Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

For both of them, the fact-orientation focuses on the most lifeless and least interesting aspects of nature. Whitehead likened fact-orientation to mistaking the coat for its owner while Heidegger likened it to the superfluousness of writing manuals for the sake of more manuals. Although both men are critical of the fact-oriented contemporary sciences, neither are as critical as Husserl has been. You will remember that he was the mathematician from the Introduction who was asked to comment on the state of science just before the Second World War. Instead of applauding modern science, he argued that it was in crisis! Here’s what he has to say about the fact-orientation of this scientific program:

      This “fact-world,” as the word already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as a something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. “The” world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points “other” than I supposed, this or that under such names as “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the “it” remains ever, in the more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naïve lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge which offer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciences of the natural standpoints. (2002, pp. 55–56)

      It is apparent that Husserl is not impressed by the reduction of nature to a list of facts. If the consequences of maintaining such a perspective of nature are not evident in his description above, Husserl (1970) goes a bit further in his Crisis. He explains,

      Merely fact-minded science makes merely fact-minded people …. [Fact-minded science] excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, find the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.… Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion …? (pp. 6–7)

      In each of these excerpts, Husserl demonstrates the lack of meaning inherent in a world that is exclusively interested in objective scientific fact. In the first instance, the anomalies in human perception—“‘illusion’, ‘hallucination’, and the like”—are understood to inhibit the recognition of nature. As such, they are to be struck from experience. Husserl argues that this is tantamount to striking the life out of nature and reducing it to mere objective fact. In the second instance, he goes a bit further in tracing out the consequences of a “fact-minded science.” This he defines as an institution that is in principle committed to extricating anything meaningful from experience!

      In demonstrating the detrimental consequences of a materially-objective, modernist conception of nature, Husserl also insinuates the solution that he sees. In the first excerpt, the implication is that human perception—anomalies and all—must not only be included, but that this must be the starting point; and in the second excerpt, the constitution of nature is understood to come by way of meaningful human existence. In each instance, Husserl demonstrates the second tendency of a viciously bifurcated nature—that wrought by the humanists. Merleau-Ponty (2003) will be used to address this in the following Section.

      Okay, so we have seen the tendency to reduce the universe to facts about the universe—that is, replace actual experience with facts about what experience should be. We have seen the history of this kind of thinking beginning almost 25 centuries ago, and we have seen a century of criticisms against this approach. So are we condemned to an eternity of a lifeless universe? This last section describes an alternative approach to nature that recognizes that it is processual; it is a nature in which we participate and in which we find meaning. To describe it, I will consult the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

      What’s neat is that a lot of Merleau-Ponty’s later work has only recently been published. In his final years (before an unfortunate and early death), he was teaching courses at the distinguished Collèges de France. This is the kind of position that academic folks dream of; you get paid very well to research whatever you want and teach a single course on the topic. Merleau-Ponty decided to teach a series of courses on Nature. The notes from his students were eventually edited into a volume titled Nature decades after he had passed away. The notes of what he had been working on were also published posthumously into a book titled Visible and the Invisible. It is remarkable to think that one’s spiral notebook (or, more contemporarily, a personal computer desktop folder of unfinished notes) might find their way to publication without you.

      In the first course he teaches on nature (2003), Merleau-Ponty devotes some class time to Whitehead’s insights. Whitehead, you recall from above, was the one who introduced the idea of living and lifeless conceptions of nature. Indeed, the section that Merleau-Ponty teaches on Whitehead provides the climax to the course! By considering these two men together, a conception of nature emerges that blends processes and things.