Consider the following a priori argument and its implications for relationships, for education, and beyond.
It stands to reason that any object of knowledge can be seen from any of many – even infinite – points of view, and that the whole truth about anything requires all perspectives be considered, or at least as many as are available to us. For just because no one happens to be looking from a given perspective at any given moment in time does not change that the perspective itself continues to exist, and could be known by anyone who takes that view. We naturally see our own point of view quite well, but its what’s in our blind spot that we most need to consider. Reality then is simply not knowable, except in this nonlinear way, as Socrates would say, “all things considered.” Since all points of view exist at all times, understanding compels us to attend to as many points of view as we possibly can – most especially the one held by the person we happen to be arguing with. For while we all know our own point of view perfectly well, it’s what we don’t see that our partner in discussion can probably teach us best. It is therefore in dialogue that we come to learn more of the whole truth of any matter, And the point of arguing is not winning, then, but understanding – and mutual understanding at that.
One might imagine an ancient sage tossing his sandal into the center of the circle to make this point. It would become immediately apparent to all who consider it that this single object nonetheless looks quite dissimilar from different points of view. And it is easy enough to see that this is true with regard to almost any object of our knowledge. Again, we are like the blind men of ancient lore, who each perceives and describes an elephant as something vastly different, e.g. a tree trunk, a wall, a snake, etc. The whole truth about the elephant includes all of these, and it is in the interest of each to consider the perspective offered by all the others.
As Socrates puts it, "the genuine lover of knowledge cannot fail, from his youth up, to strive after the whole of truth."(191)
Considering that we all have different points of origin, different experiences come of living different lives and following different paths, it naturally follows that we all see the same world, and every object of knowledge in it, from different points of view. This does not entail (as some relativists might conclude) that we all see a different world, a different truth, or that our diverse eclectic perspectives are somehow irreconcilable. On the contrary, as we’ve said, just as two eyes add depth to the vision of only one, so the integration of different perspectives and voices adds depth to our understanding of the objects of our knowledge.
Thus, the whole truth about anything will be an ideal we approach only by gradual inclusion of diverse points of view. And whether the object of our knowledge are as concrete as a sandal or as abstract as our conceptions of justice, beauty, love, or god -- none of us defines the truth about such things by virtue of any limited or privileged view.
This is a conception that should be familiar to those of us living in a digital age, who should be able to conceive of say, Neo suspended in midair in the Matrix, which we can view full circle and imagine ourselves moving freely around it. Dialectic thinking is not unlike this kind of flexible eclecticity, except that it calls upon us to practice this stretching of the mind at all times, in all discussions, with all the objects of our mutual knowledge – abstract as well as concrete, metaphysical as well as physical. This nonlinearity of reality compels us to recognize that, in principle, all of these perspectives do exist, and continue to exist, whether we pay attention to them or not, and to admit that any limited point of view, especially one that does not recognize any others as valid, cannot make any claims to ‘knowledge’ of that about which it speaks, the whole truth of which involves so much more and cumulative perspective than any one or few points of view can provide. The lenses through which we view the world and the concepts with which we frame our knowledge are all relative to this experience through which we have learned it. And still, anyone with an aim to seeing the truth has an interest in seeing more than just his or her own limited view.
We see this collective dynamic at work today in what Al Gore calls “the unbelievably rapid explosion of ‘wikis,’ most prominently Wikipedia. Wikis are Web sites that compile public information about particular areas of knowledge… The idea behind wikis is that, in general, people as a group know more than any one individual. Anyone is allowed to contribute information to a wiki,” and thus it “operates according to a meritocracy of ideas”(Gore, Assault on Reason, p. 264-265) that “has always been the beating heart of democratic theory.”(p.75) For “when ideas rise or fall according to merit, reason tends to drive us toward decisions that reflect the best available wisdom of the group as a whole.”(Gore, p.75).
So it follows that, as Socrates says, while every person is entitled to their opinion, not every opinion is equal to every other – if only because some people have simply thought things through better than others. In fact, there are no privileged perspectives, but there are those that have gone through this dialectic learning process better than others. And this is the reason we should distinguish the ‘smart’ from the ‘wise’, and look to the latter for direction – because they have better considered the whole truth of most matters. Here again, there are different senses of the word intelligence, and some are simply closer to the essence of the matter.
As we were saying earlier, Hegel is often credited with developing this ancient dialectic method beyond what the ancients did, and in a way that is fruitful for our purposes.[1] He presented it as a three-fold process by which the mind advances through stages of understanding. It begins by developing a thesis, which gives rise to a contradicting and negating reaction, or antithesis, and in the ‘winnowing and sifting’ between them there arises a resolution in the form of a synthesis. What makes this process self reinforcing is that in the synthesis, there is contained a new thesis, and so a new antithesis comes forth, and thus there is ultimately a new synthesis…and so on, and so forth, upward as the mind ascends from ignorance to understanding.
Toward a better understanding of this dialectic conception of the mind, our thought experiment addresses the ubiquitous – and potentially fortuitous – ‘problem’ that we all see the same world differently, which accounts for much of the relentless and deep-seated conflict that is becoming increasingly ferocious in our world.
What the ancients understood (better than we seem to) is that, properly understood, the complementarity is not only a method of education, but a method of conflict resolution, for the natural diversity of our perspectives is a condition that could prevent conflict from ever beginning, and in fact, enrich our mutual understanding instead. Instead of encouraging arguing to win battles over points of view, such as we do in this world that does not recognize nonlinear or dialectic thinking, which only makes agreement and mutual understanding difficult at best, and at worst, keeps us in what a kind of perpetual war. For this reason alone, it deserves more thorough examination than it gets in our contemporary thought.
Whatever scale of interaction we explore, we are plagued by the misunderstandings that invariably arise by our failure to think things through in full consideration of the points of view of others – most especially when it comes to perceiving our own actions from the receiving end.
