Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

things of which few people would denounce the importance. Yet we are gullible enough to believe that these are things that people can somehow acquire—as if they may simply be added to their shopping cart. Here they have been trademarked in their superlative forms. My partner and I have the least romantic™ history imaginable. Friends have even shared, candidly, that they were impressed that we actually admit our internet match-maker story publicly (rather than making something up that has more spontaneity and whimsy). The assumption is that the fictional story would tell others more about ourselves than our actual romance! The first time this happened (and it has happened more than once), I couldn’t believe it! To me, it couldn’t have been any other way. It certainly won’t become a Nicholas Sparks novel anytime soon, which is fortunate, because then there’d be a bunch of hapless love-seekers trying to orchestrate their own serendipitous internet-dating match.

      The problem is not that we are capable of referring to love as a fact, or even that we sometimes do. The problem emerges when we are no longer satisfied with our unique and personal version of love. I have actually had friends walk out on their partners because their love didn’t have a close enough approximation to its mid-twentieth-century billboard representation—you know, 2.5 children and picket fence. It was impossible to this friend that a loving and meaningful relationship could have come without these things. The “love thing” replaced their unique—and unique it was—loving relationship.

      I am advancing the claim that it is impossible to capture who you are by a list of facts. It is, however, possible to summarize who you are by a list of facts. The danger here is to let the summary of who you are replace the continuously changing person that you are becoming moment by moment (who can, gasp!, change her/his mind!). Keep in mind that facts are abstractions about you. As I explained earlier, abstractions are not wrong, they just fail to provide an adequate account of the process for which they stand. They are without context and without meaning. It would be more accurate to say that as a person, you are both a list of facts (helpful for describing who you are in a pinch) and a process of becoming. Fortunately, there is an easy way to remember this, and it begins with a return to the pre-Socratics.

      For the pre-Socratic philosophers (Heraclitus and Parmenides, remember?), nature was not alone. Indeed, at the time it would have been impossible to think of a concept that exists by itself, but we do this all the time today. When we ponder a word—e.g. “physis”—we immediately think of its definition, like whether it is a process or a thing. By doing so, we forget the process by which the concept itself has arisen; for example, the context of people in conversation in a particular time and place, like Heraclitus and Parmenides on the bank of a river. The process of communication, the exchange of knowledge, the sharing of ideas, the act of understanding—these are all part of the meaning of a word. A concept’s meaning is a product of its conceptual history and the context out of which it arises (as is the case with all things). The Greeks had a word for this, and it is a word that is still paid lip-service in the academy: lógos (as in Bio-logy, psycho-logy, eco-logy, and so on).

      We can understand that, for the Greeks, “physis and lógos were intimately united” (Seidel, p. 44). Lógos had originally meant “collection, the happening of uncovering, of revelation, of truth.” I hope this sounds familiar from your experiences in the college classroom, but most likely it will not. Instead, academic disciplines proceed with the positivist assumption that there is but a single pile of knowledge that represents all that can be known about such-and-such a discipline. There is no creation or revelation of truth. Instead, as Seidel has observed, lógos has eventually come to mean a “statement in the sense of correctness or rightness, the exact opposite of the place of truth” (p. 44). That is to say, a statement is either right or wrong; it can never be both right and wrong.

      Parmenides and Heraclitus both say physis. The former has in mind a thing; the latter, a process. Their apparent disagreement only occurs when lógos is forgotten. Indeed, the observations of each man come together in service to lógos. However, by separating lógos from physis, the underlying theme of collective truth is lost, and these men are suddenly found to be at odds with one another, locked in the familiar ego-based pub argument. “For after the pre-Socratics the question as to what being may be is no longer ‘What is the being?’ but rather, ‘what is the thing?’ And ultimately it becomes a mere questioning after the ‘thingliness’ of things” (p. 44). Hence the tendency to argue in terms of how much, how little, how long, etc. and have the idea that what’s being argued is the reality of the universe. Seidel echoes Heidegger in his conclusion: “Plato drove a wedge between things and being, between things and their being. He put them in different places as well” (p. 47).

      Beginning with Plato, it has been customary to separate nature into things and processes. This set in motion all of the problems with contemporary science and schooling that will be outlined in this book. Plato’s historic blunder gets systematized when Aristotle subsequently engineers an entire system of categorization of things and processes called logic. One cannot categorize a process without it first being abstracted. With logic one can construct proofs and identity statements without ever going to a concrete experience. Sentences like “if a, then b” are logically sound, even though a and b are propositions that do not stand for anything in particular. What is important to understand about Aristotelian logic is that, since its inception, it has become perfectly normal, even beneficial, to deal exclusively with abstractions. As Whitehead (1958) observes, “The disease of philosophy is its itch to express itself in the forms, ‘Some S is P’, or ‘All S is P’” (p. 194). Moreover, it has become increasingly unfathomable to think of propositions a and ~a together. This is why my friend above thought that either families in the 1960s were actually miserable, or our relationships today are somehow deficient; it’s impossible to believe that my love might be different from your love, or even that the love I have for one person could be different from the love I have for another.

      In the above discussion, we have two different ways of understanding the stuff of the world. It can be a process where the experience of investigation is just as important as that which is investigated. In Chapter 3, I will be arguing that the process of discovery is the important part of scientific investigation (and not the new way of organizing or categorizing understanding into facts).

      Unfortunately, today, at least in the majority of institutions, there is no process; nature is no longer understood as emerging but as completely emerged. It’s that stuff that you see when you look out your window. Eventually we’ll understand all of it—discoveries that are the mere burden of observation and time. “What can we point the experimental method at next?” Consequently, the “thingliness” of nature has been privileged to the neglect of the process of nature. Below, I will describe how continental philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) and process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1938/1958) alike think that the present-day conception of nature—all thing and no process—is a terrible shame. Heidegger calls this an “ontic” nature while Whitehead calls it “lifeless” nature.

      The words “ontology” and “ontological” will appear frequently throughout this section. These are important words when it comes to understanding how we learn. We don’t typically think about ontological questions because we have been led to believe that the final ontological questions were answered between the 17th and 19th centuries (so why bother asking them any longer?). Heidegger argues that this is precisely why it’s so important that we begin asking them once again! We pretend that we already know what being is and that it has already been established. Yet, we are all exceedingly inept at describing what this means, exactly! Can you describe what it means to “be” in a way that doesn’t simply use synonyms like “exist” or “live?”

      It’s interesting to try and do this exercise. We all know what it means for something to be. “It just … is.” This is usually a sufficient explanation. But once you start asking others, you will begin to realize that nobody has any clue what it means to be. We take this for granted like the motion in Newton’s famous laws. If being is the most basic part of existing, shouldn’t we know this most intimately? Why the hell is it the process with which we are least familiar! Why can’t we describe what this means? Let’s unpack being. This is going to take us down the path of ontology.

      When Heidegger