The Mind's Eye and the Many-Sidedness of Knowledge
So we can see that wisdom comes from every direction.
One April night in 1986, I had a dream that changed the way I saw the world. I was working on a paper for the Integrated Liberal Studies course (for which I would later become a TA) that asked me to explore and explain the relationship and interconnections between disciplines. The other paper, for Ancient Philosophy, asked for a thorough analysis of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
It is amazing what can happen when two such questions come together in a mind that wants to understand what really IS. As Aristotle showed, EVERYTHING IS – our challenge is only to understand how it is all connected.
When I woke up, with this dream fresh in mind, I sat down and wrote both papers in a flash. I was happy to get an A on both of them. However, while one of them won an award for the department’s best paper that year (with high praise from a committee of interdisciplinary scholars, who expressed enthusiastic respect for the way I had “integrated the ideas of many disciplines”) the other one earned me a scolding for, essentially, coloring outside the lines. “This grade if for your raw philosophical potential,” they wrote, “but you have got to learn to narrow your topic. You will not succeed in Philosophy if we do not break you of this habit!”
The ancients had a wonderful and powerful idea that was lost in the game of telephone that has been education in subsequent centuries. Perhaps because this dialectic ideal would have democratized education in a way that many since have not wanted. Such democratic insights as dialectic thinking would proliferate would be a giant step in the direction of peace on earth, good will toward all. But for the fact that history is told by the winners, who too often end up with the power, not only to rewrite the past as they want it viewed, but to actually destroy (or simply hide) the truth in high towers and deep vaults. Such ‘winners’ seldom want to end the war between ideas and between people because they are too busy trying to win it. So democratic ideals have always been treated as antithetical to any culture that end up with an oligoi or ruling upper class, which tends to result, even when the original battle began for the purposes of the demos or many.
But this dream was of a way of living and learning that had won that war for the good of all children, not a few adults. And it illuminated for me the one thing that I could do in this life, indeed, one thing that would perhaps never get done if I don’t do it.
And I would certainly like to root these ideas in a more extensive book that covers the broad implications of all this for how we might help our young survive the challenges we’re delivering them into, I am well aware that these ideas were lost in time in part because philosophers with similar aims simply wrote too much, more than anyone has time or inclination to read.
Plato, for instance, probably came closest to full elaboration of what they called dialectic thinking in the book we call The Republic. But even more than all his other dialogues, this book was written for an under-stimulated audience, and we are anything but! Which accounts in part for why so many scholars since have simply missed his point, and then passed their erroneous interpretation on to students who themselves do not read this lengthy book, and so never have the chance to notice that Plato’s Socrates does not, in fact, assert what traditional interpretations have claimed he did!
This is a rather critical point, considering that *
And so my point in this book is to capture in as few words as possible those illuminating ideas that might enlighten our future, individually and collectively. As a teacher of philosophy and a philosophical counselor, I’m concerned with the practical benefits of ancient wisdom to improve our lives, personally and interpersonally, and ensure our ability to meet the challenges of our future.
best of the rest of ancient wisdom traditions each contributed key insights that helped render this world view “one, whole and sound.”
While much of this has become ever more apparent over time, what my dream revealed was something that remains obscure. For starting from Plato’s simplest observations about the range of objective matter (from concrete to abstract), what he termed the visible’ and ‘invisible’ - and juxtaposing this continuum with the range of subjective matters, which is to say, the mind’s capacities for different ways of knowing (from analysis to synthesis), something came to light that, to my knowledge, before or since, no on before or since has explored.
What I then called a ‘mattering map’ has become the landscape of my work (and many dreams) since. For it illuminates and orders the relationship between mind and body, as well as the relationship between parts of the mind, as well as all the various ways of knowing that we tend to treat as a hierarchy, rather than a system of complementary relationships.