Better understood though, dialectic thinking can be seen to be, at heart, both a method of education and a method of conflict resolution - useful to quell both the conflict between us and the conflict within us over what is true. Rather than win arguments, it could inspire us to want to argue purely for the fun of learning from one another, and from the world at large.
So it seems worth summarizing the logic that leads invariably to the conclusion that there is something meaningfully called the whole truth, and that this is in fact, the only truth worth seeking. What’s more, that dialectic thinking (intrapersonal) and deliberative dialogue (interpersonal) is not only the most direct, but quite possibly the only way to true intelligence, that is, to wisdom. And if such a thing is possible – as the ancients believed it to be – then it compels our thoughtful and cooperative attention, for our own sake, for we could be missing much by ignoring this rather astonishing potential.
Consider what we call reality, and our knowledge about it. We tend to assume we know what is ‘real’…but in the course of the learning process that is life, the question arises time and again, do we? Is it real if we can touch it? If we can see it? If we can conceptualize it? The whole truth about reality calls for a more thorough conceptualization than we have given it, for things are not as “clear and distinct” as Rene Descartes assumed. What, in truth, does it mean to know something? And what does our knowledge tell us about what is real?
The Whole Mind Seeking the Whole Truth: Subject & Object Complementarity
Any object of our knowledge exists in many potential forms, in more or less concrete or abstract senses, and the surface itself is created by the focus of attention, that is, the subjective focus of the mind that is observing it.
Take a book for example: it is an object, in a certain sense, but when we talk about ‘a book’, we aren’t talking merely about it’s physical form, for there is so much more to it:
"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network….the unity of the book, even in the sense of a group of relations, cannot be regarded as identical in each case. The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse."(Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge?*)
Thus we see how much the objective world does not exist as objects per se, but has degrees of substance. Rather we make ‘objects’ out of the world by using our subjective minds to draw boundaries around ‘things’. Something needs only have enough surface, that is, enough difference from its background, to attract our notice in order to qualify as an object of our study. Like books, most of the objects of our knowledge are not all merely concrete and objectifiable -- they exist in different senses, rather somewhere in between the extremes of concrete and abstract.
There are many different ways to discuss this interaction between the objective and subjective worlds, many of which lead us to the conclusion that the subjective observer defines the ‘surface’ of what he perceives such that what we see depends in large part on what we look for, and the background against which we see it. [2]
Logically, the whole truth about any given object of our knowledge would have to include all these relevant perspectives, but we often settle in our ways of knowing for what is most obvious. Thus, we tend to study the mere parts without seeing their relation to the whole, or the outer surfaces without seeing the inner depth.
Socrates observed in the 5th century BCE that this unnecessarily limited, i.e. reductionist, way of knowing was already taking hold.[3] But if we were to have taken his advice, we would instead recognize that there is an intersection where the subjective mind meets the objective world, and this is where the concepts of knowledge and intelligence begin to take on meaning.
By this logic, it stands to reason that the objects of the world exist not merely in physical form, but on a continuum that stretches from the concrete to the abstract, from the physical to the metaphysical,[4] depending on the degree of substance they entail. Ideas, for instance, like numbers and words, are as real as rocks, they are just more abstract. So, for the sake of seeing the implications of this, picture that continuum on which the objects of our knowledge exist, a continuum that ranges from one extreme that includes the merely concrete/physical/visible, to the other extreme that includes the purely abstract/psychological/invisible.
Consider Figure A, which represents the continuum of objective matter.
To complicate matters further, not only do the objects of our knowledge have various degrees of substance in this way, but we can also look at those various objects in different ways. For instance, the mind has the power to analyze the various objects of our knowledge (looking close up and with ever finer resolution, breaking them up into their constituent parts). Or, by a matter of degree, it has the power to synthesize them (to step back to see their interconnections and relationships with other things). Analysis is fairly ubiquitous in our world and scientific method, but the unifying power of synthesis goes largely unnoticed in our most widely used methods of knowing. So this may be a concept from which we still have much to learn.[5]
Consider Figure B, which represents the intersection of the subjective and objective aspects of reality -- that is, where mind meets world. See Figure B.
Interesting things happen at that point where mind meets world, beginning with how the different functions of the mind tend to reveal themselves. And we can then see that the very least that shows itself to exist is not merely object and subject, but a complex interaction between the two, which compels us to rethink much that we thought we knew about various ways of knowing and the relationship of mind to world.[6]
Consider, for instance, what is it that the mind is doing when it is analyzing the concrete world, if not science? And when we are analyzing the abstract world – if not math and language? And when we synthesize the concrete world, are we not doing ecology, or psychology, or various forms of social sciences, depending on the objects of our study? And when we synthesize the abstract world, we are doing something we might call mysticism, or maybe music, or various forms of art would also fall into this category. All these different ways of knowing are just different aspects of the whole truth of any matter. And a full intelligence of any of them would require a better understanding of all the rest.
In viewing the world this way, we can also account for how the mind has capacities for gathering knowledge by way of the senses (concrete/analysis), intellect (abstract/analysis), intuition (abstract/synthesis), and emotion (concrete/synthesis).
“It’s as if all lines of discourse converge on a common center.” (Plato’s Republic)
So it stands to reason then, as the ancients tried to teach us, that the mind is always in need of balance, to see the opposing point of view. As Aristotle and Mill argue, finding the whole truth by way of dialogue in any given matter is going to involve a process of reconciling, which is to say, finding the balance between complementary perspectives.
