longer treated as a priori. We learn to “see” and feel time as conditioning everything in the outer world, and from there learn to become aware of the inner rhythm of time that makes us what we are. This is an immensely important perceptual shift of an aesthetic order. One must not mistake it for initiation into some mystical process but a simple shift into the flows that ultimately govern our lives. We are tiny blips of compressed time—our lives play out with decompression, and at full decompression, there is nothing left and the organism dies. It is as simple as that, but a rather difficult thing to conceptualize and represent. It is intuition that prepares the ground for loving and living such a truth amid the “red-herrings” and humdrum of phenomenal existence. The analysis of time and its intuitive experience forms the basis of praxis. It is all important therefore to invite into the educational world clashing worldviews with respect to time not necessarily to decide upon the right view, but to give a deeper understanding of what is at stake. Once more we hermeneutically backtrack to the debate between Einstein and Bergson: Early in this century, two very prominent, and originally independent, lines of thought collided. The area of impact included problems concerned with the experiences, or ideas, of time, simultaneity, motion. On the one hand, the chief center of interest in philosophy, it is not too much to say, was the system of Bergson, in which the passage of time, apprehended intuitively,

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was the fundamental element. On the other hand, the physical theory of relativity, which after 1919 at any rate dominated scientific thought, submerged time in a more comprehensive and essentially static “space-time,” from which it could be extracted variously and largely arbitrarily by the physicist. It was inevitable that one or other of these views should give way.34

While the will-to-truth forces us at the formal level to choose between the alternatives, what is important for education rather is the nature of the debate itself (in which were involved some of the finest and astute minds) that reveals something about ourselves, and not the triumph or defeat attributed to one position or another. Playfully, we include some practical details about the clashing perspectives of Einstein and Bergson that demonstrate why the intensity of the debate itself is important from the point of view of education, and not so much who was right and who was wrong. Let us begin with the problem which presents the conflict most pointedly—the problem of what has come to be known as “asymmetrical aging.” Paul journeys at high uniform speed to a distant star and returns two years older, according to his clock and his physical condition. Peter, however, who remains on earth, is then some two hundred years older than when Paul left him, and has long been in his grave. That is what, according to the great majority of its advocates, Einstein’s theory of relativity requires. To Bergson, however, time lived is an absolute thing, no matter whether it is Peter or Paul who lives it.35

So now it was up to Bergson to show why the physical interpretation of Einstein’s theory was incorrect—that there is, in fact, no asymmetrical aging. Bergson contended that the calculation of Paul’s clock from Peter’s system or vice versa resulted in a “phantom” time and changed nothing in terms of actual experience. Below is something of how the Bergsonian objection to the Einsteinian interpretation looked: At the basis of the theory of relativity lies the postulate of relativity, according to which, when two bodies are in relative motion, either of them can be accorded any motion that one pleases, including none at all, provided 34 Herbert Dingle, “Introduction,” in Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity with Reference to Einstein’s Theory (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. xv. 35 Ibid., p. xvi.

32  K. ROY that the other is then given whatever motion is necessary to preserve the relative motion. That means that no observation is possible that will enable one to say that the motion is divided between the bodies in any particular way. But if motion retards the process of aging, the relative youth of Paul on reunion would indicate that it was Paul, and not Peter, who had moved, and that would violate the postulate of relativity. Hence the theory would invalidate its own basis.36

According to the theory of relativity, there can be no privileged frame of reference. If two clocks were first to be separated and subsequently united, no observation could show that one rather than the other had moved. To insist that on rejoining, one clock would be demonstrably retarded in relation to the other clock would refute this fundamental postulate. For that would be tantamount to saying that one of them was in a privileged (or stationary) system in relation to which the other was retarded. If we were to remain true to the postulate of relativity, both clocks would suffer equal retardation or not at all and would agree when brought together again, provided of course they were initially synchronized. But this is not how the followers of relativity saw it. Somehow, most became infatuated with the notion of asymmetrical aging as a dramatic consequence of relativity theory ignoring the basic objections against it. Evasively, the arguments often turned toward the experimental results, which were of course irrefutable, rather than admitting the difficulties that remained in their physical interpretation. It is possible that since Bergson’s objections came from the philosophical domain rather than the scientific one, these were consistently overlooked. But apart from the difficulties relating to stationary clocks, moving clocks, and so on, there was a much deeper problem that necessarily remained unacknowledged because the space for such acknowledgment was forsworn. And that concerned the unacknowledged background and continuous presence of organic and evaluative consciousness. Clocks, measuring rods, etc., are not self-registering; all of such apparatuses presuppose an observing consciousness that remains invariant throughout, but that is not factored in, in trying to comprehend the paradoxes. In science, the participating consciousness is taken for granted and is not

36 Ibid.,

p. xviii.

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seen as problematic or something to be separately acknowledged; the methodology of science has no means for such acknowledgment. For Bergson, this participating consciousness is nothing other than time itself in its proper sense, which is duration. Paradoxes result when duration looks upon the world without realizing itself. It sees its own projections upon space as an independent reality and tries to reconcile the various fragmentary recuperations received from it. The question before educationists thus is not whether Einstein was right or Bergson. The real issue is the transformation that occurs when we properly acknowledge all aspects of reality including the nature of the participating consciousness. Unlike science which is unable, due to the very nature of its formulation, to accommodate the cognitive aspect of reality, education must bring in the missing dimensions through philosophy and aesthetic means in order to give a more complete picture of the reality which we inhabit. When we are able to acknowledge that the scientific picture of the world is one partial view, we lose the dogmatic edge and overwhelmingly symbolic concentrations that the scientific world view has generated during the last few centuries. This is not to berate science or downgrade its achievements in composing the practical world, but to place it in the larger context of existence. By systematically eliminating all reference to an observing consciousness, science has achieved the status of an absolute system of reference. Understanding duration changes all this without denying science its due. In duration, there is neither expert nor layperson, neither king nor pauper; in duration, we are not personalities but momentary compositions on a flow-line. For science, the separation of observer and observed is a necessary condition; in duration, the two must merge. The Einstein-Bergson clash results partly out of this difference—they are really talking about two very different orders of experience. There are two ways in which we are aware of the reality that we call existence: “One is by letting life itself become conscious of itself. Then we have an indivisible change or duration, or movement, indivisible because we are it, all that it is we are and a pure or true duration, because it is not something which changes or which is moved.”37 Further, the author of the foregoing lines, Professor Wildon Carr, is insistent on this experience of immanence: 37 H. Wildon Carr, Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 28.

34  K. ROY It is the change or movement itself, not something extensible of which we can say this part is here, that there, but something in which all that qualifies it interpenetrates it and exists in and is the movement itself. This is life as we apprehend it by intuition. But we may also apprehend this life by analysis, and then what do we find? The very contrary of the intuition. Our self, our life, is no longer one and indivisible but breaks up into elements, the states with which the science of psychology deals. We distinguish emotions, sensations, perceptions, all of which become more and more distinct and seem to lie outside one another; memories become separated from perceptions, and the one and indivisible duration breaks up into a series of states that have happened, and anticipations of states that will happen, divided by a present moment that is a mathematical point with no duration and therefore without reality. In intuition all reality is present, in analysis all is over and past, or not yet, and the present is nothing but a boundary line.38

The qualitative experience of life existence admits of no division or supplementary dimension. There is no experiencer behind the experience as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra understood very well. There is only indivisible movement when life becomes conscious of itself. This movement is not in space or in extension but movement by itself. This phenomenological pulsion cannot be found by analysis or scientific method, but only through the cultivation of intuition. Analysis breaks things up into parts and elements in which the observer is born as separate and distinct from the observed. Now, the fragments can be scrutinized and different conclusions can be drawn about the fragments. However, the conclusions, whether individually or their sum, do not reflect anything innate about the ontological dimension but rather about the very mode of splitting up of the integral movement or pulsion. Let me further explain this point. If we split up reality along some trajectory “A,” we will produce a certain world and the associated knowledge. On the other hand, if we analyze along some other trajectory “B,” we will produce a different world and its associated knowledge. On neither instance do we produce absolute knowledge of reality, but a knowledge conditioned by our modes of knowing. Certainly, such analysis has its uses, but one must not imagine that it has any emancipatory or liberatory value. In other words, while the analytical process and its products

38 Ibid.

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might give us power over elements and extensionality, it does not help to bring about an emancipatory moment. An enlightened being, rather, is one who has retraced its steps to the originary movement which is duration. And this cannot happen through analysis but by means of intuition. “If we can bring our life as it flows itself to consciousness it must be reality in its ultimate meaning that we know limited no doubt but reality in itself, not an appearance of reality. This is the positive aspect of the doctrine of intuition….Intuition shows us what is, and not what was, nor what will be.”39 But the natural predilection of the so-called mind is toward taking snapshots of reality and thus turning it into the past; we never know the living present, but only after it has passed, and thereafter to conceptualize it. Hence, it is only by an immense effort of will that we can re-orient ourselves with the living present that is reality. But immediately we are faced with a possible objection. Here I imagine an objection [that] I will state as forcibly as I can: “You [reference to the author] claim that it is possible for us in the fact of living and while we live to be conscious of the nature of life and this knowledge you call an intuition, and you say that it is absolute, that it is reality in itself, reality free from every intellectual form. It may be so, but such knowledge can only be personal and incommunicable; nay more, it cannot even be presented to your own mind, that is to say it cannot be reflected upon, it can only be known during the moment it exists and it only exists in the moment in which it is being experienced and there cannot even be memory of it. Nay more, in the moment in which it exists it cannot be absolutely formless. Such a thing is unthinkable. Your intuition, therefore, even if it does exist for you at some moments of your experience, is a fact that is useless both in practice and in theory. There is no conceivable means by which it could be applied. If it is a fact it is a fact that is unrelated, useless, blind.”40

Professor Carr states the possible objection rather succinctly, vividly, and powerfully. Of what use is non-objective knowledge of the intuitive kind that is evanescent and cannot be subjected to rational scrutiny? Besides, how can we even think of something that is formless or grant it any

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.,

pp. 29–30.

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credibility? It is absolutely crucial, especially from the educational point of view, to consider this objection seriously. I shall let Professor Carr answer this objection himself. There is no formless reality, but there is an apprehension that is not intellectual. The intellect apprehends reality by means of rigid concepts; the more it analyses the more the reality divides up, becomes fixed, in a word materialises, but throughout the analytical work of intellect we may become conscious that something is escaping, something is being missed; this is the movement, the change itself. If the reality is that of our own life then as we apprehend it intellectually it fixes itself in states; as we analyse the states we distinguish sensations, emotions, desires, all of which stand out before us with fixed characters which we can compare and pass in review. Yet throughout the whole process the reality is flowing; this vital flow itself will not fit into our categories, it escapes us. What intuition does for us is to give us another means of apprehension by a fluid and not a static category; in apprehending our life as true duration we grasp it in the living experience itself, and instead of fixing the movement in a rigid frame follow it in its sinuosities.41

The reality duration speaks of is not formless—only, its form is not conceptual (held symbolically in the intellect) but of a different order. What is its character then? The intellect operates in isolation and phenomenological segregation from the corpus sensorium—that is, it typically views the body from the outside as something fixed and distinct from itself. In durational consciousness, however, there is no separation of mind and body—it is the dimension in which there is a new sensation called integrated awareness or intuition. This body-mind integral cannot be conceptualized in the usual manner as the mind-intellect no longer stands apart from the body as a cognitive apparatus mulling over things. Instead, this integral has its own qualitative dynamic to which one must awaken and feel through the intuition, whose form permeates throughout the being leading to a different manner of apprehending reality. It is not as though the earlier reality disappears to be replaced by some magical extensity. Rather, the frozen immobilities produced by the collective consciousness are no longer central, and their fragmented relations superseded by an intensive “sinuosity.” In other words, the so-called

41 Ibid.,

pp. 30–31.

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mind or consciousness sinks into corporeality and the so-called corpus rises to consciousness. Together they find a new solidarity that is neither body nor mind as isolates. To understand this is central to a new pedagogic effort toward durational awareness. Intuition is neither in the body nor in the mind; it is in the conjunction of both. Hence, the old ways of thinking about the body and the mind have to be abjured. With a considerable effort, we reach the point where body and mind intersect to produce a new and fluid reality. This also means that the mind or consciousness must not stray too far from the body in speculating about the world, nor should the body merely be a center of appetites, but rather become fully awakened to its inner movements. The colonization of the body by the mind comes to an end. Thus begins the bridging of a historical and civilizational caesura that has generated havoc in the world. The bridging that produces the integral slows down the velocity around and in itself, for the mind is now grounded in the body and does not rush around projecting, speculating, and imagining. In other words, it is focused on the living present, rather than oscillating between a lost past and an imaginary future, which is the typical state of an isolated consciousness. As the integral moves, it lives each instant fully and does not have to regret the unlived life. The continuous present, as a result, has no supplementary dimension. Let us, now, get back to the Einstein-Bergson controversy for one more time. What we have learnt from the Bergsonian discussion so far is that organic existence is in fact compressed duration. Time as it unfolds in the body-mind integral is a form of slow decompression. The flow rate of this inner decompression is not influenced by external factors such as being stationary or in motion, that is, by quantitative changes in extensity. In other words, one’s outer velocity in space cannot affect the rate of inner decompression of time. To take an example, if the planet earth were to suddenly and catastrophically lose its considerable velocity (decelerate) in space, the absolute rate of aging (decompression) of the inhabitants of planet earth would not change. The seeming change observed from another system would be a phantom and a problem of translation only, and not something absolute. To continue with the thought experiment, if due to this imagined sudden deceleration one were to be ejected into space (due to inertia), on falling back upon the earth, one would not have aged slower (howsoever marginally) relative to the ones who had remained behind, which is what the physical interpretation of relativity theory seems to demand. The reason, from the

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Bergsonian perspective, is that being hurtled into space (quantitative change in extensionality) cannot affect the inner qualitative dimension whose flow is different and has nothing to do with the inertial systems of the outer or their differential motions. How then can we profitably explain the difference in perspective between the Einsteinian and the Bergsonian without insisting that one was right and the other wrong? The former comes to its conclusions through maintaining the conventional body/mind division: It is the supervening mind watching the body (or clock) age from some moving or stationary system from which it draws its inferences. For the latter (Bergsonian) perspective, duration from within the body-mind integral is a phenomenological experience different than the cognitive (mentally registered) signs of temporality. That is to say, one had a “within” view and the other had a “without” view, which are essentially two different ways of viewing reality. In the final analysis, Einstein and Bergson were really talking about two different planes and no clash was necessary. Einstein had overstepped by claiming that there was no philosopher’s time, and in countering that, Bergson made the error of taking up Einstein on a plane (physics) in which only time and not duration was evident. For pedagogy, what is valuable is the enormous breadth and depth the controversy brought out that adds to our perceptions. There is a freedom that attends to this deepening—this freedom is the discovery of a new time in the depths of the body-mind integral, a time that has been obscured for long, making us severely short-sighted. The curtailment of vision has thinned out our lives and especially education. What should have been a primary consideration in education—the possible ways of regarding space and time—had been systematically pushed out of sight by Kantianism and the Kantian approach to science. One remaining thing needs to be said at this point that might help throw light on the pages to come, and that concerns the proper relationship between the mind and the body. [The] union of mind and body is not the uniting of two realities which could exist apart— the body without the mind would have no duration, and the mind without the body would have no efficiency. If there were no bodies there would be no minds, and if there were no mind there could be no body, no carrying over of the past into the present activity, no living universe. Each of us is a living soul in a material body. At every actual moment of present existence our activity is determined by the universe of

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objects which exist in that moment, one of which objects is our body. But this reality has no duration, at the limit it is a cross-section through the universe and is instantaneous. But we are also a continuity of the past moving into the future, this is our mind which endures. It holds the successive moments of our acted past in memory. We can give no meaning to mind in terms of materialism except by metaphor, for it is not spatial or extended. These two kinds of reality unite in the ever-present moment of living experience.42

The reciprocal relationship of the two parts of our being must be highlighted in a pedagogy oriented toward the awakening of intuition. Bodies exist only in conjunction with minds and minds in conjunction with bodies. The one without the other has no enduring reality. Matter and consciousness are always bound in a whole. Universal activity is made possible through the presence of bodies, but consciousness introduces duration without which activity would be fleeting and random like the collision of two space rocks. The reality of instantaneousness is given a shape through the enduring of consciousness and memory. Consciousness cannot be grasped in terms of matter, nor can matter be truly represented in the mind.43 Both exceed each other, and to proceed to grasp either in terms of the other is merely to generate paradoxes. The attempt of knowledge to understand these in isolation leads only to fresh complications and not to emancipatory wisdom or praxis. A phenomenological space-time must be birthed at the core of experience, and this birthing of the integral is the primary and ultimate task of education, which must act as the psychosomatic mid-wife in this process. This is creation, and intuition is the first step to the creative dimension. Of course, what most people witnessing this debate, and involved in it, missed was the fact that the two great minds were talking about two different aspects of reality—Einstein was concerned with expressed reality 42 Ibid.,

pp. 86–87. Carr has clarified: “What then is a perception? What is it that my mind receives or has when there comes to consciousness the direct knowledge of something external which I call my perception of an object? A perception is not something added to reality, nor is it something of the mind projected upon the object, nor is it something of the object projected toward the mind, it is a selection from reality. It is selection which gives to the perception its distinctness and individuality. The means of selection is my body, which is organised to exclude the influences radiated on it from the infinite universe, except only in so far as they concern my actions.” Ibid., p. 92. 43 Professor

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and its interrelations, whereas Bergson was interested in the unbroken continuity that lay prior to objectification.44 This latter was better captured as a kind of élan vital that underlay different frames of reference. “This impulse, he argued, was interwoven throughout the universe giving life an unstoppable impulse and surge, ever productive of new unexpected creations, and imperfectly grasped by science. Although science could only deal with it imperfectly, it was the backbone of artistic and creative work. Bergson’s influence on literature was seen as spreading to Gertrude Stein, T. S. Elliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and numerous others….”45 A tragic opposition was thus introduced between two aspects of the same reality which continue to haunt us today. Instead of trying to find a way to see these two approaches as complementary, Bergson was accused of insurgency against reason. What should have been regarded as AND (this and that) became OR (this or that). This dichotomizing tendency in the so-called human has been the bane of cultures. The time of Einstein and the time of Bergson were addressing two different problems. The former was a purely formal (mathematical) understanding of the relations between expressed objects and their states of motion, whereas the latter was an attempt to understand change from the lived point of view that led to creative action and freedom. This highly stimulating debate between two great minds is utilized here to better understand the time dimension and interpreted in terms of what implications these might hold for education and pedagogical relations. Next I will take up for discussion the second major thinker to adorn the pages of this book, that is the twentieth-century philosopher Maurice

44 “Einstein’s and Bergson’s contributions appeared to their contemporaries forcefully at odds, representing two competing strands of modern times. Vitalism was contrasted against mechanization, creation against ratiocination, and personality against uniformity. During these years, Bergson’s philosophy was often placed next to the first in these pairs of terms; Einstein’s work frequently appeared alongside the second. Bergson was associated with metaphysics, antirationalism, and vitalism, the idea that life permeates everything. Einstein with their opposites: with physics, rationality, and the idea that the universe (and our knowledge of it) could stand just as well without us. Each man represented one side of salient, irreconcilable dichotomies that characterized modernity. This period consolidated a world largely split into science and the rest. What is unique about the appearance of these divisions and subsequent incarnations is that after the Einstein and Bergson encounter, science frequently appeared firmly on one side of the dichotomy. Other areas of culture appeared on the other side—including philosophy, politics, and art.” In Canales, op. cit., p. 7. 45 Ibid.

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Merleau-Ponty, and on whose phenomenological work this book relies for its methodological approach. Merleau-Ponty is best known for his work on the phenomenology of perception and the question of embodiment in clarifying the relation between the objective world and the experienced world.46 A leading and widely influential thinker of post-war France, Merleau-Ponty was in turn influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, as well as by the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. He attempted to guide philosophy past the systemic and the formal-analytical mode toward engagement with direct perceptual experience. Making a clear distinction between incremental knowledge and philosophical knowledge, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Philosophy does not raise questions and does not provide answers that would little by little fill in the blanks. The questions are within our life, within our history: they are born there, they die there, if they have found a response, more often than not they are transformed there.”47 Further, Philosophy does not take the context as given; it turns back upon it in order to seek the origin and the meaning of the questions and of the responses and the identity of him who questions, and it thereby gains access to the interrogation that animates all the questions of cognition, but is of another sort than they. Our ordinary questions—“Where am I?” “What time is 46 “Phenomenology is remarkable for its introductions not only of itself but also of the world to which it returns us. Here we need a beginning which will catch or fetch out a sense of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relation between language and the world and simultaneously convey this preoccupation as an expression of the crisis in philosophy in the same manner that Husserl considered that concern to be an authentic introduction to phenomenology. Such a beginning seems necessary because I see in Merleau-Ponty’s work, from beginning to end, a critique of the two principal techniques of reason, namely, the analytic method of experimental science and the structuralist method of the human sciences through which the tradition of rationalism dominates the world by removing the responsible subject of human history. The success of Western science and its industrial organization is, as Weber and Marx showed, the result of an asceticism at the roots of the positivist mode of rationality. The methodological and technical success of Western science rests, as Husserl observes, upon a residual concept of reason which excludes any treatment of the problems of reason. But these observations form part of the self-criticism of the ideal of phenomenology as a rigorous science begun by Husserl himself and, as I believe, adopted as the working principle of Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology.” “Translator’s Introduction,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Transl.) John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. xxvi–xxvii. 47 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Transl.) Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 105.

42  K. ROY it?”— are the lack and the provisional absence of a fact or of a positive statement, holes in a fabric of things or of indicatives that we are sure is continuous, since there is a time, a space, and since the only question is at what point of this space and of this time we are. Philosophy, at first sight, only generalizes this type of question. When it asks if space, if time, if movement, if the world exist, the field of the question is more ample, but like the natural question it is still but a semi-question, included within a fundamental faith: there is something, and the only question is if it is really this space, this time, this movement, this world that we think we see or feel.48

Unlike the physical domain where one might arrive at sought for answers in an incremental manner, a phenomenological inquiry into time, for instance, does not enlighten us in a piecemeal manner. Here, the interrogation cuts past the tumult of phenomena bringing us to the source of active life within us, to our own perceptual history, like a piece of great music that rolls us back upon ourselves, creating a clearing within, wherein the question can take proper shape and meaning. Thus, the inquiry itself is transformed as it finds its way to the zone of existential flow in the clearing where there is “open wondering” rather than meeting some hard agenda pre-formed and aimed at conclusions. Unlike physical inquiry, philosophy does not take the context of its question for granted as background truth. Rather, it turns on that very “background,” questioning the assumptions that gave rise to the inquiry in the first place. The metaphysical question thus goes to the source of that which “animates” all questions of perception. The unit of analysis is perception. In actuality, it is perception questioning itself, thus deepening and broadening the channels of active life. In sum, philosophy interrogates the perceptual faith—but neither expects nor receives an answer in the ordinary sense, because it is not the disclosing of a variable or of an unknown invariant that will satisfy this question, and because the existing world exists in the interrogative mode. Philosophy is the perceptual faith questioning itself about itself. One can say of it, as of every faith, that it is a faith because it is the possibility of doubt, and this indefatigable ranging over the things, which is our life, is also a continuous interrogation. It is not only philosophy, it is first the look that questions the things.49 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.,

p. 103.

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Unlike empirical knowledge, say of the scientific kind, that seeks answers to questions and is satisfied by finding them, philosophical questions deepen and broaden the nature of asking itself. The questions themselves undergo questioning as to their realm and condition of their possibility. We do not have a consciousness constitutive of the things, as idealism believes, nor a preordination of the things to the consciousness, as realism believes (they are indiscernible in what interests us here, because they both affirm the adequation of the thing and the mind)—we have with our body, our senses, our look, our power to understand speech and to speak, measurants (mesurants) for Being, dimensions to which we can refer it, but not a relation of adequation or of immanence. The perception of the world and of history is the practice of this measure, the reading off of their divergence or of their difference with respect to our norms. If we are ourselves in question in the very unfolding of our life, it is not because a central non-being threatens to revoke our consent to being at each instant; it is because we ourselves are one sole continued question, a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions. The very questions of curiosity or those of science are interiorly animated by the fundamental interrogation which appears naked in philosophy.50

What is revealed through phenomenological inquiry is not some new variable, or an action of one variable upon another. Nor do we receive any answers in the conventional sense in terms of mental representation. The inquiry connects us to the larger interrogative state in which the universe presents itself to consciousness due to the basic asymmetry between perceiver and perceived of which we have spoken earlier. In other words, what we experience are not answers (symbolic strings) but more intense states and levels of being. The endless questioning look that life casts upon itself—a perpetual doubt that says: “what is this?”— is in itself a faith. Unlike both idealism and realism that seek points of convergence (“adequation”) between thought and the thing, phenomenological inquiry uncovers the ways in which reality escapes us, alerting us to the excess that overflows the mental constructions and categories. This is important because in this gap lies the possibility of a new upsurge of the world. There is renewed contact with the pre-conceptual

50 Ibid.

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or with the essence of things. It stands to reason then that special areas of inquiry such as scientific questions are not something novel and independent, but are born of the basic stance of fundamental interrogation that consciousness bears toward the phenomenal constellations that we call the world. In showing the divergence between physics and the being of Physis, between biology and the being of life, what is at issue is to effect the passage from being in itself, the objective being, to the being of the Lebenswelt--And this passage already indicates that no form of being can be posited without reference to the subjectivity, that the body has a Gegenseite of consciousness, that it is psycho-physical-- When coming to the incarnate subjectivity of the human body, which I continue to refer to the Lebenswelt, I must find something that is not the “psychic” in the sense of psychology (that is, a Gegenabstraktion to Nature in itself, the Nature of the blosse Sachen), I must reach a subjectivity and an intersubjectivity, a universe of Geist that, if it not be a second nature, nonetheless has its solidity and its completeness, but has this solidity and completeness still in the mode of the Lebenswelt--That is, I must also, across the objectifications of linguistics, of logic, rediscover the Lebenswelt logos.51

In distinguishing between the interrogation of the outer form— physics, biology, etc.—and the recognition of elemental consciousness, phenomenological inquiry must retrace the passage between being-initself and the lifeworld against which specific beings are objectivized. In other words, the inquiry must uncover in experience the movement between essence and things. But this must not be in psychologistic terms—phenomenology is not psychology. It is not concerned with affective maps and non-physical movements in the so-called psyche. Phenomenological experience is a solid reality, just as solid and complete as the world of objects, but different. Phenomenology stands distanced from both the physiological and the psychological, with a new kind of sensibility that is not some shadow world, but both firm and definite. And it is distanced from both by means of a different time—duration. It moves from the logos to the lifeworld, and back to the logos in duration. Its key nature is interrogation, stopping at nothing. It allows us to pedagogically rethink everything, refusing the haste of foreclosure.

51 Ibid.,

pp. 166–167.

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Let us take an example. The root metaphor of cultural modernity is development, which is also a foreclosure—of many other ways of being and understandings. It is a temporal concept. Development is largely nothing but a process of speeding up, of increasing velocity, and consequently also of rapid forgetfulness. We are encouraged to forget so that the “new” stuff can come in. The hustlers of modernism implicitly assume this to be some kind of “humanizing” effort. It is as though by speeding up things we are somehow getting closer to where and what we ought to be. It is as though the essence of “humanity” was speed, and slowness in all matters was to be despised. In this is hidden the greatest of ironies. At each succeeding stage, we try to get away from what was considered “human” at an earlier stage, only to reject it in turn. In other words, we rush toward the inhuman in our effort to humanize. The defenders of acceleration will say that this is heuristics, and successive approximations get us where we want to be. This argument is obviously a specious one. There is no agreement on where we are supposed to be, there never has been, that is, apart from this rush to nowhere. Phenomenological approach is particularly useful in such a situation because it is free of sentiment, even of the scientific kind. It does not proceed by giving arbitrary content to an equally arbitrary label called the human. Instead, it interrogates whatever is presented in consciousness at any given moment in order to disclose its true existential potential or relational duration. The phenomenological method is not only appropriate for the understanding of lived time but also proper for inquiry into the larger question of its relation to the pedagogic situation and educational experience with which we are concerned here. Unlike a cat, which is born more or less into full cat-ness, the organic complex referred to as the human is not born into fullness. There is a progression through which it seems to acquire capabilities and self-consciousness. Hence, time, or progressive change, becomes the horizon of the experience of being. Memory of the past is projected into an imaginary future as a structure of expectancy gradually settles into a nucleus of cogent continuity. The latter begins to hang events on the peg of this imagined continuity, and succession or external time begins to become entrenched. We have to be careful of this mechanical succession that invades everything including, and especially, education. The latter begins to be dominated by external time obstructing the contact with the source flow of experience. After a period, all pedagogic contact is lost with the pre-temporal, giving rise to

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the sense that chronic time by which everything is planned and projected is all there is. The pedagogic task lies in reversing this and bringing back into consideration the non-temporal, letting it stand side by side with the temporal. This is no easy task, and hence, there is the acute need for a proper investigation that brings out the different aspects of the problem, as attempted here. This is not a matter of finding solutions to a problem; rather, the solution exists within a deeper understanding of the problem itself that deconstructs the problem. Phenomenology as method without a method that proceeds by looking critically at its own process is ideally suited to look into the experience called education. Something needs to be said regarding the content and progression of chapters. Chapter 2 sets the context by giving an overview of historical conceptions of time beginning with a discussion on the distinction between chronos and aion of the Greeks. Aristotle and St. Maximus are invoked. This is followed by the Pauline notion of Kairos or messianic time. For Paul, worldly time or chronos is to be seen as the time of confusion; one must learn to leave it behind in order to prepare to enter into the time of the Now in which a new kind of life begins—the life of hōs mē or “as not.” One lives each thing as not having experienced or possessed it, that is, through the negation of every positivity. This suspension of positivity or revocation of temporal content (katargesis) brings about a state of being in which our relation with the world is fundamentally altered. Serious consideration of the possibility of this new state untouched by temporal formations contributes to the pedagogy of intuition that was discussed earlier. Next, there is the Thomist notion of aeviternity. Poised between time and eternity, Thomas Aquinas’s aeviternity or aevum is closer to the timeless while yet permitting change and becoming. In other words, aeviternal time is seen as the ontological and existential matrix within which beings (creative differences) make their appearance. Aquinas’s descriptions and discussion draw us into a view of reality that is close in proximity to Bergson’s notion of creative duration as the matrix of emergence. Finally, there is the discussion of Henri Bergson and duration. Duration is ontological time that is not time of the clock or mechanical succession. It is an existential flow whose compressions and elaborations produce material life. All of these notions help to dislodge us from the conventional manner of viewing time and pedagogically prepare us toward building a creative intuition. Chapter 3 introduces the phenomenological possibility and condition of intuition. Among the Greeks, two kinds of intuitions are obtainable.

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The first is non-rational intuition consisting of intimations of mystical essences that lie beyond ordinary cognition. Plato and Socrates are mostly concerned with this kind, with almost every dialogue touching upon the question of essences—of justice, goodness, language, and so on. Although the Platonic dialogues are every bit logical in their approach to the inquiry at hand, they are never very far from the spiritual dimension. Aristotle, on the other hand, looks to intuition or direct knowledge as the way in which empirical knowledge can be founded. But even here, nous (intuitive knowledge) is acknowledged as superior to empirical knowledge. The method of intuition is distinct from the method of science in that the latter attempts to piece together reality by apprehending the parts and making a mosaic out of the parts, whereas intuition begins with the whole and finds meaning of the parts only in the context of the whole. For Kant, we cannot directly know or contact the world of nature. We construct our reality with the mental categories that are built into our perceptual schema. Kant dismisses the possibility of direct or intuitive knowledge. Consequently, Kant leaves us with more questions than answers. For example, nothing in the Kantian schema is able to solve the puzzle of the subject (consciousness) that contemplates or wonders about the nature of knowledge (world) itself, as we are doing just now. Going beyond Kant, what could be a more adequate starting point of inquiry that helps us to directly grasp our relation to the world? The starting point here is the body and the corpus sensorium which is the most intimate thing to us. “If we fix the whole attention of our mind on this life of ours as we live it, if we realize to ourselves our life as it is being lived, we get an intuition of reality, that is to say not a thought of it, not a perception or conception of it as an object, but a consciousness of the actual life we are living as we live it.” This is how Wildon Carr, the famous Bergsonian thinker, puts it, in regard to the development of intuition, which alone can put us in direct contact with the world. Chapter 4 is presented in the form of one long conversation between teachers about time, perception, theory, and the work of the teacher. It is edited and reconstructed out of several discussions held over a period. The free and open conversation has the advantage of proceeding phenomenologically and hermeneutically, making small corrections along a multiplicity of viewpoints and existential stances, but always aiming toward getting beyond the arbitrary boundaries set up through reductionism, and breaking through the wall that convention and intellectual lethargy has erected. The sense is that this kind of conversation or

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dialogue ought to be at the heart of emancipatory education, but unfortunately, that is rarely the case. A few lines are excerpted from the dialogue as example: Teacher 3: There must occur in our work a becoming-theory of each moment of perception. Teacher 2: Yes, yes, I like that…a becoming-theory. Each embodied and lived truth moves toward a kind of connected deepening and widening, and in turn existing theory is tested against this ever deepening scenario. Teacher 1: Then it becomes second nature to frame perception against theory. Teacher 2: No, no, not second, but I suggest first nature! It must become the most natural thing to theorize perception as we go along. We can’t compartmentalize our lived life from education, and then all on a sudden become theoretical…………………. : : Teacher 3: I think an alert consciousness, which has been helped to wake up from its usual sluggish take-for-granted manner of going about its business may experience moments of strangeness that it cannot identify. These are qualitative moments that cannot be associated readily with any symbol or representation, and are usually dismissed as inconsequential. Teacher 2: A difficult point rather well described. We could not put this thought-sensation into anyone unless it was already present in some nascent form, covered over by the dominant form of consciousness… the dominant form of consciousness being driven by time of the clock. But a qualitative moment is outside of clock-time.

As the conversation deepens, there appears between the participants a new aesthetic of becoming that links time, creativity, and the intuitive dimension. Chapter 5 formulates a geometry of propositions from the immanent perspective developed in earlier pages. Here, the so-called human is nothing other than a terrain, a set of boundaries and topological limits within which interchange between anonymous forces take place continuously, creating and modifying affective states. The problem of maximizing vision on this terrain invites the geometric method of propositions that is able to stretch beyond itself and point to something beyond language. In Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the geometric method put to the

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most effective use. Deleuze comments: “The geometric method ceases to be a method of intellectual exposition; it is no longer a means of professorial presentation but rather a method of invention. It becomes a method of vital and optical rectification. If man is somehow distorted, this torsion effect will be rectified by connecting it to its causes more geometrico. This optical geometry traverses the entire Ethics.” The geometric method is an attempt to present a force of logic that moves toward an invention rather than exposition that takes the turn toward praxis rather than description. The construction of these propositions here relies principally on Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Matter and Memory, aiming to generate a praxeological framework that can intercalate with teacher experience that follows in the next chapter. Together these demonstrate why the insights into time and intuition are pedagogically invaluable, and how their proper understanding could make important contribution to teacher lives and teaching practice as well as help in the emergence of a different kind of pedagogical rationality. Chapter 6 deals with teacher biographical data analyzed through a temporal lens. It borrows narratives from existing works and attempts to show the effects of a fixed notion of time and the manner in which it dominates teacher consciousness. But more, by means of biographic deconstruction, it shows how the intuition of a different order of time might enter the existing dynamic. Understanding time and temporal relationships becomes key to transcending convention and tradition, and moving toward what we might call biographical praxis. And the first thing that enters the picture is the need for a careful deconstruction of accumulated experience that brings to the fore the distinction between fragmented time and time as whole. A single wave of intelligent movement might manage a whole complex effort rather than seeing it as a sequence of discrete tasks. Shifting our attention along these lines, if, by a certain effort of insight if we are able to swing our focus to the inner duration, then the multitude of tasks facing a teacher no longer seems daunting. This is not to trivialize the challenges faced by the teacher, but “time-management” will always appear nerve-wracking seen from the side of the multitudinous succession of tasks. Durational awareness does not apprehend reality in terms of succession of broken-up pieces or as lists; rather, it encounters the real as intensity. It is the intensity that manages it as single movement. Chapter 7 deals with the emergence of creative intuition. The process of getting out of the temporalizing habit, that is, manufacturing a

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world through temporal synthesis, is a process of dis-adjustment, which is the first, but by no means an easy, step. We begin by questioning and de-valorizing clock time. This does not mean that we stop living by clock time—that is absurd and obviously impossible. It means that we become critical of it through a process of careful observation in which the immediate data of our consciousness begins to surface. It is the immediate data of consciousness that learns to resist chronic time and not some mental decision to do so. But what is immediate data of consciousness? Behind the uniformity of social chatter and cultural pulls and pushes that organize the mental plane, there is a continual upsurge of pre-representational flow that has no name or image. Once past convention and entrenched habit, we can become intuitively attuned to this flow. Our task is to learn to pay attention to this flow unmanaged and unmediated by the concept. This is the intuitive turn. Such a book as this one invites the reader to carry out an elaborate experiment with herself or himself as the theater of experiment in the context of teaching. The act of teaching must be merged with this ongoing experiment that directly involves ourselves and our bodies. The latter are our own primary laboratories that must not be underestimated with regard to their transformative capacity. The possibility of micro-phenomenological praxis is the premise on which this book is based and presented to the reader. The “business-as-usual” mode of ordinary consciousness fashioned out of the temporal order of things must be disrupted to come upon a new use of the self.

References Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” originally published in German as “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper.” Annalen der Physik, Vol. 322, No. 10, 1905. Retrieved from http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_1905_relativity.pdf. Dwayne Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality.” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26:S1, pp. 324–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00405848709543294. E. Husserl, Meditations Cartesiennes (Transl.) Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Colin, 1931). H. Edward Thompson III, “The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry.” Interchange, Vol. 28, Nos. 2–3, 1997, pp. 219–230.

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H. Wildon Carr, Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914). Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Leon Jacobson, “Translator’s Preface.” In Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity with Reference to Einstein’s Theory (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Transl.) Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1965). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Transl.) Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Transl.) John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Transl.) Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1979). Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988). St. Augustine, Confessions (Transl.) F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943). Tatyana Fedosova, “Reflection of Time in Postmodern Literature.” Athens Journal of Philology, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 77–87. https://doi. org/10.30958/ajp.2-2-1.