It’s clear enough that, whether the objects of our knowledge are thing or living beings, or ideas, these are all equally real, some are just more abstract than others. Likewise, it’s fairly obvious that we can view any such objects in any of many ways; we can analyze them by looking ever closer and dividing them into their constituent parts, or we can look at them from a distance and see them in terms of their relationship to other things.
But it’s when we juxtapose these continuum of objective and subjective ‘matters’, that a big picture emerges that made it surprisingly clear, at least to me, how the subjective mind ‘in here’ interacts with the objective world ‘out there’ and illuminates in the process the full spectrum of how various ways of knowing are related. And apparently I wasn’t the only one who saw it, since I was awarded the highest award for the year from ILS for these ideas (more on that, but first…)
Consider a few images that might trigger this intuition:
So we can see that wisdom comes from every direction.
One April night in 1986, I had a dream that changed the way I saw the world. I was working on a paper for the Integrated Liberal Studies course (for which I would later become a TA) that asked me to explore and explain the relationship and interconnections between disciplines. The other paper, for Ancient Philosophy, asked for a thorough analysis of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
It is amazing what can happen when two such questions come together in a mind that wants to understand what really IS. As Aristotle showed, EVERYTHING IS – our challenge is only to understand how it is all connected.
When I woke up, with this dream fresh in mind, I sat down and wrote both papers in a flash. I was happy to get an A on both of them. However, while one of them won an award for the department’s best paper that year (with high praise from a committee of interdisciplinary scholars, who expressed enthusiastic respect for the way I had “integrated the ideas of many disciplines”) the other one earned me a scolding for, essentially, coloring outside the lines. “This grade if for your raw philosophical potential,” they wrote, “but you have got to learn to narrow your topic. You will not succeed in Philosophy if we do not break you of this habit!”
The ancients had a wonderful and powerful idea that was lost in the game of telephone that has been education in subsequent centuries. Perhaps because this dialectic ideal would have democratized education in a way that many since have not wanted. Such democratic insights as dialectic thinking would proliferate would be a giant step in the direction of peace on earth, good will toward all. But for the fact that history is told by the winners, who too often end up with the power, not only to rewrite the past as they want it viewed, but to actually destroy (or simply hide) the truth in high towers and deep vaults. Such ‘winners’ seldom want to end the war between ideas and between people because they are too busy trying to win it. So democratic ideals have always been treated as antithetical to any culture that end up with an oligoi or ruling upper class, which tends to result, even when the original battle began for the purposes of the demos or many.
But this dream was of a way of living and learning that had won that war for the good of all children, not a few adults. And it illuminated for me the one thing that I could do in this life, indeed, one thing that would perhaps never get done if I don’t do it.
And I would certainly like to root these ideas in a more extensive book that covers the broad implications of all this for how we might help our young survive the challenges we’re delivering them into, I am well aware that these ideas were lost in time in part because philosophers with similar aims simply wrote too much, more than anyone has time or inclination to read.
Plato, for instance, probably came closest to full elaboration of what they called dialectic thinking in the book we call The Republic. But even more than all his other dialogues, this book was written for an under-stimulated audience, and we are anything but! Which accounts in part for why so many scholars since have simply missed his point, and then passed their erroneous interpretation on to students who themselves do not read this lengthy book, and so never have the chance to notice that Plato’s Socrates does not, in fact, assert what traditional interpretations have claimed he did!
This is a rather critical point, considering that *
And so my point in this book is to capture in as few words as possible those illuminating ideas that might enlighten our future, individually and collectively. As a teacher of philosophy and a philosophical counselor, I’m concerned with the practical benefits of ancient wisdom to improve our lives, personally and interpersonally, and ensure our ability to meet the challenges of our future.
best of the rest of ancient wisdom traditions each contributed key insights that helped render this world view “one, whole and sound.”
