Ontological centring and education

Jim Neyland

Abstract

Sumara and Davis (2007) assert that education should give more attention to “ex-centring” the individual. This paper builds on this assertion by indicating how earlier work on what it means to be a human being-in-the-world resonates with their notion of the ex-centred individual.

Introduction

Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis (2007) lament the dominant tendency in contemporary education towards various forms of centredness based on dyads such as self/other, mind/body, and thought/action. They would prefer to see, in contrast to these centring tendencies, an education that better reflects complexity thinking. Accordingly they would like to see more attention given to “subjunctive spaces of curriculum” which place an emphasis on “seeking out, opening up [and] dwelling in” curriculum space, and to alternatives to the dominant idea that the learner is “a self-contained, insulated, and isolated individual” (p. 86). They call for education to “de-centre or ex-centre the individual” (p. 87), to be more open to “time scale, tentativeness, movement, [and] possibility”, and to “explore possible not-yet-experienced selves” (p. 88).

In this paper I pick up and expand on some of the themes in their paper, in particular that of the subjunctivising and ex-centred self. I will focus on one aspect of self, the ontological dimension, which can be understood either as “indicativised” and centred, or as “subjunctivised” and ex-centred.

The word ontology is frequently misunderstood. This is because two different strands of meaning are derivable from its etymological roots. According to one view, it derives from the Greek ontos, which means to be, and logos, which means to know. Thus it can be taken to mean understanding the beingness of beings. This is the way Martin Heidegger understood and used the term (Gerhart & Russell, 1984). It places an emphasis on the dynamic, open, and changing aspect of self—one could say, following Sumara and Davis, the ex-centred and subjunctive self. However, in classical philosophy ontos was taken to mean essence, and this led to the notion that ontology refers to knowledge of the essence of things—one could say, the central or indicative essence of things.

So, while Heidegger’s interpretation emphasises the idea that we are each beings-on-the-way, the classical understanding is static, settled, and centred. Incidentally, Heidegger used the world ontic to refer to the classical notion, so that ontology could be reserved unambiguously to refer to the ex-centredness of being. My term “ontological centredness” refers to the modern tendency to reduce our primordial status as beings-on-the-way to that of static beings that have (in the manner of possessions) particular attributes, identities, ideas, and so on. This modern tendency also affects education.

Perfect imperfection

We are inclined these days to believe—if we listen too attentively to the voice of authority—that the seminal question in personal and educational aspiration is: Am I there yet? Have I met the objective? Have I reached the standard? Have I followed the protocol? Have I found my true self? Well, if that is aspiration it is the sort that appeals only to the faint-hearted. A less shrinking aspiration requires a different seminal question: How far can I go? What is the extent of my reach? Where could this idea lead? What is the farthest extremity of my capacity to love? What more can I do to make the world a better place? “You are not here to merely make a living,” Woodrow Wilson said, in his 1913 Founders’ Address to a gathering of Swarthmore students, “you are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget that errand.” This is a charter we could build an education around. But how can we expect our graduating students to enable the world to live more amply, and with a finer spirit, if their education is diminished in these things? How can we live with greater vision if we are measured and cautious in our aspirations?

How far can you go? There is only one way to find out: you must go too far. The call “It is only those who go too far who know how far they can go” should be written in crimson over the lintel of every classroom. It expresses a vital truth. It is an education keystone. It is a truth that comforts when we do go too far. It is also a truth that calls us forward, beyond timidity’s threshold. It asks us to be more, to live more, to discover more, to refuse to accept either a prepackaged, settled, and bounded world, or a prepackaged, settled, and bounded self. Going too far is not an error in judgement, or a cause for disapproval. It is an educational necessity, in the same way that sniffing the wind is a canine necessity. It is crucial that we go too far. A good teacher wants their students to make a habit of going too far. A good teacher wants their students to subjunctivise the world and themselves, to refuse to be satisfied with the indicative what is, and instead to perturb, unsettle, and interrogate things with a subjunctive what if.