CHAPTER 2

A Vocabulary of Time

It must be stated at the outset that even as we broadly use the word “time” we will be less concerned in this chapter with new or emergent theories of time and time that governs external sequences and simultaneities. Ever since the advent of relativity theory, the enigmas around time have attracted a lot of attention and debate. These debates are not our focus here since these relate mainly to extensity and material relations. We take time of mechanical succession only as a point of departure and are concerned rather with the phenomenological (not psychological or empirical) experience of time or time as generative interiority. Our present context, which is teachers and teaching, justifies this approach— it is the phenomenology of time that mainly concerns us, and not the formal geometries, time dilations, accelerated systems, or systems of translations that invite scientific debate. Rather, our effort will be to demonstrate the centrality of time-duration for existence, and in this context present some select concepts from antiquity that are crucial to understanding and deepening the connection between temporality and being. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty begins the chapter on temporality with an epitaph from Claudel: “Le temps est le sens de la vie” (time is the meaning of life); or, the essence of life is time. In Being and Time, Heidegger expressed a similar idea when he wrote that time is the horizon of being. In so far as we are even enabled to speak of the “meaning” of existence, its puzzle lies in time. Why or how so? Let us begin from the other end—let us start our deliberations on this question with a © The Author(s) 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9_2

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minor excursus on the nature of embodied consciousness itself. It is from there that we can establish the horizon for understanding the experience of time. I will introduce a Spinozist view to lay the ground, for in the history of philosophy, there are few who better understood the problem of embodied consciousness than Baruch Spinoza, and, in turn, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza presented below is one of the most useful ones for our purpose here. The fact is that consciousness is by nature the locus of an illusion. Its nature is such that it registers effects, but it knows nothing of causes. The order of causes is defined by this: each body in extension, each idea or each mind in thought are constituted by the characteristic relations that subsume the parts of that body, the parts of that idea. When a body “encounters” another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. And this is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature.1

Say, when we feel despondent or we feel happy, we imagine that an object or situation (their presence or their lack) is the cause or promoter of the particular state. Our idea of cause generally stops there. But this is not really an adequate understanding of the situation, for it does not tell us how discrete phenomena can affect, in this case, inner states. Spinoza teaches us that a body is a relation or a set of relations, and when it meets another body or set of relations, they combine favorably or disfavorably to produce a new or modified extensionality. Change occurs incessantly through the meeting of bodies, and the order of causes is, therefore, in actuality, the entering into composition or decomposition with other bodies. This, in general, affects everything, including affective states. Hence, the statement that we only know effects, but have little awareness of causes, is importantly indicative of the performative state of consciousness. For,

1 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Transl.) Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 19.

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As conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. We are in a condition such that we only take in “what happens” to our body, “what happens” to our mind, that is, the effect of a body on our body, the effect of an idea on our idea. But this is only our body in its own relation, and our mind in its own relation, and the other bodies and other minds or ideas in their respective relations, and the rules according to which all these relations compound with and decompose one another; we know nothing of all this in the given order of our knowledge and our consciousness. In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their real causes.2

Each performative instant consciousness is produced through subsumption or absorption of the greater into the lesser or the other way around. We are typically not aware of this process but are aware of the order of its effects. The order of effects breeds succession and change and gives rise to time as measure. This external time as measure reveals nothing about causes but leads to “billiard ball” run of effects. In speaking of the meaning of life, Claudel earlier was not referring to this kind of time of the registration of effects. It is in the composition and decomposition according to complex laws, that is, in the order of causes that the meaning of change resides.3 This inward or lived time runs in a different direction and has been intuited by different cultures and minds differently. The Greeks called the a-chronic time Aion, Paul the Apostle alluded to the time of ending as Kairos, Thomas Aquinas referred to an in-between time as Aeviternity, the philosopher Henri Bergson called the embodied process of change Duration, and so on. It is not being claimed that these different notions of time are somehow identical, but they do indicate the awareness of a divergent and non-homogeneous experience of time that was not external succession. The importance of the diverse experience of time to the pedagogic process is, as will be shown, incomparably profound and hence its discussion relevant to education. 2 Ibid. 3 It

is not the case that the causes we are speaking of are merely invisible and submit to the same order of time. As we trace the causes back and back, they regress into rarer and rarer experiential domains till we are left with no traces of them as temporal phenomena. At that point, time gives way to something entirely different.

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Chronos and Aion Let us begin with the well-known distinction drawn by the ancient Greeks between Chronos and Aion. Although this distinction is found everywhere in Greek myth and literature, in philosophy and cosmology, the difference itself is understood and used differently by different historical users at different periods, moving and evolving over a long period of time. For example, Dionysius writes: Scripture does not call eternal [aion] [only] things that are altogether and absolutely ingenerate and eternal, and imperishable, immortal, immutable, and so forth. For instance, there is “Rise up, you eternal gates” (Ps. 24:7, 9), and the like. Often it calls things that are very ancient by the designation of eternity, or, again, it sometimes designates as eternity [aion] the entire span of our own time, inasmuch as it is characteristic of eternity to be ancient, immutable, and to measure the whole of being. … Moreover the Scriptures sometimes praise temporal eternity and eternal time [aionios chronos]. Yet we know that more properly they discuss and denote by eternity the things that are, and by time the things that come to be. It is necessary therefore to understand that the things called eternal are not simply co-eternal [synaidia] with God who is before eternity. Following without deviation the sacred Scriptures, one must take such things as both eternal and temporal, in the ways appropriate to them, and as between the things that are and those that come to be; that is, as things which in one way partake of eternity, and in another of time.4

“Rise up, you eternal gates” seems to be oxymoronic; In that, it suggests the possibility of movement in the eternal. Dionysius further notes that although, properly speaking, aion indicates the absolutely immutable, that is, in which there is no change and therefore no time, the Scriptures use notions such as “temporal eternity” as well as “eternal time” suggesting that things may not be as clear cut as one might imagine. That is to say, there are beings that partake of time as well as eternity, in different measures according to their nature, as we shall see further on. In Plato, we observe yet another form of the distinction: Plato implicitly distinguishes two kinds of eternity (aion): that of the sensible world, which is derivative and temporally extended, and the “eternity remaining in unity” of its intelligible model. He clarifies the difference 4 Dionysius the Areopagite, retrieved from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/dionysius/works. html;10.3.937C-940A.

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by adding that terms such as “was” and “will be” apply properly only to the sensible world, whereas only “is” is appropriately said of its intelligible model (37e-38a). Undoubtedly these statements are to be read against the background of Plato’s general distinction between the being of the Forms and the becoming of the sensible world. Nowhere in the Timaeus, however, is there any explanation of what it means to say that intelligible reality is alive, indeed a “Living Creature,” or how we are to understand the relationship between its life and its eternal being.5

There is a kind of extended eternity that pertains to the sensible world or the world of becoming—not to a particular becoming, but to becoming and progressive fulfillment as a whole. And there is the absolute unity of eternity in which there is only an is-ness, an undying being-in-thepresent. As for whether this intelligible reality is “alive,” it is really an unnecessary question, for such dualities and distinctions (alive or not) belong to a part reality and are meaningless from the point of view of the Platonic eternal. Aristotle added a phenomenological angle at the very outset of his theory of time by raising the question of the perceiver. Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted. But if nothing but soul, or in soul reason, is qualified to count, there would not be time unless there were soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if movement can exist without soul, and the before and after are attributes of time, and time is these qua numerable.6

Who perceives time? Is time independent of the perceiver? Can time exist without anyone to observe movement and change? But non-being or non-existence cannot really be philosophically imagined. Hence, Aristotle’s question is somewhat puzzling. A mutual co-arising would be a much better way to think about it. The above passage only makes sense if one uses it loosely in order to make a distinction between time and duration. Time exists on either side of duration—as before and after. 5 David Bradshaw, “Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Vol. 70, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 311–366. 6 Aristotle, Physics (Ed.) W. D. Ross (Oxford Clarendon, 1936), pp. 223a, 21–29.

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Out of the philological tumult and the rich and confusing diversity, a basic distinction seems to have survived and passed on to the lexes of many contemporary languages that owe (at least in part) their source to the Greek language. Thus, “Αἰών and χρόνος are present in the vocabularies of many modern European languages, including English. Apart from its technical meanings in geology and astronomy, aeon/eon has the following significations in modern English: an age of the universe, an immeasurable period of time; the whole duration of the world, or of the universe….”7 Further, The Ancient Greek word chronos is preserved in English as a constituent of a number of words, such as chronicle, chronological, chronometer, synchronise, etc., which all have time as their common denominator. There are, however, 27 entries (excluding phrasal usages and combinations) on “time” in the Oxford English Dictionary. In its generalised sense, which I think is applicable to all the above mentioned usages of -chron(o)- in English, “time” is defined as “a continuous measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the present to the future”. In a more restricted sense, it refers to “duration conceived as beginning and ending with the present life or material universe; finite duration as distinct from eternity” (OED, “time” 26). Let me pause at this distinction between finite and measurable duration of time (chronos) and the infinite and immeasurable duration of eternity (eon), because it is a conception that we, again, owe to ancient Greek culture.8

The sense of eternity posed by aion is not an endless chronological time but a different order of time that has nothing to do with length, or measure, or continuity. In other words, Aion cannot be understood in terms of Chronos. “It was Plato who in his dialogue Timaeus (37D38E) clearly differentiated between, on one hand, the eternity (αἰών) of the ideal being, which is a tenseless, immovable ‘always’, and, on the other, its ‘moving image’, the time of the world (χρόνος), which is created together with the world and is measured according to the movements of the sun…[and the] planets.”9 The semantic value of the

7 Sandra Scepanovic, “Αἰών and χρόνος: Their Semantic Development in the Greek Poets and Philosophers Down to 400 BC,” Thesis, Jesus College, 2011, p. 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 4.

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word αἰών has been shown by Benveniste and others to correspond to the Vedic Sanskrit ayu or Indo-European aiw indicating a “source de vitalité” or vital force. Thus, “αἰών formerly signified ‘life’, originally in the sense of ‘vital force’, ‘vitality’, and then also in a more general sense, implying both quality and quantity of existence and occasionally bordering on the sense of ‘destiny’ (as allotted duration/content of life). Χρόνος [on the other hand] denoted exclusively ‘period of time’ in early epic poetry.”10 Here, we find the surest equation between aion and the essence of life. The etymological root of time is derived from the PIE da “to cut up.” Time is the cutting up of the flow of existence that gives rise to discrete and independent-appearing phenomena. When cut up, time appears objectively as mechanical succession of contractions. When not thus cut up, it remains as the “always,” as the ever-present totality in the instant. Chronos lives side by side with Aion without the two intersecting. Chronos as principle inaugurates knowledge by the cutting up of the immanent flow of the vital source. Undivided being, which is the annulment of time, cannot be presupposed within the cutting up. This is frequently alluded to in the aphorisms of Heraclitus, for example, in which we find references to the single thing that conducts all things through everything. Aristotle also tells us that αἰών “was divinely uttered by the ancients” (παρὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων) and we have seen that Heraclitus explicitly ascribes divine power (βασιληίη) to his αἰών in B52. This implies that αἰών was imagined as an active force, whose influence people felt or observed. Pindar represents αἰών as having influence both in the realm of individual existence (N. 2. 7f.) and on a more general level, where it approaches the sense of “time” (I. 3. 18, I. 8. 14f.). However, he uses χρόνος in a similar way, namely as that which “directs” individual human fortunes (P. 1. 46, O. 13. 28) and brings about that which befalls us (N. 4. 43). I argued that it is through their association with destiny, which they deliver, that χρόνος and αἰών acquire these attributes of power and that, semantically, at the basis of these usages lies the sense of passage of time.11

While chronos was associated with cosmic regularities, aion came more and more to be associated with a force of necessity that was active not 10 Ibid., 11 David

p. 300. Bradshaw, op. cit., p. 351.

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in the sense of physical movement but in the sense of an active intelligence that was divine in nature, working at the inner core of existence, concerned with universal justice and logical necessity. It is interesting to note that modern usage has generally retained words associated with the root chronos, and rendered aion mostly as an archaism. As the search for true justice as ontological necessity was increasingly replaced by juridicality and justiciability, the politics of time as chronos pushed aside any serious reference to aion in the domain of thinking about social and cultural life. Following the Greeks, another important attempt to address the problem of time and change is found in the works of St. Maximus (590–662 AD) as expressed in the Ambigua. It is important to note that for Maximus eternity or “the life of the age to come,” although it is without movement, is not a static condition but is ordered toward fulfillment in God. Maximus elaborates this theme extensively elsewhere. He speaks of the state of the blessed as one of “ever-moving stability” (aeikinetos stasis) and “stable sameness-in-motion” (stasimon tauto kinesian). It takes place in “the infinity around God,” a region which, although it is uncreated, is yet infinitely transcended by God as its source. Maximus also describes this state as a participation in the divine activity (energia), although he is careful to explain that such participation in no way undermines—and indeed, is ultimately required by—creaturely self-determination. This “unmoving motion” of the blessed in the “infinity around God” would appear to be Maximus’s version of the perpetual progress of Gregory of Nyssa.12

In Maximus, eternity does not signify staticity, but a higher order movement toward fulfillment in God. That is to say, there is movement without movement. It is described as ever-moving stability to distinguish it from ordinary motion and change. It belongs to a region where space and time merge to produce an infinity around God. One who enters into this state participates in this state which is one of divine activity. The pedagogic moment in Maximus inheres in this potentiality, and participation in the infinity around God is blessedness and benediction. This eternity is not opposed to creaturely time but rather is the basis of it. “Maximus’s

12 Ibid.,

p. 350.

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fullest statement on this point occurs in the course of an allegorical interpretation of the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration. He takes them as figures, respectively, of time and nature, each appearing in order to pay homage to Christ.”13 Time paying homage to that which is beyond the temporal. Further, Moses is a particularly apt figure of time because he did not himself enter into the Holy Land with those he had escorted to it. Maximus explains: “For such is time, not overtaking or accompanying in movement those whom it is accustomed to escort to the divine life of the age to come. For it has Jesus as the universal successor of time and eternity. And if otherwise the logoi of time abide in God, then there is manifest in a hidden way the entry [into the Promised Land] of the law given through Moses in the desert to those who receive the land of possession. For time is eternity, when it ceases from movement, and eternity is time, whenever, rushing along, it is measured by movement; since by definition eternity is time deprived of movement, and time is eternity measured by movement.” Although Moses (time) does not enter into the Promised Land, the laws given through Moses—that is, the logoi of time—do so, inasmuch as they “abide in God.” Historically, the Law entered the Promised Land precisely to the extent that it was embodied within the practice and observance of the Israelites.14

In an allegory of time, Maximus uses the figure of Moses to illustrate how time escorts the being to the threshold of the divine life (the eternal) without entering it, just as Moses accompanied his tribe but did not himself enter the Holy Land. The Messiah (Jesus) takes on that role of universal successor of time and becomes the living mediation between time and eternity. Prophets are the harbingers of the time to come, but the Messiah signifies the ending of time and the opening to the eternal. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul mentions that in the Messiah, all laws become inoperative or are suspended, and thus, the ending of time becomes in actuality a time of the ending—a process of katargesis or suspension of the known.

13 Ibid. 14 I Corinthians 7:29–32 (Touto de phemi, adelphoi: ho Kairos synestalmenos estin to loipon hina kai hoi echontes gynaikas hos me echontes osin……paragei garto schema tou kosmou toutou).

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Kairos and Messianic Time The continuities between Egypt, Greece, and early Christianity need hardly to be emphasized. For instance, the notion of the Day of Judgment found in the Kemetian economy of the soul is passed on through the Greeks and into Coptic Christianity. The Day of Judgment is clearly a temporal notion—a collapse of chronos as division between past, present, and future. In a remarkable passage from I Corinthians, we find Paul writing: “This now I say brothers, time is shortened, and from now on that even those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. But I desire you to be without care.”15 The key pedagogical notion relates to the contracting of time which results in the revocation or hollowing out of each human action without proposing an alternate. Ordinary time with its characteristic progression connects things and seems to give some relevance and meaning. Consider the event called “having a child.” The process identified as having-a-child is a series inaugurated and borne out in time. In other words, time as succession and change is the main ingredient that connects the series that culminates in the event called having-a-child. This might sound strange to the unprepared ear, but in actuality, there is no way to ontologically connect the state that decides to have a child and the state that has the child. This is of course true for all external events connected through time. Putting this in the Pauline formula of “as not,” we have, “those having child as not having.” What could this mean? One can interrupt the illusion of continuity at any instantaneous frame by withdrawing psychological support for it. The messianic event is a powerful disruption of the illusion of continuity, a wave of energy that acts as an antidote to mechanical adherence to continuity. The raised consciousness now rolls each instant and its associated material state back onto itself. Hence, each thing or material state becomes its own negation. One might have something, but it is the same as not having it. There is no superior or inferior state here, but a pure equivalence. There is a simultaneous vocation and revocation, returning one to the primal state. To live in Kairos is to live in the negation of time as chronos, withdrawing from 15 Martin Heidegger, “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in V. Matthias Jung (Ed.), Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2011), p. 123.

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each externalized time-event and nullifying or emptying it of any significance. The “as not” or hōs mē is an important addition to the vocabulary of time coming out of the Pauline epistles. As time contracts into itself (signifying the eschatological ending), it is important to move away from the external contractions that make distinctions, or time-events by which we mark out our lives. Within Pauline framing, this is to recognize the passing away of the world and to enter without care (burden-free) into Kairos or a different order of time. The only path from chronos to Kairos here is through the negation of every positivity that chronos had brought forth. What is now at stake is a new fundamental comportment in regard to the hōs mē. This comportment has to be explicated according to the structure of how it is carried out. Whatever the meaning of real life, though this meaning is actual, it is lived hōs mē, as if not. … Noteworthy is I Corinthians 7:20. A person should remain in the calling he is in, the genesthai is a menein. … Here, a particular context of meaning is indicated: the relations to the surrounding environment do not receive their meaning from the significance of the content toward which they are directed, but rather the reverse, from this original carrying-out, the relation and the meaning of lived significance is determined. Schematically said: something remains unchanged but is radically changed nevertheless. …..That which is changed is not the meaning of the relation and even less so its content. These directions of meaning, toward the surrounding world, toward one’s calling, and toward that which one is, in no way determine the facticity of the Christian. Nevertheless, these relations are there, they are maintained, and thus first appropriated in an authentic manner.16 16 “[T]he hōs mē shows itself as a technical term essential to Pauline vocabulary and must be understood in its specificity on both the syntactic-grammatical and semantic levels. We should take note that in the Synoptic Gospels, the particle has serves an important function as an introductory term for messianic comparisons (for example, in Matt. 18:3: ‘unless you [man]… become as the children [hōs ta paidia]’; or in the negative, in Matt. 6:5: ‘thou shalt not be as the hypocrites’). What is the meaning of this comparison? Medieval grammarians did not interpret the comparative as an expression of identity or simple resemblance, but rather, in the context of the theory of intensive magnitudes, they interpreted the comparative as an (intensive or remissive) tension that sets one concept against another. To use our previous example, the concept man is thus set against the concept children in a way that does not presume any identification between the two terms. The Pauline hōs mē seems to be a special type of tensor, for it does not push a concept’s semantic field toward that of another concept.” In Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 24.

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We can derive a pedagogy of hōs mē (as not) from this. When a modification, of whatever kind, is inaugurated and culminates in a change in content (of consciousness), this change must be rolled back on to itself (i.e., negated or nullified); otherwise, it sediments, producing a false image, generating illusory configurations and meanings. In other words, one must return to one’s core after each modification or venturing, for the philosophy of hōs mē indicates that the directions of meaning proceeding from the world (change) toward myself do not determine my facticity. To put it schematically, in the midst of change there must remain the changeless for the sake of completion. The task of pedagogy therefore is not the endless pursuit of change, and the granting of sovereignty and independence to meanings and content derived from such modifications, but to balance the latter with the “as not.” The true meaning of the world (of change/time) is grasped only when countered with the as not, each vocation counteracted by a revocation. There arises every time a formal equivalence of a particular change with its negation—meaning that it really changes nothing essential in the world. Time changes nothing of essential value even while changing everything; it only redistributes variables and composites from one existential corner to another. The true transformation lies in Kairos, which is experienced only in the passing of chronos, that is, in dying to it. Thus, the philosophy of hōs mē adds incalculably to the vocabulary of time.17 Pedagogically, another useful addition to the vocabulary and viewing lens of time is the parable. Everyday language is linear, grammatically as well as semantically. It follows the arrow of time with the tenses maintaining temporal directionality. In other words, average language is faithful to chronos. Parable on the other hand, although partaking of language, indicates a very different thing. In the parable, the difference between the signum and res significa thus tend to annul itself without completely disappearing. In this sense, we can say that like the parable of the sower in Matthew, messianic parables are always parables on language, that is, on the representation of the kingdom in which not only are the kingdom and the terms of the parable placed next to one another (para-ballo), but the discourse on the kingdom and

17 Agamben,

op. cit., p. 43.

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the kingdom itself is also placed side by side, so that the understanding of the parable coincides with the logos tes basileias. In the messianic parable signum and res significa approximate each other because language itself is what is signified. This is undoubtedly the meaning-and unavoidable ambiguity--of Kafka’s parable and of every parable in general. If what has to happen in the parable is a passage beyond language, and if: according to Kafka, this is only possible by becoming language (“if you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables”), then everything hangs on the moment and manner in which the as becomes abolished.18

According to contemporary language theories, ordinary language is predicated on the gap between the signifier and the signified—the signifier points to the idea of the thing signified. The parable on the other hand tends toward closing the difference between the signifier and the signified. That is to say, the word tends toward the thing itself in an asymptotic relation. Further, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the messianic parable is a sowing of language (“…soweth the logos”), and hence prior to language in a sense, meaning that it makes the space for language to emerge. In pointing toward language, the parable denies any chronic development, turning back upon itself hermeneutically. Thus, the parable hollows out time/language, urging the follower-listener into a state that we might call a “becoming-parable.” The latter is a complete giving oneself up to the parable, to becoming the very site of the parable, which is essentially timeless. Thus, the pedagogy of the parable leads us deeper into an understanding of the problem of time and temporal distinction. Since time cannot be understood otherwise than in the practice of time, pedagogically, a third thing in the Pauline texts that allows us a glimpse of Kairos is klēsis or calling/vocation. Messianic klēsis or living in the messiah allows us the proper use of things and not ownership, including with regard to the klēsis itself. In other words, possession is meaningless here. For societal purposes, legal fictions are created through temporal means such as “owner,” “seller,” and “buyer.” But for the one in tune with Kairos, all this has to be negated and one must accept a totally new relation with the world that renders each ontological 18 “It is against this backdrop of a messianic vocation as conceived by Paul, that the Franciscan claim to a usus opposed to property acquires its meaning. In their faith to a principle of altissima paupertas that went against the prescriptions of the Curia, factions of spiritual Franciscans were not limited in refusing all forms of property.” Ibid., p. 27.

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and legal fiction inoperative. With respect to the world of objects and relations, we are only allowed chrēsis or use.19 Property (Latin proprius), originally meaning that which was proper to one’s own nature or quality, is excluded. Within messianic klēsis the original sense is maintained and there is no concept of possession of anything—the world is always passing. Hence, the possessive tying up of a subject to another, or to an object, with a juridical bonding cannot be phenomenologically recognized within the calling.20 Ontologically speaking, one series of continuous changes (the composite individual) cannot be exclusively tied to another series of changes (the so-called object) in any actual manner other than through a fictio legis or legal fiction. Therefore, non-possession is not some kind of moral or ethico-aesthetic act of renunciation; rather it is action in line with ontological necessity that points to the fact that one cannot own anything other than by falsifying one’s own actual state and projecting the falsification on to an objectified world. This falsification arises out of a mistaken identity that is a non-identity at the core of which is a misunderstanding of the nature of the world, time, and change. Toward a pedagogy of time, a proper phenomenological relation becomes crucial for an adequate insight into temporality. It cannot be understood abstractly. Finally, there is in Paul the time of the Now (ho nyn Kairos). In I Corinthians, we find “For we know only in part [ek merous gar gainoskomen], and we prophecy only in part; but when however should come the perfect [hotan de elthe to teleion], that which is in part will be made inoperative [to ek merous katargethesetai] … for presently we see through a glass in enigma [en ainigmati], but then we will see face to face [prosopon pros prosopon]. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, as I am fully known. Now faith, hope, and love dwell [menei pistis, elpis, agape] in these three; and the greatest of these is love [meizon de touton he agape].”21 According to Paul, the time of the now lasts until parousia or full presence. This must not be confused with Apocalypse or eschaton (last day), etc. Paul is not speaking 19 This does not mean, however, that one opposes societal norms or interferes with another’s possessions. 20 I Corinthians 13:9–13. 21 Ivan Illich writes, “Perhaps Thomas Aquinas can help clarify things. Thomas, in his unique and incredibly fragile way- I and some of my friends believe that Thomism is like a delicate vase, something glorious but apt to be broken when it is moved out of its

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about the ending of time but of the peculiar interval between time and its contraction. All temporary charismata in this interval—prophesies, tongues, knowledge—shall pass away at full presence (Parousia). But a triad of graces—faith, hope, and love—shall be blessed and have an everlasting duration appended to them. Of these is Love—the greatest of the graces that shall endure. Here, we have another development in the pedagogy of time. Between time and eternity there lies the potentiality of the continuous development of Love. Or, to put it the other way, through Love one can begin to intuit this strange interval between chronos and Kairos.

Thomas Aquinas and Aeviternity Reading Thomas Aquinas one is always happily struck by the pedagogic lengths to which he goes in order to communicate something, anticipating doubts, queries, and objections on the part of his readers, and integrating the painstaking response to each one, as he moves along his thesis. Scholars such as Ivan Illich testify to this deep penchant for clarity and lucidity.22 It is perhaps the very personification of “manuductio” (leading by the hand), a word used by Aquinas himself to describe the act of teaching. Aquinas certainly knew what it meant to lead by the hand at many and complex levels. I shall begin with a lengthy quote from his Summa Theologica—this uninterrupted passage becomes necessary to give a sense of his thoughts on the question of time. The subject

time - Thomas insists very strongly that you can think about timelessness only when you distinguish time not just from eternity, which has no beginning and end, but also from a third type of duration which he calls aevum. Aevum is the type of survival and togetherness for which you and I are destined. It has no end but I know that it had a beginning even if I can’t remember it precisely….Petrus Hispanus says that as people who live in the aevum, we sit on the horizon. The horizon is the line which divides us from nose to behind into two parts. One side sits in time, the other in the aevum. This is the sense I want to convey of our being a creature who lives in a now and forever which is contingent at every moment on the creative act of God. And with this the contemporary return to cyclical time, or to no time, or to living as if I were in a trance, has nothing in common.” In Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), p. 136. 22 St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae, L 10, C 6. Full text in the public domain at https://archive.org/details/SummaTheologiae.

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of time, especially the distinctions between ordinary time, eternity, and a duration in-between, deeply concerned Aquinas. Thus, he writes: Aeviternity differs from time, and from eternity, as the mean between them both. This difference is explained by some to in the fact that eternity has neither beginning nor end, aeviternity, a beginning but no end, and time both beginning and end. This difference, however, is but an accidental one, as was shown above, in the preceding article; because even if aeviternal things had always been, and would always be, as some think, and even if they might sometimes fail to be, which is possible to God to allow; even granted this, aeviternity would still be distinguished from eternity, and from time….[due to the] fact that eternity has no “before” and “after”; but that time has both, together with innovation and veteration; and that aeviternity has “before” and “after” without innovation and veteration. This theory, however, involves a contradiction; which manifestly appears if innovation and veteration be referred to the measure itself. For since “before” and “after” of duration cannot exist together, if aeviternity has “before” and “after,” it must follow that with the receding of the first part of aeviternity, the after part of aeviternity must newly appear; and thus innovation would occur in aeviternity itself, as it does in time. And if they be referred to the things measured, even then an incongruity would follow. For a thing which exists in time grows old with time, because it has a changeable existence, and from the changeableness of a thing measured, there follows “before” and “after” in the measure, as is clear from Phys. iv. Therefore the fact that an aeviternal thing is neither inveterate, nor subject to innovation, comes from its changelessness; and consequently its measure does not contain “before” and “after.” We say then that since eternity is the measure of a permanent being, in so far as anything recedes from permanence of being, it recedes from eternity. Now some things recede from permanence of being, so that their being is subject to change, or consists in change; and these things are measured by time, as are all movements, and also the being of all things corruptible. But others recede less from permanence of being, forasmuch as their being neither consists in change, nor is the subject of change; nevertheless they have change annexed to them either actually or potentially. This appears in the heavenly bodies, the substantial being of which is unchangeable; and yet with unchangeable being they have changeableness of place. The same applies to the angels, who have an unchangeable being as regards their nature with changeableness as regards choice; moreover they have changeableness of intelligence, of affections and of places in their own degree. Therefore these are measured by aeviternity which is a mean between eternity and time. But the being that is measured by eternity is not changeable, nor is it

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annexed to change. In this way time has “before” and “after”; aeviternity in itself has no “before” and “after,” which can, however, be annexed to it; while eternity has neither “before” nor “after,” nor is it compatible with such at all.23

Recession or separation from the permanence of being inaugurates change and therefore time. Everything that changes belongs to time, and has a beginning and an end, that is, a “before” and an “after.” But there is also a kind of recession that remains in close proximity to the essence or being, partaking at the same time of change in a limited way—Aquinas introduces the term aeviternity or aevum to describe this state, something that has close relations with the timeless and yet exhibits a difference. From the point of view of this discussion, the third view of time is significant. The second article of d. 8, q. 2 clarifies the ultimate metaphysical roots of the differences between time, aeviternity, and eternity. After explaining the various ways in which creatures can participate in the eternity that is proper to God alone, Aquinas articulates the differences between the three durations in terms of limitation by potentiality. Temporal beings suffer from a double limitation: they receive only a limited mode of participated esse through a distinct essence and their being can only be actualized successively through temporally extended parts. This latter limitation is a function of material potency. Spiritual creatures do not suffer material limitation but they do exercise the act of being in a limited fashion through a distinct potential receiving principle (essence) and so are measured by the aevum.24 23 Brian J. Shanley, “Eternity and Duration in Aquinas,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Vol. 61, No. 4, October 1997, pp. 525–548. 24 “Eternity is fundamentally a negative notion describing the perfect actuality of existence without any limitation (ens extra terminos). It is uncaused existence without beginning or end (interminabilis). It is undivided existence without parts or succession (tota simul). It is fully realized and abiding existence. By contrast, temporal beings are distended into flowing temporal parts as they move away from their pasts and strive to achieve some future actuality or perfection. This approach to divine eternity clearly reflects Aquinas’s own metaphysical insights wherein esse as the act of being is accorded primacy. As we have seen throughout, Aquinas explains the different durations in terms of modes of esse. Eternity characterizes the infinite actuality of unreceived, simple, and abiding esse in [the divine]. As eternity is a function of the simple undivided actuality of esse in God, aeviternity and time are a function of the limitation of esse through participation in some distinct caused potential principle (form and matter).” Ibid., p. 544.

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An “angel,” for example, is a certain nomenclature affixed to this state of duration that has parted from the eternal (that which is beyond time) only to the extent that it introduces affective choice. The angel is perhaps the first step toward created beings whose nature becomes equated with changeableness or temporal progression. The angel retains its original unchangeableness with regard to essence or being, but has a changeable quality with regard to possessing an independent intelligence and affective modifications, as well as the capacity to change location. Thus, the angel is a “mean” between eternity and temporality, in the sense that it is a half-way house between temporal beings and the permanence of being-in-itself.25 A change is “annexed” to it without change being its primary or essential quality, whereas for ordinary beings, change or time-as-succession becomes their primary quality, and death their eventual end. In this manner, Aquinas introduces a new concept of duration, namely aeviternity or aevum, and we are pedagogically enabled to understand Heidegger’s statement that time is the horizon of being. Time is not merely an external measure of things but is the very ontological and existential matrix within which classes of beings make their appearance. In the Commentary on the Sentences Aquinas writes: “It is clear therefore that act is threefold. To one type there is not appended any potency; such is the divine being and its operation, and to it there corresponds in the place of measurement, eternity. There is another act in which there remains a certain potency, but there is nevertheless a complete act obtained through that potency; and to it there corresponds aevum. Finally there is another to which potency is appended, and there is mixed with it the potency for a complete act according to succession, receiving the addition of perfection; and to it corresponds time.”26 The action belonging to the last category progressively realizes its potential through time, bit by bit, part upon part. Whereas the act of the second kind, although it has a certain potency meaning incomplete possibility, it is nevertheless able to achieve completeness through that potency. It is significant that Aquinas speaks here of categories of acts and not of beings.

25 Thomas

Aquinas, Sentences I, d. 19, q. 2, a. 1. Bergson, Time and Free Will (Transl.) F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 227. 26 Henri

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Henri Bergson and Duration Marx had observed that humans tend to set problems that they can solve. In other words, the manner in which problems are set is historically determined and rarely exceed those boundaries. Rare is the individual who can set up a problem that fundamentally ruptures the cultural limits. The philosopher Henri Bergson was one such thinker of whom it might be said that he had dared to achieve this rare feat. He had set his face against the rampant positivism and technicism of his age and vigorously attempted to set metaphysics toward lived life, giving philosophy a new relevance. With regard to the question of time, which has always been central to metaphysics, Bergson’s philosophy played a major role in shaping twentieth-century debate. And while the Einsteinian position secured the debate by denying the phenomenological side of the problem, which we shall discuss later, the debate itself turned up enough soil to keep the question of lived time on the ferment. In order to distinguish his position, Bergson often used the word “duration” to signify the order of phenomenological time that was not within the ambit of scientific time. What is duration within us? A qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another. What duration is there existing outside us? The present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity. No doubt external things change, but their moments do not succeed one another, except for a consciousness that keeps them in mind. We observe outside us at a given moment a whole system of simultaneous positions; of the simultaneities that preceded them nothing remains. To put duration in space is to really contradict oneself and place succession within simultaneity. Hence we must not say that external things endure, but rather that there is in them some inexpressible reason in virtue of which we cannot examine them at successive moments of our own duration without observing that they have changed. But this change does not involve succession….Outside us, mutual externality without succession; within us, succession without mutual externality.27

Bergson begins by distinguishing mechanical time of the clock and internal lived duration. The phenomenology or experience of time is qualitative and heterogeneous and cannot be associated with a number. It is 27 Ibid.,

p. 228.

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actually meaningless to say, for example, that I experienced four minutes of pain or three hours of joy, although we do utter such things. Why is this kind of quantification akin to the nonsensical? The moments of inner sensation cannot be arranged in a sequence as they are not external to one another—only those things that are external to one another can be arranged in a temporal sequence. That is to say, although inner states do succeed one another, since these are not external to each other no one-to-one correspondence can be set up with a timeline. Bergson shows this through a lengthy argument in Time and Free Will. There is no inner clock or observer that can disentangle the organic form of the sensation and generate a temporal progression. All we have is a duration, which is unquantifiable. Coming next to the external world, we can only experience simultaneity. Succession is simply a function of memory. From memory, we collect and arrange the disappeared moments creating the notion of succession. In actuality, things change but do not succeed one another. That is to say, only a transcendent consciousness keeps track and projects an order of succession on externalities. In itself there is change but no succession. Only the illusion of a supervening consciousness ascribes temporal succession. How does this arise? Inwardly, first, there is the division between experiencer and experience, between sensation and the sensor, which is the basic illusion. This division separates and creates inward time (succession). The succession in turn becomes the measure of external progression. The idea of a measurable time therefore arises from compromise between ideas of succession and externality. Bergson further notes: To the simultaneities, which constitute the external world, and, although distinct, succeed one another for our consciousness, we attribute succession in themselves. Hence the idea that things endure as we do ourselves and that time may be brought within space. But while our consciousness thus introduces succession into external things, inversely these things themselves externalize the successive moments of our inner duration in relation to one another. The simultaneities of physical phenomena, absolutely distinct in the sense that the one has ceased to be when the other takes place, cut up into portions, which are also distinct and external to one another, an inner life in which succession implies interpenetration, just as the pendulum of a clock cuts up into distinct fragments and spreads out, so to speak, lengthwise, the dynamic and undivided tension of the spring. Thus,

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by a real process of endosmosis we get the mixed idea of a measurable time, which is space in so far as it is homogeneity, and duration in so far as it is succession, that is to say, at bottom, the contradictory idea of succession in simultaneity.28

The observing consciousness having instituted/projected an independent succession element from its own construction of divided continuity injects time into space. Time thus becomes spatialized. The externalized succession, in turn, reciprocally affirms the apparent progression of our inner life. This interpenetration of the outer and the inner gives us “the mixed idea of a measurable time” and constitutes the “hardness” with which we experience time. The point Bergson tries to make by means of this analysis is that the dominant discourse of science rejects duration and uncritically accepts the spatialization of time as an objectivity. Even complex theories in relativity physics proceed from the mixed idea of a measurable time and fail to suspect the basis of the production of uniform time. Treating time as pure externality, relativity looks at the relation between time and different states of motion or uniform translation. For Bergson, what philosophy needs to do is to go the other way and eliminate space from the inner world. In other words, the spatialization of time that has entered into our souls must be thrown out, replaced by the phenomenological intuition of pure duration. The pedagogic importance of this direction of thinking can hardly be overestimated. Moving from fact to fact, sensation to sensation, Bergson uncovers the errors of perception through which a positivistic time is instituted and becomes the principal measure of external reality by means of a strong separation. Therefore the same separation will have to be made again, but this time to the advantage of duration, when inner phenomena are studied, —not inner phenomena once developed, to be sure, or after the discursive reason has separated them and set them out in a homogeneous medium in order to understand them, but inner phenomena in their developing, and in so far as they make up, by their interpenetration, the continuous evolution of a free person. Duration, thus restored to its original purity, will appear as a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements which 28 Ibid.,

p. 229.

74  K. ROY pass over into one another. Now it is because they have neglected to make this necessary separation that one party has been led to deny freedom and the other to define it, and thereby, involuntarily, to deny it too.29

Just as positivist science made the big cut by throwing out the phenomenological and retaining only extensity, the world of lived duration will have to move in the opposite direction and sort itself out from the mix up with extensity. This is an essential part of the pedagogy of time. For this, inner phenomena have to be studied carefully, not after their occurrence, but in the very process of their formation, in the moment of their arising. Because this has not happened, the scientific discourse has managed to dictate terms and deny freedom to the inner evolution of the person seeking freedom from the mechanistic paradigm. Being hitched to the scientific order of time, inner change has been understood wrongly through the interiorization of extensity. This must not be understood as saying that time by the clock should or can be rejected. This says that there is more to time than measurable external succession. There is organic time which is duration. The time symbolized by t in science does not refer to duration but a relation between two durations or a certain number of simultaneities. Bergson writes, “Consciousness does not perceive time as a sum of units of duration: left to itself, it has no means and even no reason to measure time.”30 Duration cannot be cut up and therefore has no measurable units. What we might call pure consciousness in itself has no means to measure time or any need to do so. It is memory that invents time in relation to extensity. We might argue that consciousness can indeed perceive different lengths of time by comparing two different lengths of feelings. To that, Bergson replies: A feeling which lasted only half [the period] for example, would no longer be the same feeling; it would lack thousands of impressions which gradually thickened its substance and altered its colour. True, when we give this feeling a certain name, when we treat it as a thing, we believe we can diminish its duration by half, for example, and also halve the duration of the rest of our history: it seems that it would still be the same life, only on a reduced scale. But we forget that states of consciousness are processes and not things; that if we denote them each by a single word, it is for

29 Ibid., 30 Ibid.

p. 196.

