Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

proper methods and training, you can never be taken as a fool. The deductive prowess of Sherlock Holmes, who relies on his skills of observation and logic to solve mysteries, is the hero of positivism. But perhaps more compelling than these reasons, positivism promises that with enough time, humankind will eventually develop the skills to manipulate and control the entirety of the universe (and manipulate and control we have done!).

      The positivist approach has worked for many decades. It gave people a reason to continue asking important questions about meaning, why things happen, and how to make our experience better. In medicine, this model of understanding, manipulation, and control of the relationships of organic matter has nearly eliminated the threat of death by infectious diseases. In physics, the understanding, manipulation, and control of matter has led to the development of engineering, all manner of transportation devices, the utilization of energy sources, and so on. The trajectory this promises for humankind is alluring, but this doesn’t make it any less of an assumption.

      The positivist assumption isn’t always helpful. Contemporary physicists have had to suspend what they “know” about the relationships between material bodies—particularly when they deal with particles that are smaller than an atom. It’s as if positivism applies to the world of atoms, but once you get smaller than this we need a new model for the universe. This is a problem when the worldview is supposed to include everything. In medicine, there are some diseases that cannot be isolated and treated. One example is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world: cardiac disease. Cardiac disease patients did not catch a bug or acquire an infection that needs to treated; they have made certain lifestyle choices that have inhibited the healthy functioning of their bodies. The food they eat, how they choose to spend their time, and the friends they keep are unsustainable. Treatment is not as easy as taking an antibiotic, and encouraging lifestyle changes in service to health isn’t as easy as it sounds.

      We will first break down the term metaphysics. “Meta-” indicates that a process is being applied to itself. In psychology, for instance, “meta-cognition” means “thinking about thinking.” If by physics we mean “the rules by which the physical universe operates,” then meta-physics refers to “the rules by which we understand the rules by which the physical universe operates.” The first of these is epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with how we know what we know. For example, how do we know what a fact is, in fact? My argument, obviously, is that we don’t. A fact is itself an epistemological impossibility. Since knowledge about the universe presupposes a universe, epistemology is contingent upon ontology—the study of being. Ontology investigates the is-ness of what is. Ontology concerns the statement of being. To argue that there is a universe, and what this means exactly, is an ontological proposition. Epistemology and ontology are closely related: how do we know that what is, is? With fact-minded thinking, metaphysical questions are ignored. “Everybody knows fact a, fact b, fact c, and so on.” Understanding the is-ness of is, and the process of its discovery, are replaced by facts.

      Chapter Two

      The World of Facts

      The tendency to reduce the universe to facts about the world is not new. Indeed, it may be traced back nearly 25 centuries to when Plato misunderstood the agreement between Heraclitus and Parmenides. “It was here,” as German philosopher Martin Heidegger has shown, “that western metaphysics began. It was also here that the forgetting of being occurred” (Seidel, 1964, p. 30). This statement should be troubling. If you’re not troubled yet, start this chapter over (it’s only a few lines).

      This is the story of western metaphysics, a story that plays out today in high school integrated science laboratories, college philosophy courses, and alcohol-induced arguments around campfires. Heraclitus spoke of nature as a process—always changing. Parmenides spoke of nature as a thing—reducible to a matter of fact. In a contemporary classroom, only one of them can be correct. But in the fifth century BCE (Before Common Era), there was no argument about who was correctly using the term—there was no contradiction or ambiguity. Unfortunately, few of us can imagine this scenario: how can the propositions “a” and “not-a” both be correct? Were Heraclitus and Parmenides to have this disagreement today, both would probably defer to some “agree to disagree” bullshit, even though both would deeply resent one another for their intellectual challenge. We are deeply compelled by the idea that only one of the propositions can be correct, and being correct is what is important. This amounts to having the fact that is right. This is because we live on the other side of Plato in the history of western thinking.

      Here’s how it happened. Both Heraclitus and Parmenides, when referring to nature, said the word “physis” (“nature”). Parmenides had in mind a thing while Heraclitus had had in mind a process. These two forms of the concept of nature may also be understood in their Latin equivalents: natura naturata(nature natured) and natura naturans (nature naturing). See how one is a noun and the other is a gerund? If nature is a thing that has already come into being, then we just need to report the facts about it. However, if it is constantly becoming, then stating a fact about it would merely be referring to it in some particular point in time. If I drove from Atlanta, GA to Grand Rapids, MI, I could summarize this in factual form by saying “I’m driving to Grand Rapids.” But as a process, I realize there are many little detours that occur between the two cities, like stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. When stopped there, am I really driving to Grand Rapids? Well yes, but not necessarily at that moment. With Heraclitus and Parmenides, both men understood that reality was both a thing and a process, and saw no point in deciding which was the most correct. Once again, this is like saying that they agreed that both a and not-a were correct. I’m both driving to Grand Rapids and stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. But for some unfortunate reason, we are somehow handicapped from thinking this way. Trying to hold two contradictory statements in our mind is akin to practicing cognitive gymnastics, so we eventually resort to thinking “it’s either a or not-a.”

      With Heraclitus and Parmenides, there is no possibility of losing the universe to facts about the universe (this was referred to as abstractification in the Introduction). This could only occur were one inclined to decide whether nature was either a thing or a process. My smart phone is beside my laptop on the desk. It performs certain smart phone actions. I have confidence that, insofar as it remains a smartphone, it will be capable of performing these tasks. It’s a smart-phone-thing. If I received a phone call but couldn’t slide the unlock-bar, I would still believe that it is a smart phone, only that I am incompetent as its user. To call it a thing and a process would be to allow it to transform moment to moment. In any given day, it can be a smart phone, a dumb phone, a paper-weight, desk-clutter, and so on. Despite its regular and functional transformations, we still call it a smart-phone. This is not how the Greeks understood stuff like smart phones, quarries, or garden tools. Seidel explains, “Being reveals itself to the Greeks as physis, but both as the emerging dominance which abides and as the appearing appearance. In Heidegger’s view there is no opposition between appearance and being for the Greeks” (p. 35, emphasis added). A smart-phone is both its smart-phone-ness and its capacity to be a variety of other things—flashlight, alarm clock, vanity mirror, weapon. But we struggle to think this way. We prefer to say “it’s a smart phone, you idiot.” This way of thinking is a consequence of the efforts of Plato.

      When Plato hears the dissimilarity between the physis spoken by Heraclitus and that of Parmenides, he thinks: well who is correct? We have been condemned to ask superlative questions like this ever since. “So who do you love more?” “Yeah, but which city has the best pizza?” “So how small of a penis is too small?” Today we are suckers for the really real. “As Heidegger has said, metaphysics says that it is interested in being, but it is rather things that it takes, or rather mis-takes, for being. This has been the tragedy of [Western] thought” (p. 40).

      * * *

      Today we ask our search-engine or smart-phone:

       “How do I know if I’m in love or not?”

       “How can I get her to like me?”

       “How much money will I make with a psychology degree?”

      For each of these, there is an assumption that a complicated