While much of this has become ever more apparent over time, what my dream revealed was something that remains obscure. For starting from Plato’s simplest observations about the range of objective matter (from concrete to abstract), what he termed the visible’ and ‘invisible’ - and juxtaposing this continuum with the range of subjective matters, which is to say, the mind’s capacities for different ways of knowing (from analysis to synthesis), something came to light that, to my knowledge, before or since, no on before or since has explored.
What I then called a ‘mattering map’ has become the landscape of my work (and many dreams) since. For it illuminates and orders the relationship between mind and body, as well as the relationship between parts of the mind, as well as all the various ways of knowing that we tend to treat as a hierarchy, rather than a system of complementary relationships.
It’s clear enough that, whether the objects of our knowledge are thing or living beings, or ideas, these are all equally real, some are just more abstract than others. Likewise, it’s fairly obvious that we can view any such objects in any of many ways; we can analyze them by looking ever closer and dividing them into their constituent parts, or we can look at them from a distance and see them in terms of their relationship to other things.
But it’s when we juxtapose these continuum of objective and subjective ‘matters’, that a big picture emerges that made it surprisingly clear, at least to me, how the subjective mind ‘in here’ interacts with the objective world ‘out there’ and illuminates in the process the full spectrum of how various ways of knowing are related. And apparently I wasn’t the only one who saw it, since I was awarded the highest award for the year from ILS for these ideas (more on that, but first…)
Consider a few images that might trigger this intuition:
For the purposes of my book, our campfire might look something like this last image, with some thinkers closer to the center, in the hot seat, as it were. If you will look at the chapter entitled The Many-Sidednsess of Knowledge in my proposal and book, you will find more detailed explanations of what I’ll try to describe here in a more succinct summary.
Now, consider these questions: when we ask ourselves, what are we doing when we analyze the concrete world? The answer, it seems clear, is that we are doing what we call science. And when we analyze abstract objects? We are doing math and logic. And when we synthesize the abstract world? We might call this mysticism, and music, mental activities that look at the relationships between abstract objects. And when we synthesize the concrete world? Then we are doing something more like ecology, which includes all its various forms of what we call the social sciences, which are interactive, and so ecological in nature.
By asking these obvious questions of this construct (though I really think it’s more discovery than construction), we can come to see the many-sidedness of knowledge, how these ways of knowing are related, and how our familiar disciplinary perspectives are revealed to be a logically ordered system of nested relationships (rather than the hierarchy we’ve too long assumed it to be). This entails a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between different kinds of knowledge, which are just different ways of looking at the same world.
Could this help us “reconcile the inner and outer reality,” as the I Ching put it? Or perhaps represent what Einstein thought of as ‘reality in the round’? Maybe help us better understand what Neils Bohr called “the oneness of the observer and the observed” – “the undivided wholeness of the universe”?
I hope this is at least enough to show that subject and object juxtaposed in this way reveal the mind to be a comprehensive, complementary, and rather beautiful system of relationships. Taking attention to be the point of focus where mind meets world, subject meets object, and the periphery of consciousness to be the context of our focused awareness, we can better understand why we all see the same world differently, and how and why the idiosyncratic learning process proceeds by way of unique paths for each of us. For which empathy, curiosity, humility and dialogue are all necessary. And that this interactive, and (I would argue) objective ordering of the logical relationships between different ways of knowing offers us a new (or very old) way of thinking and learning as an always limited, but organic process of ever growing understanding that expands by stretching to take in ever more perspective.
This holistic insight captures the ancient’s affinity for the whole truth. And again, this gives substance to a conception of the whole truth as a meaningful ideal to aspire to even as it will remain, in principle, forever out of reach. We are never finished learning, for no matter how much we know, there will always be more to discover, to understand better, and to ‘tether’ as Socrates said, to everything else that we have learned. The more distance we can get, the more interconnections we can see, and likewise, the deeper we look into anything, the more detail opens ever outward to us, showing the fractal nature of knowledge itself. And at the very least, this conception of dialectic thinking illuminates not only how and why the right and left brain function as they do, but also could help alleviate our bias toward left-brain analytic thinking in our educational methods. This could also shed light on the need for balance between them and emphasize the value of those neglected capacities for right-brain creative thinking, if we wish them to work together as well as they might.