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the convenience of language; that they are alive and therefore constantly changing; that, in consequence, it is impossible to cut off a moment from them without making them poorer by the loss of some impression, and thus altering their quality.31

The confusion between quantity and quality becomes clear. A feeling or an intensity is a quality that cannot be quantified without losing its essential character, its uniqueness. By naming it, we feel we can objectify it and nail it down. But states of consciousness are not things; they are named only for convenience and the word cannot capture the fleeting process. Quality must be respected as such without reducing it to measurement. Durations are integral condensations that have no temporal translation. Further, Bergson observes: [The] psychic state, when it reaches the end of the progress which constitutes its very existence, becomes a thing which one can picture to oneself all at once. Here we find ourselves in the same position as the astronomer, when he takes in at a glance the orbit which a planet will need several years to traverse….But when we have to determine a future state of consciousness, however superficial it may be, we can no longer view the antecedents in a static condition as things; we must view them in a dynamic condition as processes, since we are concerned with their influence alone. Their duration is this very influence….one is bound to live this duration whilst it is unfolding….Even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and a life of their own; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling.32

There is a startling implication of the above assertion. If past states are discontinuous from future states and the two cannot be compared with any degree of ontological authenticity, it means that there is no such thing as a tomorrow from the point of view of lived consciousness.33 In other words, the future is a fiction as far as living processes (non-things) are concerned. This indeed has staggering consequence for education, for 31 Ibid.,

pp. 198–200. does not mean that there is no astronomical or physical tomorrow that can be anticipated. Mechanical displacement of celestial bodies are completed things and hence iterable. 33 John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (London: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), p. 277. 32 This

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the latter is mainly geared toward producing future states. It means education as it is practiced today is essentially aimed at a fictional goal. This is perhaps why so much effort that goes under the name of education ends up wasted. We bark up the wrong tree and give students the wrong scent. The present (or the past) can neither be duplicated nor improved upon in the usual sense since it is not a thing. It can only be understood. Calculated prediction or anticipation of the future—an approach that has proved so successful in dealing with external reality—is unsuited for comprehending lived life. In other words, the concepts that have evolved in us through lived life are unsuitable for apprehending active life itself. This is a very important realization although unsurprising. In order to honor lived life in ourselves, we must stop treating it like a thing and instead use other modes of apprehension. The following chapter will address this question at length. It takes a reified consciousness considerable effort to awaken to its actual state. It has remained in amnesia from the beginning of its socialization. The state of creative surprise has long been sacrificed to the production of a certain regime of symbolic and pragmatic order. The very possibility of an upsurge now appears strange and unthinkable, far removed as it is from our normalized lives and routinized perceptions. One of the tasks before us therefore is to make the possibility of flux and creative uncertainty thinkable. In this connection, the famous words of Keats come to mind in which he speaks of “negative capability”: I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

To be prepared for a different “achievement” within ourselves, to prepare for a readiness is an important phenomenological move that opens the door to a strange beauty that overrides every other consideration.

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This “beauty” is not the characteristic of, or, associated with a thing (a fixity), but rather it is an emanation of the ongoing autopoiesis or creative becoming (duration) of being. To deny this in education is to take the soul out of it and leave us with the aridity of the mechanical-transactional part or the reified aspect. At the same time, one must not confuse this with any kind of arrival or a goal. It is rather an orientation, or an inner integration and therefore an expansion or elevation. The “negative capability” allows us to remain with this new state without inner commotion (temporal oscillations) or the seeking of the old forms of certainty. Used to the burden and security of content this might appear to be an empty aestheticization of the pedagogic situation. But if the picture we hold of education is emancipation and the making of the necessary liberatory effort, then content itself cannot get us there: The idea (logos) and the body (corpus) cannot directly commingle to produce the necessary composite. There are many transformations in-between, both corporeal and incorporeal, that are necessary before the most fundamental problem of curriculum, one of bringing together logos and corpus, can be achieved. Negative capability of which Keats speaks contributes toward such a durational development.

References Aristotle, Physics (Ed.) W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). Brian J. Shanley, “Eternity and Duration in Aquinas.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Vol. 61, No. 4, October 1997, pp. 525–548. David Bradshaw, “Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Vol. 70, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 311–366. https://doi.org/10.1353/tho.2006.0006. Dionysius the Areopagite. Retrieved form http://www.ccel.org/ccel/dionysius/ works.html;10.3.937C-940A. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Transl.) Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Transl.) F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001). John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (London: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899).

78  K. ROY Martin Heidegger, “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.” In V. Matthias Jung (Ed.), Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2011). Sandra Scepanovic, “Αἰών and χρόνος: Their Semantic Development in the Greek Poets and Philosophers Down to 400 BC,” D.Phil. Thesis, Jesus College, 2011. Retrieved from https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:064ad3c7bd9e-4a8b-a818-0572b738fc46/download_file?safe_filename=THESIS01&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Thesis. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Thomas Aquinas, Sentences I, d. 19, q. 2, a. 1. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae. Retrieved from https://archive.org/ details/SummaTheologiae.

CHAPTER 3

Time and Intuition

The comprehension of lived duration or phenomenological time freed of extensity requires a new order of perception, for the existing perspectival schema and dominant paradigm of thinking have at their core the mechanism of time as extensional succession. It is not as though time as measurement of change was not useful and important for organizational purposes. It obviously is—even as these words are written—the idea of linear succession operating within language orders elements to make cognitive sense. Hence it would be foolish to minimize the importance of a certain temporal order of things. But alongside, what is also important is the subjective side of time as lived duration. It is vital for pedagogy to pay attention to the fact that the “before” and “after” of time must be supplemented with an understanding of what is in-between. And the in-between, or duration, cannot be approached purely through rational means as it cannot be represented in an ideational form. A pure intensity can be lived, but not imaged or reproduced. It is not any the less important for it. For a creative life, the un-representable is just as important as the representable. Such a recognition and acknowledgment force us to pedagogically look for a new mode of perception that is richer and more inclusive than rational apprehension. Rationality itself is a product of history, and we cannot afford to forget that it was not always found in its present form. For instance, reason meant something different and holistic for Plato and Plato’s Socrates—the search for a life without contradiction. It did not belittle other and more direct modes of apprehension. © The Author(s) 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9_3

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Following the philosopher Henri Bergson, we will examine the perceptual phenomenon called intuition possibly as leading to the development of a different organ of perception.1 Intuition has a very long history, certainly longer than recorded history itself. However, in the long run up to the contemporary age, and with the rise of a uni-modal rationalist-scientific thinking in most public spheres, the word intuition became rather suspect. Under the discursive regime of eighteenthcentury rationalism, anything that was not backed by externally verifiable evidence was subjective, meaning unreliable. Subjectivity was a bad word in the rising tide of objectivity. However, like with all excess, this over-emphasis was eventually bound to result in a reactive backlash at least within some segments. The inter-war years in Europe did countenance a rising resistance to the harshness of empiricism. In the present age, it was Bergson who put intuition back on the intellectual map by making it into a philosophical method. Bergson taught how to break free of the scientific concept of time and again learn to see life as a creative process. But before we can get to Bergson or the present times, let us go back in history and look at some of the foundational figures in the Western tradition to see where intuition stood in philosophy. One of the more obvious starting points is to look and see what the Greek trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle thought of intuition. There is, of course, mention of nous or noesis, both indicating direct grasp of things, much before Plato in Greek thought, such as, for example in Homer.2 In antiquity, intuition was seen as the most valuable mode of 1 The word “organ” must not be taken literally to mean a physical organ. Rather it is to be seen as a qualitative node of intensity. 2 “As K. von Fritz, ΝΟΟΣ and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems, pp. 91–93 observes, in early literature, for example in Homer’s works, a fundamental meaning of noein and nous is to grasp a thing, to understand a situation, but these concepts never denote reason or reasoning. Etymologically, the words noein and nous have the same semantic root and they are probably derived from sniff or smell. D. Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, p. IX propose[s] to connect [the word nóos, ‘mind’] with the verb néomai, ‘return home’. Such an effort which requires that nóos be reconstructed as *nos–os, a derivative from the verbal root *nes–. G. Nagy, Sēma and Nóēsis, pp. 48–49 writes that […] nóos is a nomen actionis derived from the Indo–European root–verb *nes– meaning something like ‘return to light and life’. This meaning is still attested in Indic Nāsatyā, a name of the Divine Twins who bring mortals back to life and who bring about sunrise after the night brought on by each sunset. The root–verb *nes– is attested in Greek as néomai, but in this case it means simply ‘return,’ not ‘return to light and life.’ […] There are in fact two aspects of nóstos in the Odyssey: one is of course the hero’s return from Troy, and the other, just as important, is his return from Hades. Moreover, the theme of Odysseus’ descent and subsequent

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gaining knowledge about the world and our place in it. Empirical experience was perceived as sub-servient to intellectual cognition. Plato understood the value of direct perception very well, having been trained by the great Egyptian priest-masters.3 In Greek texts, the semantic content of the word intuition (nous, noesis) covered a wide variety of related notions including mind, thought, wisdom, and soul, the various relations between which might have been apparent to the writers borne by their specific contexts, and that may have become obscured over time. Nevertheless, the idea of direct cognitive perception stands out as a central sense associated with this term. “Intellectual intuition is a way of cognition valuable for those ancient Greek philosophers who were rationalists, such as Plato seeking sources of cognition in the reason, or genetic empiricists, such as Aristotle, who claimed that the source of cognition was empirical experience.”4 But all of them allowed a type of intellectual cognition whose results cannot be verbalised (Plato’s and Plotinus’s mystic intuition) or can be expressed linguistically (Plato’s and Aristotle’s definitions of essence). The concept of intuition is ambiguous. In the philosophy of ancient Greece, especially in the first great philosophical systems, rational (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle) and irrational (Plato, Plotinus) intuition can be distinguished. Irrational intuition could be that intuition whose objects are transcendent ideas….As to the function and place of intuition in Plato and Aristotle, significant differences can be observed. In Plato, the cognition of essences constitutes the final aim of intuition. He settles for the definition of that which something is. The grasping of essence, that is the grasping of an ontic principle, constitutes the achievement of a cognitive aim. For Aristotle, intuition allows us to accept principles on which the edifice of knowledge is founded. It serves the function of a way of cognition thanks to which first premises of knowledge can be formulated. In this sense, one could perversely treat metaphysics, which is a science about principles (see Metaphysics 1003a), as a methodology for sciences.5 nóstos ‘return’ from Hades converges with the solar dynamics of sunset and subsequent sunrise. The movement is from dark to light, from unconsciousness to consciousness as expressed by nóos.” In Dariusz Pietka, “The Concept of Intuition and Its Role in Plato and Aristotle,” Organon, Vol. 47, 2015, pp. 23–40, FN 1. 3 Plato, by his own account, trained for fourteen years under the Egyptian master Sechnuphis after the death of Socrates. 4 Pietka, op. cit., p. 38. 5 Ibid.

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Two kinds of intuition are distinguishable. One concerns divine and lofty elements that lie beyond the limits of ordinary cognition. The other type concerns goals and foundations of human activity including rational activity. Plato and Plato’s Socrates are mostly concerned with the former, with almost every dialogue touching upon the question of essences— of justice, goodness, language, and so on. Aristotle, on the other hand, looks to intuition or direct knowledge as the way in which empirical knowledge can be founded. Rational knowledge is associated with sets of propositions which are founded on yet other propositions, and so on. This is unsatisfactory to the philosopher who seeks ontological guarantee for knowledge. Aristotle pays attention to the issue which, in my opinion, until today casts a shadow over the acceptance of the value of intuition for science and philosophy. For him, the value of direct cognition is undisputed since without it there would be no knowledge. If nous is dismissed, science should be dismissed too. However, not to belong to science does not have a pejorative character, because, as Aristotle underlines, the value of nous is higher than the value of knowledge. Later, particularly under the influence of positivism and neopositivism, it will become customary to think that that which cannot be substantiated is unscientific and less significant from a scientific point of view. The status of empirical cognition, of which the results can be quite easily verified, will be enhanced. It does not mean that problems which this intersubjectivity of still subjective empirical experience faces will not be noted. The issue of subjectivity and uniqueness of empirical experience was raised, among others, by K. Ajdukiewicz, Pragmatic Logic.6

For Aristotle, science or scientific knowledge was neither primary nor the benchmark for judging the validity of all kinds of knowing. Not to belong to science did not carry a depreciatory sense. Rather, science itself was seen as founded in nous or direct (intuitive) knowledge, and the value of direct understanding was judged to be higher than empirical knowledge. The idea of substantiation and the “unscientific” comes to dominate much later in history and becomes all-encompassing in the run up to modernity. Nevertheless, investigations into scientific thinking and the contexts of discovery reveal that scientists often come upon their insights in ways that have little to do with science as such and even little understood by themselves. This does not imply whimsicality, chance, or 6 Ibid.

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fancifulness; rather it indicates that there are deeper processes at work than the representational or symbolic side of the mind. Pedagogy would do well to note this, for in the general consciousness, these intuitional processes remain mostly unacknowledged and downplayed, and what emerges brightly are the contexts of justification and the means and results of substantiation. While the latter are obviously important, careful inquiry into intimations and intuitions would give a fairer picture of how we constitute our understanding of the world. Aristotle contrasts nous with logos (1143 a36–b1). In the case of practical reasoning, it is nous, and not logos, that prompts the starting–point appropriate in the circumstances. And it is striking that nous is here equated with a kind of perception: we must not conceive it as a kind of reasoning that takes perceptual data as its raw materials. The ethically educated agent sees some feature of his situation as salient in a way that prompts him to select an act, say of providing help, as his goal. When Aristotle writes, ‘This perception is nous’ (b5) he is not reducing such nous to perception. That would overlook that seeing things a certain way may be accompanied by a certainty that things are not so, whereas nous brings conviction. If perception proposes, nous selects. If Aristotle can say ‘This perception is nous’, this must be because he has in mind the perfectly virtuous agent, who only perceives in this way what he is right to take initially as his goal.7

At the heart of an act of perception by the pure or virtuous agent is nous or an imprint of the essence. The mind-heart shorn of illusion and self-deception participates in the act of perception as nous. Here the question of intuition becomes pedagogically interesting. Intuition is not simply available to anyone. One must be a purified soul to participate in it. It is not a secular concept, but an ethico-aesthetic one. There is a degree of preparation involved for one to be able to participate in intuition. It is not there just for anyone, at least consciously. In other words, one might acquire derived knowledge such as scientific knowledge, but only the prepared soul can consciously participate in a primary mode of knowing such as intuition. Hence intuition, rather than just being there, turns out to be a form of practice. To discover the modes of this practice is the task of education.

7 A. W. Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 224.

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Having begun the discussion with a brief look at intuition in Greek antiquity—the choices were made keeping praxis in mind—we will next make a huge leap in time and enter the domain of the metaphysics of intuition by referring to a contemporary exponent of intuition namely Henri Bergson. This discussion is especially warranted, for the grasp of time beyond the existing value of it as a homogeneous background measure of change and movement requires a new mode of perception. Although Bergson is little discussed today, he was one of the most prominent thinkers of the early part of the twentieth century as is evident from the nature of the references made to him by his contemporaries.8 Despite contemporary neglect, some extraordinary literature is available on the Bergsonian idea of intuition. We will principally rely on three texts: The first is Bergson’s own The Creative Mind; second, Professor H. Wilson Carr’s seminal treatise on Bergson The Philosophy of Change9; and third, the insightful commentary of philosopher Gilles Deleuze titled Bergsonism. Let us begin with a little background. Philosophy begins in an intuition of reality, a stirring that raises a question about our presence (and absence), and its relation with all other presences, etc. This question and other related ones cannot be solved through empirical means such as science, that is, through observation and conceptualization. The obvious reason is that the question relates to the source, whereas science and its methods proceed from us, the very product of the source, and hence secondary. To put it differently, science is a second order apparatus that is 8 “The philosopher John Dewey, known as one of the main representatives of American pragmatism, forcefully claimed that ‘no philosophic problem will ever exhibit just the same face and aspect that it presented before Professor Bergson.’ William James, the Harvard professor and famed psychologist, described Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) as ‘a true miracle,’ marking the ‘beginning of a new era.’ For James, Matter and Memory (1896) created ‘a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley’s ‘Principles’ or Kant’s Critique did.’ The philosopher Jean Wahl once said that ‘if one had to name the four great philosophers one could say: Socrates, Plato—taking them together—Descartes, Kant and Bergson.’ The philosopher and historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson categorically claimed that the first third of the twentieth century was ‘the age of Bergson.’ He was simultaneously considered ‘the greatest thinker in the world’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the world.’” In Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 12. 9 Professor Carr was in direct correspondence with Bergson himself and exchanged letters with him in order to clarify ideas.

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derived from lived life and hence cannot respond to first order questions of source. In order to look back at the source, we need different perceptual means. Hence we must show that there is a method of philosophy which is the very contrary of the method of science, namely, the method of intuition. The distinctive character of this philosophical method, as we shall try to show continually throughout this study, is that it apprehends the whole before it apprehends the parts, and that it interprets the parts as a dissociation within the whole. Science, on the other hand, seeks to apprehend the ultimate elements which come together in the whole; it endeavours by more and more successful analysis to isolate the constituents and discover their affinities; it conceives the whole as an association of its parts.10

The method of intuition is distinct from the method of science in that the latter attempts to piece together reality by apprehending the parts and making a reasonable mosaic out of it. Whereas intuition begins with the whole and finds meaning of the parts only in the context of the whole. Obviously, its insistence on wholeness sets it apart from the rational method that focuses on with the fragment, as well as those philosophies that start from concepts. Reality cannot be comprehended in a concept, and the more perfect, the more fitting the concept the further are we from, and not the nearer to, the fundamental reality. It is only by realising this that we shall ever understand the true nature, the real purpose of the intellectual process itself. Reality lies below and not beyond thought. The doctrine then that there is an intuition of reality is the direct contrary of the doctrine which is illustrated in the writings of Plato, of Hegel, and others…. [F]ar from its being a mystical experience, it is the most common and unmistakable fact, and that we only fail to recognise it because it is so absolutely simple that it requires a strong effort to turn the mind from its naturally intellectual bent in order to get this non-intellectual vision. When we do succeed, it is no ecstatic vision that we get, no exaltation into a higher sphere. Rather we obtain a fleeting vision of the reality that underlies our common everyday experience. Why is it so important that we should make this effort and seize this intuition?11

10 H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 19. 11 Ibid., pp. 21–22.

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To the last question, Professor Carr answers that only through the proper awakening of intuition will we be able to correctly understand the cognitive process and hence possess an adequate theory of knowledge. To most modern sensibilities, the proposition “Reality cannot be comprehended in a concept” would be startling. After all, for the last three or four centuries or more, we have been building and refining concepts, have we not? The vast systems of thought ranging from astronomy to nano-science, from mathematics to genetic biology have all been spectacularly successful, have they not? Yet, despite all the outer successes, arguably, the basic human condition continues to remain unemancipated. We continue to be the most destructive and violent species on earth, getting in the way of every other life form on the planet, relentlessly colonizing each eco-system, muddling along from one crisis to the next, and always believing redemption to be round the corner. All our concepts have not lifted the melancholy that has long settled on human civilizations. We strongly feel something amiss and therefore devise more concepts. But ironically, the more sophisticated the concept the further are we from actuality. Thought pursues reality as though it is just ahead and a little beyond. However, reality, or the source, is never beyond, nor does it inhere in some abstract world of transcendental ideas, but lies beneath the concept. Hence every forward movement only takes us away from the source. To Plato, we lived in a shadow world that was a vague reflection of the world of ideal forms. For Hegel, the dialectic took history forward toward the Real enshrined in the World Spirit. For the intuitionist, all this is mystified hocus-pocus. It simply defers the facing of the real issue. And the real issue is that we are turned away from reality toward dense matter and complex ideas. But the real is not complex; it is rather the essence of simplicity, which is why we have to make an immense effort to turn from the intellectual apprehension of the world to the pre-conceptual. For too long, we have been addicted to the concept; now, we are asked to free the mind, even if fleetingly, from image and representation. The result is not some mystical perception or ecstatic vision. The result is a contact with necessity. Only from necessity can we be, and therefore attain an understanding of the true nature of things and the relationship between these. This is not easy to do and requires serious pedagogical effort of a negative kind. The breaking out of the habitual response of looking for more concepts requires a form of restraint and withdrawal, rather than any positive action.

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The best way perhaps in which to get a clear notion of what is positively affirmed in saying that we have an intuition of reality is to compare the contrary doctrine set forth so powerfully in the philosophy of Kant, the doctrine that we cannot know things in themselves. The forms of the mind constitute, as it were, a ready-made scheme into which the data of sense are received, and apprehension consists in combining these sense data according to necessary and universal rules, in virtue of which combination they are objectified and become known. Through being received by the mind into its forms of sensibility, the rough material of sensation acquires spatial and temporal characteristics. Then the understanding, through means of the categories, constructs this sensuous material into objects of perception, and these objects of perception, being related by the categories to the unity of apperception, are connected together as parts of one world, the world of nature. Now it is clear that if all apprehension is intellectual apprehension then Kant is right; we cannot have knowledge of things in themselves. Metaphysics would be just this knowledge and therefore Kant concluded metaphysics is impossible. The doctrine of the intuition of reality is therefore the reverse of this conclusion.12

A contrast with the Kantian schema is deemed useful here. Kant distinguishes between things-in-themselves (ding-an-sich) and our perception of them. We cannot directly know or contact the world of nature. We construct our reality with the mental categories that are built into our perceptual schema. Kant dismisses the possibility of direct or intuitive knowledge. However, Kant leaves us with more questions than answers. How, for instance, could we possibly acquire the meta-knowledge that we have indirect knowledge of the world? Nothing in the Kantian schema is able to solve the puzzle of the transcendental subject that contemplates the nature of knowledge itself. Kant’s transcendental idealism, on the contrary, makes us into mechanical subjects of the categories and the a priori, without the possibility of true redemption. The position taken here is the converse of this. It is held that direct knowledge is possible, but this “knowledge” cannot be represented through image, nor is there an adequate language to speak about it for more or less the same reasons. The question then arises: how shall we think about it, and is there any experience at all in which we are directly aware of this reality without the symbolic form which gives it materiality?

12 Ibid.,

pp. 23–24.

88  K. ROY There is one experience, or rather an experience of one object, which does seem to give us this very distinction between reality felt and reality thought about. When we are conscious of reality, conscious, that is to say, of being actually part of present existence, acting and not merely dreaming or imagining, conscious of ourselves as part of what is we are then aware of the world as an aggregate of objects affecting us and affected by us in particular ways, but there is one of these objects that we know in a way in which we know nothing else, this is our body. It is an object, an external object, to the mind, like any other object that forms part of the physical world, but we know it in an intimate way in which we know nothing else. We know it from within as the seat and instrument of our life. If then anywhere there is possible for us a view of reality in its purity, free from any external form that apprehension may impose upon it, it will be in the inward view that we may obtain of this privileged object. We have here a common experience.13

The body, typically neglected in the era of the mind, is the most intimate object, since our experience of it is direct—the sensation does not require a mental representation. In other words, we do have direct knowledge of the reality of the body without any intellectual form. Our enfleshment is intimate in a way nothing else is. No doubt we can know the body objectively through the intellect like a medical practitioner. But we also have a privileged and an inward view that is free of any external modes of apprehension. This intimate and connected view—called “oceanic” by Freud—is denied by Kantianism and by rationalist modernity. What is equally important: It is available to everyone and not to a privileged few. In this larger sense, each one of us is “sitting on” reality; it is not accessible only to some esoteric group—scientist, mystic, or any other. This is true ontological justice; here the mind does not rule over the heart. Once this embodied awareness takes hold in consciousness, everything else falls in place. Only we must be correctly taught to become aware of it, to receive it simply and adequately. On this plane, there are no discrete quantifiers, only inward intensities. It does not make you feel better or worse. It simply is, as the underlying reality, devoid of particularities. What then is the point of this intuition? It is not personal, and because it is not personal, it connects us to duration, to the nature of change in and of itself without mental projection or measurement. It 13 Ibid.,

p. 26.

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ends our monadic existence without outwardly coming into conflict with the conventional manner of the habitual world. We are simultaneously able to experience two levels—the particular and the impersonal, the temporal and the durational. This has nothing to do with any doctrine, any school of thought, or any organized truth. It is what a human being inherits, simply and directly, merely by being born into the species, without the mediation of anyone or anything. All we need to do is to block for a time all incoming images and outward participations and gradually become aware that there is an integrated background quality spread through the corpus sensorium. When we turn away from the external world with its interests and activities, its good and evil, its strife, the victory or defeat of our efforts, we seem to be turning away from reality and we do turn away from it as the field of our activity. If then we turn our mind inward to contemplate our life itself as it is being lived within us we seem to become conscious of the actual reality of existence itself. If we fix the whole attention of our mind on this life of ours as we live it, if we realise to ourselves our life as it is being lived, we get an intuition of reality, that is to say not a thought of it, not a perception or conception of it as an object, but a consciousness of the actual life we are living as we live it. Bring it as a picture to the mind, present it to the mind as an object of thought, and it is gone. We can only refer to it as an experience of life that we have in living. This is the intuition of reality.14

This intuition of reality does not come to us as a thought or conception, or in terms of anything that we already know or connected to the personality. Try as we might, we cannot picture it. There is no metaphor that can capture pure lived duration spread through the body-mind complex. That which is derived cannot picture the source, because the latter lies underneath it. Too many traditions have complicated it, and too much speculation has gone into the simple intuitive is-ness with the net result that it has been removed from ordinary reach into a different realm. Nevertheless, it is within each one’s reach; one can and must simply subside into it. In no way does it complicate our lives; it simply adds a new and creative dimension. It does not belong to us; we belong to it. It is that single thing of which Heraclitus speaks that supports each being without having any positive characteristic of its own. 14 Ibid.,

pp. 26–27.

90  K. ROY There are two ways in which we apprehend that reality which we call our own life. One is by letting life itself become conscious of itself. Then we have an indivisible change or duration, or movement, indivisible because we are it, all that it is we are and a pure or true duration because it is not something which changes or which is moved. It is the change or movement itself, not something extensible of which we can say this part is here, that there, but something in which all that qualifies it interpenetrates it and exists in and is the movement itself. This is life as we apprehend it by intuition. But we may also apprehend this life by analysis, and then what do we find? The very contrary of the intuition. Our self, our life, is no longer one and indivisible but breaks up into elements, the states with which the science of psychology deals.15

What does it mean for life itself to become conscious of itself? It means non-interference—non-projection or introjection, two ways in which we construct reality. We are habituated to change in things or to things that change. But when we are located within change itself then there is “indivisible change” or pure movement which is duration. Seen from within, that is immanently, things are nothing but states of compression of duration, specific modes of composition that interpenetrate movement. When seen as extensionality, that is, seen transcendentally, these appear as changing entities. In other words, moving with change itself, we do not perceive change in extensity, just as any receiver hypothetically moving with a beam of light would not be subject to any information—no information would ever reach him. This seems like a tall order for the average consciousness. However, we do get regular intimations of this, albeit fleeting ones that are generally overlooked or even suppressed, since the mind is habituated to fragmentation and analysis. From the fragmented state, this looks like impossible fantasy. Nevertheless, it is neither impossible nor fantasy. It is our primary right, possibly the only right, to know whence our time has been projected. We must proceed with that sense, not with the will-to-knowledge, but with the sense of destiny and necessity. Then it becomes possible to drift from the obsessions of society with its selfcreated discontents that are in turn implicated in us. That is the first step; it generates the necessary space for intuition to come into its own. Intuition doubtless admits of many degrees of intensity, and philosophy many degrees of depth; but the mind once brought back to real duration 15 Ibid.,

pp. 27–28.

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will already be alive with intuitive life and its knowledge of things will already be philosophy. Instead of a discontinuity of moments replacing one another in an infinitely divided time, it will perceive the continuous fluidity of real time which flows along, indivisible. Instead of surface states covering, successively some neutral stuff and maintaining with it a mysterious relationship of phenomenon to substance, it will seize upon one identical change which keeps ever lengthening as in a melody where everything is becoming but where the becoming, being itself substantial, has no need of support. No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition.16

Intuition is not some totality or final perception at which one arrives comprehensively. It has various degrees, intensities, shades, and depths, in other words, multiplicities. In a growing awareness that goes from strength to strength, intuition transforms relations at each level, through the understanding of qualitative difference. Once turned toward duration, perception will possibly receive a dim difference at first, an intimation beyond the discontinuous, discrete, and the broken up everyday reality, which is the conventional habit of thought. It is the turningtoward that is important. The beginning of the intuitive life is now filled with a different feeling about things that is not knowledge in the ordinary sense but a concrete and phenomenological sensibility; there is a direct connection with continuously lived life. It is in contact with its own flow, its own duration, which is indivisible, meaning only liable to change in quality, and not quantity. This is not mystical but logical. The empty line of measurable time moving into the future is replaced by a continuous and simple presence which is qualitatively elastic. Unlike extensionality that requires a supporting consciousness, this simple presence is its own support. Hence the dead–weight of discrete reality with its finished objects does not oppress simple presence. In order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses and of consciousness. Kant’s error was to believe that it was. After having proved by decisive arguments that no dialectical effort will ever introduce us into the beyond and that an effective 16 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (Transl.) Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 149–150.

92  K. ROY metaphysics would necessarily be an intuitive metaphysics, he added that we lack this intuition and that this metaphysics is impossible. It would in fact be so if there were no other time or change than those which Kant perceived and which, moreover, we too must reckon with; for our usual perception cannot get out of time nor grasp anything else than change. But the time in which we are naturally placed, the change we habitually have before us, are a time and change that our senses and our consciousness have reduced to dust in order to facilitate our action upon things. Undo what they have done, bring our perception back to its origins, and we shall have a new kind of knowledge without having been obliged to have recourse to new faculties.17

Kant’s main error was to believe that dialectical effort was all-conclusive, thus dismissing other dimensions of being. He failed to see that there was or might be something submerged beneath categorical reasoning, not beyond it, and hence not the goal of the intellect, but nevertheless experienceable. In other words, he did not look in the other direction; he was brilliantly single-tracked. To project one’s own limitations as the general limits of a species speaks of a peculiar conceit. It is not as though evidence to the contrary was not available in the Western tradition itself. Plato, for instance, records that before or after lengthy dialogues, Socrates would often be found sunk in a different mode of being. This bi-modality is missing in Kant, and hence he declares the intuitive mode as unavailable to the human in general. This different mode is not directed at things and hence is not for action on things. Things are particular compressions or compositions that are cognized by breaking out of the immanence of the intuitive dimension. No doubt they are necessary for survival. However, when consciousness is directed only at things, and action upon things, we lose the intuition for the source or origin of perception. We take the thing-perception mode for granted and move from there forgetting to look beneath it. Thus, the Kantian limits observed in the human are cultural limits and not ontological ones. The world into which our senses and consciousness habitually introduce us is no more than the shadow of itself: and it is as cold as death. Everything in it is arranged for our maximum convenience, but in it, everything is in a present which seems constantly to be starting afresh; and we ourselves, fashioned artificially in the image of a no less artificial universe, see 17 Ibid.,

p. 150.

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ourselves in the instantaneous, speak of the past as of something done away with, and see in memory a fact strange or in any case foreign to us, an aid given to mind by matter.18

The thing-universe—and its corresponding mode of perception— constitutes a cold and dead world—relics of times past. It is a dead world because it consists of finished things that are soulless, that is, without the implicit movement. This is what finished means, and we become the curators of this museum of things, ourselves no less shadows of the past struggling to grasp a present that is always slipping away from us. These finished products and things are meant to increase convenience. They do, but they are seemingly always starting over. At the same time, they diminish the possibility of contact with raw existential duration, for the consciousness is now focused on convenience and its extension. As an inevitable accompaniment, there is intellectual laziness and torpor. The great poet and philosopher Tagore writes that we behave like bees obsessed with our hives, but “the too exclusive enclosure deprives us of the perspective which is so much needed to give us proper proportion… It is an indication that man has not been moulded on the model of the bee and he becomes recklessly anti-social when his freedom to be more than social is ignored.”19 The freedom to be more than social and political is grounded in intuition, in duration. Consciousness obsessed, and in continuous contact, with the thingified world breeds pestilence just as mosquitoes do in a puddle that is cut off from the flow of water. When we pull back consciousness from this pestilential puddle, we become aware of an elastic moment when the “puddle” connects to a wider and deeper flow that pedagogically alters its character, even if fleetingly. This connection is intuition toward duration. Let us grasp ourselves afresh as we are, in a present which is thick, and furthermore, elastic, which we can stretch indefinitely backward by pushing the screen which masks us from ourselves farther and farther away; let us grasp afresh the external world as it really is, not superficially, in the present, but in depth, with the immediate past crowding upon it and imprinting upon it its impetus; let us in a word become accustomed to see all

18 Ibid.,

pp. 150–151. Tagore, “The Teacher,” in The Religion of Man (Santiniketan: Visvabharati University Press, 1968), p. 167. 19 R.

94  K. ROY things sub specie durationis: immediately in our galvanized perception what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again. Satisfactions which art will never give save to those favoured by nature and fortune, and only then upon rare occasions, philosophy thus understood will offer to all of us, at all times, by breathing life once again into the phantoms which surround us and by revivifying us. In so doing philosophy will become complementary to science in practice as well as in speculation.20

The primary lesson is this: let us emerge from the unbroken flow or duration—in which there is no quantitative change—to the use of things, and then we again turn our consciousness back toward the flow. We do not linger too long in the world of things, to its “dead angularities,” and organize to proliferate or fight to own them. Our relations to the surrounding world do not receive their meaning from the significance of object-proliferates. Rather, they receive their meaning from the lived duration to which we must return again and again from the thingified world.21 So the dialectic is not between sensations and the categories as Kant had imagined, but between the world of duration and the world of external change. This is not to dismiss the empirical world, which would be both impossible and foolish, but to insist that there is a complimentary reality that grounds the empirical, a reality that has been long ignored or brushed aside as not relevant to mainstream consciousness whose universe consists mainly of the will-to-power and the will-to-knowledge. Of course, all of this only begs the question, and the methodological issue will have to be revisited hermeneutically here, otherwise duration will remain rather vague, mysterious, and out of pragmatic reach. In other words, the question must be raised: In what sense is intuition a formal method that leads us to the other side of reality? We will find, unsurprisingly, that the question on method will also lead us to the pedagogy.

20 Bergson,

Creative Mind, p. 150. could be thought of as the ontological basis for the Pauline distinction between usus and dominium (use and ownership). In apostolic thinking, the correct relation with things has to do with their use and not ownership. The Franciscan insistence on a usus as opposed to possessive rights over property may be understood in this light—a moral stance backed by ontology. 21 This

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The most general methodological question is this: How is intuition – which primarily denotes an immediate knowledge (connaissance) – capable of forming a method, once it is accepted that the method involves one or several meditations? Bergson often presents intuition as a simple act. But, in his view, simplicity does not exclude a qualitative multiplicity, various directions in which it comes to be actualized. It is in this sense, then, that intuition involves a plurality of meanings and irreducible multiple aspects. Bergson distinguishes essentially three distinct sorts of acts that in turn determine the rules of the method: The first concerns the stating and creating of problems; the second, the discovery of genuine differences in kind; the third, the apprehension of real time. It is by showing how we move from one meaning to another and what the “fundamental meaning” is that we are able to rediscover the simplicity of intuition as lived act, and thus answer the general methodological question.22

Although intuition is made out to be a single act—one of direct simplicity—it has a non-numerical qualitative multiplicity implied in it. Like loving, which is a single act having multiple aspects enfolded in it, intuition is a multifaceted simplicity. For the sake of communication and approach, it must be analyzed, and on analysis, we find that at least three inter-related acts are involved. The first is to get away from false problems and generate an authentic problem, which is the primary philosophical act; the second concerns qualitative differences within composites—a meaningful question can only be asked if we are able to make proper distinction with regard to elements within (otherwise poorly analyzed) composites; and the third, the time dimension in relation to which a question is raised must not be caught up in illusory succession mixed up with extensity as discussed earlier. In other words, intuition-facing-duration is re-discovered in the simplicity of a lived act only if these conditions are met. Otherwise, the problem of intuition remains a mysterious and abstract one. We shall briefly look at each of these conditions next. Consider the first necessary condition. We are trained to “solve” problems, that is, to focus on the solution rather than on the nature of the problem itself. Bergson, on the contrary, insists that we need to examine the problem to see if it is a false problem. Humans set themselves false problems and seek their solution. “The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently 22 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (Transl.) Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 14.

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of positing it, even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden, and so to speak, covered up: The only thing left to do is to uncover it.”23 The habit of solving artificial problems goes back all the way to school where the teacher or the textbook poses the problem and the student is made to seek the solution according to some pre-established algorithm or formula. This way we do not develop any intuition about the reality in which we participate because the problem and its solution are ready-mades that do not allow us the freedom to formulate an authentic query about our actual contact with reality. In art, poetry, music, or even mathematics, the effort of invention consists in generating the very terms in which the problem will be formulated. In painting, for example, the problem and its solution are identical—the very raising of the aesthetic problem through a medium is simultaneously its solution. This allows for the creative emergence of a direct, pre-rational grasp of things that comes out of the totality of existential relations running through the psyche and the soma and their interrelation. The root of each genuine problem thus lies in the élan vital or life essence. This, however, presents a fresh problem: “how can this constitutive power which resides in the problem be reconciled with the norm of the true? While it is relatively easy to define the true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems have already been stated, it seems much more difficult to say in what the true and the false consist when applied to the process of stating problems.”24 In other words, the norm of the true and (creative) constitutive power seems to be at odds with one another. If the make-up of the authentic problem is that of the creatively constituted, how can we judge it normatively? In order to answer this question, we must attempt an intrinsic determination of the false problem. Take for example, a typical problem in the domain of education— the question of competence. The notion of “competence” exhibited in the foregoing as management skills, planning skills, instructional skills, and assessing skills is legion and is of the same order as many typified expressions we find in current educational literature—“competency-based teacher education,” “competency-based curriculum development,” “competency-based testing,” “management by 23 Henri

Bergson, op. cit., p. 57. op. cit., p. 16.