Some of the best writing on what I am calling the ontological problem occurred during the second and third quarters of the 20th century. Much of this writing exhibits elements of what today we call complexity thinking, and many of its analyses remain urgent. One finds the themes of being, having, time, self, and otherness explored from several directions. Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be?, Balthasar Staehelin’s Haben und Sein, and Gabriel Marcel’s Être et Avoir, three more or less identical titles, are indicative of a considerable strength of feeling. Some of these writers expanded on the work of 19th century writers—Friedrich Neitzsche, for instance—and some brought a linguistic angle to the problem by drawing on the scholarship of linguists, particularly those writing in French, such as Emile Benveniste, Lucien Febvre, and Philip Bénéton. Sumara and Davis’s discussion of the subjunctive meshes neatly with some of the linguistic themes explored by these scholars. In what follows I will briefly discuss Fromm’s contribution, but first I will mention those of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Macquarrie, and Alfred Korzybski.

Niebuhr, in his Gifford Lectures on human nature (Hoggart, 1977), observes that plants and most animals are unconscious of self-identity, and unaware of time and choice. A daffodil does not think about yesterday or contemplate tomorrow with hope or misgiving. A seagull’s life is not in any way conceived as a quest in relation to which choices are made. Plants and most animals are not beings that encompass a core of active potentiality or promise. They are, of course, incomplete and unfinished as growing organisms, but they are finished as beings, and in this sense, perfect. They are “forever unpromising”. But, Niebuhr explains, we human beings are different; we are unfinished (Hoggart, 1977). We see our lives as existing in time and subject to choices. We know we are riding on time’s arrow, and that we are forever the promise of something more. Possibility is immanent in us. In short, we are beings on the move, always changing, always incomplete. We humans, one could say, have a perfection in not being finished, in not being perfect. We are perfect imperfection. Our human nature is, in Macquarrie’s phrase, to be “beings-on-the-way” (1970, p. 46).

Continuous change, then, is part of the human condition. As such, it ought not to be exempt from the educational experience. But education can fail to be in harmony with our nature as beings-on-the-way. In particular, an education that is closed, unfulfilling, joyless, and without enchantment or elements of surprise is discordant with the nature of what it is to be a human being. The sort of education just referred to, I have argued elsewhere, is an education without spirit (Neyland, 2008).

Korzybski approaches this issue in a related manner (Postman, 1996). He points out that plants are what he calls “chemistry-binders”, nonhuman animals are “space-binders”, but humans are, in addition, “time-binders”. Chemistry-binding is the capacity to convert sunlight into organic chemical energy through photosynthesis. Space binding is the capacity to move about within, and control, part of the physical world. Humans have the ability, in addition, to transport their culture through time. We do this by using language and symbolism of various kinds (Postman, 1996). Time-binding enables us to represent features of our experience and our world in words. Words are summaries of how we see aspects of the world and our experience of it. But it is an error to think of this in terms of centralising essences.

Korzybski’s work resonates with that of contemporary scholars who work in the area of cognitive semantics, a school of research dedicated to the examination of the nonessential nature of language. Korzybski, and modern-day cognitive semantic theorists, do not think of the word chair, for instance, as referring to a centralising essence. The word chair is an abstract idea that encompasses the various objects we call chair. Central to this abstract idea are the familiar prototypical chairs that we commonly use when sitting around a table—four legs each about 40 centimetres long, a seat, and a back. But the idea also includes slightly less prototypical objects, such as armchairs and deckchairs. Because, historically, chairs were rare, and only important people sat on them, we have shorthand expressions such as chairperson—the person appointed to sit in the chair and direct proceedings while others sat on boxes, chests, and so on—and these are sometimes shortened to the word chair.

Now, there are four aspects of this process of abstraction that are important here. First, the various concepts that make up language and culture allow us to stabilise, to bind, the dynamic flux of the world and experience by highlighting particular aspects of it. Second, having done so we are able to communicate these dimensions of culture across time. Thus we are able to conceive of our lives and human culture in general as having a past, a present, and a future. Third, these language labels are not precise identifications of things in the world. They involve ambiguities and possibilities. There are grey areas in the denotation chair, for instance. An object that looks a bit like a stool, but with a low back, is one that falls somewhere between the denotations chair and stool, and, depending on the height of the back, might be called by either, neither, or both names. A beanbag for some people might be a chair, but for others not a chair. In other words, the language concept chair is an imprecise and socially constructed idea, and to the degree that its denotation is caused to remain a little unsettled it can be thought of as inhabiting subjunctive space.