When Neils Bohr introduced his principle of complementarity in 1928, he called it, “the oneness of the observer and the observed,” and “the undivided wholeness of the entire universe.” He held it to be “reflective of the need for understanding mutually exclusive opposites as parts of a whole in every discipline” (Jones, 320-322) “What is needed,” he said, “is for each person to be able to hold several points of view, in a sort of active suspension, while treating the ideas of others with something of the care and attention that are given to his or her own… In this way it may be possible to hold a number of different approaches together in mind with almost equal energy and interest. In this way an internal free dialogue is begun which can lead on to a more open external dialogue” (p.87)
The fact that any object of knowledge might be viewed from different outside-looking-in perspectives helps bring home the complexity of even objective matter.
But the real complication comes in when the object of our knowledge is also a subject – that is, a living and even perceiving being. If the object we seek to know is itself conscious, with a mind of it’s own, then no amount of outside-looking-in views will suffice, and we must learn to perceive living objects from their own point of view, from inside-looking-out. Looking at the world only helps us understand reality as objects, not as subjects. No amount of outside-looking-in perspective will suffice to constitute the whole truth of a subject, which has its own inside-looking-out point of view. If the object of our inquiry is itself alive, perceptive, conscious, then even an infinity of outside-looking-in points of view is not be enough to give us full knowledge of it. It ‘knows itself’ in a way that no number of outside looking in perspectives, by themselves, can capture.
Likewise, for every point of view, there are also an infinite number of points of focus, near or far. Which helps to illustrate that how we look at something matters as much as what we are looking at…all of which makes for an infinitely complex ‘reality’ – that each mind will nonetheless perceive it uniquely, with infinitely complex individuality.
Within each individual, in every mind, there is this intersection where attention meets the world. And that point where attention focuses at the cutting edge of time is nested within a complex system of peripheral vision.
As Paulo Friere put it, “Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.”(Pedagogy, p. 22)
All of which gives substance to a conception of the whole truth as a meaningful ideal for us to aspire to in relationships, in politics, in science, and especially education, even as it will remain, in principle, forever out of reach.
The ancients tried to teach us that the only truth worth pursuing is the whole truth. So if this is our goal, then it is imperative that we go about our learning cumulatively, taking seriously this infinity of points of view, and continually stretching our minds to take as many views as possible. Only by gathering multiple perspectives do we gain depth of understanding.
And it is the person who is best able to see from as many points of view as possible who has a claim to be the wisest, although the truly wise remain humble enough to know how much they still and always have left to learn.
Since no one ever completely understands anything, the goal of dialectic education could never be to reach full and complete understanding of the whole truth about anything, let alone everything, since there is simply no end to this process. As Socrates might say, while the perfect person would be all people put together, not only is it not possible for anyone to be perfect, but not even desirable. For continual learning is among the great joys of life, we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good, as they say. The recognition of how the mind, in a sense, grows by ever inclusive perspectives leaves us with the highly desirable process of learning. We might call this skill eclectic empathy, that is, stretching the mind to see from ever expanding and dialectic points of view, which would bring our higher and healthier human purposes back to our educational endeavors.
The impossibility of complete knowledge should not discourage our learning and moving toward the development of individual excellence of mind, for all of us approach our own highest potentials by incremental approximation.
This model reminds us that everyone has much to learn, and consequently, the challenge for all is to learn and teach our young to both listen and share their own perspective, for everyone is a teacher, just as everyone is a student.
But as we’ve seen, reductionist science does not consider anything ‘real’ that it cannot objectify, that is, cannot view exclusively from outside-looking-in, which unfortunately excludes many subjects worth knowing, including consciousness, love, and the whole truth about anything living. Still, it’s an indisputable fact is that not all substance is dead matter, and we cannot claim to know living subjects exclusively from outside looking in. So while we are fond of following a method of science based on our love of physics (physics envy, * calls it), we would be wise to use a method based rather on living systems. This way of understanding the world allows for us to look not simply at the world out there, but from the world in here, and in everyone. It calls for us to use empathy along with observation, and employ the elasticity of our imagination, in order to understand what is really going on in the subject/object systems we observe.[7] And if a better understanding the whole truth is our goal, then we must learn to perceive living objects from their own point of view, that is, to consider our objects as subjects, from-inside-looking-out.
Socrates made the dialectic mind and method his object of study, and in so doing, would have us integrate what we call the scientific and the Socratic methods into a conception of Socratic science, the goal of which would be to integrate the subjective and objective aspects of reality into something always approaching, albeit never quite reaching, the whole of truth.
“The answer,” physicist David Bohm says, “does not lie in the accumulation of more and more knowledge. What is needed is wisdom.”(p.4) What is needed is “a creative dialogue between different points of view.”(p.87)
It follows from this model then, that while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not every opinion is as good as every other. As we’ve made clear, there are no privileged perspectives, but there are in fact those that have gone through the learning process better than most others, those who have gathered ever more points of view and thus achieved more depth of understanding. And it is worth our while to take such voices seriously. In a certain sense, Protagoras was right, “Man is the measure.” But some are better at measuring than others.
Ironically, it is intellectual humility, perspective, empathy, curiosity, among other learning skills, that become the necessary tools for one who wishes to achieve excellence in learning, that is, true intelligence.
Consider Figure C:
When viewed in their dialectic/complementary relationships to one another, this is how the voices of philosophy might arrange themselves.
A Lesson in Humility, Empathy & Curiosity
There is a lesson in humility here, of course, because if anything that can be known can be viewed from an infinite number of points of view (including, if it is alive, inside-looking-out), then what does it mean to talk of 'the truth'?
Seeing this, it may not be as fruitful to ask where any particular thinker or culture fits on this ways of knowing map, for ideally, those who are well developed will be all over it. But it is very fruitful to ask where various disciplines fall, for these are not generally all over the map (there are exceptions,) but rather quite specific in terms of the subject matter they focus on and the perspective they take. We can, for instance, organize the sciences in terms of their degrees abstract matters, just as we can do this for others areas of study.