24 Deleuze,

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competency-based objectives,” and their many derivatives. As such, “competence” reflects what might be seen as the current mainstream metaphor of teaching, schooling, and curriculum thought. This metaphor sees “competence” as means to given ends, skills and techniques oriented toward interest in efficient control. Such a knowing-how-to-do view of competence is embedded in scientific and technological thought and action within the framework of which auricular competencies such as “teaching competence” “curriculum development competence,” or “curriculum evaluation competence” are seen strictly within a technical ends-means framework, reducing competence to instrumental reason and instrumental action. As such, the teacher, the curriculum developer, or the curriculum evaluators are seen as rule-oriented, rule-governed beings cast within a manipulative ethos, an ethos in which even the future is conceived in terms of rules.25

Mainstream educational practice and discourse have long been obsessed with the notion of competence. It is one of the ruling metaphors in educational literature. And of course, the idea of competence and its many derivatives cannot be separated from the idea of comparison and quantitative measure. Herein lies the basic confusion which leads to the formulation of a false problem: Competence is really a qualitative notion that lies at the intersection of biography, intuitive grasp of conditions, rational analysis, and the physical contingency. The point of intersection of all of these complex trajectories keeps shifting from moment to moment and cannot be grasped quantitatively. But the ruling ideas insist on measuring competence and rationalizing it, using it as a standard of judgment of ability. Deleuze says, “We are victims of a fundamental illusion that corresponds to two aspects of the false problem. The very notion of the false problem implies that we have to struggle not against simple mistakes (false solutions), but against something more profound.”26 In other words, we have to contend with not just simple errors of perception, but an illusion that carries us along, or in which we are immersed, inseparable from our condition. Bergson borrows an idea from Kant although he completely transforms it: It was Kant who showed that reason deep within itself engenders not mistakes but inevitable illusions, only the effect 25 Ted Aoki, “Competence in Teaching as Instrumental and Practical Action: A Critical Analysis,” in Edmund Short (Ed.), Competence: Inquiries into Its Meaning and Acquisition in Educational Settings (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 71–79. 26 Deleuze, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

98  K. ROY of which could be warded off. Although Bergson determines the nature of false problems in a completely different way and although the Kantian critique itself seems to him to be a collection of badly stated problems, he treats the illusion in a way similar to Kant. The illusion is based in the deepest part of the intelligence: We tend to think in terms of more and less, that is, to see differences in degree where there are differences in kind. We can only react against this intellectual tendency by bringing to life, again in the intelligence, another tendency, which is critical. Only intuition can produce and activate [this second tendency] because it rediscovers differences in kind beneath the differences in degree, and conveys to the intelligence the criteria that enable it to distinguish between true and false problems.27

There is a deeply ingrained intellectual tendency that confounds quality with quantity, or difference of kind with magnitude. This tendency is so deep-set that it cannot be corrected; it can only be counteracted by awakening the intuitive faculty. Only intuition can distinguish differences in kind from differences in degree. How is intuition able to accomplish this? It does not do so intellectually or as an idea presented to consciousness. Intuition itself is a pre-intellectual, corporeal capacity that is essentially qualitative. Like a breakwater that resists waves, the awakened intuition corporeally thwarts the waves of measurement that is a major constituent of intellectual habit. Pedagogically, the awakened intelligence releases us from the truncated reality that rational intellect by itself imposes. The mobilized corpus sensorium brings in the other dimension which can sort the qualitative side from the quantitative. Since intuition has no investment in the products of the intellect, it is able to provide a wholesome clarity that is otherwise missing in the conflict-ridden intellect. Against this, the old obsession with competence begins to appear in a wholly different light. But to begin with, a deeper look at the word would certainly be appropriate. “Let us uncover the root etymology of ‘competence.’ The disclosure of the Latin root reveals a fresh view. The Latin root is ‘com-petere,’ ‘com’ meaning ‘together’ and ‘petere’ meaning ‘to seek.’ In a root sense, then, to be competent means to be able to seek together or to be able to venture forth together. This root meaning of ‘competence’ as ‘communal venturing’ holds promise for a fresh view of what it means to be a competent teacher.”28 The seeking or venturing together signified 27 Ibid. 28 Ted

Aoki, op. cit., p. 130.

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in competence takes us far afield of the narrow quantification implied in the instrumental and techno-semantic view of the word. The struggle against the thinning of lives must be carried out at all levels—at the level of implication and at the level of practice—a serious bulwark of this resistance being potentially present in education. One might gain support from the work of the Polish scholar Karol Wojtyla who makes a powerful case for distinguishing capability from instrumental view of action. [Wojtyla’s] denouncement of competence as instrumental action has meaningful relevance for us. I understand that Wojtyla became skeptical of the reductive tendencies of instrumental reason embedded in materialistic and positivistic thought inherited from the 19th century and spreading into all domains of thought in Poland. He had recognized that since Descartes, knowledge of man and his world has been identified with cognition, the ensuing post-Cartesian attitude extending it as reflections in behaviourism, utilitarianism, and determinism. His efforts to transcend objectivism appear in his book The Acting Person dealing with the communal venturing of man as experienced through acting and reflecting throughout one’s life. Unraveling the network of man’s constitutive tendencies and strivings, Wojtyla, in his book, attempted to reveal man’s status in the world, the meaning of emancipation, and of human fulfillment. He probed by means of ontological hermeneutics the constitutive dynamism integrated by the acting person. Believing that man is no mere creature of circumstances conditioned and encapsulated by his social milieu, he proposed man’s worthy life venture as self-disclosure and self-governance as he fashions a personal and social life worth living.29

The word closest (in translation) to competence used by Wojtyla that I could find in the above-mentioned work is efficacy: “Our first task, therefore, will be to examine the interrelation of consciousness and the efficacy of the person, that is to say, of consciousness and what constitutes the essence of the dynamism pertaining to man’s action. Going deeper into the wealth of that experiential whole in which the person reveals itself more and more fully through action we shall discover the specific transcendence disclosed by the person’s action.”30 Wojtyla espouses a philosophy of action through which human essence 29 Ibid. 30 Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Transl.) Andrzej Potocki (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1969), p. 16.

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is revealed. The meaning of action here is nothing other than a continual self-revealing or disclosure-toward-fulfillment. This becoming-action of the human, besides going beyond nineteenth-century humanism, resolves the traditional opposition between mind and body as well as emotion and intellect. Within this constitutive dynamism, competence acquires the form of an inner ontological striving and has little to do with conscious will. The unfolding is neither circumstantial nor monadic and hence transcends the fragmented effort to measure it quantitatively. What is required instead is to comprehend what is actually going on in the presence of action and apply the proper distinctions. This contributes to the awakening of intuition which is the primary pedagogical task set out here. The second condition attached to the awakening of intuition is to do with the problem of composites and their adequate analysis. Deleuze writes: “According to Bergson, a composite must always be divided according to its natural articulations, that is, into elements which differ in kind. Intuition as method is a method of division [toward essence]. Bergson is aware that things are mixed together in reality; in fact, experience itself offers us nothing but composites. But that is not where the difficulty lies. The awkward thing is that we no longer know how to distinguish in that representation the elements which differ in kind, the presences of duration and extensity….In short, we measure the mixtures with a unit that is itself already mixed.”31 Having accepted the composite as a single whole we proceed to respond to it using measures that are themselves composites, giving rise to complications and further problems. For example, consider this banal problem: “Should we teach more math or less of it?” In this question, the referent called “math” is taken as a single thing about which a decision is to be made. But math is hardly a single thing for the learner; it has a static element and a dynamic one, a symbolic content and an experiential one, and an ontic level and an ontological one. Similarly, the receiving subject (student) too is dealt with as something unified. But the bond between the flesh and the idea is too subtle to be studied from the outside as psychology attempts to do, maintaining the division between the observer and the observed (therapist and patient). Psychology is humanistic, whereas intuition is durationistic. Intuition alone can separate these elements in the

31 Deleuze,

op. cit., p. 22.

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composite and show us how to treat each separately within ourselves that stretches the articulation beyond the badly analyzed composite called the human. Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience. But these conditions are neither general nor abstract. Bergson speaks of going “to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes human experience.” Above the turn is precisely the point at which we finally discover differences in kind. But there are so many difficulties in trying to reach this focal point that the acts of intuition have to be multiplied….we push each line [cognitive series] beyond our own experience: an extraordinary broadening out…It is in this sense that Bergson on several occasions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefitted in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience – just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements of the real curve, “the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.” To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman, to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy.32

The awakening of intuition takes us beyond experience to the very ground of experience. Here “us” must not be understood as some sovereign entity standing outside experience but as a mere placeholder that allows linguistic articulation. We are ourselves badly analyzed composites which begin to come apart in the form of different strands once we turn ourselves over to intuitionistic movements. Consider the statement: ‘This student does badly in history.’ On the face of it, this seems to be a fairly unproblematic assertion. But it unwittingly erects a false relation between two frozen immobilities that on analysis turns out to be a case of a collection of badly analyzed composites leading ultimately to an un-useful precipitate. The locus of the “student” composite within a particular articulation, the selective identification of the temporal train called “history,” the quantitative measure that connects the two on a performative plane, the evaluative basis, the composition of the evaluator, all of this and more make that summative statement a very wobbly one indeed.

32 Ibid.,

p. 27.

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And that is not all. Each of the above strands can be pushed back further, beyond experience to the ground of experience where we become aware only of certain movements crisscrossing. A judgment at the level of mid-sized bodies or frozen patterns maybe useful for limited social purposes, but is not philosophically meaningful for it keeps us trapped within humanistic objectives and pretensions. To be stuck in a particular conception of ourselves is philosophically unbecoming even when it is socially appropriate. The purpose of philosophy is to take us beyond ourselves as we know it and open up the composite to the “overman” or the trans-human potential. That is where emancipation lies and not within the human condition. Then the next philosophical question is what do we find when we sort out our composites? “How does Bergson proceed? He asks, first, between what two things there may be (or may not be) a difference of kind. His first response is that, since the brain is an ‘image’ among other images, or ensures certain movements among other movements, there cannot be a difference in kind between the [perceptive] faculty of the brain and the reflex functions of the core [matter].”33 This hypothesis implies that matter and perception are of one kind. The difference between the two is merely a delay that representation introduces creating an interval in which a multiplicity of reactions (movements) are possible. By virtue of this interval, we are enabled to retain only those elements of the material object that interest us. That is to say, perception is object minus aspects that do not interest us. This is the exact opposite of what commonsense tells us: it tells us that perception is one thing and matter another. The difference of degree is seen as difference in kind. All manner of false questions and false relationships arise from this. The second line that must be developed next concerns true differences in kind or qualitative difference. According to Bergson, the principle that links together instants and makes ourselves and objects appear more than instantaneous is memory. The memory principle gives everything a duration in time. We are consequently in the presence of a new line, that of subjectivity, on which recollection-memory and contraction-memory are ranged: These terms may be said to differ in kind from those of the preceding line (perception-object-matter). In short, representation in general is divided 33 Ibid.,

p. 24.

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into two directions that differ in kind, into two pure presences that do not allow themselves to be represented: that of perception which puts us at once into matter and that of memory which puts us at once into the mind….[Their] mixture is our representation. All false problems derive from the fact that we do not know how to go beyond experience toward the conditions of experience, toward the articulations of the real, and rediscover what differs in kind in the composites given to us and on which we live.34

The two lines differing in kind, contraction-recollection-subject and perception-object-matter, intersect each other to produce experience. By themselves these are “pure presences” and cannot be represented. Only by extending the line beyond experience and careful super-polation as described earlier can we keep these lines distinct. The effort that keeps them distinct is intuition. Intuition as method is thus this method of separation, of putting things in their right places. Existence takes a different turn when we are able to eliminate false problems that arise due to mixing up different categories of presence. Education arises out of compounded states, that is, out of the mixed state of perception and recollection. But there is no understanding of this compounded state which is mistakenly seen as a simple one. For example, in positivistic thinking (which is the dominant mode of thought), matter is taken as an independent reality that we study. The fact is that matter and perception are not ontologically or qualitatively different but only separated by a time interval. Similarly, the individual is treated as sovereign without proper attention to the process that gives rise to it. The interaction between matter and subject undergoes profound transformation when we grasp exactly what is going on when we say we perceive something: And what exactly is going on? The ceaseless reciprocal movement between matter and memory that gives rise to consciousness needs careful meditation upon which the hard separation between observer and observed is set aside. The sorrow that is inherent in subject/object separation is weakened, and we are enabled to move beyond psychology. There is the undeniable moment of poiesis in intuition that makes learning do something entirely different: Education becomes the search for an entry point into the ontological movement of the real rather than be caught in the psychological movement of the self. 34 Ibid.,

pp. 25–26.

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Finally, in the closing moments of this chapter, we have to speak of the actual relation between intuition and duration. Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us. “Only the method of which we are speaking allows one to pass beyond idealism as well as realism, to affirm the existence of objects…[thus] one perceives any number of durations, all very different from one another.” Without intuition as method, duration would remain a simply psychological experience.35

By means of intuition, we become aware of own internal duration, and at the same time become conscious of other durations that are different from ours. In the context of education, the teacher’s duration is not the student’s duration. The assumptions of homogeneity or congruence lead to pedagogic impasse. This means that the inner movement of the teacher, that is, the subterranean flow on which floats the frozen precipitates that we call knowledge is different than the inner flow of the child. Hence the knowledge-precipitate appears entirely different from the two divergent perspectives. Ignorance of this qualitative difference constitutes the basic error of education: The difference is not quantitative (amount of knowledge possessed by each, etc.) but qualitative (differential flows). Besides, it is not as though a given world is being surveyed by a given body (or bodies). The reality is that a world arises at the same time as the observer comes into being. Two flows intersect to generate the perceptual pairs that we come to know as reality including ourselves. An intellectual understanding of this does not return us to the immanent flows or pure presences, but they do give us a pedagogic direction away from the illusions that the quantity-quality mix-up produces. In other words, it gives us a starting point for the development of intuition. If the old configurations created by wrong notions about composites persist, as they are very likely to since they are part of long-settled perceptual habits, it only means that our pedagogic intensity must be raised to new levels to achieve a moment of breakthrough. What does this pedagogic breakthrough offer? The proper understanding of quality and quantity changes our ontological bearing and gives new meaning to emancipatory 35 Ibid.,

pp. 32–33.

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education. It also gives us the possibility of discovering new meaning in our existence as well as in our dissolution, in being and nothingness, for now the twain are not qualitatively different. And the things that are qualitatively different, when experienced in consciousness, bring about a different relation with what is.

References A. W. Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Dariusz Pietka, “The Concept of Intuition and Its Role in Plato and Aristotle.” Organon, Vol. 47, 2015, pp. 23–40. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (Transl.) Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1991). H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914). Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (Transl.) Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946). Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Transl.) Andrzej Potocki (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1969). R. Tagore, “The Teacher.” In The Religion of Man (Santiniketan: Visvabharati University Press, 1968). Ted Aoki, “Competence in Teaching as Instrumental and Practical Action: A Critical Analysis.” In Edmund Short (Ed.), Competence: Inquiries into Its Meaning and Acquisition in Educational Settings (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 71–79.

CHAPTER 4

Beyond Chronic Pedagogy: A Conversation

We know of the debate, the discussion, and the argument—a clash of ideas is commonplace. But the no-holds-barred conversation that aims to get at the truth of something, and not just put forth one’s own ideas, is a rare occurrence in education and elsewhere. We come armed with our truths and agendas, our preformed notions and institutionalizations, but rarely do we come together to converse openly about what the background assumptions are and what they make us think and do. Even more rarely do we put together our minds and turn our collective consciousness into a needlepoint in order to explore the ground beyond what is commonly seen and felt. There is an invisible boundary within which we are held by fear and anxiety, by inhibition and indoctrination, by command and conformity, so that anything beyond the commonsense seems mystical and improbable. This invisible boundary is akin to a concrete wall that prevents us from feeling the world anew, that stands between the constituted self and all that is. The monadic self, constituted of specific cultural configurations of time and space, begins to take itself for granted, getting its legitimacy from an uncritical psyche and the existing cultural obsessions. Its pseudo-sovereignty prevents it from looking into itself as a curious construction that acts as a filtering lens. Thus what is sensible to the self seems to be the obvious, and its limits begin to appear as the natural, ontological limits of the perceptible world. The free and open conversation has the advantage of proceeding hermeneutically, making small corrections with the help of a multiplicity of viewpoints and questions, but always aiming toward getting beyond the arbitrary © The Author(s) 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9_4

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boundaries, and breaking through the wall that convention and intellectual lethargy has erected. This kind of conversation or dialogue ought to be at the heart of emancipatory education, but unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, the surreptitious conservation of existing perceptual limits and haggling about inconsequential things within those limits, are the typical demonstrations of the educational debate. This has the advantage of not disturbing the applecart and at the same time appearing to be doing something by shifting cultural matter and symbolic content from one existential corner to another. Hence the saying: “The more things change the more they remain the same.” The actual relation is a tautological one: the more things don’t change, the more they remain the same. The space between the conditional and the consequent is the pseudo-interval in which the apparent takes place which is eventually closed over by the tautological relation returning us to where we were. Below is the reproduction of a three-way conversation which is a reconstructive synthesis of more than one dialogue with some unnecessary parts edited out. The teachers are engaged in looking beyond the usual binaries and oppositions that haunt education and in discovering the perceptual tools that will help them do so. Teacher 1: You were complaining the other day that in our meetings, discussions, and practical decisions we wear a naïve realist outlook, without being specifically conscious of it ourselves. It seemed to me that you were questioning the commonsense categories and ways of speaking about the educational situation such as student, teacher, texts, classes etc. Could you go into that a little bit—what other ways could we speak of these things? It might have pedagogical significance beyond the problem of meetings, etc. Teacher 2: The most settled or the habitual level of the intellect is the “commonsense” perspective. It certainly has its uses but cannot take us very far in thinking about the limits of our existence and the meaning of experience, which is what education is supposed to do. Ironically, sophisticated theories are used as discussion points in classrooms, but they are rarely employed in determining the course of our actual practice. When it comes to how we should proceed, we talk mostly in pre-theoretical, pre-critical terms, as though, for example, Marx, Freud, Berkeley, or even the Christ or the Buddha had not existed or spoken. Each of them, in their own way, was a careful critic of the naïve perspective. Their pedagogies were always challenging the settled habits of thinking. We teach about theory, we don’t practice theory.

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Teacher 3: Are you suggesting that we choose as our reference point a specific framework for deciding our general course of action in the institution? Teacher 2: No, that is certainly not what I am suggesting. That would be too ideological. But we argue about action without clarifying to ourselves and to others what are the grounds or premises of our thoughts. This is the task of theory. Coming from the “commonsense” perspective, we appear to think of our basis as self-evident, which actually makes them baseless. The proposals for action, or contemplation for action, are presented in a-theoretical terms as though what meets the eye was all there was. Teacher 1: Could you give some examples of what you mean? Teacher 2: In a recent meeting, we were discussing what should be done to extend the scope and reach of the existing programs. First, the problem was set in a-theoretical terms. It foreclosed everything other than numerical consideration and proliferation. Teacher 3: You mean mostly courses were named for addition or modification, and timing? Teacher 1: Right! It was a game of lists. There was no critique of why or how we do things to start with. Each thing was externalized, as though it was an issue of time and space, and not about qualitative or aesthetic issues. Teacher 3: The ‘game of lists’ is a good way to frame our pedagogy itself! We are forever discussing lists of readings and assignments or discussing about the discussion of lists, as though these are the guarantees of an education. Teacher 2: Yes, that is true. But this game of lists is part of something much bigger that I want us to consider—the so-called theory/practice divide of which we hear all the time in education. The game of lists obviously falls on the practice side of this imaginary divide. Teacher 1: I see what you are saying. It connects to the basic problem that we began with—the denial of theory. Teacher 2: Quite. You see, this ridiculous thing called theory/practice divide needs careful attention and deconstruction. It is ridiculous because it reveals an extraordinary thoughtlessness on the part of those who are mostly concerned with thinking. Teacher 3: What do you mean? Teacher 2: Theoria implies a way of looking at things, a certain manner of consideration. It starts at the very beginning, as the saying goes, meaning that it begins with the little things. We begin with consciously and theoretically making sense of the little things, and not accepting the way in which they “naturally” present themselves.

110  K. ROY Teacher 3: You mean, we ought to train ourselves to look theoretically at the living moments of our lives. Teacher 1: And we must see to it that theory is not confined only to some formal areas or public domains. Teacher 2: Exactly the point. Then this question does not even come up. You are theorizing all the time, in order to make sense of the successive moments of perception and their connection: I don’t like my neighbor. But theory asks: is my ‘neighbor’ there to be liked, or does it present the possibility of stretching the ‘me’ itself? Teacher 3: Right. There is a becoming-theory of each moment of perception. Teacher 2: Yes, yes, I like that…a becoming-theory. Each embodied and lived truth moves toward a kind of connected deepening and widening, and in turn existing theory is tested against this ever deepening scenario. Teacher 1: Then it becomes second nature to frame perception against theory. Teacher 2: No, no, not second, but first nature! It must become the most natural thing to theorize as we go along. We can’t compartmentalize our lived life from education and then all on a sudden become theoretical in the latter domain. When we live our everyday lives a-theoretically, then that shows up in formal practice. Theory extends the possibilities—the slice of life we admit into our range of possibilities. But this is blocked when you only confine yourself to manipulating linguistic resources. Teacher 3: Please clarify the last part. Teacher 2: Existing language, born of past and current practice, has some inherent resources that we can continually rearrange, pretending that we are doing something new. But nothing new comes out of this. Philosophers have often exploited this linguistic resource to promote some system or other, but in the end it turns out to be more word games without substantially extending existential possibilities. As educators we do this all the time. We feed students a lot of words, which are mere descriptions of reality, without changing that reality itself. Teacher 3: Why is theory any different? Does it not partake of language? Teacher 2: Theory begins by admitting the limits of language, that is, current practices. No doubt it uses language, but it uses language against itself to make it yield the pre-conceptual. Teacher 1: Now maybe we can go back to the question we began with: the problem of naïve realism. Teacher 2: Yes, let us do so. Teacher 1: Let us take the example of the meeting that you mentioned. How might it have progressed theoretically conceived?

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Teacher 2: Obviously, there are potentially a million ways it might have gone. But we can hold up an example, like a thought experiment. Alright? Teacher 1: Okay! Teacher 2: In perspectivism, a beginning must be made by acknowledging the perspective. If I have thought along Nietzschean lines about the future of our education, then that should be acknowledged. Or if it is along lines of repression and Eros, then there should be acknowledgment of that. Or if it just brute practicality, then I must admit that as a fraction of the available slice of life. Teacher 1: You expect each one to frame her or his proposition against a framework each time? Is that not cumbersome and unrealistic? Teacher 2: When we practice theory, we discover the particular darkness of the age, as well as its light. It is this darkness and light that come through the presentation of our becoming-theory. It is not something deliberate. Teacher 3: You are saying that the digested and internalized theory then shines forth and operates self-consciously as its own critique. Teacher 1: I understand that. But each one also has her/his own peculiar darkness. Teacher 2: Which must be acknowledged and filtered through theory. This casting of the circles of theory-tempered light create intersections of colour that decide the direction of action. Teacher 1: How can we ever hope for agreement? Teacher 2: We don’t hope for anything. The lights blend to highlight what needs to be highlighted. Theory must not be abandoned in the hope of agreement. Teacher 1: This is too metaphorical. Let us be concrete. Teacher 3: Let me try and give an example. Let us imagine a neo-leftist thinker among us seeing education as extraction of ‘surplus value’ from the young, wants this value to be returned in real terms and not merely through grades. At the same time a Deweyan looks at existing curriculum, and thinks that it must turn toward the phenomenological or toward experience. Coming from two very different points of view, both are in the final analysis prioritizing, or highlighting if you will, labour. Now it is up to the participants to think out in what way we can radically give value to student labour. Teacher 2: That is actually a very good example of theoretical thinking— not thinking about theory but theoretical thinking. Teacher 1: It also demonstrates how the theoretical overlap occurs in terms of practice. While they are addressing seemingly different problems, the emancipatory angles appear to intersect.

112  K. ROY Teacher 3: But I want to press this question of naïve realism further and ask about the underlying ontological basis. What is the structure of thinking that keeps us within a naïve realist perspective? Teacher 1: I think that needs to be carefully established, lest we ourselves become realists about realism. Teacher 2: I suggest that the problem lies in a fundamental confusion between quantity and quality. In education, the naïve perspective quantifies learning; it thinks of inner things in the same way as it pictures outer ones, and therein begins endless confusion. Quantity is passed off for quality. Teacher 3: Please clarify your statement. Teacher 2: The numerical magnitude of things outside of us is never intensive. Take for example, “intense” rain—that is just a manner of speaking. It is actually quantity not intensity. One can actually measure the rainfall and contrast it with last week’s rain or whatever. But anger or fear or learning are not measurable in the same way. These are truly intensities. It is a different class of phenomenon altogether. Intensity of feelings or sensations inside of us never corresponds to numerical magnitude. We confuse these two fundamentally different classes of phenomena. The result is a lot of prattle that gets us nowhere. Teacher 3: And I think what you are suggesting is that “learning” being of the qualitative kind is not measurable. Teacher 2: Yes. Once we see this, many things follow, and the world of education, which is based on this central myth of equating quantity and quality, is turned upside down. This is the importance of theory. It is able to challenge the naïve perception, commonsense equations, and observe the consequences of loose use of language. Teacher 1: Hmmm…if what you say is true, it does seem as if there would be rather deep consequences for how we consider education. Teacher 2: I want to go a little slow here. The philosopher Henri Bergson has studied this problem rather deeply—the problem of confusing quantity and quality, magnitude and intensity, and its general consequences. Teacher 1: Ah! Bergson. Not someone you hear of much these days. Teacher 2: The unnecessary disagreements with Einstein damaged his reputation. They were essentially talking of different things. I think he remains highly relevant, more so today than ever before. Teacher 3: In graduate school they refused to teach Bergson because they thought he was too mystical! Teacher 2: I have heard that said of Marx! Classless society being mystification and secularized Christianity, etcetera. Anyone saying anything important beyond the existing levels of intellectual tolerance is accused of mysticism.

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Teacher 3: OK, so what of the confusion of quantity and quality? What does Bergson have to say about it? Teacher 2: Two inner states, that is, qualities, are not comparable; they are essentially heterogeneous to one another. In other words, I cannot be more angry or less angry; anger cannot be measured on a continuous scale. The ‘more angry’ and the ‘less angry’ are actually two entirely different states and not degrees of the same phenomenon. Teacher 3: If we accept that, what of that as far as our present problem is concerned? Teacher 2: I’m coming to that. If we accept the above to be true, then we can say that the terms in which we grasp ourselves have all been borrowed from the external world, that is, the world of measure. For the power of increase in magnitude of sensations is obviously borrowed and introjected from external phenomena in which we are attuned to seeing discrete multiplicities or numbers which can be added. Teacher 1: I think I’m following you, please go on. Teacher 2: We add up distinctly different states of consciousness— qualitative multiplicities—and produce a combined psychic state which we grasp and speak of as ourselves. This apparently integrated psychic unit becomes the basis for education. Are you following me? Teacher 1: I am trying, please continue. Teacher 3: But we do experience continuity, don’t we? Surely we don’t jump from discrete state to discrete state? Teacher 2: Yes, but the continuity we experience is not time but duration. I was coming to that. The synthesized continuity is the product not of additive time, which is but projection and introjection, but what Bergson calls duration—an inner time that is not time by the clock at all. The moments of duration do not lie adjacent to one another, but are interpenetrated by each as qualitative multiplicity. Their unfolding in experience does not happen in time, but inside time just as a piece of elastic can be stretched. To understand this phenomenologically and not merely conceptually is important. It changes our view of ourselves, and hence the nature and course of action that we find relevant. Teacher 3: What is the advantage of replacing time by the concept of duration? Teacher 1: Let me see if I got this right. I’ll use a metaphor. There is external light which is a quantitative phenomenon—more light, less light, and so on. We also speak of inner light, which is not light at all, but some kind of expanded understanding that is neither additive nor quantitative, but qualitative. In the same manner, inner time or duration is not time at all but something quite different. We create a hybrid by mixing two different orders, a mix of the internal and the external, which results in confusion. Does this make sense?

114  K. ROY Teacher 2: That is certainly a useful way to think about this. Teacher 1: I already feel light-headed! Let me ask, why do we maintain this confusion between time and duration? What does Mr. Bergson say about this? Teacher 2: Bergson says we keep up this illusion because the inner states are too heterogeneous and nebulous; we solidify them and give fixed names to them to overcome their instability and fleetingness. Objectification helps to project them onto social life. Teacher 1: Sounds reasonable. What then is the problem? Teacher 2: Well, in a sense, it breeds a schizophrenic existence. There is an external, spatial self that is bred in reciprocal action with the outer, a certain social representation, if you will. And there is the inner state which is a living process that is constantly in a state of becoming, and that has nothing in common with the juxtaposition of moments in external space. These two are opposed to one another. One is quantitative, and the other is pure quality. We get addicted to the quantitative projection perhaps because it gives us power over the outer. But real freedom lies in duration because it is becoming in and of itself. Teacher 3: Let us turn back to the question of education. What does all this have to do with pedagogy? Teacher 2: To begin with, the naïve realist perspective hides all this. It takes time uncritically as a homogeneous medium, inside and outside of us. And the moment we do that we become the subjects of time, and the question of freedom etc., appear as impossible conundrums. Pedagogy itself becomes trapped in the age-old conflict between free-will and determination. Teacher 1: Are we saying that theory helps us to move in the direction of the Real? Teacher 3: I think we could perhaps say that theory helps us to move away from confusion that we ourselves have created. Teacher 2: Theory helps us to understand and avoid the mix-up between fundamental differences of kind, a mix-up that is at the root of a lot of civilizational crises. Its pedagogical implications are immediately obvious. Let us look at it step-by-step. First, we create a homogeneous medium that enables us to externalize and group sensations into commonly held objects; next we get these ready for language; third, it all gets inserted into social life; and finally we speak about these and their inter-relations in classrooms, which we call education. Teacher 1: Fairly straightforward, it seems. Teacher 2: Yes. Too straightforward! Everything begins to go haywire when you include in all this the receiving and projecting consciousness—the observer. The neatness of the above is alluring, and

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the observing consciousness cannot resist the temptation of doing the same thing to its own inner states and replacing the nebulous heterogeneity by neat categories in order to create a viable social self. The external order is introjected to generate an inner spatiality that is essentially a manufactured one. In due course, looking outward from this objectified self, the psyche seeks more than mere objects, which it calls “freedom.” In other words, it seeks something beyond being the cause of a series of effects, because the latter is too mechanical and bounded. In other words, it seeks its own original condition which it has left behind. Teacher 3: And this original condition is “duration?” Teacher 2: Absolutely! The spontaneous becoming that is duration and no other. Bergson says we are all sub specie durationis, and hence seek to return to it unconsciously. But now the objectified world mirrored in our own objectification does not allow us to return. Teacher 1: The response is possibly further objectification, because that is the only way we have become used to…. Teacher 2: Yes, and this is what we call technology. Because we are unable to back into our durational state, having lost our intuition for it, we invent more objects, we break up the world into further differentiations seeking the original freedom. Unfortunately, the freedom cannot be had in objects and in their relations, however sophisticated, because they are finished things, dead, without true becoming. Teacher 1: This has the feel of a Greek tragedy. Teacher 3: And we are the authors of it, having inaugurated it through our own hubris. Teacher 2: The question before us is of course what to do about it as educators. Teacher 3: Yes, sooner or later we must turn to the question of praxis. Teacher 2: Let us do so now, let us turn to duration as a pedagogic problem. The problem of freedom has sprung from a confusion between duration and extensity, between quality and quantity, between magnitude and intensity. Let us see if it is possible to address it pedagogically to go beyond the confusion. Teacher 3: Before we go on, I need a clarification. Is there any manner in which this problem comes up in the course of things and not gratuitously? Teacher 1: I think it comes up because we are always in a moral crisis of some sort, and it can probably be traced back in some way to the confusion we are talking about. For it seems to be some kind of fundamental confusion that has got to be at the root of things. The crisis in education, for example, the inability to address existential issues in any

116  K. ROY meaningful manner and go beyond formulas, as well as its focus only on the outer, seems to be just this kind of moral crisis. Teacher 2: Agreed. Now to take the discussion toward praxis we must ask the question: in what manner can we raise the qualitative question within education? For clarification I must hasten to add that I do not mean quality of education, I mean the question of quality itself as we were discussing earlier. Teacher 1: It seems to me that we have got to learn to be very simple. I say this because complex ideas have not helped the human condition nor have the great philosophical systems provided succour to the thirsty soul. Teacher 2: There is nothing simpler than intuition as method. The complexity lies in attempting to express it in words. The first thing one must learn about it is the power of negation. To negate inwardly is to deny the hold of all conceptual schemas that try to give shape to the psyche. The psyche has no shape or permanence, as follows from our earlier discussion. It is an ever-becoming interpenetration of shadowy sensations to which the template of time borrowed from the external world gives stability. Teacher 1: The development of intuition demands that we scramble and randomize any inner psychological order that was accidentally produced in our contact with the outer world, is that it? Teacher 2: You have put it better than I could. After following the exterior according to the rules of extensional logic, one must return to oneself which is duration. The process of return is intuition. But the radical simplicity itself is forbidding…we are used to concepts. The mind does not know the other path, how to lapse into itself. Teacher 1: We have made a beginning. We said that the first thing to learn about this domain is the value of negation. Pedagogically, the value of negation has never been explored. We only ask of the student to take on more and more positivity. We never speak of off-loading the apparatuses that society has programmed. Teacher 3: True, but I don’t see how we could approach this ‘pedagogical negation’ in a concrete manner. Teacher 2: I don’t think there is any path to it. It lies in the careful and circumspect manner in which we approach things. We cannot declare negation as a method. But the development of an alert consciousness requires shedding much positivity, as alertness is not a function of knowledge. It is rather about finding an inner rhythm to which you stick overcoming the continuous debris of extensionality. Teacher 1: So, would it be fair to say that negation is a form of observation? If, by development of intuition, we mean some sort of

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meta-knowledge of consciousness, that is, knowledge of how it behaves, then observation would be a logical point to begin, I would think. Teacher 3: Alright. I see what you are saying. Teacher 1: Ordinary mental action is directed towards things, towards manipulation and rearrangement of matter. We can begin by introducing the notion that there exists another kind of intimate knowledge that is not action on matter. This could be an important pedagogical move to begin with. Teacher 2: I think it would be an error to think too quickly about the student. What about ourselves? Are we assuming that we are beyond the concept? Teacher 1: When I spoke about pedagogy I included ourselves. Here there is no ‘us’ and the ‘student.’ All of us are essentially in the same boat. That boat is the conceptual boat. Teacher 2: I agree. In fact, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ itself is the product of extension, part of the old-fashioned way of looking at reality. Intuition, which is looking back at duration, has neither us nor them. Teacher 3: You mean it is not personal, is that what you are saying? Teacher 2: Exactly. There is nothing personal in intuition. It is not my intuition. Intuition is just intuition that has a special destiny to return to our source, to duration, that is all. Conceptual intelligence cannot do it. Teacher 3: Are there other steps that we need to consider? Teacher 2: Certainly. This is just the beginning, a sort of making a clearing, so that we can look around. [After a pause] Teacher 2: You know, I am often accused of being a romantic! To me that word signifies one who admits of quality metaphysically, as distinct from quantity. In the modern consciousness, anyone who admits of quality, including the poets and the artists, become marked as romantics. Teacher 1: In the popular discourse, the romantic is one who is often not practical, who is a dreamer. Teacher 2: Yes…one who is not practical. And to be practical means one who is concerned with quantity, with measurement, with numbers and magnitudes. But one who insists that there is more to existence than measurement is branded as a romantic. Teacher 3: Are you suggesting that modern consciousness is one-sided since it is blind to quality? It makes it pathological? Teacher 2: Yes, that is what I am saying. And to awaken intuition we need to move away from this single-track thinking. We have to create, or encourage, a kind of thinking that is not addicted to ceaseless comparing, measuring, categorizing, but is also in sympathy with reality as such. I’ll try and explain this complementary movement. There are two

118  K. ROY ways of considering material reality. One is by breaking down the complex into its simple constituents and measuring them. This as you know is the analytical method. The other method detects in the most elementary forms a tendency toward quality which is measureless. Teacher 3: I did not grasp the last point you made. Teacher 2: Quality does not reside in anything. Rather all things participate in quality. Another name for quality is freedom. Quantity is a certain expression of quality, its externalization. Teacher 3: Now you are indulging in mysticism! Teacher 2: No, not mysticism. Quality is intuited by reversing the usual direction of the workings of thought. That is why one struggles to say anything about it. If the outward movement results in quantity and discrete objects, the reverse movement leads back to quality. Teacher 1: So, it looks as though this unnameable thing is beyond any pedagogic move. Teacher 2: It is beyond the symbol, it is true. We cannot reduce it to any symbol and proceed with it. That is the greatest difficulty. But although we cannot operate with symbols, we can locate ourselves in the mobility of our consciousness resisting the tendency toward the symbol. The experience of pure mobility is the pedagogic moment here. Teacher 1: Let me see if I get this correctly. You are saying that in the normal course of things, we are used to mirroring the external discrete reality with an equally broken up fragmented inner reality, and vice versa. It is mutual and reciprocal in a circular way and carried out through symbolic representation. You are suggesting that we must break through this circularity at some point, break through and go to what is behind the symbol, to the fluidity that lies underneath it. Is that it? Teacher 2: Yes, rather. Teacher 1: And this fluidity is ‘quality’ that is pre-magnitude? Teacher 2: It will speak for itself when we return to it, meaning that we must be careful not to reduce it to another symbol! Teacher 1: I understand that, but it still does not clarify for me the pedagogic question. Teacher 3: I think an alert consciousness, which has woken up from its usual sluggish take-for-granted manner of going about its business may experience moments of strangeness that it cannot identify. These are qualitative moments that cannot be associated readily with any symbol. The attempt to do so, meaning, the attempt to quickly bring it under a symbolic regime should be resisted, as we discussed earlier. The discomfort, if one can put up with it, and realize why it is occurring, brings up the other side. It is a matter of cultivation. Teacher 2: Rather well put. We could not put this into anyone unless it was already present in some nascent form, covered over by the dominant

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form of consciousness. The dominant form of consciousness being attention to matter and its relations. But we know that the fundamental principle of matter is decay or degradation—the moment it comes into existence it starts to fall apart, however slowly or rapidly. The net result on consciousness-toward-matter is a psychological state we call anxiety, which is also a condition of decay. In other words, matter and anxiety mirror each other. Anxiety attempts to overcome matter by still more matter, but it obviously cannot, since they are identical. One form of decay cannot overcome another form of the same thing, it can only get compounded. Once we deeply realize this, anxiety may stop and there is inward relaxation. In this inward relaxation, another movement becomes slowly apparent that has no expression in matter. Teacher 1: Could we say then that a lot depends upon our proper understanding of matter and its relationship to us? That pedagogically, our approach to matter must take a more philosophical turn, and we must learn to look at it not naïvely as something innocent and independent of us but as intrinsically linked to our very act of being conscious of them. The use of things reciprocally conditions our psyche, gets us trapped into the temporal order of things. Teacher 2: The fact of the matter is that matter is not independent of us, but a limiting case of that which we experience as consciousness at the other end, that is, the fluid end. This must be carefully addressed pedagogically. At the moment this is badly ignored and the naïve approach to matter is encouraged. Our very language has to change and we must become more circumspect about how we view the world of things. Their immobility must not deceive us. This must no doubt enter our pedagogic stance. Teacher 1: At last I am able to view, albeit very dimly, the pedagogy of this immense enterprise of reorienting thinking. The weight of our current attitude is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, which makes the simplicity of all this appear very difficult. From horizon to horizon, each moment and action of our lives is in the direction of thingification. Teacher 3: The biggest thing is not that I learn something new, but that I shake myself loose from what I have already learnt to become, due to outer social pressure, and inner un-watchfulness. Teacher 2: The biggest thing is that I have become immobile, like things. I have to get back into becoming, into the original fluidity in which there is no particularity. Redemption lies in the non-symbolic, interpenetrative order of duration. Teacher 3: This realization requires a lot of humility, to get off the high horse of conceptualization. The arrogance of knowledge must be set aside it seems. We do not renounce knowledge, we put it in its place.