I would propose that this is what the ancient Greeks tried to teach us in all their efforts to illuminate the meaning of dialectic thinking. And if we were to take all this seriously, we might actually learn to use the whole mind for all it’s worth, to grow our understanding by developing the mind’s eye as a comprehending subject, understand it as an instrument that can be tuned, focused, refined and enhanced in its functionality.
And the more questions we ask of this model, the more detail is revealed as the finer distinctions between the sub-disciplines of these ways of knowing emerge – and might look something like this (each nested within the next):
We can also see from all this how each quadrant entails a different capacity of the mind (i.e. sense, intellect, intuition, emotion), and can surmise that a well-functioning mind might achieve equilibrium in the dynamic between these faculties, some of which are widely undervalued in our age, while others are unduly overvalued – rendering most well-trained minds woefully one-sided and imbalanced. Intellect, for instance, is certainly a valuable capacity, but focusing on this at the expense of intuition creates what is arguably an unhealthy bias toward analytic thinking that can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Likewise, academic emphasis on the importance of math and science undervalues what creative capacities may have to offer – our divine capacity to ee the connections between things.
In this way, dialectic understanding could help alleviate some of our bias toward analytic left-brain thinking about physical and tangible matters in our educational methods, and help shed light on the need for balance and the value of creative right-brain thinking about interconnected relationships and processes. And perhaps this is most important because lacking this balance, the mind, like any system with feedback out of whack, it’s likely to spin out of control and perhaps crash. So it might be in our interest to understand this dynamic better.
This holistic understanding of the multifunctional mind might also help us understand the value of what we think of as ‘mood swings.’ Perhaps they occur naturally as ones psychological energy flows from intellect to emotion, from sense to intuition, and back around. And they can become extremely unhealthy when out of balance. Understanding this dynamic better might help us understand how energy flows through all the parts of the mind. Failing to recognize that energy has to go somewhere and taking no responsibility for helping to direct that energy toward constructive learning and creative behaviors, we have no compunction about medicating what we take to be illnesses, just for the sake of keeping them under control of institutionalized rules. The Taoists would say we seriously underestimate how much the mind needs spontaneity and self-direction, we label perfectly healthy behaviors as disabilities, creating negative self-perceptions that destroy confidence and tend to stick for a lifetime. Few teachers start with this intention, probably, but in schools-as-we-know-them, “the overriding concern is to stay in charge.” As Alfie Kohn shows, the ‘hidden curriculum’ in our schools is behavioral, and the overriding purpose is more often control of behavior then the learning itself. “The implicit model is that of a zero-sum game: ‘If I’m not in control, the student has beat me.’ The point is not to so solve problems and to learn together but to win a power struggle.”(164)
Perhaps you share my frustration with the practice of drugging children to reduce their impulses, to keep them still and quite. In my experience teaching philosophy, where so many of them come to finally figure out who they are, the result of this is often that they grow up with little or no self-control, and often believe their only intelligence comes out of a bottle. And not infrequently, they’d rather die than live this way.
A recent article makes clear what many have long sensed. The use of pharmaceuticals to treat ADHD, NEK, President: Otfried Höffe said, "amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development.”(Inventor of ADHD’s Deathbed Confession: ADHD is a Fictitious Disease,” by Mortiz Nestor, in Current Concerns) There is a moral imperative to free young minds from such constraints that serve others ends in something other than the good of the child (i.e. the good of the institution.) It’s just wrong to limit their potential unnecessarily – free them to listen to and follow that Heisenberg calls the “impulse of the soul.”