[1] This model is often attributed to Hegel, but he himself never used that specific termimology. Hegel attributed this formulation to Kant. But in fact it appears to have been used first by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and others, including Fitsche, popularized it. The dialectic was actually stated in the form by (The Accessible Hegel. Michael Allen Fox. Prometheus Books. 2005. p.43. Also see Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), secs. 50, 51, p.29. 30.)
[2] Douglas Hofstadter put it this way in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Godel, Escher, and Bach, showing that “all things in all of time and space are inextricably connected with one another. Any divisions, classifications, or organizations discovered in the universe are relatively arbitrary. The world is a complex, continuous, single event.” (p.*) Alan Watts, in his book The Way of Zen, agrees that "a doctrine of relativity…[shows] that all things are without 'self-nature' (svabhava) or independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself -- no thing, no fact, no being, no event--and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped. For what is singled out exists only in relation to its own opposite, since what is is defined by what is not…"(p.* Alan Watts, Way of Zen) Gregory Bateson argues that the idea of surface leads inevitably to the reality of paradox: "[I]t takes at least two somethings to create a difference. . . i.e., information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be immanent in their mutual relationship; . . . There is a profound and unanswerable question about the nature of those 'at least two' things that between them generate the difference which becomes information by making a difference. Clearly each alone is--for the mind and perception--a non-entity, a non-being. An unknowable, a Ding an sich, a sound of one hand clapping.”(p.*)
Ecologist Tim Allen puts it this way: “All our evidence [of external reality] deals with transactions…entities have meaning only in encounters… The only constants are functions – exchanges as Heraclitus said, connections as E. Mach expressed it. Nothing exists by itself or in itself. Everything exists through reciprocity, Wechselwirhung.” [Boodin 1943]
ianua = Latin for door…in Koestler’s (1967) Ghost in the Machine. Janus was the Roman “god of all biological entities.” “the entity has a duality in that it looks inward…and outward…it is at once a whole and a part.” Keostler calls these ‘holons’ with “a doorway between the * of the structure, and the rest of the universe.”(p.9) “The doorway may be stretched or moved. Perhaps the analogy of a lens that is continuously adjustable…”(p.9)
[3] (Charmides, n.d.)
[4] See Plato’s sun and good in Introductory Thoughts.
[5] It is important to note that, while the concept of synthesis has been largely ignored by our contemporary methods of knowing (though it is one of the components in Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives), the process of synthesis has not been neglected altogether in the history of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, for one, in his Critique of Pure Reason, emphasized that understanding depends upon this intuitive activity, without which no real knowledge would be possible. “Pure synthesis, represented generally, gives us the pure conception of the understanding.” He added that, “by this pure synthesis, I mean that which rests upon a basis of a priori synthetical unity,” that is, universal and necessary knowledge, as distinct from a posteriori, which involves contingent and particular knowledge.(Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Bohn’s Philosophical Library, trans. By J.M.D. Meiklejohn, Henry. G. Bohn: London,, p.63) “By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting together different representations, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge.”(Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: concise text in a new, faithful, terminologically improved translation exhibiting the structure of Kant's argument in thesis and proof. Scientia, 1982. p.37) Kant emphasized that it is in this way that the mind itself makes a transcendental contribution to its knowledge (an idea that influenced Einstein (Issacson, Walter. “Einstein: His Life and Universe.” p.20)). That is, the subject supplies the laws (which exist objectively but are applied subjectively) by which the understanding of objects is possible. That is, the mind does not merely perceive the world as it is, but filters what it sees and hears and synthesizes information about perceptions of the world, giving order to knowledge (which amounted to a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy). In this, Kant initiated a paradigm shift that put the subject at the center of inquiry, such that the objective world is only understood by the active function of the mind that constitutes understanding by constructed schema. However, in order for the ultimate synthesis to be objective, it must connect a posteriori with a priori knowledge. In other words, it is not enough for a perceiving subject to connect two a posteriori intuitions, for this could amount to a subjective distortion of reality. In order for knowledge of reality to be objective, and thus hold good for all people in all times, the subject must connect its particular (a posteriori) knowledge with the universal (a priori) knowledge. As Aristotle puts it, the learner must move from what is less knowable to what is more knowable.
[6] Studying Einstein, for instance, we learn that different observers perceive things differently because of the time it takes light to travel from the object to the observer. The motion of either the object or the observer changes how each perceives the same reality differently. This is explained in the theory of Special Relativity. In the theory of General Relativity it is shown that this is not only a matter of changing appearances, but an actual effects, such that objects (mass) in motion actually bend light (energy), such that two different observers – one in motion relative to the other, who is at rest – will experience the effects of time and space differently. In fact, one will grow old sitting still while the other will stay young traveling at the speed of light. Add to this the quantum effect (whereby seemingly objective matter turns out to react to the observers subjective expectations), and we have very strong philosophical and empirical evidence that mind and world are not independent of one another. In fact, they work together in such a way that what is is in fact, both subject and object. Add to these modern scientific discoveries the ancient dialectic insight about how our points of view interact, and we can ‘see’ these relationships more clearly, and in a way that illuminates, not only how the humans mind works, but the full scope of our individual human potentials, were we to take it more seriously in our educational purposes. And for this reason, among others, it behooves us to understand this interaction better.
[7] There is a theory from the biological sciences called ‘hierarchy’ or ‘systems theory’ that helps makes sense of this. "[C]omplexity,” writes Tim Allen, “…is a function of the way the observer looks at the system. Hierarchy theory is a form of general systems theory, and that body of theory is emphatic in its inclusion of the observer in the system. . . The form of the data, whatever they are, are always a reflection of the restrictions imposed on the observer and the choices he makes…. Observation is the stock in trade of science and the very act of observing necessarily employs a point of view."(p.*) (*put Heisenberg) What’s more, if the subject is aware of being observed, this might have an interference effect.