120  K. ROY Teacher 2: Among the several pedagogical meditations required, this is certainly one of them. Teacher 1: So far, we have spoken of two other meditations—negation and admission of quality. There must be more in this attempt to orient ourselves towards intuition. Let us identify some of the others. Teacher 2: We will turn to what might be one of the most difficult meditations. It is not difficult in itself. It is difficult because of the habits of thought and prejudices we hold that obstruct clear and direct vision. Teacher 1: Go on, I believe we’re ready for it. Teacher 2: Let us look at how we ascribe characteristics to things. We think a flower is beautiful or a horse is fast, and so on. Careful investigation will show that this is really a lazy way of grasping the situation, by attribution to the object. In actuality, beauty or velocity pre-exist the object. A particular amalgamate or composite participates in these qualities, but we are used to associating the quality with the object. To think of qualities existing by themselves require a lot of careful introspection. Teacher 3: It seems to have little basis in experience. We do not experience qualities existing by themselves. Are you being neo-Platonic here? Teacher 2: Not necessarily. You see, beauty or ugliness etc. cannot make any sense unless consciousness already has an intuition of them that provides them with cognitive value in a pre-given sort of way. But what I am going to propose now might appear even more perplexing. I propose that the world at base is movement and not something which moves. That is to say, movement is not an attribute of things. Things don’t move; rather it is motion that moves through them. Or, which is the same thing, objects are nothing but different orders of movement criss-crossing each other. The something that moves is basically a naïve perception engendered by the mental apprehension of movement, seen from outside the frame of that movement. Located within the movement, there is no object that moves. Teacher 1: But then it behoves us to explain why the natural bent is to perceive in static forms and not in terms of dynamic movement. Otherwise we will stand accused of reducing things again to mere claims and verbal abstractions. Teacher 2: The intellect has great propensity toward static matter. During the course of our evolution, the intellect has grown reciprocally in relation to objects. It is impossible to convince the intellect to see reality in terms of flowing dynamic movement. Hence the intellect has to take a back seat in these meditations. Teacher 3: What then is the organ of perception? Teacher 2: You will no doubt have noticed that when we are in deep crisis, we stop paying attention to objects. The world appears to us as in a

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whirl. We seem to be caught up in movements rather than objects. You will say that this is psychological rather than anything ontological. But I beg to differ. At the level at which we are speaking now, the psyche merges with ontology. Obviously we cannot liquefy existing objects and render them back into pure movement. That is impossible because they have already attained ontic status in consciousness. They have become stamped with the conferred staticity. But we can certainly go beyond them to the yet-to-emerge reality that is in potentia and let our psycho-ontology perform there in order to abstain from thingifying. Teacher 3: That still does not prove that the basis of everything is movement and not states of matter. Teacher 2: Yes, but for that we have to go one level below the mid-sized objects with which we are familiar. Science amply proves this fact when it descends to the level of the very small. It is unable to find anything other than movement. Movement of what? The ‘…of what’ is the prejudice born of our particular frame of reference. In actuality, there is no ‘of what.’ Berkeley called matter Idea for a good reason. Matter exists only in relation to consciousness, and not independently of it. Just as a wave-like movement or radiation manifests itself as energy at the receiving end, without any ‘ether’ for propagation, movement manifests itself in general without substance, culminating in objects which are nothing but frozen movement. Teacher 3: All this is quite logical, but it is not phenomenological. When I get hit by a car I do not claim that matter is illusion or mere idea. Teacher 2: Alright, let us take consider that example. When I get hit by a car, one series of movements symbolized by my body is modified by another series of movements called the car. Every form of contact is movements in collision. Nothing is ever stationary, even if it appears to be thus, relative to my frame of reference. There are movements, and movements within movements, and still others within them, ad infinitum. Besides, movement should not be seen as jumping around or as obvious displacement. Degradation is also movement. A chair can sit there and ‘move’ in the sense of deteriorate. When I move from A to B, that is one kind of movement. But even when I am relatively still, there are an unthinkable variety of movements going on in my body. All of these are movements. To learn to see movements one must pay attention to the body, the inalienable presence that is with each of us. Medical science tells us that at any given moment the body is an intersection of various homeostasis. But the stasis is not absolute, it is a relative one. The movements are maintained within a certain range. It is their combination that presents itself as a body.

122  K. ROY Teacher 3: Given all that has been said, I think we make an error when we use the word “see” in the context of movement. Seeing, although it is often used inclusively, has too much opticality, prioritizing vision. What is emerging rather is that we must feel movement. The example of the body clearly indicates that we mean feeling and sensing in a corporeal sort of way. Teacher 1: I think you are right. The word “see” is misleading. You can see movement only at the gross level. At other levels, we have to learn to feel it. Teacher 2: No doubt. The de-objectification of reality must begin by feeling things deeply within and without. Teacher 1: Voila! Now we have added a third dimension of consideration to the other two. A solid, three-pronged praxis has emerged: the meditation on negation, the meditation on quality, and the meditation on movement. Together these are supposed to take us pedagogically in the direction of awakening intuition as method….It seems to me that the deeper we go, the more there is to discover and act upon. Teacher 1: Yes, the loss of the commonsense perspective is the loss of our internal anchors that keep us moored to the old habits of thought and to staticity. We are now adrift, not aimlessly, but within a definite current of difference. It is a strange feeling, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Teacher 2: We have cleaned up some basic misunderstandings in the conceptualization of our dealings with reality. But we have much further to go, I think. Having made a clearing, I would like us to take up for consideration a fourth meditation. It is stated in negative terms—the absence of a privileged frame. Seen from anywhere in the universe, all movements are relative to each other. There is no absolute frame. Teacher 3: This is sometimes referred to as a post-humanist frame. You are implying that the category called the human or any category for that matter does not enjoy privilege over any other category in terms of the basic impulse of ontological movement. All movements are ultimately relative to each other. There is a kestrel flying high over my head and I am watching it. In the ordinary manner of viewing, I see the kestrel as a fragment of the larger reality of which I am conscious; there is an implicit hierarchy in this way of looking. I don’t see the kestrel and I as mutually determining each other. But in actuality, there is only movement watching movement, and no other. The so-called ‘watching’ itself is a movement. Teacher 2: And between two movements that are in mutual reckoning, there is a field of attention. This attention is neither yours nor mine, but in which both of us participate. It is simply a tension that binds, for a time, before making way for other tensions in a continuous change.

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Teacher 1: We are in need of some important clarification here. Granted that movements are primary, and are relative to each other, what happens to things like moral responsibility etc.? What about the good old questions of good and evil, and so on? If all is movement, then what is to distinguish the desirable from the undesirable? Teacher 2: The moral categories arise when we are in denial of the basic impulse. Teacher 3: That stands to reason. The need for moral categories come up once we have transgressed, or act in denial of, ontological truth. Why else would we want to refer to categories that are external to the primary movement? Then we are back to measurement—quantifying quality. Teacher 1: Are you saying that movement is its own morality and has no need of anything external to judge it? This is the very opposite of Kant. Teacher 3: Yes, but we have got to be careful here. We do not mean intentional or purposive movement. We are referring to primal or original movement, and not to directed movement. Teacher 1: Yes, yes, I see that. The moment purpose or intention enters, it is no longer pristine or innocent—it comes from a thingified consciousness. The movement we are talking about is something beyond ourselves, the ‘ourselves’ itself being a product and not the process. Teacher 2: Something very important takes place when we give up the innate privileged position. Our consciousness turns more pliable and supple. These are the true moments of change, when we become elastic. In terms of praxis, one might even say that this is the best we can do. Teacher 1: I can see that happening to me right now, albeit fleetingly. It is as though all the foundations of my thinking are shaken. And as I am floundering, I’m trying to reach for my old anchors to preserve me within the range of stable expectations. Teacher 2: The brain does not like uncertainty. It reaches for the concept, which is stable and formulaic. The pre-conceptual is slippery, on the other hand. Consciousness wants to settle down in denial of its true nature. Teacher 3: Then creative resistance must be our duty. Creative resistance means never to allow ourselves to settle down into striated formations and become sedimentary rock-like. This takes plenty of creative effort because there is no path to it. Inwardly, one must become nomadic. Teacher 2: Unceasing psychic and somatic effort is necessary to get away from commonsense perceptions and business-as-usual attitudes. Teacher 1: Have we then finished saying, for the time being, all that needs to be said on the various meditations toward intuition?

124  K. ROY Teacher 2: No, there remains but one more, a most subtle and vital one. And that is the attempt to envision the mind by the mind. It is an almost impossible task. That which is the background taken-for-granted of all our activities is deliberately and consciously foregrounded and made to take notice of itself. It is not as though the mind will immediately be transparent to itself. No sir! It is an arduous task which most philosophies and philosophers have avoided. They have taken mental production at face value and moved on. But the one who hopes to awaken intuition cannot afford this blindness. Concepts can give us a science, but they cannot give us a path to intuition, which is prior to the concept. Teacher 1: How is it that we remain in forgetfulness about the very basis of our mental activities? Why is it that we are turned away from our intuitive essence? Teacher 2: I don’t think philosophy can come to any reasonable conclusion about that question, because the question itself pre-supposes conceptualization. And in relation to intuition, concepts cannot produce the necessary clarity. Teacher 3: Nevertheless, attempts have been made. One could suppose that the notion of Original Sin was one such effort. Sin is the separation or division that knowledge or the concept engenders—between God and Man, or between observer and observed. Necessity gives way to contingency, and all hell breaks loose. From that point on, things take over the consciousness, the human no longer faces toward necessity. Teacher 2: Well put. But the mystery remains, only pushed back further. Be that as it may, our problem is to find ways and means of turning the mind back toward intuition. Your last point about necessity is absolutely relevant here. Teacher 1: How so? Teacher 2: Chronic time or time by the clock as external measurement pertains to the successional order of the objectified world—its concern is what comes after what, or what is simultaneous and what is not, and so on. This is all too obvious in the manner in which education is organized today. But intuition is not concerned with any of this because it is the other side of this reality. It is concerned with necessity, which is duration. It is concerned with the flow that is the other side of objecthood, from which all objectivity springs. Teacher 1: Let me see if I have this right. The relation between chronos and duration is the same as that obtaining between contingency and necessity. We are saying that the externalization of duration results in objects or temporal things that are contingent, meaning no necessity is attendant upon them. In other words, these could just as easily have been

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otherwise than they are, and they start to deteriorate as soon as they are produced. But we are also saying that duration itself has no time in it; rather, it is by itself—unlike things it is not the effect of any cause. Hence it is necessity or essentiality. It cannot be modified by will. This account does not come out of speculation, but out of pressing logic: darkness can only be other side of light, stillness the obverse side of movement, and so on. In the same manner, things that continually fall apart are the other side of an unnameable qualitative heterogeneity that does not. Otherwise we would not be having this conversation. Does this more or less capture some of what we have discussed? Teacher 3: I believe so. It has also been implied that this duration is neither human nor personal, rather the so-called human itself is but a specific externalization of duration. We must assiduously stay away from giving a human spin on this. Teacher 2: And although we are using language to express this, we must continuously remind ourselves that the word is not the thing, the description is not the described, and so on. Thus we must sink into the real that is beyond language, and beyond time as we usually know it. Teacher 1: May I continue? The intuition we are discussing pedagogically cannot make duration into datum of consciousness, that is impossible, for you cannot bring the primal into the derived, but it can continually create conditions that help consciousness subside from the excitement of time-bound things to its underlying heterogeneous flow. Teacher 3: I think you are on track. And while you are at it, do also summarize the five meditations that we discussed perfunctorily that are supposed to make a clearing for intuition to operate. Teacher 1: Yes, let me do that. First, there is the meditation on negation, whereby concepts are negated in order to turn consciousness toward the pre-conceptual; second, there is the all-important one of understanding quality as a radically different dimension than that of quantity; third, we have the meditation on relativity—there being no privileged frame of reference including the human; fourth, there is the meditation on movement—on seeing things as orders of movements; and finally, we spoke of being conscious of consciousness—an effort that forcibly makes the mind confront itself in all of its activities. Teacher 3: Ah, well spoken! These five meditations are not independent of each other, but are deeply interconnected. Each seems to be aimed at reducing the status of what it has conventionally meant to be human. I am not necessarily being critical here—I think it is good to be taken down a notch or two, considering everything. But then I want to pose the next question. If intuition is not aimed at the objective world in its

126  K. ROY relation to the human, what is it aimed at? To put it crudely, what is all the fuss about? Teacher 2: To recollect, intuition aims at regaining contact with the pre-objective world that is non-chronic and trans-personal. The world of finished products or temporal objects is essentially a dead one, whereas existence is about living processes. The world of dead or finished objects cannot sustain the living although it might amuse and entertain. Living processes must continually overcome the dead and entropic accretions of culture, otherwise they get trapped in time. Real becoming lies in the pre-objective, pre-individualized world of heterogeneous succession. From this, the pedagogic implications are quite clear; it implores us to search beyond and beneath the world of objects for a movement that is not necrophiliac. Teacher 3: You seem to be saying that living processes are inherently and inexhaustively creative. That is their very nature and they cannot be or do otherwise. These processes are not caught in time, although their extensities or projections filtered through consciousness are caught in time and degradation. These are usually called objects or things. But they cannot nourish the living process in us, although these can make things convenient. Consciousness must take cognizance of this and pedagogically retract into the qualitative dimension, even if fleetingly. It will bring about a balance between the quantitative side which cannot be denied, and the qualitative, primordial side that gives a sense of the creative life that is without a purpose. So then it would appear that we must next speak of creativity, of creative existence, and what it means for education, must we not? Teacher 2: Yes, certainly. But we have to end for the day soon, and that will have to await another conversation. Teacher 1: But one nagging question remains. Many philosophers have spoken about intuition as the path to the ultimate reality etc. How would this be any different? Teacher 2: Yes, many have. It was their way of bypassing the limits of the intellect and positing something absolute. The difference in what we are saying is this: there is none of the absolute or the eternal etc. etc. in all that we have discussed. When we locate ourselves within the very living processes of which we are continuously being made and unmade, words like eternal, absolute, etc. become meaningless. That is an externalist point of view, an empty intellectualism. How do we know, how can we tell in advance if something is eternal, even, how can we conceptualize the eternal? We have to stand apart from the eternal to call it so, which is an absurdity, is it not?

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Teacher 3: One last question—it is also a pesky one that won’t go away. How is all that we have discussed any different? I mean are we also playing word games? Teacher 2: Firstly, textual language is usually supposed to give itself away straightaway. By that I mean there is no significant delay between articulation and reception. If you understand the language and the discourse, then what is being said can be grasped readily or with a little bit of effort. One might have to read it a second time, but that is a different matter. That is not the case here. What is being said cannot be mentally imaged right away. There is a gap. We have to bring in something else in that gap. A new kind of effort is demanded that tears the mind from its habitual stance. So, no, it’s not a word game. It is praxis in the truest sense. Secondly, the discussants are involved in this directly, they are not throwing this at someone as description of some matter settled in advance. In other words, we are part of the experiment, of what is being discussed. We cannot but do that, if this is to be authentic. Teacher 3: So we are drawing a distinction here between words that remain as symbolic formations, part of an ever-expanding superstructure of images and command words, and words that somehow become part of the flesh. Teacher 1: The point at which the idea merges with the body to produce the holistic corpus is difficult to imagine. Maybe we should say something about it before we wind up. Teacher 2: Yes it is difficult to picturize from the outside, but as soon as you are observant of the manner in which a word takes shape in consciousness and then breaks up the next instant you can feel the word as a sensation. The feeling of the word as a sensation is key to the enfleshment of the word, so to speak. Teacher 1: That is certainly helpful—the word or idea as immediate sensation. We tend to picturize things in their compounded state and a difficulty arises….but when you put it like that…after all how else do we know the flesh other than through sensation. So the corpus sensorium becomes the ground of meeting between word and flesh. Teacher 3: That’s a nice thought! To me it feels like the first moment of a pedagogic breakthrough that we have had. I see the glimmer of something and it’s expansive. Teacher 1: Moving the word and the idea away from the intellect to its point of affective entry into the body does seem like a very important move in what we have been discussing. Teacher 2: Yes. It is definitely more accessible than intuition as an idea, although, in reality, both lead to the same thing.

128  K. ROY Teacher 3: The Word becoming flesh has always had a powerful connotation in the Christian world. But it is seen from afar as the theological problematic of the Incarnation. What we are suggesting is that this “transubstantiation” is ontological fact having nothing to do with theology and has direct experiential value to the ordinary life. Teacher 1: I think that is true of much of wisdom texts across cultures. Unfortunately, short-sightedness has pushed it all underground and put it beyond reach as mysticism etc. Teacher 3: The most powerful intuitive moments are what later become known as religion. But let us not allow ourselves to stray too far from our intent which is to bring back intuition as an important pedagogical element. Teacher 2: Because it is intuition that allows us to gradually gain access to our inner creative processes also known as duration. Teacher 3: In all that we have said so far, we have stoked a fire and generated a certain kind of “heat” in the situation, as it were. It seems to me that things like intuition cannot be come upon in a cold manner. A certain atmosphere is required in which another aspect of reality other than the commonsensical one becomes probable or even thinkable. Teacher 2: That is why the method of dialogue becomes invaluable. In dialogue we can generate the “heat” you mention, and take the inquiry forward one step at a time in the direction of the Open. No one knows fully beforehand how far one will get or where. That is the beauty of it.

We might add that the inherent pluralism that is implied in a true dialogue helps gather steam and strength the further one gets away from the existing conceptions and ways of constructing things. Once the yoke is off, the psycho-somatic kaleidoscope turns in unpredictable ways throwing up entirely new patterns of thought-affect. The latter or the inner elaborations have little value in themselves but are ways of reaching intensity or quality as we have discussed elsewhere. The ability to cut adrift of the fragmented self that is the product of time and reach pure intensity or mind-body unification is the basis of the pedagogic praxis suggested here. This does not make other parts of reality inoperative but emerges in a complementary manner to those aspects. A submerged part of existence is allowed to come to the surface and merge with the existing fragment to achieve a fresh wholeness. Emancipation does not come of struggling within the political dimension alone for it is only a fragment. Emancipation or liberation, by definition, is the experience of the whole. And the part obviously cannot yield the whole. There is no

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path to liberation; it is essentially uncharted territory. But that does not mean it is unapproachable. Taken together this implies that the gestalt called the pedagogic situation must challenge itself to be able to open up the next step by going beyond reification. Intuition opens up the next level of itself, and so on. There are no external markers for this strenuous activity nor can it be measured. One must walk on without expecting anything. That is probably the hardest part. All our previous training has made us result-oriented as well as future-oriented. The movement of praxis makes a break with that habit. We move without a future and therefore conserve the energy that is spent on the so-called future that in actuality is a fiction. Ontological hope is not in the future but in the action of intuition which is always in the present—a heightened and deepened present, which we have called duration. This heightened present revivifies our contact with the world, which takes care of that which is to come. In other words, the awakened present, from its ontological fullness, is ready for anything without anxiety or fear. To put it differently, there is no supplementary plane of anxiety in duration, and achieving this fullness is the task of pedagogic intuition. The foregoing conversation implicitly aims at this situational integration as gestalt.

CHAPTER 5

Freeing Time: A Propositional Calculus

This chapter arranges in propositional form some of the key elements that emerge out of the discussions in the previous chapters and works out their implication for the universe of relations which we call education. From the immanent perspective developed in these pages, the so-called human is nothing other than a terrain, a set of boundaries and topological limits within which interchange between anonymous forces take place continuously, creating and modifying affective states. The problem of maximizing vision on this terrain invites the geometric method of propositions that is able to stretch beyond itself and point to something beyond language. In Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the geometric method put to the most effective use: “The geometric method ceases to be a method of intellectual exposition; it is no longer a means of professorial presentation but rather a method of invention. It becomes a method of vital and optical rectification. If man is somehow distorted, this torsion effect will be rectified by connecting it to its causes more geometrico. This optical geometry traverses the entire Ethics.”1 The geometric method is an attempt to present a force of logic that moves toward an invention rather than exposition that takes the turn toward praxis rather than description. The construction of these propositions here relies principally on Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Matter and Memory, aiming to generate a praxeological framework that 1 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Transl.) Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 13.

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can intercalate with teacher experience that follows in the next chapter. Together these demonstrate why the insights into time and intuition are pedagogically invaluable, and how their proper understanding could make important contribution to teacher lives and teaching practice as well as help in the emergence of a different kind of pedagogical rationality. Proposition 1 Our intellect seeks “patterned immobilities” or fixed points on which it can exert its efforts. Explanation: In the course of its long evolutionary path, the human species has evolved the intellect as a strategic complex to deal with the continuous flux of an ever-changing reality. This complex interface has grown to impose patterns on the reality flux in order to reduce it to graspable proportions and make adaptive life possible. Reality seemingly is continually slipping past, and the intellect freezes aspects of it into a certain order. These patterned immobilities become the constituents of what we call “normal life,” and enter into the conventions of our communicational process, that is, our speech habits. The image we have of ourselves as well as the perceived reality around us grow up amidst, and develop upon, these conventions to the extent that we gradually stop perceiving the true continuous change and original flux of life. The perceived permanences now become our essential building blocks of reality, and we see in terms of discrete “things” rather than flows, in terms of breaks rather than continuities, in terms of oppositions rather than harmonies. But how useful is it to perceive existence in terms of the original flux? The question of usefulness is a rather limited one: That we must always be pointed toward utility is itself a cultural peculiarity. Historically, all cultures did not necessarily believe in expansion of usefulness. This is not to belittle the manner in which culture has arranged or brought up reality. It is to say that it is necessary to reach beyond culture sometimes in order to overcome ontological crippling. Correct understanding of what is helps us in overcoming specific cultural stances that have developed contingently, in order to prevent the locked-in position. It may not be possible to remain in flux always, but it may be important to get back into it occasionally in order to get back our true bearings. Why would the above be useful educationally? Education, as it is understood and practiced today, is the perfect example of the patterned

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immobilities referred to above. Let us take the case of a typical teacher preparation program existing today. It prescribes a repertoire of “basic skills and strategies of teaching,” thought to be key to the classroom-teaching situation. These basic teaching skills and strategies read as follows: 1. Classroom management and discipline. This would include such topics as organizing and managing routine tasks and physical arrangements, individualizing and grouping for instruction, behavior management and/or modification, and pupil reinforcement. 2. Curriculum planning. Included in this area would be the development of skills in relation to goal setting, writing lesson objectives, lesson and unit planning, motivation of students, and selection of appropriate materials and aids. 3. Instructional strategies or methods. Students should be provided examples of and opportunities to practice different skills related to the presentation and discussion of information. Included would be such items as questioning, explaining, and demonstrating, along with methods of achieving lesson closure and giving directions. 4. Assessing and evaluating student behaviour. This would include observation and listening skills, other diagnostic techniques and record keeping.2

Aoki observes that the root metaphors and philosophical presuppositions that guide the above competency-based thinking is derived from the “naïve scientism of our technocratic guidance system” that effectively reduces “beings-as-humans to beings-as-things.” This reductive process derived from the factory model starts by reducing beings to objects. This involves a reality perception that sees in terms of patterned immobilities—teacher, classroom, student, objectives, materials, lessons, skills, methods, and so on. All of these have been produced by reducing the flow-and-flux of life, and imposing on it a technocratic model that is not different from the discrete processes employed in producing objects such as vehicles or washing machines. But neither the flow-and-flux 2 Ted Aoki, “Competence in Teaching as Instrumental and Practical Action: A Critical Analysis,” in Edmund Short (Ed.), Competence: Inquiries into Its Meaning and Acquisition in Educational Settings (Lanham: University Press of America Inc., 1984), pp. 71–79.

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that is grouped under the name teacher, nor the flow-and-flux called the student are cars or washing machines whose inner mobilities have been destroyed at the outset to make them useful. The educational project loses all meaning if in order to accomplish it we must engage in such reduction as to equate beings to things. This is not to say that there is no fair method to this endeavor. But the method must proceed through an accurate understanding of reality, of being, and of process. And that means we must start by grasping our underlying reality and not by readily imposing upon it a limiting situation or a specific fixity. In other words, we must become attuned to grasping ourselves at two levels— at the phenomenological level of a “crowned anarchy,” or capped flow, and at the social level of the incorporated functional individual. These two levels of identity and difference and identity-within-difference must be seen as complementary and not contradictory or oppositional. There must exist a concretely founded dialectical unity between them. And this is possible only when we have a double and concurrent perception of time as inner flow and time as external simultaneity. Time then, as we shall see, becomes an inner resource, a font of the creative life that is inherent in existence, the search for which is the inherent promise of the true educational effort. Proposition 2  We see change in terms of a succession of states. But real change is indivisible. Explanation: Real change is creative change inherent in existence. This change is a flow and not to be seen as the procession of successive states. One might argue to the contrary and point to the fact that death follows life as a dramatic instance of succession of states. Let us take this example for illustrative purpose. In actuality, “death follows life” is an externalist viewpoint and overwhelming social construction. All we can tell from the outside is that at the macro-level of organization, the temporal composite we know as the body—a patterned immobility—ceases to participate in certain existing fixities to which we attach sentimental value. In actuality, the changes in the particular composite which we perceive as the body are continuous and indivisible, and its perceived dramatic change of status at “death” is more psychological than phenomenological. We are unable to accompany a specific body-composite in its further journey and so we consider it as dead. As of today, we have very little

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phenomenological knowledge or inner view of the fixity or immobility we call death.3 The snapshots of existence with which we operate on social life in any case are dead things. Once we snap out of these snapshots, death is no longer anything dramatic or a succession. So what is it that changes, which is another way of asking “what is time?” The answer to this question might come as a surprise: What changes is change itself and not things that change. We see change in things; but things themselves are composed of other things, and ultimately of flux and change. The fundamental unit of everything turns out to be modification itself and not movement in any medium, just as the fundamental unit of energy turns out to be a wave, that is, a movement, and not something else. Hence what changes is change itself, and therefore, it is indivisible being a recursive function. Philosophy, for a long time, was not concerned with either movement or change or time, but solely with the “conceptual cocoon which we mistakenly took for them or for their equivalent.”4 If metaphysics learns to go beyond the conceptual cocoon in which it has become trapped and begins to see itself as a mode of apprehending creative becoming, then metaphysics will become experience itself and not remain as mere arrangement of words. Metaphysics will be the actual encounter of ceaseless creation, and time will be revealed in its true nature as pure movement and “the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty.” The habitual representation of movement is a succession of immobilities or changing series of positions much like the frames of a film or an animation. Each frame is a “still” and the movement is actually the internal movement of the projector. From this we get our normal understanding of time as successive states of things or events adjacent to one another. This has completely covered over the inner continuities and interpenetrative flux that is our actuality. The importation of extensity into the psyche obviously has tragic consequences for education and has produced a twisted image of learning. The idea that learning consists of a succession of states is set very deep in the belief system of modern educationists informed as they are by the psychometric model of measuring learning. Nevertheless, it is based on a serious misunderstanding and confusion between quality and quantity, 3 There

are plenty of esoteric accounts, but this is not the place to go into these. Bergson, The Creative Mind (Transl.) Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 16. 4 Henri

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between mechanical time and inner duration. One might gather “learning” over “time” just as one might collect stamps or designer labels, but it does not establish relationship with the inner duration or qualitative dimension of the being, which is the only true change. The other “change” is not change at all but a series of fixities. Dwayne Huebner observes: “As with the categories of purposes, goals, or objectives, learning also points to the temporality of man, to the temporality of the individual man.”5 Temporal progression is at the core of conventional ordering of what we call learning. In fact, it is a concatenation of various temporal sequences. Learning has been associated with a change in behavior of an organism. An observer concerned with the process of learning certain specified aspects of behavior at a given time, for example at t1 and later at t2, seeks to identify the changed status. If change is detected and it is assumed to be related to interaction with the environment, it can be said that learning occurs. It must be emphasized that “learning” is a postulated concept. There is no such “thing” as “learning.” Learning theory is postulated as an explanation of how certain aspects of behavior are changed. The category “learning” points to those aspects of a person’s existence concerned with change and continuity, change and permanence, or succession and duration. That is, this postulated category points to the fact that man is a temporal being, whose existence is not given by his occupation of space, but by his participation in an emerging universe, the meaning of which is shown by the relationship between duration and succession. In the individual, this temporal existence is given by or identified with the relationship between those aspects of his being which appear to be continuous and those which appear to change.6

An observer who tries to identify change of status in the observed must himself or herself become immobilized in order to assess another’s condition. A correspondence must be set up between two fixities, not unlike two moving trains coming alongside and running at the same speed to appear motionless relative to each other. It does not matter whether the trains are traveling at 10 or at 100 km per hour. They would present a still frame of reference to each other and passengers 5 Dwayne Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26, No. S1, 1986, pp. 324–331. 6 Ibid.

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can exchange messages or shake hands through the windows without anything going amiss. This aspect of the observer’s frame of reference is completely hidden from sight under the tide of sociality and the flood of convention. When measuring we feel that we are observing from a neutral frame of reference that has no bearing on the measurement. This is obviously false as the example above shows. Measurement clearly depends on the equation between two frozen states, that is, on their relative staticity, when one may be superposed on the other. When I measure you, what I am really doing is comparing one snapshot of a certain attribute ascribable to me with the corresponding aspect of you. It does not matter for our purposes that the measured attribute is not necessarily “mine” but derived from the existing pool of social convention, normalized through discourse-practice, and made into a standard. What is important to realize is that a certain fixity of the measurer is used to freeze the measured, and voila, we have a measurement to which we give social meaning. In actuality, the continuous flux of duration or change cannot be measured in any manner. Change is indivisible, creative, and interpenetrative; one part of it cannot be usefully isolated for measurement. It is its own god, forever forthcoming in a process of creative evolution. When this is objectified, we begin to see change as an attribute of the object, losing sight of the inherent creative continuity that makes up real experience. It is the true experience that must be the authentic and ultimate goal of all education. Proposition 3  Duration must be thought of and experienced as creative evolution of the being as there is perpetual creation of possibility itself and not only of actuality. Explanation: Time as mechanical succession of events in the external world is introjected and internalized preventing the perception of the ever-becoming novelty of duration. Time creates its own peculiar psychology. If we removed the time of habit, then the world would truly become a strange place. This is exactly the strangeness that is unwittingly suppressed through the curriculum of familiarity that relies on verbal and temporal resources, and that puts the critical intelligence and other faculties to sleep. Excess bookishness or reliance on the word—an apparatus produced through succession in time—thus “compresses and suppresses”

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what is waiting to burst forth. The teacher “necessarily places in primary importance the whole collection of acquired results of which the social patrimony is composed, and of which he is legitimately proud.”7 The teacher carries the legacies of knowledge, that is, the inherited slices of frozen immobilities and attempts to impose these on the next generation. “However, encyclopaedic as the programme may be, what the pupil can assimilate from ready-made knowledge will amount to very little, will often be studied without relish, and always be quickly forgotten. There is no doubt that each of these results acquired by humanity is precious; but that is adult knowledge and the adult will find it when he needs it.”8 The archival concept of learning, that is to say, leading children to the archive of adult knowledge, is in actuality a futile exercise. The archive is in reality a sepulcher, a tomb of time that does not release in the child the creative upsurge of the world. On the contrary, it kills the natural impulse the child has to experiment with its surroundings. The archive can be accessed by the adult anytime he/she wishes; it does not need to be stuffed in the child’s brain. It is a peculiar prejudice born of interest in dead things that deems it necessary for us to carry around bagfuls of knowledge. Instead, curriculum should consist of that which begins to disturb my given sense of myself, which is time and the frozen immobilities, and critically alter my relation to the environment so that the damage created by socialization may be reversed. This socialization consists of looking into the past and anticipating the future. To break out of this is to suddenly come face-to-face with the present. The present does not easily find its way into the category of goals, objectives, or purposes. To identify these values requires withdrawing from the present moment and looking down upon it as if it were past. This is always a process of inspecting something which was. By their very nature; goals, objectives, and purposes become statements of a desired future—a tomorrow. The present creeps in in the teaching. It is when the educator must deal with the student that he seemingly drops the concern for the past or for the future and focuses upon the present. If he remains focused upon the past or upon the future, he loses contact with the student, and the

7 Bergson, 8 Ibid.

Creative Mind, p. 99.

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educational process may suffer. It is by criticizing the category “learning” that the significance of the present is brought into perspective with the past and the future.9

Entering into the phenomenological present means going past the categories of “goals,” “objectives” and so on which are the forward-looking elements of the curricular process and the orchestrated myth of learning. If we could grasp the present in its entirety, “interwoven with organic beings, we should see it ceaselessly taking on forms as new, as original, as unforeseeable as our states of consciousness.” But such is not the case. Instead, we create an imaginary future built up with the fixities of our current pre-occupations and project that as a desirable future. We transmit to future generations what interests us, what our attention centers upon and even sketches, in the light of our past evolution, but not what the future will have made interesting to them by the creation of a new interest, by a new direction communicated to their attention. In other words then, the historical origins of the present in its most important aspect, cannot be completely elucidated, for they would only be restored in their completeness if it had been possible for the past to be expressed by its contemporaries in terms of an indeterminate and therefore unforeseeable future.10

The very notion of a future bespeaks of a certain violence, that is, a violence done to the present. This does not mean we accept the social arrangement or cultural peculiarities of the present, nor does it mean we deny the astronomical or planetary future. Rather, it means that we do not realize the actual potential contained in the living present or in duration. Having turned away from the present, or not having truly realized the present, we project a future. Such a future is unlikely to be meaningful either, since it is pieced together from the incomprehension and unrealized ambitions of the present. The discontents of the unlived present tend to become our future. And therefore, when that future, in turn, actualizes as the present, we cannot grasp it either. Only the discontents and missed realities multiply, becoming more and more complex, impossible of a solution. This runs contrary to the common sense direction in 9 Huebner, 10 Bergson,

op. cit., p. 325. Creative Mind, p. 25.

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which we are implicitly or explicitly assured that we are resolving current difficulties toward a promising future. The uncomprehending present is only the breeding ground for the problems of the future and not their solution. Curriculum is the search for the missing present. It involves several meditations as argued in an earlier chapter, for the living present, or duration, is the most difficult to find although it lies in front of us. That is the conundrum. There is no difference here between teacher and student. Both are engaged in the same activity, attempting to climb back into the same existential flow of duration. Curriculum obviously cannot abandon the conventional kind of descriptive knowledge; it is appropriate for certain manipulations. Nevertheless, it must learn to stretch beyond symbolic manipulations to the pre-conceptual and reach into the expanded present from which it can draw on creative becoming. The stirring of the soul must be its primary concern, participated in by means of a reorientation of consciousness. Proposition 4  The duty of philosophy is to lay down the general conditions for the direct, immediate observation of oneself by oneself through which an intuition-toward-duration may be developed. Explanation: The pedagogic value of such observation is immediately obvious but seriously neglected. Further, this inner observation is prevented by cultural preconceptions and habits we have developed. Kant had shown that our thought-categories operate upon an unknowable substance previously dispersed in space and time and thus become organized especially for human consciousness. This unknowable cosmic substance or “thing in itself” (ding-an-sich) escapes us. In order to comprehend it, we would need an intuitive faculty which we do not possess, according to Kant. Setting aside for the moment the fact that Kant saw his own particular infirmity—the lack of intuition—as the infirmity of all humankind, and taking a humble path through this difficulty, we can say that at least a part of reality, our embodied corporeality, can be grasped in its natural immediacy, since we inhabit it. Unlike substance in general that is at once-remove from us, the body and the consciousness associated with it are intimately intertwined. It is in the precincts of such a locus that we can begin our attempt to directly observe what is. Here, the observer and the observed are one. What emerges is pure observation which is also duration.

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Current educational thought is based on division and fragmentation. To begin with, there is the most obvious and blatant separation of the student and the curriculum. Existing educational fantasy believes that learning lies outside the embodied organism and is to be pumped in just as diesel or petrol is pumped into vehicle tanks. Freire had called it the banking model; I am additionally calling it the pumping model. Schools are akin to gas stations where you tank up with something called knowledge. This “knowledge” is volatile and keeps evaporating while you pump additional amounts. Human beings in general tend to have single-track minds, and the models they use tend to recur throughout the socius: What is good for cars is also good for schooling. But is knowledge meant to be pumped in or is knowledge the contact the organism has with its environment? If we proceed with the philosophical assumption that knowledge is an emergent relation between the knower and the unknown, then the pumping model begins to look atrocious. Obviously, the closest unknown to the knower is the knower him/herself; he/she represents the largest bundle of intimate unknown. The child being the most natural knower begins by poking and prodding at its own body—it appears to itself as a giant conundrum. It would then be reasonable to say that this is where knowing begins—with the organism itself, as curiosity is awakened in contact with the environment. From here knowing moves outward to less intimate things. In this form of knowing, the division between knower and known is not absolute but dialectical; there is an expansion in the knower in contact with the known, and the known undergo change by being acted upon by the knower. In this approach, change becomes the emblem of learning, and studying change becomes self-knowledge. There are other orders of separation that need to be overcome in the process of developing intuition-toward-duration. The teacher/student division is one among them. The existing approach to education takes this categorical separation too seriously. On examination, this separation appears as yet another form of ignorance and nothing else. The so-called teacher has got to be the most basic and continuous student in the educational endeavor. On her/his endless becoming rests in large measure the authenticity (or otherwise) of the classroom. This becoming or flux does not recognize any category. One has to step off all pedestal, negate all category in order to consciously enter becoming, otherwise one is frozen in time—a patterned immobility among many others.  The teacher identity does not disappear, but it is there for administrative purposes only. It must not be carried over into the domain of learning.