Fourth, just because we see the world this way does not mean that this is the way the world actually is. The real world, according to one model, is made up of arrays of atomic nuclei with electrons distantly buzzing around them. Accordingly, things that appear to us to be solid and complete wholes are in fact vast areas of space punctuated by very dense pin-point nuclear masses. If evolution had constructed our eyes differently so that we saw using x-rays instead of light rays, we would not see a world with chairs in it at all. We see “chairs” for three reasons: our perceptual architecture allows us to make distinctions of this sort; the peculiarities of experiential life predispose us to choose to highlight, against the backdrop of other physical objects, those for seating; and social agreement allows us to distinguish which of these highlighted objects are chairs and which are not. This whole process involves, at every level, a human fabrication of some sort. In Korzybski’s words: “Whatever we say something is, it is not” (Postman, 1996, p. 181).

There are two points I am trying to stress here. Humans are unique in being able to live in time by forming abstractions and transporting these across time. Second, we humans are unique because we know that what we construct as abstractions and other cultural artefacts are not the way things actually are. We know that our concepts and categories are not unquestionable certainties. So, it is not just that we are beings-on-the-move in terms of our aspirations and quests, and our living in time; we are also beings-on-the-move in relation to our understanding of the world. Our understandings are always provisional, always subject to change, never final. Our responsibility for constructing our understandings, and for revising these constructions, is never finished. The notion of responsibility is particularly germane in relation to education in the world of the 21st century, characterised as it is by global warming and the like. A subjunctive, ex-centred education brings us face to face with our responsibility for the world. An indicative and centred education, because it panders to the illusion that we encounter settled truths, allows us to ignore our responsibility.

The centring impetus

Niebuhr, Macquarrie, and Korzybski are each, in different ways, drawing attention to a tendency in Western culture to reduce what is complex and nuanced to a single and oversimplified dimension. They are each pointing out that we humans have a dimension of being that a rat, vegetable, and computer do not. The term anthropomorphism refers to the fallacious practice of attributing to nonhuman things attributes that are human. Thus, for instance, we might say, anthropomorphically, that “the computer is thinking”, “the pigeon is contemplating its future”, or “the daisy is enjoying the sunny afternoon”. Arthur Koestler coined an equivalent term to refer to the opposite and equally incorrect tendency to overstate our similarity with the lower animals studied by psychologists of the behaviourist school. These psychologists studied the behaviour of the rat, and attempted, foolishly, to generalise the results to explain human behaviour. In other words, they emphasised our rattiness. Koestler (1967) calls this the fallacy of ratomorphism: the fallacy of denying to people the faculties not found in lower animals. We also suffer today from what might be called “computeromorphism”: the fallacy of narrowly understanding the working of the human brain as equivalent to the workings of an electronic central processing unit. It is sometimes said in jest, but with discernment, that in the effort to construct a computer that can match a human brain we humans are attempting to meet the computer half way by doing our best to downplay those qualities of human thinking that are not machine-like. These are examples of centring tendencies in contemporary education, particularly because behaviourism and cognitivism—which are what I have just been referring to—remain dominant in orthodox education theory.

Another who has warned about the current tendency in Western culture to similarly dehydrate human experience is Fromm. He approached the issue by analysing two facets of human experience, and showing that one of these is being systematically reduced to the dimension of the other. The two facets—or “modes”—are those of having and being. He begins his study by noting that his project flies in the face of contemporary common sense. According to modern sensibilities, having is the “supreme goal” of culture, and the “very essence of being is having”. In popular culture, who I am, he argues, is closely related to what I have:

To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life: in order to live we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have—and to have more and more—and in which one can speak of someone as ‘being worth a million dollars’, how can there be an alternative between having and being? On the contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is nothing. (Fromm, 1979, p. 25)

However, his years of experience working as a psychologist led him to conclude that having and being “do not refer to certain separate qualities of a subject” but “to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of orientation to the world, to two different kinds of character structure the respective predominance of which determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting” (p. 33). In other words, Fromm identified two modes of existence that lie on different planes, or in different dimensions.

Being, according to Fromm, is used linguistically in three different ways: first, as a grammatical denotation of identity, as when I say, “I am tall” or “I am poor”; second, as the passive, suffering form of a verb, as in “I am beaten”, as distinct from the active “I beat”; and third, as meaning, in a way quite different from the expression of identity in the first category, to exist. It is the third meaning of being that is the focus of Fromm’s distinction between having and being, and the focus of our earlier discussion of being-on-the-way, becoming, and so on.