It stands to reason that any object of knowledge can be seen from any of many – even infinite – points of view, and that the whole truth about anything requires all perspectives be considered, or at least as many as are available to us. For just because no one happens to be looking from a given perspective at any given moment in time does not change that the perspective itself continues to exist, and could be known by anyone who takes that view. We naturally see our own point of view quite well, but its what’s in our blind spot that we most need to consider. Reality then is simply not knowable, except in this nonlinear way, as Socrates would say, “all things considered.” Since all points of view exist at all times, understanding compels us to attend to as many points of view as we possibly can – most especially the one held by the person we happen to be arguing with. For while we all know our own point of view perfectly well, it’s what we don’t see that our partner in discussion can probably teach us best. It is therefore in dialogue that we come to learn more of the whole truth of any matter, And the point of arguing is not winning, then, but understanding – and mutual understanding at that.
One might imagine an ancient sage tossing his sandal into the center of the circle to make this point. It would become immediately apparent to all who consider it that this single object nonetheless looks quite dissimilar from different points of view. And it is easy enough to see that this is true with regard to almost any object of our knowledge. Again, we are like the blind men of ancient lore, who each perceives and describes an elephant as something vastly different, e.g. a tree trunk, a wall, a snake, etc. The whole truth about the elephant includes all of these, and it is in the interest of each to consider the perspective offered by all the others.
As Socrates puts it, "the genuine lover of knowledge cannot fail, from his youth up, to strive after the whole of truth."(191)
Considering that we all have different points of origin, different experiences come of living different lives and following different paths, it naturally follows that we all see the same world, and every object of knowledge in it, from different points of view. This does not entail (as some relativists might conclude) that we all see a different world, a different truth, or that our diverse eclectic perspectives are somehow irreconcilable. On the contrary, as we’ve said, just as two eyes add depth to the vision of only one, so the integration of different perspectives and voices adds depth to our understanding of the objects of our knowledge.
Thus, the whole truth about anything will be an ideal we approach only by gradual inclusion of diverse points of view. And whether the object of our knowledge are as concrete as a sandal or as abstract as our conceptions of justice, beauty, love, or god -- none of us defines the truth about such things by virtue of any limited or privileged view.
This is a conception that should be familiar to those of us living in a digital age, who should be able to conceive of say, Neo suspended in midair in the Matrix, which we can view full circle and imagine ourselves moving freely around it. Dialectic thinking is not unlike this kind of flexible eclecticity, except that it calls upon us to practice this stretching of the mind at all times, in all discussions, with all the objects of our mutual knowledge – abstract as well as concrete, metaphysical as well as physical. This nonlinearity of reality compels us to recognize that, in principle, all of these perspectives do exist, and continue to exist, whether we pay attention to them or not, and to admit that any limited point of view, especially one that does not recognize any others as valid, cannot make any claims to ‘knowledge’ of that about which it speaks, the whole truth of which involves so much more and cumulative perspective than any one or few points of view can provide. The lenses through which we view the world and the concepts with which we frame our knowledge are all relative to this experience through which we have learned it. And still, anyone with an aim to seeing the truth has an interest in seeing more than just his or her own limited view.
We see this collective dynamic at work today in what Al Gore calls “the unbelievably rapid explosion of ‘wikis,’ most prominently Wikipedia. Wikis are Web sites that compile public information about particular areas of knowledge… The idea behind wikis is that, in general, people as a group know more than any one individual. Anyone is allowed to contribute information to a wiki,” and thus it “operates according to a meritocracy of ideas”(Gore, Assault on Reason, p. 264-265) that “has always been the beating heart of democratic theory.”(p.75) For “when ideas rise or fall according to merit, reason tends to drive us toward decisions that reflect the best available wisdom of the group as a whole.”(Gore, p.75).
So it follows that, as Socrates says, while every person is entitled to their opinion, not every opinion is equal to every other – if only because some people have simply thought things through better than others. In fact, there are no privileged perspectives, but there are those that have gone through this dialectic learning process better than others. And this is the reason we should distinguish the ‘smart’ from the ‘wise’, and look to the latter for direction – because they have better considered the whole truth of most matters. Here again, there are different senses of the word intelligence, and some are simply closer to the essence of the matter.
As we were saying earlier, Hegel is often credited with developing this ancient dialectic method beyond what the ancients did, and in a way that is fruitful for our purposes.[1] He presented it as a three-fold process by which the mind advances through stages of understanding. It begins by developing a thesis, which gives rise to a contradicting and negating reaction, or antithesis, and in the ‘winnowing and sifting’ between them there arises a resolution in the form of a synthesis. What makes this process self reinforcing is that in the synthesis, there is contained a new thesis, and so a new antithesis comes forth, and thus there is ultimately a new synthesis…and so on, and so forth, upward as the mind ascends from ignorance to understanding.
Toward a better understanding of this dialectic conception of the mind, our thought experiment addresses the ubiquitous – and potentially fortuitous – ‘problem’ that we all see the same world differently, which accounts for much of the relentless and deep-seated conflict that is becoming increasingly ferocious in our world.
What the ancients understood (better than we seem to) is that, properly understood, the complementarity is not only a method of education, but a method of conflict resolution, for the natural diversity of our perspectives is a condition that could prevent conflict from ever beginning, and in fact, enrich our mutual understanding instead. Instead of encouraging arguing to win battles over points of view, such as we do in this world that does not recognize nonlinear or dialectic thinking, which only makes agreement and mutual understanding difficult at best, and at worst, keeps us in what a kind of perpetual war. For this reason alone, it deserves more thorough examination than it gets in our contemporary thought.
Whatever scale of interaction we explore, we are plagued by the misunderstandings that invariably arise by our failure to think things through in full consideration of the points of view of others – most especially when it comes to perceiving our own actions from the receiving end.