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All creative emergence is similar, whether in the student or the teacher. This indistinguishability is fundamental and needs to be readily acknowledged. All relationships are altered and we are no longer recognizable in terms of the old order and conventional way of thinking and separating. The favored divisions are gone replaced by flows, intensities, and qualitative movements. Obsessive need to measure and control is supplanted by organic communicational relations. A third kind of separation also needs to be mentioned, and that is the fragmentation of the knowledge base of the curriculum itself. Adult knowledge requires compartmentalization due to its extreme codification and specialized nature. The attained specificities, symbolic structures, and diversity of methods require the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries. However, when we supply knowledge to younger minds in similar compartmentalized fashion, it does not necessarily result in broadening or sharpening intellectual capacity. On the contrary, the young begin to perceive the world itself in fragmentary terms and not just the formal knowledge of the world. This damage needs desperately to be contained; the process of putting the world back together in consciousness is called intuition. Intuition reaches beyond the divisiveness to a pre-codified, pre-symbolic, and undivided world that is in a state of becoming or emergence. This does not deny epistemic understanding, but presents itself as complementary and essential to it. It is the inescapable other side of analytical knowledge, which heals the existential wounds of knowing. The tearing open of the world through the weapon of knowledge needs restoring by means of an intuitive return to the pre-fractured world. This needs to be urgently recognized in the educational world which has so far been coopted and guided by the instrumental worldview. We are in need of a complete reorientation, away from the model of thinking that was based on division, measurement, success, and intent that originated in the techno-scientific world. Even for an instant if we are able to tear the mind away from its rut, we will learn to face the other way and be on our way to the birth of intuition. Consciousness touched and deepened by intuition can countenance multiple and heterogeneous times without bigotry. It turns from evolutionary time to intuitive duration and back again without difficulty. Proposition 5 Conceptual thought is powerless to reach the core of the mind, hence the need to search for the supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.

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Explanation: The concept is a spin-off of the living process, and cannot properly reverse its sights on it—the derivative cannot access or decipher the originating matrix from whence it came. The concept is time; as it objectifies the externality, it starts the clock of history, as it measures it frames the world around it in terms of difference, succession, and change. This breeds a certain kind of world that is unsatisfactory and melancholic because it is incomplete and begs for completeness. It is also violent because we do not recognize or acknowledge its incompleteness and one-sidedness. The fragment is received as the whole. To pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the whole, is not a question of getting outside of time; on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very movement which is its essence. A truly intuitive metaphysics that would follow the undulations of the real is the ultimate goal of education. Pure change is duration; intuition is the process through which it is attained. What we acquire is the “direct vision of the mind by the mind,” with nothing intervening, no “refraction through the prism” of thought and representation. The intellect starts ordinarily from fixities and reconstructs movement as best it can by juxtaposing immobilities. Intuition, on the other hand, starts from movement and perceives it as reality itself. When education starts from symbolic knowledge, it is following the centuries-old road of juxtaposing immobilities and trying to attain something living and meaningful, which is impossible. Dead things however cleverly assembled and decorated will remain dead. For so long we have taken the frozen immobilities as true constituents of an education that these have begun to have a life of their own not unlike puppets on a string. However, this imagined life does not have the quality, characteristics, rhythm, or creative movement of the truly living. Conceptual learning cannot reach creative movement simply because the latter has no content. We have to constantly move between the dimension of content and the dimension which is pure rhythm; between that which is frozen in time, and that which is emergent. This requires a new mind, and a humility that turns our understanding inside out. The “direct vision of the mind by the mind” as stated by Bergson opens the door to a world of inner melody that is not dependent on anything external. That does not mean it loses contact with the empirical dimension or becomes solipsistic; rather, it forces open another dimension that makes us truly autonomous.

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Proposition 6  Intuition is the sensation of the radical simplicity of the new, whereas intellection is a rearrangement of already existing elementary ideas. Explanation: Intellection is for the most part a reordering of existing resources within the symbolic order, a construction along the most fundamental existing directions of thought. Words cannot by and of themselves lead to praxis. The idea of the classless society, for example, cannot bring about a classless society. It is not a question of redistribution but of an action of radical simplicity. The basic unit of analysis has to undergo a profound transformation in order to make such a thing even a distant possibility. In other words, we have to begin to be able to perceive ourselves in an entirely different light. A fact run as metaphor may be of some help here. In the early part of the twentieth century, it became clear that light could be both a wave and a particle depending on the context of its interaction. This startled conventional thinking which was used to relations of mutual exclusivity—this Or that was the ruling attitude. Human thinking is not comfortable with the situation that forces upon us the truth of “this And that.” But this is exactly what we must invite and get used to with respect to our view of ourselves. To use the above scientific truth metaphorically, we too are both “wave” and “particle,” a socialized unit and nebulous becoming at the same time. We belong to time as externalized succession as well as to time as internal duration. Educationally, we must keep reaching for resources outside those stored within language. We must focus more on relations than fixed ideas. The relation this and both must be cultivated insistently in order to overcome the binary habit. The belonging to empirical time as well as to inner duration can only be phenomenologically grasped once the old habit of dichotomous thinking is broken. It would come as no surprise that a new way of thinking is more about breaking old habits than anything else. The study of habits thus becomes a mandatory hermeneutics for fresh pedagogical relations. Radical simplicity is born of shedding complex attitudes that have cropped up through an evolutionary past that might have been useful at some period. When this is carried on as tradition and legacy, it prevents the simplicity from returning to us in new ways, and we begin to mistake the complexity of our perceptions as something fundamental to reality itself. But reality is neither simple nor complex, its flows are made of undulations that cannot be measured

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or put into hierarchical relationships. Periodically, we must return to this radical simplicity in order to get back into our original rhythm and duration. This is the creative font from which everything arises which we have all but forgotten, replaced by various superstitions, mythical, and technological. Proposition 7 The emergence of intuition must be given time; the intellect often does not have this patience—it expects all to emerge in linguistic meaning and action. Explanation: Being linguistic beings, it is rather easy to confine ourselves to notions stored up in the language. It gives itself up easily to the understanding. These ideas were formed by the intellect in contact with the environment as its needs appeared during the course of evolution. They correspond to a cutting out of reality the patterns and lines that had to be followed in order to act conveniently upon it. A long time before there was anything like a philosophy or a science, the role of the intellect was already that of manufacturing instruments and guiding the action of our body on surrounding bodies and elements. Science has pushed this labor of the intellect much further, but has not changed its direction in the main. During the last century or so, the temptation has been to carry to the very depth of the mind the application of those procedures which are successful as long as one remains near the interface of organism and environment. The result has been that we have reduced the mystery of the mind-consciousness simply to a physics of the psyche. Outside oneself, the effort to learn is natural; one makes it with increasing facility; one applies rules. The same thing does not apply for the inner. Within, attention must remain tense and progress becomes more and more slow and difficult; it is as though one were going against the natural propensity to look at the outer. Therefore, we must encounter the question of patience. The inner does not easily let up its secrets, and there are no easy handles by which one can progress, or even know that one is getting anywhere. In an important way, education must focus on the phenomenology of patience; it is nothing other than learning to relate to time differently and denying the introjection of mechanical succession as psychological time. Our endless emphasis on time by the clock and on the mechanical succession in extensionality makes of us an impatient species in general. As we jump from object to object or event to event, there is a

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sense of something real taking place. There is great emphasis on speed in the contemporary attitude. Velocity counts for a lot as we move in ever-increasing haste toward an empty horizon and a time line aimed at the not-yet, to use a Heideggerian phrase. This time line stretching into the future begs to be filled quicker and quicker with activities and events. We feel time pressing in upon us, and in response we attempt to pack each moment with something or other. But in reality we should be going in the exact opposite direction if we wish to grasp the emergent nature of reality. We should attempt to slow things down so that we have the time and the space to become transparent to ourselves, and not hurtle past those moments in which a doubt arises as to the real nature of our being and the direction in which we seem to be moving. Pedagogically, we may not be in a position to substantially change the pace of the curriculum as it is typically not decided locally, but we can bring alertness to the situation by refusing to import and introject external acceleration as part of our inner reality. Duration has no speed, only undulations, and one must learn to retract into it instead of pursuing only the forward motion of time. This is not easy but doable since it is the only intimate thing we have. If we want pedagogically to connect to the world as it is and not as we have made it or as we fancy it then we have to make this immense effort to look in a different direction. Proposition 8  For pedagogic purposes, we have to establish a clear difference in method between philosophy and science and insist that they can both be equally accurate and definite; they both bear upon the same reality but each of them preserves and works on only half of it. Explanation: The old attitude of science and the scientific method being the sole benchmark for everything must be given up once and for all in education. It has created enough damage and retarded the growth of beings in dimensions and planes other than science. The particular religion of science and scientism that took hold sometime in the seventeenth century made tool making and control of the environment the central purpose of human existence. Through enhanced control and measurement it was assumed we will find our way to emancipation. This uncritical and absolute belief in the emancipatory function of science smacks of a dogmatism that is contrary to the spirit of science itself, and education needs to challenge it.

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The religion of science identifies the technological prosperity with the prosperity of humanity. The religion of science is not capable of thinking of itself critically, to think against its own schematics and metaphysics. Its suicidal narcissism that transfers into a special sort of irrationalism, is based on the fetish of technological progress, and from that to progress in general —to social progress. That scientific uncritical acceptance of itself and of its consequences gives the motive to the contemporary criticism of scientific method to talk about modern “religion of science.” All contemporary critics of scientific method lead down to the critique of scientific-theoretical methodism, to the idea of a single universal and a commonly accepted methodology.11

But let us briefly get to the beginning of this thing. The whole objective of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was an effort to explain how a particular schematic or categorical order is superimposed on supposedly incoherent materials to produce the sensible world. And we know the price we have had to pay for this manner of looking upon the world according to which the human mind imposes its form upon a “sensible diversity of unexplained origin,” and the order we find in things is the order we ourselves have put in them. The price of the Kantian schema is that we cannot seemingly get beyond the limits of our categories and participate in reality directly. This makes science possible and valid, but metaphysics impossible and invalid, since there could be no knowledge outside (the categories) of empirical science. Thus intuition or a non-analytical way of apprehending the world was rejected out of hand despite the overwhelming cultural evidence of such direct understanding being present across geography and history. This suppression of a complementary form of understanding has produced cultural blindness and educational bankruptcy, besides fetishizing science to the point of making a religion out of it. It must also be mentioned in this context that the offspring of science—technology—has had similar one-sided impact on human consciousness to the point that we have unleashed upon ourselves and the planet a level of mindlessness in which technology is increasingly employed to clean up the problems created by the previous round of technologization. The absurdity of this is not visible to many due to our 11 Enver

Halilovic, “Feyerabend’s Critique of Scientism,” Eranohar, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 145–160.

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increasing incapacity to see directly past the ideological curtain of technologism, or even if it is visible, we are unwilling to do anything about it due to our set ways and habits. It is not surprising that education has become infiltrated by technology at several levels from the design of assessments to the use of technological apparatuses in the classrooms. It is therefore important to state without any ambiguity that education has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. It belongs to a different domain altogether—the expansion of consciousness toward the ending of sleep-walking through an objectified world, and the rousing of the spirit toward its own living processes, which ought to be the main objectives of education, unfortunately are not reachable by technical means. One must awaken to oneself, meaning become alerted to one’s intimate movement beyond the dead things and dead knowledges of the external world. This does not mean that the objective world is not important— the living organism depends on it, but we are not just an organism, otherwise there would be no need for an education. We seek the living movement without which we are reduced to a footnote in evolution, no matter what we think of ourselves. This living movement is duration; it is time of a different order, and the only thing that can give us hope, not the hope for a future but for the richness of the present. Proposition 9 The need is to reverse the direction of our accustomed way of operating—rather than trying to piece together reality from snapshots taken through discrete measurements of the flow, we must begin with change and movement envisaged as reality itself, and no longer see discrete states as the true picture of reality. This is the task set for the focus on time. Explanation: Snapshot-reality is useful because it is repeatable, but we must not be seduced by it in order to remain in the familiar. Deliberately the background flow is to be sought that hides behind discreteness. Consciousness has to be shown that if the habitual movement of thought is practically useful, good for communication, and outer action, it leads to philosophical cul-de-sac because reality is presented in the wrong order. A child grows up, its attention is drawn toward mummy, papa, milk bottle, toys, nappies, etc., giving rise to a practical, utilitarian world that seemingly is an end in itself. Each day we return to these fixities that are comforting and secure, and the physical world is born with its temporal sequences that become habit-forming as we slide downward in life

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unto death. We need to climb back up the slope of habits acquired in time and in contact with matter, which also form what are called intellectual tendencies that block the return path to the undivided existential flow. But in spite of this a supplementary attention can be pedagogically cultivated and developed that help us back up the slope and deny the becoming-habit of the human. Educationally, significant action needs to be taken to understand the relation between background flow and time-based habit. We must learn to liquefy our solidities and encrustations. But this cannot be achieved directly. A habit-resistant pedagogy must be put in place from the start. It can take many forms but at the core we have to be free from ruling sentiments and cultural root metaphors that push us along a pre-determined path toward patterned immobilities. The intellectual infantilism displayed in textbook-oriented learning must be jettisoned in favor of active learning that vigorously engages the senses. The awakening of the senses is vital in the reverse pedagogy of time. A learning which is bookish from the outset compresses and suppresses activities which were only waiting to surge forth. Let us give the child exercise in manual training, but without allowing that teaching to sink to the level of a drill. Let us apply to a real master, that he may perfect the touch to the point of making it a sense of touch: the intelligence will go from the hand to the head. But I must not dwell too long on this point. In all subjects, letters or sciences, our teaching has remained too verbal. The child is a seeker and an inventor, always on the watch for novelty, impatient of rule, in short, closer to nature than is the grown man. But the latter is essentially a sociable being, and it is he who does the teaching: he necessarily places in primary importance the whole collection of acquired results of which the social patrimony is composed, and of which he is legitimately proud. ….But let us cultivate a child’s knowledge in the child and avoid smothering under an accumulation of dry leaves and branches, products of former vegetations, the new plant which asks nothing better than to grow.12

It is difficult, or even impossible, to capture living processes through symbolic representation. No wonder then that intellectual laziness swings toward the description via the word. Description takes the place of experience and begins to be mistaken for the described. The discourse, 12 Bergson,

Creative Mind, pp. 99–100.

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and the discourse on discourse, takes the place of sensory and creative expansion of the being. “However, encyclopaedic the [educational] programme may be, what the pupil can assimilate from ready-made knowledge will amount to very little, will often be studied without relish, and always be quickly forgotten. There is no doubt that each of the [empirical] results acquired by humanity is precious; but that is adult knowledge and the adult will find it when he needs it, if he has simply learned where to look for it.”13 The ready-made archive of adult knowledge works as a substitute for authentic experiencing that might not necessarily leave a record. Real knowing is a flash, a transition from one state to another that leaves a different kind of qualitative trace in the consciousness. Left to itself it grows into intuitive understanding that is primary and far more fundamental than objective knowledge. The latter can be picked up or looked up when necessary, but the psychosomatic dispositions required for intuitive grasp are far more elusive requiring proper and timely cultivations. Distinguishing between qualitative time and quantitative time is one of these lifelong meditations. The ability to move from one time to the other must be pedagogically developed as the most crucial and basic existential skill. Social or objective time must be seen as important for cooperation with others since a commonly agreed upon temporal frame is required for joint activities. Equally important is durational awareness that has nothing to do with society but is an inner flow, unique, and non-homogeneous. We must not confuse this with the personal; we are not setting up the old individual versus society opposition here. The inner duration is not something personal or individual; rather, it is the background occurrence of a non-humanistic flow of change or impermanence of which all beings are a part. Here, humanism has no place and the categories through which humans build up their dualities and oppositions are left behind. What we encounter is the creative upsurge of the world of which we are not masters. It pays no special regard to us as a species; we are merely an effect of duration. Breaking the back of our foolish pride as a species is an important side effect of durational awareness, a pride that has cost the earth and all other co-species tremendously. When all the characteristic clutter, petty sentiment, and the piety of thought put together by social time are overcome, there is a different harmony that is

13 Ibid.

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not manufactured, a dynamism that is not personality-based, and an acumen that is not born of the politico-cultural. This brings about a serious transformation in the way we look at ourselves and our relations with the world. The bankrupt old ways are replaced by ontological novelty, and at the center of it all is time as quality. Proposition 10 Duration or pure movement composes a world of impermanence and change, and intuition helps us to get back into the original movement by being in sympathy with it; thus we taste creative evolution. Explanation: Bergson writes that “There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile [thing].”14 This is the hardest part to grasp. Why then do we not perceive change as the basic unit of existence? Let us begin by looking at how the barriers to understanding arise—the pathways to wrong perception. Error begins when the intellect claims to think one of the aspects as it thought the other, directing its powers on something for which it was not intended….Concrete space has been extracted from things. They are not in it; it is space which is in them. Only, as soon as our thought reasons about reality, it makes space a receptacle. As it has the habit of assembling parts in a relative vacuum, it imagines that reality fills up some absolute kind of vacuum. Now, if the failure to recognize radical novelty is the original cause of those badly stated metaphysical questions, the habit of proceeding from emptiness to fullness is the source of problems which are non-existent.15

The intellect was born of the organism’s brush against the environment. In other words, evolutionarily its task was directed toward means-ends relationships or practical goals. When intellect oversteps its boundaries and starts to encroach upon ontological issues, things begin to go wrong. It begins to pose false problems which lead us astray. But when

14 Ibid., 15 Ibid.,

pp. 172. pp. 110–112.

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we restrain the intellect and keep it in its proper place, the false problems begin to fade. The difficulties raised by the ancients around the question of movement and by the moderns around the question of substance disappear, the former because movement and change are substantial, the latter because substance is movement and change….the object and the subject should be, with regard to one another, in a situation analogous to that of the two trains we spoke of at the beginning: it is a certain regulating of mobility on mobility which produces the effect of immobility.16

The intellect which is used to thingified or patterned immobilities resists the idea that change could be substantial, meaning that change or movement could be reality by themselves and not the attribute of something. This requires a lot of mental readjustment and careful observation for most who are used to thinking about change as modification or alteration in a body. That there is ultimately no underlying or separate body upon which change occurs goes against commonsense ideas. But there is only change all the way down, and we have to learn to discard the old mental hook on which a whole reality is hung, in order to move sympathically toward a different order. Reality no longer appears then in the static state, in its manner of being; it affirms itself dynamically, in the continuity and variability of its tendency. What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion. Everything comes to life around us, everything is revivified in us. A great impulse carries beings and things along. We feel ourselves uplifted, carried away, borne along by it. We are more fully alive and this increase of life brings with it the conviction that grave philosophical enigmas can be resolved or even perhaps that they need not be raised, since they arise from a frozen vision of the real and are only the translation, in terms of thought, of a certain artificial weakening of our vitality.17

Once superficially freed of the superstition of the thing or object fetishism (to use that phrase in a new light), we begin to realize that the frozen vision of the real is our true enemy. If we are phenomenologically past, this nemesis a new life seems to enter us and we feel elevated—the 16 Ibid., 17 Ibid.,

pp. 183–184. p. 185.

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entirety of our being is now mobilized. The old oppositions that held the spirit back are no longer operative or remain suspended. We are now moving in the opposite direction to time as entropy, toward organic negentropy, which is the true direction of complex beings. Most old philosophical questions now appear puerile and irrelevant, the product of wrong thinking at best. Epistemic truth games are akin to flotsam on the ocean waves, bobbing up and down on the surface of ontological movement. They can only take themselves for granted but cannot grasp the undulations underneath them. They start from an arbitrary present that has no Presence, and look backwards to piece together a past out of cultural remains, which we call history, and project a future, in turn, toward an empty horizon. The past is seen as the lost world, and the future as the not-yet. This chopped up past–present–future has become the foundation of empirical thinking caught in time. But time as duration has no past–present–future structure. The past is not lost, the future is not the not-yet. It happens in exceptional cases that the attention suddenly loses the interest it had in life: immediately, as though by magic, the past once more becomes present. In people who see the threat of sudden death unexpectedly before them, in the mountain climber falling down a precipice, in drowning men, in men being hanged, it seems that a sharp conversion of the attention can take place,--something like a change of orientation of the consciousness which, up until then turned toward the future and absorbed by the necessities of action, suddenly loses all interest in them. That is enough to call to mind a thousand different “forgotten” details and to unroll the whole history of the person before him in a moving panorama.18

When the future-bound consciousness, in a moment of pure crisis, loses its futuristic orientation, we experience the conservation of time as everything in the present: The past–present–future collapses in an enduring now. Duration does not lose anything, for there is nowhere for impressions to go, and so they remain conserved. There is no separate “memory” required for this; matter itself is its own memory, containing its own presence and imprint on the undulations. But “Why, then, the unrolling? Why does reality unfurl? Why is it not spread out? What good is time? 18 Ibid.,

p. 179.

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Therefore, it acts. What can it be doing? Plain common sense answered: Time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation. It could, therefore, be elaboration. Would it not then be a vehicle of creation and of choice? Would not the existence of time prove that there is indetermination in things? Would not time be that indetermination itself?”19 The action of time is nothing but a principle of retardation which creates consciousness, one that prevents everything from being given all at once. The retardation allows things to roll out in a sequence for the ordinary consciousness. But to a consciousness in which a sharp turn or intuitive growth has occurred, time becomes a creative tool because something that can retard can also be the source of expansion and creative indetermination. We are neither fully the thing (realism), nor purely the representation (idealism); as a complex organism we are somewhere in-between, since we exist as a combination of a thing and an idea in our own reflection on ourselves. We can lean ever so slightly toward either end, bringing forth entire new combinations of mind and matter, which are two limit points of the same undulation. Proposition 11 Education in a world of flux, undulation, and change aims at producing an intense moment, a flash of understanding that is beyond conceptual systems—the learner must experience between itself and the educative process an affective impulse that takes it beyond the frozen (time) to creative uncertainty (duration). Explanation: Philosophy must no doubt help us toward acquiring an adequate conceptual apparatus. But it must do more. It must help us get beyond the merely scholarly toward illumination. We might get a lesson on this subtle philosophical art from Spinoza, who, even while he is putting forth a conceptual apparatus of amazing sophistication, is transcending it to touch another domain. Gilles Deleuze writes admiringly: “there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys, something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else.”20 He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that 19 Ibid.,

p. 180. Spinoza, p. 129.

20 Deleuze,

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a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash.” Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system’ or the composition. When Nietzsche writes, “I am really amazed, really delighted … I hardly knew Spinoza: what brought me to him now was the guidance of instinct,” he is not speaking only as a philosopher. A historian of philosophy as rigorous as Victor Delbos was struck by this dual role of Spinoza, as a very elaborate model, but also as a secret inner impulse. There is a double reading of Spinoza: on the one hand, a systematic reading in pursuit of the general idea and the unity of the parts, but on the other hand and at the same time, the affective reading, without an idea of the whole, where one is carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed according to the velocity of this or that part.21

Spinoza leads us to a “secret inner impulse” which ought to be the true purpose of philosophy. Philosophers ought not to be content with describing the world, as per Marx’s critique. Philosophy must, instead, provide us with an affective reading that once more reinserts the givenness of the world into the existential flow. Education has this responsibility of producing a two-faced reality in experience. Side by side with symbolic knowledge and representation of the world, we must be helped to receive the occasional flash of illumination, the direct comprehension of things. This flash is an intuitive moment toward the reception of which education must prepare us if it is to contribute to meaning. Proposition 12  The “teacher” in this approach is nothing other than a volume scaling factor in the pedagogical transformative matrix. Explanation: In the conventional form of educational arrangement, the teacher occupies a special place as though it is a qualitatively different category than the student. A difference of degree is seen as a difference of kind, which leads to wrong pedagogic assumptions. From a different perspective that consists of fluxes and movements, the confusion between quantity and quality is abolished. There are lines of force emanating from both limited forms—teacher and student. Both teacher and student jointly aim for praxis, the only difference being that the two

21 Ibid.

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efforts may not be equal in scale or volume. The most urgent task before the teacher is self-transformation—the quantitative dimension separated from the qualitative as a striving for essence. It is the same for the student. However, the teacher might have a better intellectual grasp of the direction of the effort, hence able to steer and amplify it in the right direction. The leap from quantitative thinking to quality, from sovereign individuality to durational movement, is not an easy or simple process. The jump is an orbital one—from a lower orbit to an orbit of different intensity. The old ways of thinking and penchant for the bankrupt orders must be sacrificed to be able to glimpse the durational dynamic that lies beneath the fragmented temporal surface of things. The search does not end with a finality but is an ongoing process of deepening. Unlike accumulative and symbolic learning, durational praxis cannot be stored— indeed, stored by whom or what? The temporally constituted individual must open itself to its background constitutive process using every fair means at its disposal and every effort it can muster. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues--humility, poverty, chastity--and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact. He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life, but rather the “effects” of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher. Humility, poverty, and chastity become the effects of an especially rich and superabundant life, sufficiently powerful to have conquered thought and subordinated every other instinct to itself.22

Certain traditional virtues are taken from their conventional roots and made to serve not moral or ascetic ends but ontological ones. As has been acknowledged throughout the pages of the book, the move to open up to an inner duration is not something that can be accomplished intellectually or by simply reading about it. It requires at the very least a certain subordination of thought that continually pushes us along the stream of the commonsensical that blocks vision and insight. We need to jettison those routines that keep us tied to the egoistic and the petty (products of time), to the narrow and the circumscribed (products of 22 Ibid.,

p. 3.

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habit), so that we can move toward the ontologically abundant. The abundant here does not allude to quantitative plenitude but to a qualitative expansion to which no image can be attributed, nevertheless, which takes away the limits imposed by culture.

References Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Transl.) Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988). Halilovic Enver, “Feyerabend’s Critique of Scientism.” Eranohar, Vol. 28, 1998, pp.145–160. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (Transl.) Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 16. Huebner Dwayne, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality.” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26:S1, 1986, pp. 324–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00405848709543294. Ted Aoki, “Competence in Teaching as Instrumental and Practical Action: A Critical Analysis.” In Edmund Short (Ed.), Competence: Inquiries into Its Meaning and Acquisition in Educational Settings (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 71–79.

CHAPTER 6

Teacher, Time, and Biographical Praxis

Books of education concerned with broad, overarching philosophical issues might be criticized for not doing enough for the practical everyday concerns of teaching and teacher being, and instead, taking recourse to high theory. The difficulty is often that what we call “practical” and “everyday” are themselves particular (and partial) temporal constructs that have become normalized to the point where we equate them with reality. Therefore, these require revisiting and careful deconstruction in order to reveal other possibilities. This is not to evade responsibility for the everyday realities of teaching and teacher life but to approach the same through a philosophical interrogation of the givenness of its terms. As our biographies and social realities are constituted through these terms, constructs, and discourse-practices, there is a lot of psychological investment in this partial reality. Hence the process of understanding this reality must begin with close biographic analysis in the context of teacher practice. “In schools people are constantly regulated and classified so that ‘normalization is disseminated throughout daily life through surveillance and monitoring’. Writing one’s autobiography becomes, in this framework, in part a process of deconstructing the discursive practices through which one’s subjectivity has been constituted: what specific power/knowledge relations have shaped and regulated

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one’s life?”1 In the present context, we will ask: What specific temporal relations have constituted one’s life and one’s work that make it appear in a certain light in consciousness? The task of freeing time and therefore creative possibilities demand a careful observation of how mechanical time has been appropriated and internalized in the psychological structure affecting teacher work and life profoundly. In other words, inquiry into temporal habits, individual as well as collective, is critical in teacher practice. Time itself is the principal habit constitutive of the biographic relation—synthesized into a past and projected as future. The sociologist Dan Lortie was one of the first to observe how biography (temporality, in our context) plays out in teacher-becoming.2 Everyone going through years of formal schooling not only is exposed to loads of symbolic content, but is at the same time unwittingly apprenticed to their teachers’ attitudes and ways of doing things. This early conditioning hugely influences and complicates the ways in which new teachers approach their work. In other words, temporal structures as frozen immobilities get transported over generations and resist fluidity. Since Lortie, other scholars, including Deborah Britzman, have weighed in on the profound relation between biography and teacher being. Britzman’s ethnographic case study of two student teachers specifically set out to describe and analyse ‘the interaction between each student teacher’s biography and the social structure of the school’. One of the questions that was addressed relates to the life experiences that student teachers use in their teaching to help construct meanings and actions in the classroom. Britzman concluded that the student teacher’s conceptions of the roles of students and the roles of teachers were ‘familiar and firmly rooted in his or her biography.’ The student teachers’ biographies had many examples of previous and observed teaching models which profoundly affected their actions in the classroom. Student teachers have both positive and negative impressions of teachers and images of teachers they do not want to become. Britzman suggested that biography and socialization links be further explored: ‘Prospective teachers participate in long-term radical therapeutic relationships where life experience is articulated and analyzed in relation to how individuals affect and are affected by the social setting, 1 Sue Middleton, “Developing a Radical Pedagogy: Autobiography of a New Zealand Sociologist of Women’s Education,” in Ivor Goodson (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 20. 2 Dan C. Lortie, School Teacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

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people and personal experience.’ Britzman also urged greater consideration of the impact that student teachers’ biographies have on the context of teacher education because student teachers bring with them their ‘institutional biographies—the cumulative experience of school lives…’3

Biography is condensed time—the accumulated past, looking toward a projected futurality, through the present, by means of the illusion of public time, or generalized lines of anticipation synthesized and extrapolated from the collective. This anticipatory synthesis is tradition (from Latin tradere “handing down”). Understanding time and temporal relationships thus becomes key to see through convention and tradition, in order to move toward what we might call biographical praxis, or an emancipatory reconstitution of the self. Within the context of such preparation, the first thing that enters the picture is the need for a careful deconstruction of accumulated experience that generates conventional meaning including certain forms of anxieties and tensions that are essentially the products of temporal anticipations and projections. Let us begin with one of the most obvious issues that teachers encounter—the perceived shortage of clock time in teacher lives—which connects directly with our main theme. Teachers simply have too many different things to do, and not enough time to do them all. This is a complaint heard more often than not, and across cultures where modern schooling has taken hold. Through their research, Butt et al. describe the predicament of a language teacher and her struggle with time. The greatest constraint I feel is that on my time. A look at last week’s diary showed, in addition to my full-time teaching responsibilities, the preparation of a proposal for a multicultural lighthouse grant, a meeting with my director for funding to attend a week-long multicultural training program, orienting the native tutor to work with native students at…school, a meeting with the Native Liaison Officer to discuss a cultural awareness workshop for classroom teachers with native students, a Board of Directors meeting for Immigrant Settlement Agency, a graduate course, a computer writing workshop, and a call from the superintendent inviting me to speak to a local service club on ways they might assist immigrant and refugee children in this community. In addition, I serve on an Alberta Education

3 J. Gary Knowles, “Models for Teachers’ Biographies,” in Ivor Goodson (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 104.

162  K. ROY Committee for English as a Second Language and am a member of the writing team for a grade three Social Studies unit I am also a single parent with three children and sometimes I feel really stretched to try and give them ‘quality’ time.4

This is a classic form of the complaint. And yet, it will be seen on examination that most problems of this nature, including the one above, acquire their dimensions as problems by dint of our habitual manner of understanding time as externality. They present themselves as difficulties or obstructions because we miss something important due to unexamined attitudes and conventional thinking.5 Once we learn to restate and view the situation differently, the problems more or less tend to resolve themselves. In the above case, which may be seen to be typical, the basket of tasks seems to be overflowing; time is short and there are too many things that need attention. This view is real but from the side of discreteness or fragmentation—one can compare this with fragments of a shattered pane as opposed to the single whole pane: The whole pane is easier to deal with than the fragments. To take an analogous example, at any instant, there are perhaps a million processes going on in the body. If these are regarded as discrete processes, then it would seem impossible that any organism could handle such a wide variety of demands in a coordinated fashion, every living instant. But seen from the angle of wholeness, there is only a single life wave passing through the corpus that activates various centers of interdependencies. Again, at the conscious level, we are able to carry out immensely complex activities that require many kinds of instantaneous coordination managed through reflexes, but as soon as thinking enters the picture, we become confused and lose the rhythm of the action, forgetting basic sequences. Examples of this abound, such as driving, playing music in an orchestra, classroom teaching, and so on, activities that cannot be broken down into simpler sequences without losing the entire cadence. A single wave of intelligent motion manages the whole series. Shifting our attention along these lines, if, by a certain effort of intuition we are able to swing our 4 Richard Butt and Danielle Raymond et al., “Collaborative Autobiography and the Teacher’s Voice,” in Goodson, op. cit., p. 77. 5 This is certainly not to suggest that there are no external factors bearing down on teacher practice, but that we do not avail of the potential that exists in deeply freeing ourselves from culturally ingrained habits.

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focus to the inner flow/duration, then the pressing crowd of tasks no longer seem daunting. This is not to trivialize the challenges faced by the teacher, but “time-management” will always appear nerve-wracking seen from the side of the multitudinous succession of tasks. However, durational awareness does not apprehend reality in terms of succession of broken up pieces or as lists; rather, it encounters the real as intensity. It is the intensive quality operating as intuition that manages it as a single movement. But then we must ask, what is this intensity and how shall we recognize it? If we ask ourselves in what does this idea [of intensity] consist, our consciousness offers us the image of a container and a contained. We picture to ourselves, for example, a greater intensity of effort as a greater length of thread rolled up, or as a spring which, in unwinding, will occupy a greater space. In the idea of intensity, and even in the word which expresses it, we shall find the image of a present contraction, and consequently a future expansion, the image of something virtually extended, and, if we may so, of a compressed space. We are thus led to believe that we translate the intensive into the extensive, and that we compare two intensities, or at least express the comparison, by the confused intuition of a relation between two extensities. But it is just the nature of this operation which it is difficult to determine.6

First, intensity must not be confused with magnitude. Contrary to popular ways of thinking and speaking, there is no increase or decrease in intensity, for intensity is qualitative and not quantitative. When I say my pain is increasing, what I actually mean is that qualitative differences are flowing into one another. This is not mere wordplay and the understanding of the distinction is of great philosophical as well as pragmatic significance. The translation of intensity into extensity takes place automatically in the untrained consciousness; nevertheless, different intensities are actually different qualitative states and not a continuous increase or decrease on a single scale of magnitude. It takes great mental effort to turn off the quantitative translation, but this realization is crucial from the point of view of experiencing things differently. How so? When we

6 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Transl.) F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 127.

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deny ourselves the quantitative analogy, or phenomenologically understand the qualitative distinction, it momentarily brings to an end the old habit of thinking (mixing intensity with extensity). Admittedly, thought has no direct experience of the qualitative and cannot represent it. And for that very reason, the hiatus makes intuition possible. There is an inward glimpse of duration which is cadence, flow, and rhythm, as discussed earlier. Next, let us focus on a different pedagogical issue, but one that is equally related to temporality and to biography. It shows again why and how biographical research is key to understanding the insinuation of time within educational relations. In this case, the researchers quote a teacher who is generally perceived as an effective performer. We hear the voice of the teacher justifying his approach to the curriculum from the point of his own biographical propensities: I am a stickler for the mandated curriculum for the following reasons: 1. I have made a habit from my earliest teaching days to refer to the curriculum guide and follow it like the Gospel. 2. I want to avoid criticism from my students’ subsequent teachers. 3. I want my students to have an easy transition from grade to grade. 4. I want to have the black and white data to justify my programs to administrators, parents, students and other outside groups (safety measure). 5.  I have made a commitment—however covert—to superiors that I would teach the curriculum guide and having a well-developed sense of right and wrong, I just do not want to eliminate any areas. Earlier Lloyd [the teacher] had also written that he didn’t want authority figures to come down on him for failing to cover the curricula, that nothing should be left out in a system of progression, and that he found it challenging to learn and cover all curriculum areas since it gave him a sense of knowledgeability.7

No doubt the teacher must pay adequate attention to the mandated curriculum—an object arisen out of and in the world of extensity with which he/she is engaged. But at the same time, he/she must become curious about its reconstitution in consciousness. In other words, even

7 Butt

et al., in Goodson, op. cit., p. 69.