All of which reveals the fractal nature of the mind and of knowledge itself, and explains why it is (as Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall research (on spontaneous learning by internet access in slums) that the mind is best understood as a self-organizing system and that learning is an emergent phenomena. This also shows why we learn best by way of minimally evasive educational methods, as Mitra argues. As Socrates said, “There should be no element of slavery in learning…enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So let your children’s learning take the form of play, and then you will see what they are good at!”
As Plato suggests, the laws of the psyche parallels the laws of the physical world - they are related in precisely the same way that the moral law of karma is analogous to the physical law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But we have been limited by our habitual reductionist methods for too long, since they obscure the ecological laws of nature, which have yet to capture the popular imagination.
For it stands to reason by these insights that there are some things that can never be perceived from outside looking in (e.g. gravity, love, consciousness, etc.) We simply cannot get outside of them so to perceive the perimeters, that is, to see them as ‘objective’ in the narrow sense we tend to think of it, i.e. as if everything ‘real’ is an actual object. These processes are certainly objectively real, in the sense that they exist, with or without us, but not in the sense that we can perceive or study them from outside in. Indeed, we can only truly understand them from inside out.
These are not static and mechanical, but dynamic and organic processes and relationships that we are part of and which we can only come to understand in terms of the flow of energy and reciprocal feedback relationships and communication processes, as the Taoists would recommend. As it is, we treat thought as if it’s a result of chemical processes, when we might recognize that these chemical processes are as much a result of our thought – cause and effect goes both ways.
This is, I think, the real and potentially revolutionary value of all all this - not just to help us understand the mind as a comprehensive object, from outside-looking-in, but to help us to understand it as a comprehending subject that helps creates its reality from inside-looking-out. When the purpose is understanding the individual’s learning journey, and helping to guide learning by question and answer toward ever more of the whole truth of every matter.
Whereas our persistent bias toward reductionist, materialist, and mechanical methods has us looking at the mind, and everything else for that matter, as seen from outside in, as if it were merely a object, made up of parts that themselves can be objectified by this limited method of knowing. By contrast, these ancient tools of practical wisdom offer a holistic and organic way of understanding the mind, one that could help us learn to look from and see through it, rather than to look at the brain as if it were a mere physical object to be analyzed from outside looking in.
Only then will we come to understand how mind participates in the outer world in such a way that it actually creates reality. Only then will we begin to understand how learning advances by way of consciousness participating in the outer world (as quantum theory tried to show us, and so many today oversimplify as what they are calling the ‘law of attraction’).
If we were to take all this seriously, we might actually awaken our sleeping creative capacities and enable the growth of consciousness by way of this dialectic tool. And in the process, answer the question – can we plant the seeds of an intrinsic goods economy by way of healthy teaching and learning relationships?
In this way, dialectic understanding could help alleviate some of our bias toward analytic left-brain thinking about physical and tangible matters in our educational methods, and help shed light on the need for balance and the value of creative right-brain thinking about interconnected relationships and processes. And perhaps this is most important because lacking this balance, the mind, like any system with feedback out of whack, it’s likely to spin out of control and perhaps crash. So it might be in our interest to understand this dynamic better.
This holistic understanding of the multifunctional mind might also help us understand the value of what we think of as ‘mood swings.’ Perhaps they occur naturally as ones psychological energy flows from intellect to emotion, from sense to intuition, and back around. And they can become extremely unhealthy when out of balance. Understanding this dynamic better might help us understand how energy flows through all the parts of the mind. Failing to recognize that energy has to go somewhere and taking no responsibility for helping to direct that energy toward constructive learning and creative behaviors, we have no compunction about medicating what we take to be illnesses, just for the sake of keeping them under control of institutionalized rules. The Taoists would say we seriously underestimate how much the mind needs spontaneity and self-direction, we label perfectly healthy behaviors as disabilities, creating negative self-perceptions that destroy confidence and tend to stick for a lifetime. Few teachers start with this intention, probably, but in schools-as-we-know-them, “the overriding concern is to stay in charge.” As Alfie Kohn shows, the ‘hidden curriculum’ in our schools is behavioral, and the overriding purpose is more often control of behavior then the learning itself. “The implicit model is that of a zero-sum game: ‘If I’m not in control, the student has beat me.’ The point is not to so solve problems and to learn together but to win a power struggle.”(164)
Perhaps you share my frustration with the practice of drugging children to reduce their impulses, to keep them still and quite. In my experience teaching philosophy, where so many of them come to finally figure out who they are, the result of this is often that they grow up with little or no self-control, and often believe their only intelligence comes out of a bottle. And not infrequently, they’d rather die than live this way.