Better understood though, dialectic thinking can be seen to be, at heart, both a method of education and a method of conflict resolution - useful to quell both the conflict between us and the conflict within us over what is true. Rather than win arguments, it could inspire us to want to argue purely for the fun of learning from one another, and from the world at large.
So it seems worth summarizing the logic that leads invariably to the conclusion that there is something meaningfully called the whole truth, and that this is in fact, the only truth worth seeking. What’s more, that dialectic thinking (intrapersonal) and deliberative dialogue (interpersonal) is not only the most direct, but quite possibly the only way to true intelligence, that is, to wisdom. And if such a thing is possible – as the ancients believed it to be – then it compels our thoughtful and cooperative attention, for our own sake, for we could be missing much by ignoring this rather astonishing potential.
Consider what we call reality, and our knowledge about it. We tend to assume we know what is ‘real’…but in the course of the learning process that is life, the question arises time and again, do we? Is it real if we can touch it? If we can see it? If we can conceptualize it? The whole truth about reality calls for a more thorough conceptualization than we have given it, for things are not as “clear and distinct” as Rene Descartes assumed. What, in truth, does it mean to know something? And what does our knowledge tell us about what is real?
The Whole Mind Seeking the Whole Truth: Subject & Object Complementarity
Any object of our knowledge exists in many potential forms, in more or less concrete or abstract senses, and the surface itself is created by the focus of attention, that is, the subjective focus of the mind that is observing it.
Take a book for example: it is an object, in a certain sense, but when we talk about ‘a book’, we aren’t talking merely about it’s physical form, for there is so much more to it:
"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network….the unity of the book, even in the sense of a group of relations, cannot be regarded as identical in each case. The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse."(Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge?*)
Thus we see how much the objective world does not exist as objects per se, but has degrees of substance. Rather we make ‘objects’ out of the world by using our subjective minds to draw boundaries around ‘things’. Something needs only have enough surface, that is, enough difference from its background, to attract our notice in order to qualify as an object of our study. Like books, most of the objects of our knowledge are not all merely concrete and objectifiable -- they exist in different senses, rather somewhere in between the extremes of concrete and abstract.
There are many different ways to discuss this interaction between the objective and subjective worlds, many of which lead us to the conclusion that the subjective observer defines the ‘surface’ of what he perceives such that what we see depends in large part on what we look for, and the background against which we see it. [2]
Logically, the whole truth about any given object of our knowledge would have to include all these relevant perspectives, but we often settle in our ways of knowing for what is most obvious. Thus, we tend to study the mere parts without seeing their relation to the whole, or the outer surfaces without seeing the inner depth.
Socrates observed in the 5th century BCE that this unnecessarily limited, i.e. reductionist, way of knowing was already taking hold.[3] But if we were to have taken his advice, we would instead recognize that there is an intersection where the subjective mind meets the objective world, and this is where the concepts of knowledge and intelligence begin to take on meaning.
By this logic, it stands to reason that the objects of the world exist not merely in physical form, but on a continuum that stretches from the concrete to the abstract, from the physical to the metaphysical,[4] depending on the degree of substance they entail. Ideas, for instance, like numbers and words, are as real as rocks, they are just more abstract. So, for the sake of seeing the implications of this, picture that continuum on which the objects of our knowledge exist, a continuum that ranges from one extreme that includes the merely concrete/physical/visible, to the other extreme that includes the purely abstract/psychological/invisible.
Consider Figure A, which represents the continuum of objective matter.
To complicate matters further, not only do the objects of our knowledge have various degrees of substance in this way, but we can also look at those various objects in different ways. For instance, the mind has the power to analyze the various objects of our knowledge (looking close up and with ever finer resolution, breaking them up into their constituent parts). Or, by a matter of degree, it has the power to synthesize them (to step back to see their interconnections and relationships with other things). Analysis is fairly ubiquitous in our world and scientific method, but the unifying power of synthesis goes largely unnoticed in our most widely used methods of knowing. So this may be a concept from which we still have much to learn.[5]
Consider Figure B, which represents the intersection of the subjective and objective aspects of reality -- that is, where mind meets world. See Figure B.
Interesting things happen at that point where mind meets world, beginning with how the different functions of the mind tend to reveal themselves. And we can then see that the very least that shows itself to exist is not merely object and subject, but a complex interaction between the two, which compels us to rethink much that we thought we knew about various ways of knowing and the relationship of mind to world.[6]
Consider, for instance, what is it that the mind is doing when it is analyzing the concrete world, if not science? And when we are analyzing the abstract world – if not math and language? And when we synthesize the concrete world, are we not doing ecology, or psychology, or various forms of social sciences, depending on the objects of our study? And when we synthesize the abstract world, we are doing something we might call mysticism, or maybe music, or various forms of art would also fall into this category. All these different ways of knowing are just different aspects of the whole truth of any matter. And a full intelligence of any of them would require a better understanding of all the rest.
In viewing the world this way, we can also account for how the mind has capacities for gathering knowledge by way of the senses (concrete/analysis), intellect (abstract/analysis), intuition (abstract/synthesis), and emotion (concrete/synthesis).
“It’s as if all lines of discourse converge on a common center.” (Plato’s Republic)
So it stands to reason then, as the ancients tried to teach us, that the mind is always in need of balance, to see the opposing point of view. As Aristotle and Mill argue, finding the whole truth by way of dialogue in any given matter is going to involve a process of reconciling, which is to say, finding the balance between complementary perspectives.