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in acting it out, one must be critical about the object called the curriculum guide, which is a temporal product, that is, something frozen in time in order to be able to act on reality. Once alerted to the distinction between temporality and existential flow, we cannot simply leave it there and accept it uncritically. Being a product of chronological time, we must ask what ontological necessity or freedom does it point toward, or what is the nature of experience that is inherently encoded in it. To want to be true to the curriculum is reasonable, but to follow it like the “Gospel” could be misguided, for the Gospel, although alluded to in a metaphorical sense above, refers to something out of time. The human being is constituted of two parts—the evolutionary human (temporal) and the being (durational). Pedagogy must be prepared to encounter the pupil on both of these planes, otherwise we renege on the true promise of education. There is a more or less stable component in our juridico-legal and sociopolitical existence that cannot be denied, which brings it into contact as well as into conflict with other similarly relative stabilities. Education must necessarily take this into account in understanding the nature of the problem that it poses between various relative immobilities. But this does not exhaust the strange thing that we call living, which is always emergent, and in creative indeterminacy—the being expresses itself in unpredictable becoming. The stable component and its corresponding relations may be collectively seen as a productive irritant that forces the being to act, but at the same time it is for the latter to realize that it can never fully overcome the indeterminacy. It recedes as we move forward rather like the horizon that retreats before us. Bereft of that possibility of final overcoming, we must look back at the source from where we (our body-image) are projected. This is the other dimension of education that is generally neglected; it demands the cultivation of the intuitive. The looking back toward the source cannot be done other than through intuition. It is not available to empirical consciousness. A common theological description of man’s nature is that he participates in both the conditioned and unconditioned, or in necessity and freedom. Man is conditioned to the world; he participates in the world’s structures of necessity. But given this patterning, fixation, and conditioning, he also participates in the unconditioned—in freedom, or (if you wish) in the continual creation of the world. The explanatory problem is not to explain the unconditioned, or freedom, but to explain those conditions which make

166  K. ROY man a part of the world of necessity. This, I believe, is the function of the “learning” category. It attempts to explain man’s conditionedness, the patterning of his behavior. By raising questions about learning how to learn or be creative, man is probing the very nature of what it means to be a human being and hence delving into metaphysics and theology. This meaning is tied to the meaning of time. In fact, man can be defined by his temporality. The problems of change and continuity, conditioned and unconditioned, necessity and freedom, or of fixation and creativity are essentially problems of man’s temporality. He is not a fixed being.8

Necessity and freedom are not two things, neither are they opposed. When we act according to necessity, we are inwardly freed of the burden of the action—the gap between actor and action disappears, and the fluid state reappears. The cosmological orientation that aligns us with necessity brings about a moment of pure harmony which is freedom. With this sense of freedom as the existential condition, we can re-emerge as relative stabilities that are in interaction with other relative stabilities. This is necessarily tied to the inner experience of time as duration. It is in duration that we are fluid and yet whole, and not in clock time. The re-emergence into the temporal world contains a trace of sub-specie-aeternitatis or the sense of the non-temporal being. Consider another experience with a different teacher perception— I turn to Butt et al. once again for some rich data on teacher lives: Glenda feels that two major factors influence her current pedagogy. The first is the cultural heritages and needs of her students. She feels that they are already proficient communicators in one language and she just provides them with the opportunity to use their communication skills in another through a supportive environment relevant to their interests which provides confidence, comfort and proficiency. She feels that it is the students who have enabled her to create a unique learning environment. The second factor that influences her pedagogy is Glenda as a person. Such characteristics as a desire to succeed, a fear of failure, and a highly developed sense of responsibility towards herself and others are sources of motivation for the self-initiated way she evolves her expertise and particular philosophy in ESL. She has not stopped this process. This year she has identified

8 Dwayne Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26:S1, pp. 324–331.

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the provision for creative writing for advanced students as an observable weakness in her teaching. She has already attended several workshops and intends to pursue more. Glenda also realizes that not having a mandated curriculum and tests has provided her with the freedom and challenge to do what she has done in terms of curriculum.9

Glenda has evolved an effective teaching strategy for her language students—she has perfected techniques for the benefit of the other. This is obviously sophisticated and good as far as extensity goes. But we cannot stop at that, and instead must ask—Who is the other? Time has invented self and other, and it is through questioning time that we can discover the true nature of this opposition. Important as it is to do what the teacher has accomplished pedagogically in time, one cannot stop there if one is to touch the creative or emancipatory dimension. By the latter, we do not mean some personal creative urge or its expression; rather what is alluded to is the dimension from which we ourselves are projected and distinctions arise. One might frame the other as the sole object of one’s pedagogy and settle down into a workable formula and a solid routine. But that would be to be in amnesia of the other side of reality—the durational side, in which these distinctions tend to disappear. Becoming too successful in dealing with one side leads to a certain loss of sight when it comes to the obverse side of the same reality. The realization of the true otherness of the other does not lie in the mastery of techniques, in principles, or in successful strategies. The true otherness of the other appears as an anarchy of the soul when time as we know it has been pushed back to reveal the living present. Ethics occurs as an an-archy, the compassion of being. Its priority is affirmed without recourse to principles, without vision, in the irrecuperable shock of being-for-the-person before being-for-oneself…Ethical priority, according to Levinas, occurs as the moral height of the other over essence, identity, manifestation, principles, in brief, over me…. The surplus of the Other’s nonencompassable alterity – not the alterity of horizons – is the way ethics intrudes, disturbs, commands being.10

9 Butt

et al., in Goodson, op. cit., p. 79. A. Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 10. 10 Richard

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The becoming-ethical or the turn toward rightful pedagogy for a temporal being occurs when the priority of the Other is affirmed over everything else including all manner of expertise. This otherness does not refer merely to the physical or organismic other, but includes the irreducible otherness in oneself. The shock of the irreducibility of the otherness destroys the complacency born of the extrinsic experience of time—as past and future—in which the me is born, and in which the relationship of the me with everything else takes place. This shock opens for us the possibility of an intuitive moment in which anything might happen, because it is freedom from the past and therefore bringing upon us creative indeterminacy. Pedagogically, it might be more useful to start with intuition than with duration, although the former is nothing other than the instantiation of the latter. The brief loss of the me awakens entirely new sensations along with loss of fear and anxiety that normally hold us back more than anything else. Now the so-called learning environment becomes something entirely different from the old adult– child or teacher–student relation that was psychologically operational and inwardly recognized as the only one. There is an active suspension of the old that leads to the upsurge of new relations which cannot be described beforehand. Too much reliance on the categories, and what convention considers as expertise, prevents the arising of this new relation. The “expert” always acts on the outer, believing himself/herself to be distinct from what is acted upon. While this form of reality is useful at one level, it cannot go very far in the emancipatory direction, where the distinction between subject and the object tends to disappear. What is pedagogically relevant is that adequacy at the level of discrete relations is not necessarily adequate at the level of the whole. Therefore, things need radical redefinition and categories need to be held under erasure for intuition to find space—this is the most important thing to remember for the educationist who dares to approach the creative dimension. The intuitive plane holds open those very doors that Kantianism had closed. We have discussed the awakening of intuition extensively in an earlier chapter. The qualitative dimension or elemental intensity associated with intuition negates usual modes of quantification or measurement such as “motivated kids” and “uninspired ones,” “appreciative kids” and “indifferent ones,” and so on. Witness a well-meaning biographical reference to teacher work: “In spite of the time, energy, and commitment as well as the constraints mentioned earlier, I enjoy my work. It is satisfying to

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work with students who are highly motivated to learn, who are responsive and appreciative, and who hold the teacher in high esteem.”11 At the level of intensity or the qualitative dimension, “learning” may not be associated with personal enthusiasm or acquisition—all humanistic suppositions that have no bearing upon durational awareness. No special characteristics or powers are ascribed to one group or set of individuals over and against any other group. The pedagogic situation maintains itself not through binary formulations out of frozen immobilities, but by means of intuitive incursions into the durational. This, however, does not mean we lose sight of extensity. The totality then operates as an ensemble in which each part is its own relevance. There are multiple possible observational perches and levels from where an observation can be made about the operation of such an ensemble. The teacher biographic situation is one such observational perch. “How did Glenda’s past life history influence who she is as a teacher? How did she come to think and act the way she does in the classroom? In reflecting on her past and these questions, Glenda reconstructed her memories using the metaphor of a ‘slow motion film of a seed developing and growing into a blossom’, since ‘the awareness of and respect for the values and traditions of cultural groups has been a gradual process for me.’ She relates significant events that represented crossroads in her life and identifies key people who influenced her within phases called ‘Planting the Seed’, ‘Nurturing’, ‘The Bud Begins to Open’, ‘Full Bloom’, and ‘Planting Again’.”12 Witness that all of these expressions are essentially time metaphors, showing again how closely time is implicated in teacher-becoming. This is the first opening—an opening that sets into proper perspective, or order, the set of external relations toward the privileging of the other. The seed develops and blooms…but the blossoming must not be taken in the direction of something finished, which is convention, otherwise one is truly finished as a becoming-being. Time and again one must confront and be cautioned against this tendency toward the patterned immobility. Even as one is adjusting to the serious presence of the Other, one must be warned that this adjustment continues to be a process within commonsensical categories that themselves ultimately need to be transcended toward creative becoming. “Glenda uses insights gleaned 11 Butt 12 Ibid.

et al., in Goodson, op. cit., p. 81.

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from examining her own personal professional biography and from the social learning of others’ life histories in order to project herself into the future. She plans to focus on engaging those constraints from outside her classroom that made her feel helpless.” The world of frozen immobilities are the constraints that make their appearance in a million ways, including as frozen practices and dogma, that stand between us and the flow of duration. The feeling of helplessness and impotence may be reversed at the root by reversing our own immobilization and reentering our inner time. This does not mean that the outer constraints disappear but these will now appear in a frozen dimension that the new motility can essentially bypass. “She intends to use her personal strengths and new knowledge to initiate a major school-based project in intercultural education at the school. In doing so she will not impose her personal agenda on others but will participate with her colleagues in evolving what they want out of it.” That’s no doubt wonderful, and here the word “participate” must be highlighted. Once the biographic daguerreotype is reinserted in the fluid dimension, the need to impose on others disappears. In other words, the ego relaxes, takes a backseat. “She will take the position that each teacher has a unique understanding of his/ her classroom and therefore can determine how best to incorporate project activities therein.” This vision, which is at the moment sociological, must be raised to the ontological level, meaning that one’s own complicity with the projections that appear to us as an independent objective reality must be carefully observed, even as we respond to this “objective reality” as best as we can. The alert observer becomes aware of movements rather than discrete activities which result in a slowing down of time and hence yields more time for observation. “At the same time, however, she realizes that when teachers feel inadequately prepared her support should always be felt. She will try to create a sharing and collegial atmosphere wherein she will be a learner who does not have all the answers as well as [being] a resource person.” The sense of being a learner is of paramount importance and must be developed to the hilt in the sense that each existential moment must be converted into an act of pure observation and learning. The coming off the knowledge pedestal must be an ontological truth that leads to humility which is the basic quality for intuition. “I do not have all the answers” will now read as “I am the problem”. “She will also bring in community resource people. She feels and has the aim that, a project like this will create an open and cohesive school climate.” Entering into the present means developing

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a two-level complementary reality. While all effort is made to muster thinking toward a meaningful order—the “project,” the complementary reality is a counter-flow that refuses closure. “Glenda claims that her pupils have taught her what her curriculum and pedagogy should be. In that sense she lives the notion of teacher as learner, not only in her personal but also in her pedagogical life. The relationship in the classroom then is horizontal in the sense that everyone participates in some sense in discerning where to go and what to do next—important ingredients in reducing alienation and increasing the opportunity for self determination. Glenda hastens to add, however, that this hasn’t been easy. She still has difficulty leaving ‘the teacher as dispenser of wisdom and knowledge’ to trust in her students.” Trusting student experience means stepping away from the conventional image and becoming one image among many. That is good as far it goes, but not adequate by itself; one has to go further in seeking the creative element. The teacher–student relationship in the classroom turns horizontal—this must be welcomed. But there is also the vertical element, not in the sense of a hierarchical relationship of power, but a relation of intensity, the induction of which is the task of the relatively mature intellect. Thus, the vertical intersects the horizontal producing a moment of creative indeterminacy that is not chaos. When I give up my teacher authority, it does not imply abdication. Rather it means that teacher authority is replaced by something more creative and potent that is alive and responding to each instant differently. The pedagogic eros of each moment must dictate the turns that the situation takes as a whole. But our problem, in general, is the burden time places on us in the form of psychological pasts—the innumerable time-images—that interfere with the emergent moment.13 Reflecting on the teacher biography, the researchers further observe: “In her work, there is a structural continuum from the real to the ideal. Though the gap presents a dilemma, Glenda appears to use the tension created as energy to move gradually from the real to the ideal.” Incompleteness is the very nature of discrete reality or extensity; no matter how we try to complete the picture or fill in the bits of the puzzle, the picture remains partial. One must recognize this as an ontological fact, which exerts an important influence on the ways of our thinking and the manner of reflective consideration of our biographies. Returning hermeneutically to this essential incompleteness opens out in 13 Ibid.,

pp. 81–82. Paragraph reconstituted with commentary.

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thought a new depth, a new questioning that is not articulable in usual language. This is compounded by the fact that the biographic plane or time-terrain in which our lives and thoughts unwind or play out, generally leaves out of the reckoning the very nature of the interval in which all of the eventalization or aggregation of events occurs. The result is a conflict between the real and the ideal because the ontic essences are modified through psychological pressure to maintain simple continuity. “There are three terrains within which she has real-ideal continuums, along which she aims to progress. One concerns the primitive dress, diet and dance approach to multicultural education and the ideal ‘vegetable soup’ form of intercultural education. Another is her own professional competence which ranges in the past from inadequacy and incompetence towards a future whereby she will have evolved her skills to be able to work effectively within an intercultural notion of education. The third is the broader context of the school, school board and society.” The seeing of the other as something out there that needs to be synthesized into a multicultural “soup” is an innocent way of framing the situation. It still prioritizes the observer and clouds the ethical question about the nature of the other in which is hidden the question of time and one’s own temporality. To put it differently, we are still concerned with the “progress” of the observer, a futurism born of the existing temporal axis. “This framework, regardless of the content of Glenda’s personal, practical knowledge, characterizes it as much as a process as anything else. We see her moving along a developmental continuum in an open and dynamic way.” Granted that the peculiar temporal composite called the human is able to move along till faced with the inevitable contradictions of extensity, of a reality born of frozen immobilities and discrete or monadic formations. In the event, the developmental arc or trajectory must be based on what actualities then? In other words, to what should we credit the possibility of truly novel possibilities without which the world becomes an endless progression of dreary repetition? Only to the irreducible reality of time—only to the ontological reality of duration and its intuition can we grant the possibility of a purely ethical moment, a moment free of contradiction.14 14 Huebner observes: “The environment expressing concern for man’s temporality must make possible those moments of vision when the student, and/or those responsible for him, project his potentiality for being into the present, thus tying together the future and the past into the present. Somehow, the environment must provide opportunities for the

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“Her knowledge is self formed out of personal and professional experience, moved along by a strong sense of responsibility to herself and to others as well as a desire to succeed.” This “self formed” knowledge is fine as far as it goes, but it floats contingently and lightly on the surface of experience. One has to go into this experience, into its essence to wring out of it the ontological connection between self and other. The “desire to succeed” must be transformed into an ethical transcendence, into an awareness of the otherness of life, otherwise it remains self-centered and not fundamentally creative. “As a result of this process [of self formed knowledge] the content of her practical knowledge, so far, is undergirded by several key factors. Emotionally, Glenda is able to understand and empathize with her students. She is able not only to accept but value them as individual humans with personal stories but also their cultural and linguistic backgrounds as well. This is manifested in a central way in her curriculum and pedagogy.” Within secular and empirical formations, Glenda has phenomenologically reached the point where the hierarchical cultural order is overcome and a fresh empathy is born. However, a new journey begins hermeneutically toward creative wisdom once the categories involved in the current thought process themselves are transcended. It is a step few are willing or able to take, but that does not stop us from considering it as a serious pedagogic orientation to strive for. The demand is that we become aware of two kinds of time playing out simultaneously in the pedagogic situation. The first is secular time or chronos that is time out of which secular formations and their external relations arise. The second is duration or internal flow which is transpersonal and in which there are no categories or boundaries, but which is the source of the creative movement.15

student to become aware of his temporality, to participate in a history which is one horizon of his present. Only in this way can he contribute to the continual creation of the world and recognize his own active participation as an ingredient in the transcendency of the world. This framework provides the possible reinterpretation of the significance of the categories of purpose and learning in the educational process. Given man’s temporality, the future makes sense only as the horizon of his present. Heidegger’s “ahead-of-itself” is not a future “now” that can be prescribed. Rather, it is Dasein coming toward himself in his own potential for being. It is the projection of a “having-been” onto a present to create the moment-of-vision.” Dwayne Huebner, op. cit., p. 329. 15 Goodson, op. cit., p. 86. Paragraph reconstituted with commentary.

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Teacher biographies are replete with “coping strategies,” that is, a reductive move that attempts to simplify what is essentially a complex situation, and bring it within manageable proportions. The beginning teacher had several coping strategies and they were directly related to her personal dispositions and previous experiences. ‘Environmental simplification’ was one strategy that was adopted where she conformed to role expectations and reduced, by simplification, the many demands that were placed upon her. Some demands were forgotten; others were systematized. Another way in which she made life bearable was to seek support from friends, family and others by seeking ‘strokes’. Alternatively, she simplified by compartmentalizing her life responsibilities. ‘Context restructuring’ refers to a third approach that was used. The teacher specifically sought to alter either the physical environment of the classroom, the instructional activity, or the curriculum content to fit her needs. ‘Compromise’ was used as a fourth strategy. The tension between personal and institutional requirements resulted in compromises of values and approaches so that she could feel more at ease in the school setting. An orientation to ‘skill improvement’ represents a fifth coping strategy. As a means of enhancing the learning environment, the teacher focused on developing both her own professional skills and those of students. ‘Problem disownment’ was also employed….16

Coping strategies often are ways of killing time. Used in a defensive manner, any teaching “strategy” becomes a coping mechanism. The ubiquitous “Power Point” presentation, the breaking up of the class into small groups, or even the good old didactic lecture can become a coping strategy that reduces the complexity of the pedagogic situation through “restructuring.” These generic methods allow us to get away with the feeling that something was accomplished since the allotted time quota was filled up. It is of little consequence that the student never touched the qualitative dimension or truly experienced anything meaningful. A symbolic transaction that met official standards and approval for ways of managing class keeps the eyes focused on metric time but never gets to the inward relation that alone can weave the fragments together toward significant meaning. The entire effort is on horizontal or lateral expansion and not on the creation of vertical intensity. To emerge intact from the pedagogic situation by means of coping implies that the frozen 16 J.

G. Knowles, In Goodson, op. cit., p. 112.

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immobilities are not disturbed. Vertical intensity, on the other hand, would mean awareness of inner change even in the middle of experiencing the outer. Another related point is that the harder the calcified self-image the greater the difficulty in touching the qualitative dimension. Inner plasticity means vulnerability, something that many want to ward off with a frozen center of attention that has built itself up along societal lines of “success.” Another factor that made it very difficult for Elizabeth to deal with the perceived student disorder was the question of failure. Elizabeth’s kindergarten through grade twelve experience was not only stable, but it was very successful. She was a straight ‘A’ student. Towards the end of the first month of teaching, she perceived herself as a failure—as many beginning teachers do—and, for the first time in her life, not only was failure a reality, it was public knowledge. Besides, she ‘was very vulnerable to [student] opinions’ and sought verification for her success in the classroom as she had done when teaching in her local church. When the students were not forthcoming in their praise, Elizabeth became very depressed about her teaching performance….When her senior high school students were not willing to accept Elizabeth as being at the centre of the classroom arena she had severe discipline difficulties.17

Keeping my students’ attention riveted on me—is that to be considered pedagogic success or failure? The biographic trajectory toward hardening of the temporal concentrate of the self, which is in the contrary direction to the loosening up that is required for the creative dimension, cannot conceivably promote harmony between disparate temporal elements. What one often witnesses, for example, in neophyte classrooms is a reversion to deep-seated models of teacher role identity in order to ward off the threat of possible disorder. Teachers fall back on reductionist patterns to reduce complexity. Durational rhythm does not need shepherding of consciousness; rather it requires the easing off from the obsession with the patterned immobilities and their apparent relations which appear to us as the only reality. An experimental withdrawal is necessary from the fixation with the extensity. The “center of gravity” of the situation must be brought back within the body-corpus and the psychological must

17 Ibid.,

p. 117.

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be set aside. There is too much psychology at play in this success-failure thing that interferes with the ontological reality. Once the center of gravity of the situation is displaced and relocated within the corpus, the observation shifts from the psychological self to the ontological self. Changes and movements hitherto unnoticed become apparent and new mobilities appear. Fighting off chronic time is the key to transcending the situation; rather it is a becoming-situation that is needed, wherein the separation is overcome, and one relinquishes the separate temporal perch from where one looks out on extensity. The move from judgment to pure otherness (in which all are Other including the observing consciousness) is a move away from quantity-measurement (success, failure, etc.) to a singular moment of qualitative transformation. The assiduously cultivated and maintained boundary between teacher and student is renounced. It is by no means the suggestion here that the quantitative or conventional aspect does not matter, but rather that it must not be allowed to dominate or be seen as the sole aspect of a complex relation. The complementarity angle is insisted upon here and must always remain in view. Knowles speaks well of the “biographical transformation model” that might help teachers come out of the shadow of their specific upbringings and overcome the deep-seated values socially embedded in them that inhibit authentic becoming. It must be added that this “transformation” cannot be completed as long as the temporal structure within which meaning is interpreted remains the same. In other words, the biographic transformation has to be the function of a new rhythm, and the latter can only be secured by becoming aware of an inner dimension that is not conditioned by upbringing or social and cultural contingencies. Any other form of reconstruction that does not take into account the durational side of the being is bound to come up against new fragments of the unconscious or archetypal notions of teaching and learning, or basic oppositions that refuse to get dislodged. While the obvious precipitate can be tackled, the one who tackles or interprets his/her situation remains at the core of the effort and cannot be dealt with at this level. In other words, while the superficial blockages can be overcome at the conventional level of activity of the consciousness, which includes the seeking of self-affirmation, becoming dejected when denied, and so on, the center of projection from where these mento-emotional turbulences are generated cannot be reached in this way. And if they cannot be reached in the usual rearrangement of thought patterns, then no lasting

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transformative change can be said to have occurred. We have here a case of thought playing hide and seek with itself that cannot be taken as serious praxeological effort. But it is not only the inner ghosts that haunt biographical history; biography is also the confrontation with the external forces that daily assail the being. Sexual harassment, racial taunts, religious bigotry, homophobia, and other axes of social persecution often accompany the exposure of the teacher person, especially those marked out clearly as the Other. The teacher is particularly vulnerable under such circumstances because he/she is faced with half-formed minds who are not held fully accountable but who are nevertheless primed by the adult world and act as its proxy. Such situations are never easy and their gravity must never be minimized; they cast a shroud of despair over those at the receiving end. It is easy to wear the attitude that says just put up with it and move on. But such an attitude is nothing other than a betrayal of the pedagogic situation that is essentially about collective emancipated existence. The only true hope is to cultivate the ontological alongside the psychological. The latter constitutes the moment-to-moment reactions of the psyche caught in time—the chronic time that marks its path down the social road. Here there is no resolution because it is essentially a path of fragmentation and of conflict. There exists on the other hand a domain of realization that remains intact under all circumstances and at all times. That domain, according to our analysis, is duration, or the fluid anterior flow that is the ontological matrix of our projections. There is no other refuge for the human other than being in contact with the pure flow of consciousness of which he/she is an integral part. This contact transcends all conflict and all fragmentation without denying the harshness of the outer conflicts and fragmentation that are a part of daily existence. There is yet another angle to this process that needs to be added. In biographic praxis, moving from the temporal self to an ontological awareness involves several complex meditations. But it also encompasses bringing about change in basic living patterns. It involves, for instance, gradually breaking from the addiction to thought as time or temporal thinking. One way to countenance this is by means of appeal to heightened sensuous activity. Habitual thinking formed out of identification with a narrow band of activities merely strengthens the ego-self and the inner image. To break out of this habit, the mobilization of the corpus sensorium at multiple levels is vital. One must begin by engaging in unfamiliar sensory activities. If I have never done gardening, I must engage with the

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soil and plants. If I have never sewn fabric, I might learn how to weave. If I have never kneaded clay, I might become apprenticed to a potter or ceramicist for a time. And so on, but these activities must not be done as token observances. The expansion is not driven toward strengthening the temporal self but rather toward loosening the inner image that prevents us from tasting a different flow. Let me explain that statement. If I have an image of myself as a professor (apart from my functionality as a professor), this temporal image blocks the perception of the ongoing moment-tomoment flux in my being. To get beyond chronic time within biographic praxis, I have to let go of all psychological images of myself, or at least treat them lightly, seeing them for what they are—temporal and contingent accretions. These temporal accretions are inimical to my real growth into the other dimension. They keep my gaze fixed on their superficial demands and interactions preventing the gaze from entering the deeper layers and movements of becoming. Thus, an intense engagement with living processes as these occur in ourselves is demanded to shake us out of the ennui of the every day, creating in us a new self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of the self as is often implied; rather it is the discovery in consciousness about the mode of appearance and construction of what we call reality. To begin with, what is involved here is that in order to grasp the basic workings of the mind, the body-corpus has to be brought to an adequate level of activation. In other words, we must naturally overcome the body/mind split historically introduced in thought. But philosophically what does this integration entail and how are we to be biographically oriented toward this new condition? The term “integration” is derived from the Latin adjective integer which means whole, complete, unimpaired. Thus “integration” points to a whole or the wholeness of a thing. “To integrate” means to assemble component parts so as to make a whole; thus integration denotes a process and its result. But in psychology and philosophy the term “integration” is used to denote the realization and the manifestation of a whole and a unity emerging on the basis of some complexity rather than the assembling into a whole of what was previously disconnected. Our considerations have shown that it is in the latter sense that we should envisage the person as integrated in the process of action.18

18 Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Transl.) Andrzej Potocki (Dodrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979), pp. 128–129.

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Integration takes place in the process of action—when one is consumed by the totality of action there ceases to be any separate actor; the totality of the action takes us past the conventional division. Making whole in the moment of action or the emergence of unity is a key to biographic praxis. The emergence of unity must not be understood in the psychological sense—what emerges is not some wholesome individual—but in the ontological sense of the emergence of a different unit, a gestalt that comprises the entire dynamic manifold. The integration is not into a fresh monadic composition, but a terrain of potentialities and possibilities. A certain complexity in the structure of self-governance and self-possession manifested in and through the action, or, strictly speaking, in self-determination, is a characteristic and noteworthy trait of the person. Transcendence of the person is but one aspect of personal dynamism; it exposes but one of its poles. When it is accompanied by the subjective unity and wholeness of the structure of self-governance and self-possession, then it manifests the integration about which we are speaking. In the analysis of the dynamism of man, transcendence of experience passes into the immanence of the experience of acting itself: when I act, I am wholly engaged in my acting, in that dynamization [of the spirit] to which my own efficacy has contributed.19

Overcoming the limits of personhood through conatus is one aspect of action. Equally important is the passing of this personal transcendence into the immanence of experience itself. Let us proceed by means of an example. Let us assume one enters the situation pedagogically as a character—say, Vladimir or Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. While at the moment of entry, there is a supreme effort of action as the experiencer, but as soon as the interaction begins, the situation takes over, and the characters are subsumed by the developing situation. The “dynamization” of the spirit here leads to an immanence, to the substratum in which we proceed in terms of complex singularities. In other words, when we start out “cold,” we perceive ourselves as isolated monads, but when “dynamized,” the separation begins to melt away to produce complexes that cannot be broken down into monads. This is the immanent

19 Ibid.

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condition, and durational meaning emerges only in these non-monadic complex flows. All the same, it is not only the dynamism proper to man that receives its basic reflection in consciousness; the human being is aware as well of the main trends in his dynamism, this awareness being connected also with his experiencing them. Indeed, he experiences acting and doing as something essentially different from the mere happening, that is to say, from what only takes place or goes on in him and in what he as man takes no active part. Having the experience of the two, objectively different structures - of the “man-acts” and the “something-happens-in-him” - together with their differentiation in the field of experience, provides the evidence, on the one hand, of the essential contiguity of man’s consciousness with his being; on the other hand, the differentiation of experience gives each of these structures that innerness and subjectiveness which in general we owe to consciousness.20

There are things that go on in us with which we are not directly concerned, or in which we take no active part, such as physical changes in the body. This is the other part of the organismic dynamism which must be observed. It provides evidence of substantial goings-on in the background of consciousness entirely independent of our will, and hence of time as we know it. At present, however, we are not interested in [following] experience as such but in those structures which to be objectively differentiated require that we rely upon the total experience of man and not merely on the evidence which might be supplied by our consciousness. The immanent experience itself is insufficient with respect to all the processes, operations, events and states of the human body, all that pertains to the life of the organism. We always have to reach to other sources than the merely spontaneous and instantaneous evidence of consciousness itself and the experiences associated with it; we have to supplement it continuously from the outside in order to make our knowledge of man in this dimension as complete as possible.21

While the immanent experience is vital, biographically we have to emerge from it in order to deepen and extend our horizons of experience-ability. This dialectic between the two levels of reality is the important 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.,

p. 44.

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biographic tension that is common both for the teacher and the student. Neither of these levels is important in and of itself; what is important is the dialectic that proceeds between the two levels, and obviously no category (student, teacher, or anyone else) is absolved of the need for the dialectical engagement. In emerging from the immanent level to the transcendent, there has to be concerted effort in deepening the reach of the emotive energies, and the capacities for concentrated work must be enhanced. Psychosomatic activations must be extended in as many directions as possible and new uses of the body and the sensory apparatuses must be accompanied by growing empirical understanding. Modern education makes its gravest error when it treats each of these parts as independent and considers some of these as part of the curriculum, leaving out of consideration other parts of the dialectic. It has so far been unable to comprehend that education is not a thing but a spark that is lit in the dialectic between the transcendent and the immanent. The biographical approach on the other hand recognizes this and therefore seeks to uncover and operationalize the dynamism of the whole being. The scientific method, which is the highest known method to the current wisdom in education, falls very much short of this goal. The aim of our subsequent analyses is not to gain insight into the dynamisms of man’s psychosomatic complexity of the type pursued by the particular sciences. First, because the particular sciences are very much concerned with details, which would lead us away from viewing our object, namely, the person-action relation as a whole. Second, they seem to be preoccupied in investigating the different psychical and somatic dynamisms as such and, as it were, for their own sake. In doing so they overlook that specific personal totality which is essential to our approach.

In our approach to awaken the dynamic being or the biographic totality of the human, we cannot depend on the methodology of the sciences, while at the same time we have to be careful not to be inconsistent with its empirical conclusions. The methods of the sciences focus on details and investigate each part for its own sake, whereas here we are interested in the biographic essences of each being and the relations within the whole. Science is not concerned with psychosomatic wholeness, whereas the latter is the principal concern of education. Science establishes causal relations between various part realities, whereas we are interested in understanding how the biographic totality or the dynamic manifold hangs together. Reciprocal determination (mutual conditioning) is a key

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to the way we must proceed in order not merely to understand but to biographically arrive at praxis. Our investigation into the dynamisms appropriate to the psyche and the soma of the human being will in contrast deal mainly with the essentials of these dynamisms, and with the characteristic nature the dynamisms assume because of their integration in the person’s action. Our description cannot be inconsistent with [the scientific], nor can it accept their reliance on minute details and the methods they employ. We thus see what is to be in principle our characteristic of the psychosomatic dynamism of man, to whom we attribute reactivity as well as emotivity, the former corresponding more to the soma and the latter to the psyche. We must here emphasize that trait of the dynamism which determines its inner content and makes possible its unity (or integration). Man in his psychosomatic complexity constitutes a highly diversified manifold, the particular elements of which are strictly interrelated, in such a way that they mutually condition each other and depend on each other.22

The biographic approach sets up an independent line of inquiry that ticks on its own since it is more than just an intellectual problem. It ultimately leads to the phenomenological question: What is this dynamism that results in the experience of the self, and how is it able to hang together and reflect on itself? The educational validity of this question lies in the fact that all other questions are extrinsic to this basic existential one. If I cannot say anything about the dynamism called myself, how can I reliably make claims about other dynamisms and their true relations with me? Of course, the deeper I go into the biographical dynamism of myself the greater is the uncertainty quotient, and the more the world-relations appear strange. The old taken-for-granted relations melt away and their place is taken by a fluidity that cannot be fully grasped because it is always slipping away from me. Another name for this creative uncertainty is duration. This creative uncertainty is suppressed and denied in mainstream education. Hence it never seems to get anything right—the old conflicts between the child and the curriculum, and the teacher and the student, continue unabated. All the efforts at reform end up ultimately in the same place, and nothing seems to change. As the ontic direction (combined alignment of social apparatuses) is contrary to

22 Ibid.,

p. 134.

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the ontological, the settled nature of things always manages to stultify the emergent. Attention to the emergent, on the other hand, shakes the foundations of the being and return us to the primary oscillations—the non-substantial topoi of our being. Thus, in the biographic review and analysis, what begins with the apparently human individual gradually transposes itself onto a non-humanistic plane through a corporeal awakening to the distinction between time and duration. This mapping occurs gradually, as we have seen, through various complex stages and meditations. The biographical journey is for those who are out to make free beings of themselves—free of categories, presuppositions, word games, and cultural hangovers. It is self-education at its most intensive. It is praxis that ought to be at the heart of the educational enterprise. Instead what grips us today is the mechanical transmission of patterned immobilities that forms the content of learning. But it is not just the content of learning that is at stake; it is also what it teaches us about ourselves that is so problematic. The poverty of humanism (a failed doctrine spun around a self-serving species-specific ascendancy), and the anxiety to retain aspects of the associated rationalistic effort called the Enlightenment were the breeding grounds of the nineteenth-century modern individual. The Vienna Circle had openly declared war on metaphysics, and in that war comprehensively replaced the mythic idea of destiny with the modern idea of rational progress. Among the many effects of this undeniable hegemony, I shall mention only one. From its origins, mankind has set up a specific means of controlling time - the narrative of myth. Myth allows a sequence of events to be placed in a constant framework in which the beginning and the end of a story form a sort of rhythm or rhyme, as Holderlin put it. The idea of destiny long prevalent in human communities - and even today in the unconscious, if we are to believe Freud - presupposes the existence of a timeless agency which ‘knows’ in its totality the succession of moments constituting a life, be it individual or collective. What will happen is predetermined in the divine oracle, and human beings have as their only task that of unfolding identities already constituted in synchrony or achrony.23

23 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Transl.) Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1991), p. 67.

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The idea of destiny ultimately makes nonsense of the human as something sovereign and autonomous. If the so-called human was only articulable within a time that is guided by a “timeless agency” then the coming together and the falling apart of the human are according to laws inaccessible to it. This would put the human on an analogous plane to any other natural object and deny it any special status. The modern narrative was born of the rejection of this attitude. The modern narrative, to be sure, induces a more political than ritual attitude. The fact remains that the ideal situated at the end of the narrative of emancipation is supposedly conceivable, even if it comprises, under the name of freedom, a sort of void or ‘blank’, a lack of definition, to be safeguarded. In other terms, destination [Bestimmung] is not destiny. But both designate a diachronic series of events whose ‘reason’ at least is judged to be explicable, on the one hand as destiny, by tradition, on the other as task, by political philosophy. Unlike myth, the modern project certainly does not ground its legitimacy in the past, but in the future. And it is thus that it offers a better hold for the process of complexification. Having said this, it is one thing to project human emancipation, and another to programme the future as such. Liberty is not security. What some people have called the postmodern perhaps merely designates a break, or at least a splitting, between one pro- and the other — between project and programme.24

The modern attitude attempts to cut open the circularity of destiny and replace it by a linear idea of time and along with it an individuality that has as its ideal a certain undefinable blankness under the name of freedom, emancipation, etc. In actuality, this narrative is aimed not at freedom or liberty, but at security, both economic and psychological, under the sign of progress. Thus, from the very start there is a subterfuge and the human operates and is kept together under what Marxists call false consciousness. The biography under Capitalism thus, for instance, acquires knowledge about itself from a distorted perspective. Capital is not an economic and social phenomenon. It is the shadow cast by the principle of reason on human relations. Prescriptions such as: communicate, save time and money, control and forestall the event, increase exchanges, are all likely to extend and reinforce the ‘great monad’. 24 Ibid.,

p. 68.

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That, ‘cognitive’ discourse has conquered hegemony over other genres, that in ordinary language, the pragmatic and interrelational aspect comes to the fore, whilst ‘the poetic’ appears to deserve less and less attention — all these features of the contemporary language-condition cannot be understood as effects of a simple modality of exchange, i.e. the one called ‘capitalism’ by economic and historical science. They are the signs that a new use of language is taking place, the stake of which is that of knowing objects as precisely as possible and of realizing among ordinary speakers a consensus….Capital does not govern the knowledge of reality, but it gives reality to knowledge.25

Capitalism itself is a specific manner of viewing time and an instrument of realizing homogeneity and consensus. It stands to reason then that biography under Capitalism is not the freely acquired understanding of the self and its possible uses, but takes its cue from a regime born of the specific configuration of time. The surrounding discourse bristles with command words that are linked to social obligations and implicit presuppositions—both products of the time of capitalist congealment— that make us do things or perceive things according to a certain cognitive order leaving little scope for examining things afresh. Clearly, at the base of the collective assemblage of syntactics and cognitive codes of a certain sociopolitical arrangement that makes or prevent us from freely becoming are temporal relations. Real transformation toward biographical praxis begins when we cut adrift of the fixities and calcifications of the surrounding apparatuses that mix with our body-images to make unfortunate composites. At the instant when the dynamism breaks free of the inward projection of chronic time, the biographic withdrawal from the current temporal regime produces poiesis of the organic manifold that has otherwise gone missing.

References Dan C. Lortie, School Teacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Dwayne Huebner, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality.” Theory into Practice, Vol. 26:S1, pp. 324–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/0040584 8709543294. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Transl.) F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001). 25 Ibid.,

pp. 69–70.

186  K. ROY J. Gary Knowles, “Models for Teachers’ Biographies.” In Ivor Goodson (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives (London: Routledge, 1992). Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Transl.) Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Transl.) Andrzej Potocki (Dodrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979). Richard A. Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction.” In Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1985). Richard Butt, Danielle Raymond, G. McCue, and L. Yamagishi, “Collaborative Autobiography and the Teacher’s Voice.” In Ivor Goodson (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives (London: Routledge, 1992). Sue Middleton, “Developing a Radical Pedagogy: Autobiography of a New Zealand Sociologist of Women’s Education.” In Ivor Goodson (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives (London: Routledge, 1992).

CHAPTER 7

Time and the Creative Tension

The melancholy of time has rarely been portrayed more pitilessly and relentlessly than by T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It is the very vision of a consciousness fragmented by time and the frustration brought upon it by the interminable bustle of temporal things and agendas. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.1

The sense of betrayal of organic life and its potentialities is hinted at by means of the shattering imagery of disjointedness and incoherence

1 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” available in the public domain at: https://poets.org/poem/love-song-j-alfred-prufrock.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9_7

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of the modernist life and its hollow busyness. The voice points to this empty bustling and derisively assures that there will be a time for everything. But the whole is not the sum of the parts, and we cannot stitch together an authentic life from the temporal fragments. A “hundred visions and revisions” only generate further velocity that ultimately end in the mediocrity of the familiar (“taking of toast and tea”). And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.2

Do I dare disturb the universe? What would disturb this universe of lifeless and futile acceleration, this growing old without ever having really lived? Seemingly there is time aplenty for new decisions but those will only be negated in what would immediately follow, indicating futility. Each temporal decision rebounds on itself through its consequences. We have fractured the world in new ways seeking novelty, but true freshness eludes us. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?3

There is nothing new in the temporal; all that could happen has already happened, and continue to repeat themselves endlessly in various ways. Their synthesis does not bring the sought-for redemption or release from 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

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the trivial. Their synthesis does not produce the longed-for triumph over the objective world, only more clutter. For the world itself is not a temporal object, although the different fragments might be so. In fact, the world is not an object at all—even physics tells us that the sum of the forces (or energy) in the cosmos is exactly zero. This realization (the world as non-object), even at the intellectual level, is absolutely central to turning the act of teaching into an act of creative emergence. For it infuses us with a fresh sense of wonder that we had lost in the process of objectification. That the world appears to us as object is mainly due to the fact that we do not pay critical attention to temporality or our collective sense of time—the succession of “nows” seems to be intrinsically linked by some magical continuity, giving us panoramic vision of an apparent solidity. Thus, the objectified “world” appears before us—a synthesis of public time—and teaching becomes a child of this peculiar construct. Heidegger observes “Temporalizing does not mean that ecstasies come in a ‘succession’. The future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been.”4 The endless present (public time) is manufactured through a temporalizing process that is a two-level gathering up of what has been and the projection of a future. The process of anticipation gathers and projects a future onto an existing discourse or one of the various culturally embedded and historically sanctioned social apparatuses available to it. This makes it appear very solid and real. The task before teachers and the act of teaching is to decipher this process of anticipation-projection (temporalization) that keeps us bound to the social by means of distractions such as idle chatter, uncriticality, and curiosity that constitute our relations with the objective world and the finished products within it. Obsessed as contemporary culture is with these distractions, it leads us to miss the primary sensations that are prior to the agglutinations that produce the objective world. The production of the world ought to be the pedagogic focus rather than what has already been produced. The process of getting out of the temporalizing habit, that is, manufacturing a world through temporal synthesis, is a process of dis-adjustment, which is the first, but by no means an easy, step. We 4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Transl.) Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 321. Italics mine.