A recent article makes clear what many have long sensed. The use of pharmaceuticals to treat ADHD, NEK, President: Otfried Höffe said, "amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development.”(Inventor of ADHD’s Deathbed Confession: ADHD is a Fictitious Disease,” by Mortiz Nestor, in Current Concerns) There is a moral imperative to free young minds from such constraints that serve others ends in something other than the good of the child (i.e. the good of the institution.) It’s just wrong to limit their potential unnecessarily – free them to listen to and follow that Heisenberg calls the “impulse of the soul.”
All of which reveals the fractal nature of the mind and of knowledge itself, and explains why it is (as Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall research (on spontaneous learning by internet access in slums) that the mind is best understood as a self-organizing system and that learning is an emergent phenomena. This also shows why we learn best by way of minimally evasive educational methods, as Mitra argues. As Socrates said, “There should be no element of slavery in learning…enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So let your children’s learning take the form of play, and then you will see what they are good at!”
As Plato suggests, the laws of the psyche parallels the laws of the physical world - they are related in precisely the same way that the moral law of karma is analogous to the physical law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But we have been limited by our habitual reductionist methods for too long, since they obscure the ecological laws of nature, which have yet to capture the popular imagination.
For it stands to reason by these insights that there are some things that can never be perceived from outside looking in (e.g. gravity, love, consciousness, etc.) We simply cannot get outside of them so to perceive the perimeters, that is, to see them as ‘objective’ in the narrow sense we tend to think of it, i.e. as if everything ‘real’ is an actual object. These processes are certainly objectively real, in the sense that they exist, with or without us, but not in the sense that we can perceive or study them from outside in. Indeed, we can only truly understand them from inside out.
These are not static and mechanical, but dynamic and organic processes and relationships that we are part of and which we can only come to understand in terms of the flow of energy and reciprocal feedback relationships and communication processes, as the Taoists would recommend. As it is, we treat thought as if it’s a result of chemical processes, when we might recognize that these chemical processes are as much a result of our thought – cause and effect goes both ways.
This is, I think, the real and potentially revolutionary value of all all this - not just to help us understand the mind as a comprehensive object, from outside-looking-in, but to help us to understand it as a comprehending subject that helps creates its reality from inside-looking-out. When the purpose is understanding the individual’s learning journey, and helping to guide learning by question and answer toward ever more of the whole truth of every matter.
Whereas our persistent bias toward reductionist, materialist, and mechanical methods has us looking at the mind, and everything else for that matter, as seen from outside in, as if it were merely a object, made up of parts that themselves can be objectified by this limited method of knowing. By contrast, these ancient tools of practical wisdom offer a holistic and organic way of understanding the mind, one that could help us learn to look from and see through it, rather than to look at the brain as if it were a mere physical object to be analyzed from outside looking in.
Only then will we come to understand how mind participates in the outer world in such a way that it actually creates reality. Only then will we begin to understand how learning advances by way of consciousness participating in the outer world (as quantum theory tried to show us, and so many today oversimplify as what they are calling the ‘law of attraction’).
If we were to take all this seriously, we might actually awaken our sleeping creative capacities and enable the growth of consciousness by way of this dialectic tool. And in the process, answer the question – can we plant the seeds of an intrinsic goods economy by way of healthy teaching and learning relationships?