When Neils Bohr introduced his principle of complementarity in 1928, he called it, “the oneness of the observer and the observed,” and “the undivided wholeness of the entire universe.” He held it to be “reflective of the need for understanding mutually exclusive opposites as parts of a whole in every discipline” (Jones, 320-322) “What is needed,” he said, “is for each person to be able to hold several points of view, in a sort of active suspension, while treating the ideas of others with something of the care and attention that are given to his or her own… In this way it may be possible to hold a number of different approaches together in mind with almost equal energy and interest. In this way an internal free dialogue is begun which can lead on to a more open external dialogue” (p.87)
The fact that any object of knowledge might be viewed from different outside-looking-in perspectives helps bring home the complexity of even objective matter.
But the real complication comes in when the object of our knowledge is also a subject – that is, a living and even perceiving being. If the object we seek to know is itself conscious, with a mind of it’s own, then no amount of outside-looking-in views will suffice, and we must learn to perceive living objects from their own point of view, from inside-looking-out. Looking at the world only helps us understand reality as objects, not as subjects. No amount of outside-looking-in perspective will suffice to constitute the whole truth of a subject, which has its own inside-looking-out point of view. If the object of our inquiry is itself alive, perceptive, conscious, then even an infinity of outside-looking-in points of view is not be enough to give us full knowledge of it. It ‘knows itself’ in a way that no number of outside looking in perspectives, by themselves, can capture.
Likewise, for every point of view, there are also an infinite number of points of focus, near or far. Which helps to illustrate that how we look at something matters as much as what we are looking at…all of which makes for an infinitely complex ‘reality’ – that each mind will nonetheless perceive it uniquely, with infinitely complex individuality.
Within each individual, in every mind, there is this intersection where attention meets the world. And that point where attention focuses at the cutting edge of time is nested within a complex system of peripheral vision.
As Paulo Friere put it, “Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.”(Pedagogy, p. 22)
All of which gives substance to a conception of the whole truth as a meaningful ideal for us to aspire to in relationships, in politics, in science, and especially education, even as it will remain, in principle, forever out of reach.
The ancients tried to teach us that the only truth worth pursuing is the whole truth. So if this is our goal, then it is imperative that we go about our learning cumulatively, taking seriously this infinity of points of view, and continually stretching our minds to take as many views as possible. Only by gathering multiple perspectives do we gain depth of understanding.
And it is the person who is best able to see from as many points of view as possible who has a claim to be the wisest, although the truly wise remain humble enough to know how much they still and always have left to learn.
Since no one ever completely understands anything, the goal of dialectic education could never be to reach full and complete understanding of the whole truth about anything, let alone everything, since there is simply no end to this process. As Socrates might say, while the perfect person would be all people put together, not only is it not possible for anyone to be perfect, but not even desirable. For continual learning is among the great joys of life, we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good, as they say. The recognition of how the mind, in a sense, grows by ever inclusive perspectives leaves us with the highly desirable process of learning. We might call this skill eclectic empathy, that is, stretching the mind to see from ever expanding and dialectic points of view, which would bring our higher and healthier human purposes back to our educational endeavors.
The impossibility of complete knowledge should not discourage our learning and moving toward the development of individual excellence of mind, for all of us approach our own highest potentials by incremental approximation.
This model reminds us that everyone has much to learn, and consequently, the challenge for all is to learn and teach our young to both listen and share their own perspective, for everyone is a teacher, just as everyone is a student.
But as we’ve seen, reductionist science does not consider anything ‘real’ that it cannot objectify, that is, cannot view exclusively from outside-looking-in, which unfortunately excludes many subjects worth knowing, including consciousness, love, and the whole truth about anything living. Still, it’s an indisputable fact is that not all substance is dead matter, and we cannot claim to know living subjects exclusively from outside looking in. So while we are fond of following a method of science based on our love of physics (physics envy, * calls it), we would be wise to use a method based rather on living systems. This way of understanding the world allows for us to look not simply at the world out there, but from the world in here, and in everyone. It calls for us to use empathy along with observation, and employ the elasticity of our imagination, in order to understand what is really going on in the subject/object systems we observe.[7] And if a better understanding the whole truth is our goal, then we must learn to perceive living objects from their own point of view, that is, to consider our objects as subjects, from-inside-looking-out.
Socrates made the dialectic mind and method his object of study, and in so doing, would have us integrate what we call the scientific and the Socratic methods into a conception of Socratic science, the goal of which would be to integrate the subjective and objective aspects of reality into something always approaching, albeit never quite reaching, the whole of truth.
“The answer,” physicist David Bohm says, “does not lie in the accumulation of more and more knowledge. What is needed is wisdom.”(p.4) What is needed is “a creative dialogue between different points of view.”(p.87)
It follows from this model then, that while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not every opinion is as good as every other. As we’ve made clear, there are no privileged perspectives, but there are in fact those that have gone through the learning process better than most others, those who have gathered ever more points of view and thus achieved more depth of understanding. And it is worth our while to take such voices seriously. In a certain sense, Protagoras was right, “Man is the measure.” But some are better at measuring than others.
Ironically, it is intellectual humility, perspective, empathy, curiosity, among other learning skills, that become the necessary tools for one who wishes to achieve excellence in learning, that is, true intelligence.
Consider Figure C:
When viewed in their dialectic/complementary relationships to one another, this is how the voices of philosophy might arrange themselves.
A Lesson in Humility, Empathy & Curiosity
There is a lesson in humility here, of course, because if anything that can be known can be viewed from an infinite number of points of view (including, if it is alive, inside-looking-out), then what does it mean to talk of 'the truth'?
Seeing this, it may not be as fruitful to ask where any particular thinker or culture fits on this ways of knowing map, for ideally, those who are well developed will be all over it. But it is very fruitful to ask where various disciplines fall, for these are not generally all over the map (there are exceptions,) but rather quite specific in terms of the subject matter they focus on and the perspective they take. We can, for instance, organize the sciences in terms of their degrees abstract matters, just as we can do this for others areas of study.