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begin by questioning and de-valorizing clock time. This does not mean that we stop living by clock time—that is absurd and obviously impossible. It means that we become critical of it through a process of careful observation in which the immediate data of our consciousness begins to surface. It is the immediate data of consciousness that learns to resist chronic time and not some mental decision to do so. But what is immediate data of consciousness? Behind the uniformity of social chatter and cultural pulls and pushes that organize the mental plane, there is a continual upsurge of pre-representational flow that has no name or image. Once past convention and entrenched habit we become intuitively attuned to this flow. Our task is to learn to pay attention to this flow unmanaged and unmediated by the concept. Concepts break up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another, they further the interests of language and social life and are useful primarily for practical purposes. But they give us nothing of the life and movement of reality; rather, by substituting for this an artificial reconstruction, a patchwork of dead fragments, they lead to the difficulties which have always beset intellectualist philosophy, and which on its premises are insoluble. Instead of attempting a solution in the intellectualist sense, [we] put these broken fragments of reality behind, to immerse in the living stream of things and to find the difficulties swept away in its resistless flow.5

Intellectualist philosophy ties itself up in knots and contradictions as it attempts to explain the possibility of experience and experiencer. Having given ourselves a grand species title—the “human being”—we try to see from the inside as well as outside simultaneously, mixing up the frames without realizing it.6 The artificial reconstruction of experience and experiencer is then sought to be explained philosophically leading to all manner of difficulties. But when we strip ourselves of the artificial reconstruction and learn to pay attention to the innate stream that is continually arising from within, there is an authentic dimension in which there are no fragments. This is inner time or duration, by means of which the 5 F. L. Pogson, “Translator’s Preface,” in Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), pp. vi–vii. 6 An elephant does not call itself an elephant, nor see or manage its relations from the vantage of that supervening image. It is a human-invented species category conferred on that organism. In case of the human, it is a self-invented category that is then taken to be a consistent description with objective meaning.

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cosmic is reborn in us each instant without any conscious help from us. To learn to live without the concept, at least intermittently, is to return ourselves to the original flow of things. This is not to suggest that we can manage social life without the concept, but to claim that conceptual existence by itself is incomplete. When, for instance, we apply the conceptual method to questions such as freedom, the problem is brought into its sharpest focus. Freedom lies in grasping the mode in which we are continually coming to be, and cannot be conceptually determined post facto. From the interior point of view of the emergent being, questions such as freedom, determinism, and so on turn out to be idle and misconceived. The problems disappear when one takes the immanent view that has been developed in these pages. Concepts are temporal relations; without time as projective synthesis no concept can be generated. And concepts in turn differentiate, make separations in reality that are not always useful. We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space. That is to say, language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects. This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life…But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space, and whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end.7

Living freedom, creative emergence—processes such as these (inherent to education) are not conceptual or spatial things, although we often speak of them conceptually. And when we use language to express these, sharp delineations and boundaries are forced upon them that are akin to material objects which have definite spatial separation between them. Contradiction and confusion are the results that inhabit these discontinuities. The essence of chronic time is succession and discontinuity. To go beyond these and seize existence as flow are the ultimate educational tasks. Obviously, this supreme task cannot be approached head-on. Complex preparation in stages is necessary. Too much valorization of quantitative knowledge or the language of measurement sometimes 7 Ibid.,

p. xix.

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comes in the way of this preparation. It is necessary therefore to be on guard against the invasion of knowledge into spaces that are qualitatively different. States of consciousness sensations, emotions, pleasure, pain, desire, conation, will, cognition do not naturally adapt themselves to measurement, yet we see an increasing body of scientific workers engaged in devising experimental methods the object of which is to impose on this refractory material a mathematical order and to bring it within the scheme of a universal mechanism. To these workers the whole success of the new science depends on the successful introduction of measurement.8

Rigid concepts that bring precision to our measurement of worldly objects and movements are not adequate when it comes to the problems of life and consciousness precisely because it is through life and consciousness that we become aware of the measurable objects in the first place. The scientific approach, which has been incredibly successful in fitting our experience of the world in a strict mathematical model, is unable to grasp the fact that the psyche is not an object, and cannot be fitted into a schema that is essentially the experiencer’s own projection. The physical order is no doubt complete in itself. It reconstructs and represents the world. But it cannot represent all of reality which must also accommodate the psychic order or the processes that are anterior to the objectification of the world. In other words, we must learn to recognize the psychic order besides the physical order, and their difference. This corresponds to the distinction between the temporal order and the order of duration that we have examined throughout the work. But it is necessary to ask if these two orders are so disparate that there is no dialectical translation between them. In other words, we might seek to know whether it is possible to find a non-convergent or disjunctive platform from where we can conceive a dialectical relation between them. It is not, I think, mere coincidence that the main conclusion to which recent developments of physical and mathematical science seem to lead is identical with the main conclusion which a recent philosophy has

8 H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 7.

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formulated. The considerations which have led to the conclusion are very different in their origin. While science is demonstrating by direct and indirect experiment that there is no rest, but that all natural phenomena must be interpreted in terms of relative movement, in philosophy a new doctrine is maintaining that it is impossible to conceive movement to be derived from things, but things may be derived from movement. Movement is original, all else is derived.9

Newtonian physics proceeded along the lines of ordinary experience that movement is ascribable to bodies, and that the case of absolute rest was possible with regard to a system. But post-Newton, the electrodynamic theory of Maxwell and its paradoxical results when applied to moving bodies seemed to tear asunder the old assumptions. Einstein writes: It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise— assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed—to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case.10

The asymmetry that appears in the observable phenomena is not “inherent in the phenomena” themselves. Rather they are the product of the relative motion of the respective bodies. This was the astonishing conclusion forced upon the physicist (who was keen to save the Maxwell

9 Ibid.,

pp. 15–16. Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” in The Principle of Relativity (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 25. 10 Albert

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equations). This put paid to the idea of absolute rest, and therefore also the question about the existence of the ether, the hypothetical medium in which electromagnetic waves were supposed to travel. If there was no state of absolute rest, then there was no ether either, which made the issue of waves in space even more interesting. What scientists were forced to conclude was that movement did not require a medium, which was contrary to commonsense notions. In other words, what we were seeing was that movement was primary, and not something derived from the shifting positions of bodies. This was a revolution in science. But some metaphysical traditions, especially Bergsonian philosophy, have held all along that movement is primary. The essential principle of the philosophy of change is that movement is original. Things are derived from movement, and movement is not a quality or character that things have added to themselves. I shall have much to say on this principle, but for the present let us leave out of question whether it be true or false. If it be true it is a meta physical principle, and it is philosophy not physical science. By this I mean that it is not a hypothesis verified by working. No experiment that we can imagine ourselves to contrive would increase or decrease its probability. It is beyond physics in the sense that it does not rest on anything we are able to observe in the external world but on the nature of conscious experience itself. It belongs to philosophy because it is only the method of intuition that reveals it; it is indeed, as I shall endeavour later to show, the positive fact about reality that intuition reveals.11

From the metaphysical side, no proof can be given for the assertion that the fundamental ontological matrix is nothing other than movement, that all things are derived from vibrations, tremors, and oscillations. But no proof is necessary, for proof or evidence belongs to the outer dimension, that is, to the world of derived objects. Rather we should look to the immediate data of consciousness or the method of intuition to establish the truth of this principle. What does immediate data of consciousness reveal? It reveals that our immediate experience of ourselves consists in nothing other than movements—of pulse, of breath, of pupil, of heat, of water, of acid, of excreta, of nervous impulse, of thought, and so on. Each of these movements, when examined, consists of yet other

11 Carr,

op. cit., p. 11.

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subtle movements, ad infinitum. At the bottom of it, we do not find some solid impenetrable mass but more movements. Thus, movements rest on movements, which, in turn, rest on yet other movements, and at some level, according to our sensibilities, appear to congeal and produce the familiar solidity we are used to. All this is not proof, but is nevertheless equally rigorous intuitive detection that is in the nature of conscious experience itself. But movement is also time, in fact, they are directly translatable, as is evident in the manner of our presentation here. Hence both physical science (electrical theory of matter) and intuitive philosophy (the psychic-corporeal constituent) are staring at time, albeit different conceptions of it, as the ultimate source of things and experience. This gives us the needed window to a point where we can dialectically generate a disjunctive synthesis between the opposites. Philosophical time and scientific time must be related in the living process, and this constitutes the creative tension or the disjunctive synthesis of existence. As the title suggests, the book is ultimately aimed at bringing about a conscious realization of this creative tension, that is, the realization of a pull between two qualitatively different times and processes. We can begin by embracing the fact that at the root of existence is a polarity—the tension between quality and quantity—that flashes as between an anode and a cathode. That starts us on a new and much-needed journey. Need we bother about it, does it matter, would it not happen anyway? Can we not rely on the commonsense perspective to see us through? If our existence had been entirely an unconscious process of living by instinct then it would not perhaps matter. Having emerged, for whatever reason, from the state of nature to the plane of conscious choice, it becomes immediately imperative to look critically at all aspects and sources of ordering experience. If we neglect to do that we create a lopsided and monstrous reality. In other words, if scientific time is important, then so is philosopher’s time—the latter’s reality has been reasonably established by means of the arguments in the foregoing pages. Hence it is claimed that the one without the other is thoughtless and irresponsible. Thus, it falls upon education to envision and engage in the phenomenological labor that is essential to bring up the other side. The rethinking of experience must occur throughout the pedagogic situation; the old manner of separating the teacher and the taught must be given up. In a post-humanist frame, there are only situations and experiences—these are the units of analysis, and not the conventional ones such as teacher, student, etc.

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But what is the phenomenological task to which we refer above? The preparation for the intuition of another time is made by examining the nature of experience itself, the basic unit of analysis. Using a rather lengthy quote from Bergson, which contains certain outstanding insights relevant for our work here, I will attempt to outline for us the direction of the preparation necessary for a glimpse into creative time. Psychologists who have studied infancy are well aware that our representation is at first impersonal. Only little by little, and as a result of experience, does it adopt our body as a centre and become our representation. The mechanism of this process is, moreover, easy to understand. As my body moves in space, all the other images vary, while that image, my body, remains invariable. I must therefore make it a centre, to which I refer all the other images. My belief in an external world does not come, cannot come, from the fact that I project outside myself sensations that are unextended: how could these sensations ever acquire extension, and whence should I get the notion of exteriority? But if we allow that, as experience testifies, the aggregate of images is given to begin with, I can see clearly how my body comes to occupy, within this aggregate, a privileged position. And I understand also whence arises the notion of interiority and exteriority, which is, to begin with, merely the distinction between my body and other bodies. For if you start from my body, as is usually done, you will never make me understand how impressions received on the surface of my body, impressions which concern that body alone, are able to become for me independent objects and form an external world. But if, on the contrary, all images are posited at the outset, my body will necessarily end by standing out in the midst of them as a distinct thing, since they change unceasingly, and it does not vary. The distinction between the inside and the outside will then be only a distinction between the part and the whole. There is, first of all, the aggregate of images; and then, in this aggregate, there are ‘centres of action,’ from which the interesting images appear to be reflected thus perceptions are born and actions made ready. My body is that which stands out as the centre of these perceptions; my Personality is the being to which these actions must be referred. The whole subject becomes clear if we travel thus from the periphery to the centre, as the child does, and as we ourselves are invited to do by immediate experience and by common sense. On the contrary everything becomes obscure, and problems are multiplied on all sides, if we attempt, with the theorists, to travel from the centre to the periphery.12 12 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 44–45, originally published in 1896; entire text now available in the public domain at: http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/matter_and_ memory.pdf.

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Contrary to the Kantian problematic that sought to understand how it was possible for the human mind to perceive outer reality, that is, how the inner cognitively apprehended the outer, here the problem is turned on its head. Bergson shows that the manner in which Kant framed the problem only leads to philosophical conundrums and is insoluble—the contact between the inner and the outer ultimately remains inexplicable. Rather than proceeding from an imagined center (cognizer) to the periphery (cognized) as Kant did, Bergson posits that the “world” is already full of cognizer-cognized reflexive micro-totalities—he calls these “images”—without the assumption of which no true account of cognition would be possible. The point is not how a particular image/body (the subject) cognitively apprehends all the other images within its range, but how one particular image/body comes to occupy a privileged position among all other images. Once framed in this manner, the answer to the above question becomes obvious. Whereas all other images are changing from the point of view of a particular image/body, the one image that remains stable or invariant to it is none other than itself. From this experience of stability or invariance arises the sense of a privileged center. With this brilliant move, Bergson demolishes the Kantian problematic, and in its place, frames the problem of the inside and the outside in terms of the distinction between the part and the whole. Each part feels itself privileged with respect to all other parts due to its constancy with respect to itself. The center-to-periphery is reversed, and the real movement is seen to be from periphery to center. In other words, it is the collection of other image/bodies that makes a specific image/body attain something like self-consciousness. Although a duality is maintained, the observer/observed relation from this point of view becomes intrinsically an integral one: We know ourselves only in relation to all other parts of the world, and each part, in turn, depends upon still others. Another startling conclusion is forced upon us—all parts of the world are micro-cognitively conscious and there are no privileged positions—privilege is arbitrary and self-imagined, having no basis in actuality. The only basis of differentiation between two locales or image/ bodies is the level of concentration of cognitive elements: the higher the concentration the more options for action. All of this changes the manner in which we view ourselves and relate to the world. Commonly, the movement is center-to-periphery. But now all are peripheral; the center is nothing but an imagined space of habit with no ontological

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distinction. The self or the privileged center of habit can now clearly be seen as the product of time—outer mechanical succession projected inward toward a pseudo-continuity. To cut the thread of time is to stumble onto freedom and pure duration. However, the knowledge of the above does not immediately become the stuff of our consciousness. We have much work to do, especially in the direction of reeducation of the senses. Such a claim may seem surprising, for the senses are often perceived as primary and not in need, or within the ambit, of education. However, the givenness of the senses is not to be taken at face value as the following account shows. The first of these facts is that our senses require education. Neither sight nor touch is able at the outset to localize impressions. A series of comparisons and inductions is necessary, whereby we gradually coordinate one impression with another. Hence philosophers may jump to the belief that sensations are in their essence inextensive, and that they constitute extensity by their juxtaposition. But is it not clear that, upon the hypothesis just advanced, our senses are equally in need of education, - not of course in order to accommodate themselves to things, but to accommodate themselves to each other? Here, in the midst of all the images, there is a certain image which I term my body, and of which the virtual action reveals itself by an apparent reflexion of the surrounding images upon themselves. Suppose there are so many kinds of possible action for my body there must be an equal number of systems of reflexion for other bodies; and each of these systems will be just what is perceived by one of my senses. My body, then, acts like an image which reflects others, and which, in so doing, analyses them along lines corresponding to the different actions which it can exercise upon them. And, consequently, each of the qualities perceived in the same object by my different senses symbolizes a particular direction of my activity, a particular need. Now, will all these perceptions of a body by my different senses give me, when united, the complete image of that body? Certainly not, because they have been gathered from a larger whole. To perceive all the influences from all the points of all bodies would be to descend to the condition of a material object. Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment. The diverse perceptions of the same object, given by my different senses, will not, then, when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object; they will remain separated from each other by intervals which measure, so to speak, the gaps in my needs. It is to fill these intervals that an education of the senses is necessary. The aim of this education is to harmonize my senses with each other, to restore between their data a

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continuity which has been broken by the discontinuity of the needs of my body, in short to reconstruct, as nearly as may be, the whole of the material object. This, on our hypothesis, explains the need for an education of the senses.13

The structure of needs and desires breaks up the action of the sensorium, giving a disjointed view of reality. To be able to grasp the totality of anything requires us to harmonize our senses beyond the dictates of needs that generate attitudes. The demands of the body orient our senses toward particular aspects of things, ignoring others. This choice consisting of conscious perception breaks up the continuum and a true view of things. A careful reeducation of the senses is necessary in order to perceive without the clutter of needs and the chatter of wants. Why would this be necessary in the present case? A moment of wholeness is a breakthrough to actuality—the perception that my body is one image among others whose reflexivity is produced by all other systems of reflexivity around me, and whose apparently privileged position is an illusion. This decentering, in turn, is essential for readiness on the path of intuition. It stills the old habits of thought and modes of perception, turning us in the needed direction away from the internalization of mechanical time. In other words, once the false order is understood deeply, we are on the way to a different perception. This clearing is always a surprise and does not necessarily occur according to any prescribed path or sequence of steps, nevertheless a correct understanding of the production of reality is invaluable in being oriented toward readiness. This is the essential secret of the creative turn—cessation of the inward projection of mechanical time-images that generate the elaborate psychology of a falsely privileged “me,” and toward the sensory harmony and continuum in which time-fractured images slow down or come to a halt. This does not imply however that external succession is vitiated or disturbed in any way. It is rather the appearance of the inner string of pseudo-succession imported from the outer that is interrupted. The negation of psychological time reveals the underlying duration (ontological time) which by its self-nature is always emergent and creative. Being is creative. What does all of this mean for teacher practice? A heavy dose of theory can achieve little all by itself. Therefore, alongside, the text has 13 Ibid.,

pp. 46–47. The entire text is in the public domain.

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indicated the direction of small changes, shifts in orientation, observation of differences, examination of contradictions, intensification of assonances, and new practices of the self that increasingly bring us out on a new plane—a plane of praxis. The readiness and preparation for change is the slow construction of an uncompromising inner atmosphere, which, although it operates in a misconceived and ill-behaved social reality, forever seeks out the minor openings with which to proceed to the next insight. It does not wait for “human beings” or “institutions” to (initiate) change, for these are temporal projections of the existing order; it is not very different than attempting to change shadows. We have to reach the source of the shadows and not try to change the insubstantial. In such a drift, the act of teaching and teacher being reflect one another, the former being a creative expression of the latter. We began with a critique of the “aroma of time” in which social life and constructions are steeped. In small steps, beginning with a famous debate between science and philosophy that brought to poignancy the question of time and experience, we started to move out of the familiar complacency with regard to the attitude toward time. It set us out on the path of readiness-toward-intuition. This task is pedagogic, in the sense that it must be carried out at the root of consciousness, at any age, and all ages. It is pedagogic not in the narrow humanistic sense, but in the sense that experience must be disaggregated to reveal the fiction of the projection of inward temporality. Such an action frees experience from the burden of a gratuitous dichotomy. The result is a pure tension in which experience occurs and orients to a continually emergent world. Finally, in closing, we wonder, as Emerson had wondered tonguein-cheek, if we get even a “berry for our philosophy.” Perhaps not, for philosophy does not bear fruit directly. Philosophy points to the work of poiesis that needs doing. It requires us to dig deep into our souls, and so we return to the archaeological site where we began our journey. This time we are equipped with an active solitude to which we have intuited our way, and that resists the encroachment of mechanical time. We recognize the civilizational debris all around us and pick our way unsentimentally past without getting distracted. In other words, we practice aversion. We have learnt that time and its frozen immobilities cannot give us the truth about ourselves and so we learn to resist inventing or projecting a future. In other words, we turn away from death. Once the entire being is collected in the present there is a new quality, a new vitality—a poiesis that is free of the archaeological determinations. Becoming open to the production of this qualitative dimension is the work of the

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teacher. In the middle of the rough and tumble of school work, the active solitude remains ever silent and watchful. Active solitude has its own inner rhythm from which it responds to the outer, and then retreats to its inner qualitative flow. This is the essential meaning of living time at two levels—chronos and aion. The former allows us to determine phenomenal simultaneity and succession, the latter allows us to get back to the creative core of our being. A single, homogeneous view of time is disastrous; one must learn to live dialectically, moving between the two planarities. Pedagogically speaking, sudden slippage can occur in the phenomenological tension between the two planarities that is a creative moment which has no representation or symbolic content. The pedagogical situation, which is neither the individual nor the collective, but a relation, expands in accordance with this slippage, simultaneously allowing for the qualitative as well as the quantitative, the flow and the detail, which are of two different orders. Obviously, such a change is not mere happenstance; it requires sustained micro-phenomenological effort on the part of all concerned, and the relentless pursuit of the truth of experience. A qualitative transformation of the pedagogical situation is hardly likely to come out of social negotiations that are stuck in the narrative of chronic time. Besides, institutions become frozen over time with their vision clouded by the material relations and social priorities in which they are implicated.14 In order to break free, one must have, and be willing to honor, the intuition of creative freedom, and follow it to the essence of things, or at least be oriented toward it in preparation for praxis. Often, the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the fact that there are no real answers to be had for our problems—be it global warming or educational failure—within existing social formulas and perspectives, no matter how much these are promoted, for the solutions are themselves part of the problems. This means that the factors that create the problems in the first place are also the background constituents and implicit values of the deemed solutions. Whereas, in order to be true solutions, they need to be qualitatively of a different order. To understand this is to turn away from intellectual conceit and toward intuition as method in an

14 One

might even say, by the very dint of our analysis, that institutions are stillborn. To confuse education with institutions of education (such as schooling) is therefore problematic. We, as teachers, must continually deinstitutionalize ourselves and what we do, and must continually attempt to re-aestheticize that which we call the curriculum.

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effort to balance our approach to the sum of relations we call the world. It releases the strangeness that is on the other side of the known world, which we are trained to suppress in order to yield a manageable reality. In moments of crisis, that is, when our comfortable routines are disrupted, this manageable reality comes apart at the seams, bringing with it widespread downturn of livability. However, no change takes place in the inner rhythm of duration even during such times. This immunity is crucial to study that might bring much-needed equanimity in teachers’ lives and work. Let me end with those famous lines of Keats in which he seems to seek out that which en-dures: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”15

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination….” Thus wrote Keats in a letter to his brother in 1817. The poet’s imagination seizes upon the urn which helps him enter a world of aesthetic endurance reminding us of the sub specie durationis. It “dost tease us out of thought” which is of the temporal order. The creative tension lies in developing the capacity to move between the two planes.

References Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” In The Principle of Relativity (London: Methuen, 1923). F. L. Pogson, “Translator’s Preface.” In Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Dover Publications, 2001). 15 John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, available in the public domain at: https://poets. org/poem/ode-grecian-urn.

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H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change: A Study of the Fundamental Principle of the Philosophy of Bergson (London: Macmillan, 1914). Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, originally published in 1896. Retrieved from http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/matter_and_memory.pdf. John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn. Retrieved from https://poets.org/poem/ ode-grecian-urn. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Transl.) Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Retrieved from https:// poets.org/poem/love-song-j-alfred-prufrock.

Index

A Aeviternity/Aevum, 46, 55, 67–70 Agamben, Giorgio, 63, 64 Aion, 28, 46, 55, 56, 58–60, 201 Aristotle, 46, 47, 57, 59, 80–83 “As not”, 46, 62–64 B Being, 10, 19, 43, 45, 104, 134, 146, 167, 170, 181, 199 Binary, 24, 144, 169 Biographical praxis, 49, 161, 185 Biography, 97, 160, 161, 164, 170, 171, 177, 184, 185 Body, 14, 36–39, 43, 44, 47, 54, 55, 77, 88, 100, 104, 134, 140, 141, 145, 152, 162, 178, 180, 181, 192, 196–199 Body-mind, 36–38, 89, 128 Britzman, Deobrah, 160, 161 Buddha, 5

C Canales, Jimena, 17, 18, 21–23, 40, 84 Capitalism, 184, 185 Carr, H. Wildon, 33, 35, 36, 39, 47, 84–86, 192, 194 Causality, 12, 15 Change, 5, 6, 9, 12, 16, 17, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 45, 46, 54–57, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68–72, 74, 79, 84, 88, 90–92, 94, 108, 132, 134–137, 141, 143, 146, 148, 150–154, 166, 175, 177, 182, 194, 196, 200–202 Christianity, 62 Chronic, 2, 3, 8, 11, 26, 46, 50, 65, 177, 178, 185, 190, 191, 201 Chronological, 8, 58, 165 Chronos, 3, 28, 46, 56, 58–60, 62–64, 67, 173, 201 Civilization, 6, 21, 86

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 K. Roy, Teachers and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9

205

206  Index Classroom, 133, 141, 148, 160–162, 169–171, 174, 175 Clock, 2, 20, 29, 31, 32, 38, 46, 50, 71, 72, 74, 143, 145, 161, 166, 190 Competence, 96–100, 172 Conatus, 14, 15, 179 Conceptualization, 12, 13, 27–29, 84 Consciousness, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 25, 27–30, 32, 33, 35–37, 39, 43–45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 55, 62, 71–76, 81, 83, 88–94, 98, 99, 103, 105, 107, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 160, 163–165, 175–178, 180, 184, 187, 190, 192, 194, 198, 200 Control, 2, 3, 10, 97, 142, 146, 184 Coping, 174 Corpus sensorium, 36, 47, 89, 98, 177 Creation/Creative, 15, 16, 28, 30, 39, 40, 46, 49, 67, 76, 77, 79, 80, 89, 96, 134, 135, 137–140, 142, 143, 145, 150, 151, 154, 160, 165–169, 171, 173–175, 182, 189, 191, 195, 196, 199–202 Cultural, 1, 2, 11, 45, 50, 60, 71, 92, 107, 108, 132, 139, 140, 147, 149, 153, 161, 166, 169, 173, 176, 183, 190 Curriculum, 11, 77, 96, 97, 137, 138, 140–142, 146, 164, 165, 167, 171, 173, 174, 181, 182, 201 D Dasein, 10, 27, 173 Death, 4, 8, 70, 81, 92, 134, 135, 149, 153, 200 Deleuze, Giles, 49, 54, 84, 95–97, 100, 131, 154

Descartes, Rene, 3, 84, 99 Destiny, 59, 90, 183, 184 Determinism, 15, 99, 191 Difference, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22, 33, 38, 43, 56, 64, 65, 68, 69, 81, 91, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 134, 140, 143, 146, 155, 163, 192, 200 Dionysius, 56 Duality, 25, 197 Duration, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 16, 28–30, 33–39, 44–46, 49, 57–59, 67–75, 77, 79, 88–91, 93, 94, 100, 102, 104, 129, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142–146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 163, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 182, 183, 190, 192, 198, 199, 202 E Eckhart, Meister, 26 Education/Educational, 2, 6, 9–16, 22–25, 30, 31, 33, 36, 38–40, 45, 46, 48, 55, 75–77, 83, 96, 97, 99, 103–105, 107, 108, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141–143, 145–148, 150, 154, 155, 159, 161, 164, 165, 170, 172, 173, 181–183, 191, 195, 198, 199, 201 Einstein, Albert, 16–24, 30, 31, 33, 38, 40, 193 Eliot, T.S., 187 Emancipation, 10, 11, 77, 99, 102, 128, 146, 184 Embodied consciousness, 54 Empirical, 12, 18, 22, 24, 43, 47, 53, 81, 82, 84, 94, 143, 144, 147, 150, 153, 165, 173, 181 Eternity, 26, 46, 56–58, 60, 61, 67–70 Existence/Existential, 3, 4, 6, 9–12, 15, 16, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30,

Index

33, 37, 38, 42, 45–47, 53, 59, 60, 64, 68–70, 75, 88, 89, 93, 96, 103–105, 108, 128, 132, 134–136, 140, 142, 146, 149– 151, 154, 155, 165, 166, 170, 177, 182, 183, 191, 194, 195 Experience, 2, 4–9, 12–14, 16, 18, 25–28, 30, 31, 33–36, 38, 39, 41, 43–46, 49, 53–55, 71–73, 81, 82, 85, 87–89, 100–104, 128, 132, 135, 137, 149, 153–155, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 171, 173–175, 179, 180, 182, 190, 192–197, 200, 201 Expressed reality, 39 F Fedosova, Tatyana, 8 Fluidity, 29, 91, 160, 182 Freedom, 1, 11, 15, 16, 25, 26, 38, 40, 74, 93, 96, 165–168, 184, 191, 198, 201 Freire, Paulo, 141 Future, 1, 8, 10, 16, 37, 39, 45, 62, 69, 75, 76, 91, 97, 129, 138–140, 146, 148, 153, 160, 163, 168, 170, 172, 173, 184, 189, 200 G God, 26, 56, 60, 61, 67–69, 137 H Hegel, G.W.F., 85, 86 Heidegger, Martin, 53, 62, 70, 173, 189 Heraclitus, 59, 89 Horizon of being, 7, 8, 53, 70

  207

Huebner, Dwayne, 10, 136, 139, 166, 172, 173 Humanist, 4 Husserl, Edmund, 2–4, 27, 28, 41 I Image, 1, 14, 50, 64, 86, 87, 89, 92, 102, 132, 135, 157, 160, 163, 171, 177, 178, 190, 196–199 Immanent, 48, 59, 104, 131, 179– 181, 191 Immobilities, 28, 30, 36, 101, 132, 133, 135, 138, 143, 149, 152, 160, 165, 169, 170, 172, 175, 183, 200 Individuality, 15, 39, 156, 184 Inner man, 4 Intuition, 6, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 28–30, 34–37, 39, 46, 47, 49, 73, 80–96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 129, 132, 142, 143, 145, 147, 151, 162–165, 168, 170, 172, 194, 196, 199, 201 K Kairos, 3, 46, 55, 62–65, 67 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 47, 84, 87, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 140, 147, 197 Katargesis, 46, 61 Keats, John, 75–77, 202 Klēsis, 65, 66 Knowledge, 2, 10, 15, 18, 22, 23, 34, 35, 39–41, 43, 47, 55, 59, 67, 81–83, 86–88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 104, 138, 140–143, 147–150, 155, 159, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180, 184, 185, 191, 192, 198 Knowles, J.G., 161, 174, 176

208  Index L Language, 15, 26–28, 30, 41, 47, 48, 58, 64, 65, 75, 79, 82, 87, 131, 144, 145, 161, 162, 166, 167, 172, 185, 190, 191 Learning, 11, 22, 103, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 156, 166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176, 183 Life, 10, 13–15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 29, 33–37, 40–44, 46, 47, 53, 55, 57–61, 63, 71–76, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88–91, 94, 98, 99, 132–135, 143, 148, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 162, 169–171, 173–175, 180, 183, 187, 188, 190–192, 200 Limits, 12, 15, 48, 71, 82, 92, 107, 108, 131, 147, 157, 179 Logic, 11, 18, 44, 49, 131 Lortie, Dan C., 160 Love, 66, 67 Lyotard, Jean-François, 183 M Marx, Karl, 41, 71, 155 Matter, 6, 16, 19, 21–23, 25, 31, 39, 45, 46, 86, 93, 102, 103, 108, 136, 137, 148, 149, 153, 154, 171, 176, 195, 201 Meaning, 9, 12–14, 19, 22, 24, 27, 35, 39, 41, 42, 47, 53, 55, 58, 62–66, 70, 80, 85, 91, 94, 95, 98–101, 104, 134, 136, 137, 145, 148, 152, 155, 160, 161, 166, 170, 174, 176, 180, 190, 201 Measurement, 11, 70, 75, 79, 88, 98, 137, 142, 146, 148, 168, 191, 192

Mechanical, 2, 6, 7, 9, 13, 45, 46, 53, 59, 62, 71, 75, 87, 136, 137, 145, 160, 183, 198–200 Memory, 16, 26, 35, 39, 45, 72, 74, 93, 102, 103, 153 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 4, 27, 41 Metaphysics, 3, 17, 40, 71, 81, 84, 87, 92, 135, 143, 147, 166, 183 Mind, 8, 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 35–40, 43, 47, 54, 55, 71, 76, 81, 83–90, 93, 100, 103, 107, 141–143, 145, 147, 153, 154, 177, 178, 197 Movement, 5, 6, 11, 13–16, 29, 30, 33–37, 42, 44, 49, 56–58, 60, 61, 68, 81, 84, 86, 90, 93, 101–104, 129, 135, 142, 143, 148, 151–153, 155, 156, 163, 170, 173, 176, 178, 190, 192–195, 197 N Necessity, 12, 25–27, 59, 60, 66, 86, 90, 165, 166 Negation, 46, 62–64, 199 Negative capability, 76, 77 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 155 Noema/Noematic, 4 Non-possession, 66 Non-rational intuition, 47 Nous, 80, 83 O Object, 3, 4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 29, 30, 39, 40, 44, 47, 54, 66, 81, 87–89, 91, 102–104, 133, 137, 145, 148, 151, 152, 154, 164, 165, 167, 168, 181, 184, 185, 189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 198, 199

Index

Observer, 4–6, 18–20, 33, 34, 72, 100, 103, 104, 136, 137, 140, 170, 172, 197 Ontology, 2, 15, 18, 23, 25, 30, 34, 46, 60, 65, 66, 70, 75, 82, 88, 92, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 129, 132, 151, 153, 156, 165, 170–173, 176, 177, 179, 183, 194, 197 Other, 156, 167–169, 176, 177 P Parousia, 66, 67 Paul, The Apostle, 3, 31, 32, 46, 55, 61, 62, 65, 66 Pedagogy, 2, 16, 21, 25, 38, 39, 46, 64–67, 74, 79, 83, 94, 149, 165–168, 171, 173 Perceiver, 2, 43, 57 Perception, 1–4, 11, 13, 14, 16, 27–29, 34, 38, 39, 41–43, 47, 73, 76, 79–81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91–94, 97, 102, 103, 133, 134, 137, 144, 151, 152, 166, 178, 196, 198, 199 Permanence, 5, 68–70, 132, 136 Phenomenal, 12–15, 30, 44, 201 Phenomenological/Phenomenology, 2–4, 6–9, 13, 24, 25, 27, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41–46, 53, 57, 66, 71, 73, 74, 76, 79, 91, 134, 135, 139, 145, 182, 195, 196, 201 Philosophy, 14, 17, 24, 29, 30, 33, 40–43, 54, 56, 64, 71, 73, 80–82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 135, 140, 145, 146, 154–156, 166, 178, 184, 190, 192–195, 200

  209

Plato, 47, 56, 57, 79–82, 84–86, 92 Poiesis, 103, 185, 200 Praxis, 12, 14, 16, 30, 39, 49, 50, 84, 128, 129, 131, 144, 155, 156, 182, 183, 200, 201 Proust, Marcel, 5 Psychology, 11, 34, 44, 90, 100, 103, 137, 176, 178, 199 Psychometric, 11, 135 Q Quality, 9, 16, 21, 23, 59, 66, 70, 75, 76, 89, 91, 98, 104, 128, 135, 143, 151, 155, 156, 162, 163, 170, 194, 195, 200 R Rational, 12, 13, 26, 35, 79, 81, 82, 85, 97, 98, 183 Reality, 3, 9–15, 18, 19, 22–26, 28, 29, 33–40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 57, 73, 76, 84–91, 94, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104, 128, 132–134, 138, 140, 143–148, 151–153, 155, 159, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170–172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 185, 190–192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202 Reason, 16, 21, 37, 40, 41, 44, 57, 71, 73, 79–81, 84, 87, 97, 99, 151, 164, 184, 185, 195 Relativity, 17, 19, 31, 32, 37, 53, 73 Representation, 2, 9, 13, 14, 43, 64, 86, 88, 102, 103, 135, 143, 149, 154, 155, 196, 201

210  Index S School, 11, 89, 96, 141, 159–161, 170, 172, 174, 175, 201 Science, 10, 12–14, 17–19, 22–24, 28–30, 32–34, 38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 73, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90, 94, 145–147, 149, 181, 185, 192–195, 200 Scientific, 10, 12, 21, 24, 31–34, 43–45, 53, 71, 74, 80, 82, 83, 97, 144, 146, 147, 181, 192, 195 Secular, 25, 83, 173 Self, 3, 4, 34, 50, 103, 107, 128, 161, 167, 173, 175–178, 182, 185, 198, 200 Self-knowledge, 141, 178 Sensory, 4, 5, 19–21, 24, 150, 177, 181, 199 Separation, 10, 14, 20, 21, 33, 36, 69, 73, 74, 103, 141, 142, 176, 179, 191 Situatedness, 13, 16 Socius, 23, 141 Socrates, 47, 79–82, 84, 92 Spinoza, Baruch, 48, 54, 131, 154, 155 St. Augustine, 3, 26 St. Maximus, 46, 60 Staticity, 60, 137 Subject, 3, 4, 6, 8, 27, 41, 47, 66–68, 76, 87, 90, 100, 103, 149, 152, 168, 196, 197 Subjective, 8, 9, 79, 80, 82, 179 Succession, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11–14, 17, 45, 46, 49, 53, 55, 59, 62, 69–74, 79, 95, 134–137, 143–145, 163, 183, 189, 191, 198, 199, 201

Symbolic, 33, 43, 76, 83, 87, 100, 108, 140, 142–144, 149, 155, 156, 160, 174, 201 T Tagore, RabindraNath, 93 Teacher, 2, 47, 49, 53, 96–98, 104, 108, 132–134, 138, 140–142, 155, 156, 159–164, 166–171, 174–177, 181, 182, 189, 195, 199–201 Teaching, 22, 49, 50, 53, 67, 97, 132, 133, 138, 149, 159–162, 164, 167, 174–176, 189, 200 Technology, 30, 147, 148 Temporal, 1–3, 6–11, 13, 26, 45, 46, 49, 50, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 75, 77, 79, 87, 89, 101, 134, 136, 137, 148, 150, 156, 159–161, 165, 166, 168, 172, 175–178, 185, 187–189, 191, 192, 200, 202 Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 8 Thinking, 11, 12, 19, 20, 22, 29, 37, 60, 73, 79, 80, 82, 94, 103, 133, 142, 144, 147, 152, 153, 156, 162–164, 171, 177 Time clock, 20 lived, 31, 45, 55, 71, 79 mechanical, 2, 6, 9, 22, 53, 71, 77, 136, 137, 145, 160, 198–200 messianic, 3, 46, 62 metaphysical, 69 psychological, 6, 17, 18, 53, 145, 160, 171, 199 public, 161, 189

Index

Timeless, 7, 26, 46, 65, 69, 183 Totality, 5, 6, 12, 14, 16, 59, 91, 96, 169, 179, 181, 183, 199 Transformation, 33, 64, 77, 103, 144, 151, 176, 185, 201 Truth, 2, 4, 15, 23, 30, 42, 89, 95, 107, 144, 153, 170, 194, 200–202 V Vienna circle, 183 Violence, 139

  211

W Whitehead, Alfred North, 20, 21 World, 1–5, 9–13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27–30, 33, 34, 37, 40–44, 46, 47, 50, 56–58, 62–66, 72–74, 81, 83, 86–89, 92–94, 99, 104, 107, 129, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146–148, 150, 151, 153–155, 164–166, 172, 173, 177, 188, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 200, 202