Fromm argues that we cannot be pinned down to what we are—what he calls the having mode. Just as Niebuhr and others have said, we are always becoming—the being mode. In the having mode the self is a persona, which is a thing that is centred, fixed, and describable. In the alternative, more fundamental, mode of human existence, the self is not fully describable. Here the focus is not on what I am—whether I am more or less of a particular thing—but on what I am becoming and where I am going. It is true that a great deal can be said about me—my character, personality, abilities, and so on—but my whole individuality can never be fully understood. Even a single act of behaviour cannot be fully described. Fromm describes the mode of being as “the mode of existence in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one’s faculties productively, is oned to the world” (Fromm, 1979, p. 28).

Statements like this are bewilderingly unfamiliar to us because we in modern culture have slipped more and more into centred ways of thinking that render these sorts of ideas unthinkable. What is Fromm getting at here? A small illustration will help. Take the notion of happiness. Happiness is a state that we obtain only if we do not seek it, or crave it. If I try to make myself happy I will fail. Trying to take possession of happiness, and attempting to orchestrate it by willpower or stealth, or any other strategy, does not lead to happiness. In Fromm’s terms, happiness does not come by way of the having mode. Instead, happiness creeps up on us when we are least attentive to it. To say, “I have happiness’, is a misnomer. In fact, even to say, “I am happy”, is not quite right either. Rather—and in saying this I am taking the analysis a little beyond Fromm’s—to an extent “happiness has me”. Elsewhere (Neyland, 2008) I have argued that happiness is neither something we should associate with the active voice in linguistics, nor something we should associate with the passive voice, but rather is illustrative of a medial voice between the active and passive. Fromm, I think, is getting at something along these lines when he says, I am “oned to the world”.

Of particular significance is Fromm’s argument that the having mode is gaining in dominance in contemporary Western culture—again, he bases his arguments here on linguistic scholarship. He notes, for example, that concepts formerly structured metaphorically by verbs are increasingly becoming restructured as nouns. And nouns, unlike verbs, he argues, are things possessed, rather than experiences in which the self plays an active part. Nouns downgrade my role as active participant self. In Fromm’s words: “The I of experience is replaced by the it of possession.” For example, I might say “I have insomnia” rather than “I cannot sleep”, or “I have a problem” rather than “I am troubled” (Fromm, 1979, p. 31).

Linguistic history provides further support for this assertion. In fact, it provides support for a stronger proposition: that “to have” is not a natural category of human existence at all. The expression to have, or its equivalent, does not exist in many languages. It is more common for languages to use an expression roughly translatable as “it is to me”. The history of change in linguistic structures indicates, further, that the construction “it is to me” is later followed by the construction “I have”, but not vice versa. It is important to note that both having and being are necessary. It is emphatically not the case that being and having are opposites, and that being ought to be given priority. Being and having are on different planes, and both need to be emphasised.

Macquarrie stresses this point. A person must know something and have something before they can be something. “There is a floor of material well-being through which people must not fall if they are to live with dignity and decency appropriate to humanity … food, health, housing, education, and the like” are issues that cannot be ignored (Macquarrie, 1970, p. 57). In view of this, it is a growing concern, as I have argued elsewhere, that there is currently a rapidly expanding gap worldwide between the rich and the poor. Over the last 20 years of the 20th century, for instance, the gap between rich and poor, already large, grew 25 times larger (data from a number of sources on this are summarised in Neyland, 2007a).

Ontological centring, and ex-centring, in education

I conclude this paper by briefly discussing Fromm’s and John Dewey’s ideas about what an ontologically ex-centred education would minimally entail.

Because having and being are fundamental modes of human existence, they are reflected in our educational experience. Fromm outlines how these distinct modes function specifically in education. In a formal learning situation—which we will assume to be well presented and stimulating—students in the having mode of existence, he argues, will listen to what is presented, understand its logical structure and meaning, and record it in their notes. Students in this mode may be presenting themselves as tabulae rasae— which means blank slates—passively receiving data. Alternatively, they may actively structure what they hear into clusters of thought and theories (I have slightly modified Fromm’s initial formulation here). However, in each case, the content—received or constructed—does not become part of their own individual ways of thinking in a fuller sense, changing and enriching them—Sumara and Davis’ notion (2007, p. 86) of “dwelling in” subjunctive spaces seems apposite here. In Fromm’s words:

The students and the content … remain strangers to each other, except that each student becomes the owner of a collection of statements made by someone else … the having-type individuals feel rather disturbed by new thoughts or ideas about a subject, because the new puts into question the fixed sum of the information they have. Indeed, to one for whom having is the main form of relatedness to the world, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down (or penned down) are frightening—like everything else that grows and changes, and thus is not controllable. (1979, pp. 37–38)

John Dewey expresses something of the mode of being, and of the ex-centred subjunctive, when he argues that any learning that does not begin with a question or a problem actually inhibits education:

Instruction in subject matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the student’s own experience, or that is not presented in such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for intellectual purposes. In that it fails to enter into any process of reflection, it is useless; in that it remains in the mind as so much lumber and debris, it is a barrier, an obstruction in the way of effective thinking when a problem arises. (1910, p. 199)

The ex-centred, being-type curriculum encourages learners to approach learning with problems and questions, not necessarily well formulated, but “stirring”. Learners do more than just listen and hear; they respond. What is presented activates their intuition, and stimulates them to form new questions and ideas. Returning to Fromm:

They listen with interest, hear what [is presented], and spontaneously come to life in response to what they hear. They do not simply acquire knowledge that they can take home and memorise. Each student has been affected and has changed: each is different after the [lesson] than he or she was before it. (1979, p. 38)

This leads inevitably to the important question: So what? We have seen that Sumara and Davis exhort us to rethink education from the point of view of complexity thinking, because this allows us to ex-centre both curriculum space—which I have argued elsewhere (Neyland, 2007b) is becoming increasingly a “literary” space—and the individual. Fromm’s and Dewey’s expositions resonate with this larger exhortation. Fromm’s and Dewey’s analyses gain credence because they rhyme with the larger analyses of Niebuhr, Macquarrie, and Korzybski concerning the shape and impetus of modern Western society. What then does all this mean for curriculum development?

Collectively, this scholarly work boils down to the assertion that there is in modern education a powerful tide of influence, largely unconscious, that is shaping the form and direction of the curriculum. Furthermore, and crucially, this is to the detriment of both education and the individual. As a result of this unconscious tidal force, things like the outcomes-led curriculum, the scientific management of education, assessment systems, and much else besides seem to the Western mind set to be good and proper in education. Their rightness is seen to be, as it were, unquestionable. But when these ubiquitous curriculum trends are examined in the light of the underground drift towards a centred curriculum space and the centred individual, they are seen to be not good and proper but confusions of priority. In fact, these so-called best practices are seen to be, at least potentially, antieducational and personally damaging. What I am urging here is that curriculum developers become more aware of this larger cultural drift and its possible consequences.

There is much more to be said on this issue, so much in fact that at the moment I find it impossible to reduce it all in summary form to a handful of sentences. But I have just written a book on the subject (Neyland, 2008) in which I scratch the surface of a small part of this wonderfully intricate topic.

References

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: Heath.

Fromm, E. (1979). To have or to be? London: Abacus Books.

Gerhart, M., & Russell, A. (1984). The metaphoric process: The creation of scientific and religious understanding. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.

Hoggart, R. (1977). W. H. Auden. London: Longman.

Koestler, A. (1967). The ghost in the machine. New York: Henry Regnery.

Macquarrie, J. (1970). Three issues in ethics. London: SCM Press.

Neyland, J. (2007a). Globalisation, ethics and mathematics education. In B. Atweh, A. Barton, M. Borba, N. Gough, C. Keitel, C. Vistro-Yu, & R. Vithal (Eds.), Internationalisation and globalisation in mathematics and science education (pp. 113–128). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

Neyland, J. (2007b). The spectre of the literary curriculum. Curriculum Matters, 3, 92–107.

Neyland, J. (2008). If you don’t strike oil, stop boring: Rediscovering the spirit of education after scientific management. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Postman, N. (1996). The end of education: Redefining the value of school. New York: Random House.

Sumara, D., & Davis, B. (2007). Subjunctive spaces of curriculum: On the importance of eccentric knowledge. Curriculum Matters, 3, 79–91.

The author

Jim Neyland has been a classroom teacher and a teacher educator, and has worked in curriculum development at the national level. He is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Educational Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

Email: jim.neyland@vuw.ac.nz