[1] This model is often attributed to Hegel, but he himself never used that specific termimology. Hegel attributed this formulation to Kant. But in fact it appears to have been used first by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and others, including Fitsche, popularized it. The dialectic was actually stated in the form by (The Accessible Hegel. Michael Allen Fox. Prometheus Books. 2005. p.43. Also see Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), secs. 50, 51, p.29. 30.)
[2] Douglas Hofstadter put it this way in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Godel, Escher, and Bach, showing that “all things in all of time and space are inextricably connected with one another. Any divisions, classifications, or organizations discovered in the universe are relatively arbitrary. The world is a complex, continuous, single event.” (p.*) Alan Watts, in his book The Way of Zen, agrees that "a doctrine of relativity…[shows] that all things are without 'self-nature' (svabhava) or independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself -- no thing, no fact, no being, no event--and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped. For what is singled out exists only in relation to its own opposite, since what is is defined by what is not…"(p.* Alan Watts, Way of Zen) Gregory Bateson argues that the idea of surface leads inevitably to the reality of paradox: "[I]t takes at least two somethings to create a difference. . . i.e., information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be immanent in their mutual relationship; . . . There is a profound and unanswerable question about the nature of those 'at least two' things that between them generate the difference which becomes information by making a difference. Clearly each alone is--for the mind and perception--a non-entity, a non-being. An unknowable, a Ding an sich, a sound of one hand clapping.”(p.*)
Ecologist Tim Allen puts it this way: “All our evidence [of external reality] deals with transactions…entities have meaning only in encounters… The only constants are functions – exchanges as Heraclitus said, connections as E. Mach expressed it. Nothing exists by itself or in itself. Everything exists through reciprocity, Wechselwirhung.” [Boodin 1943]
ianua = Latin for door…in Koestler’s (1967) Ghost in the Machine. Janus was the Roman “god of all biological entities.” “the entity has a duality in that it looks inward…and outward…it is at once a whole and a part.” Keostler calls these ‘holons’ with “a doorway between the * of the structure, and the rest of the universe.”(p.9) “The doorway may be stretched or moved. Perhaps the analogy of a lens that is continuously adjustable…”(p.9)
[3] (Charmides, n.d.)
[4] See Plato’s sun and good in Introductory Thoughts.
[5] It is important to note that, while the concept of synthesis has been largely ignored by our contemporary methods of knowing (though it is one of the components in Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives), the process of synthesis has not been neglected altogether in the history of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, for one, in his Critique of Pure Reason, emphasized that understanding depends upon this intuitive activity, without which no real knowledge would be possible. “Pure synthesis, represented generally, gives us the pure conception of the understanding.” He added that, “by this pure synthesis, I mean that which rests upon a basis of a priori synthetical unity,” that is, universal and necessary knowledge, as distinct from a posteriori, which involves contingent and particular knowledge.(Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Bohn’s Philosophical Library, trans. By J.M.D. Meiklejohn, Henry. G. Bohn: London,, p.63) “By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting together different representations, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge.”(Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: concise text in a new, faithful, terminologically improved translation exhibiting the structure of Kant's argument in thesis and proof. Scientia, 1982. p.37) Kant emphasized that it is in this way that the mind itself makes a transcendental contribution to its knowledge (an idea that influenced Einstein (Issacson, Walter. “Einstein: His Life and Universe.” p.20)). That is, the subject supplies the laws (which exist objectively but are applied subjectively) by which the understanding of objects is possible. That is, the mind does not merely perceive the world as it is, but filters what it sees and hears and synthesizes information about perceptions of the world, giving order to knowledge (which amounted to a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy). In this, Kant initiated a paradigm shift that put the subject at the center of inquiry, such that the objective world is only understood by the active function of the mind that constitutes understanding by constructed schema. However, in order for the ultimate synthesis to be objective, it must connect a posteriori with a priori knowledge. In other words, it is not enough for a perceiving subject to connect two a posteriori intuitions, for this could amount to a subjective distortion of reality. In order for knowledge of reality to be objective, and thus hold good for all people in all times, the subject must connect its particular (a posteriori) knowledge with the universal (a priori) knowledge. As Aristotle puts it, the learner must move from what is less knowable to what is more knowable.
[6] Studying Einstein, for instance, we learn that different observers perceive things differently because of the time it takes light to travel from the object to the observer. The motion of either the object or the observer changes how each perceives the same reality differently. This is explained in the theory of Special Relativity. In the theory of General Relativity it is shown that this is not only a matter of changing appearances, but an actual effects, such that objects (mass) in motion actually bend light (energy), such that two different observers – one in motion relative to the other, who is at rest – will experience the effects of time and space differently. In fact, one will grow old sitting still while the other will stay young traveling at the speed of light. Add to this the quantum effect (whereby seemingly objective matter turns out to react to the observers subjective expectations), and we have very strong philosophical and empirical evidence that mind and world are not independent of one another. In fact, they work together in such a way that what is is in fact, both subject and object. Add to these modern scientific discoveries the ancient dialectic insight about how our points of view interact, and we can ‘see’ these relationships more clearly, and in a way that illuminates, not only how the humans mind works, but the full scope of our individual human potentials, were we to take it more seriously in our educational purposes. And for this reason, among others, it behooves us to understand this interaction better.
[7] There is a theory from the biological sciences called ‘hierarchy’ or ‘systems theory’ that helps makes sense of this. "[C]omplexity,” writes Tim Allen, “…is a function of the way the observer looks at the system. Hierarchy theory is a form of general systems theory, and that body of theory is emphatic in its inclusion of the observer in the system. . . The form of the data, whatever they are, are always a reflection of the restrictions imposed on the observer and the choices he makes…. Observation is the stock in trade of science and the very act of observing necessarily employs a point of view."(p.*) (*put Heisenberg) What’s more, if the subject is aware of being observed, this might have an interference effect.