User:Robbie McClintock/2018/Kant in the Culture Factory

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Kant in the Culture Factory

Robbie McClintock

Hello,

I'm working on this essay as a contribution to a set of online worksites that prototype a Collaboratory for Liberal Learning. I hope the Collaboratory might become a way to facilitate educational thought and action digitally, independent from the existing forms and structures for educational work. I do not here want to say much about the structure or function of the Collaboratory, but rather to express some ideas exemplifying concerns relevant to it as a means for putting liberal learning into action.

According to an old saw about liberal learning, it arises through the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But that's easy to say yet difficult to do. What does pursuing knowledge for its own sake entail? Why is it difficult? What does the phrase mean? Enthused with high-minded principle, we easily find ourselves charting a path up the ever-branching academic ladder according, each usually sticking to a well-calculated ascent; coping with ever-present assessment regimes; framing research to satisfy peer review and to win grants; planning courses with an eye to student evaluations, collegial sensitivities, and administrative expectations; publishing another paper, another book, in the pursuit of tenure, promotion, fame, perhaps even fortune. We produce knowledge for many reasons other than for its own sake.

I hope the Collaboratory for Liberal Learning can become a locus of thinking and acting educationally for its own sake, without all these extrinsic motivations. For that to happen we need to finesse extrinsic motivations and act on the intrinsic purposes of education in sustained efforts. But we cannot implement such efforts according to a pre-planned blueprint; they need to emerge through recursive, adaptive activities. To act recursively, we start acting with a first approximation and a willingness to continue with successive effort with as much purposeful self-awareness as we can muster. With this idea in mind, the brief reflections that follow do not plan a course of action. Rather they may inform intentions, guiding recursive initiatives that we might take in learning liberally, for its own sake.

These reflections, mini-essays in the light of Kant, are not at this stage fully developed, nor at all exhaustive of the possibilities. Between us all, we could write many such essays in the light of many exemplars of learning liberally, from Socrates and Plato through the pantheon of greats. All could aim to stimulate thinking and acting educationally for its own sake, without extrinsic motivations -- suggestive, possibly performative, not prescriptive. They should end with a pause for wonder, perhaps too with a reflective urge for action. Here you will only find a couple preliminary attempts.

"Kant and the Public Use of Reason" explores the distinction between the private and the public use of reason he drew in writing about enlightenment. I think using reason publicly overlaps significantly with the idea of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Then, "Notes towards the Definition of Study" ventures a first-pass at a set of concepts for constructing educational experience from the raw data of life. T. S. Eliot and Kant inspire these notes, especially Kant's exploration of how persons construct experience of the external world by structuring inchoate data with an aesthetic of time and space and a logic of "the pure concepts of the understanding." And to end it, I reflect on analogies of pedagogical experience akin to Kant's analogies of experience, pedagogical characteristics that persons might be alert to as they pursue their self-formation for its own sake. Finally, as the whole paper nears ending, I enter an IOU for a discussion of "Design and Modernity," an important set of developments in which Kant had an important role that I have neither the time nor space to address here. And I follow that with the actual ending, some reflections on Wittgenstein’s famous admonition about remaining silent with which he ended the Tractatus.

I expect these and other such mini-essays to remain work in progress. Work-in-progress should become the mantra for learning liberally. Pursuing knowledge and self-formation for its own sake remains in progress until that possibility ends in death. From time to time I will interject italicized observations as place holders for further development of the text.

... in heaven, … perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.

Plato, Republic

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Kant on the Public Use of Reason

Part of Kant’s enduring relevance arises from his realism about despotic power. In his answer to the question, “What Is Enlightenment?”, he praised the rule of Frederick the Great, which permitted freedom of expression in religious matters and even some in matters political, while requiring obedience in action from his subjects. That sufficed, Kant thought, for the eventual emergence of an enlightened condition for all. Let’s do something dangerous and try to see Kant’s satisfaction with Fredrick’s despotism, not as a deficiency of democratic commitments, but as sound basis for thinking and acting educationally.

Dreams of democracy did not shape Kant’s judgment. We should perhaps follow this example, for our democracies may be more despotic than we habitually think. Without forcing the matter too much, we can observe that the age of democratic revolution marked a great divide in educational theory. Thought and practice came to dwell less on the problem of achieving autonomy, personal and collective, while living under despotic rule and took up the challenge of educating the person and the polity for democratic life.9 This shift rested on an historical materiality: principles of heredity as a means of transferring the possession of power contracted and principles of passing its possession to representatives chosen by citizens, variously defined, expanded. Call the result "democracy," but we should ask more deeply than we do whether the actual powers, as codified and exercised, have significantly changed as a result. Federalist 10 has long been a Utopian hope, for party politicians have become masterful in subverting the means of preventing the deleterious effects of faction.

With a present-day perspective, interpreters easily criticize the German Aufklärung in general and Kant in particular as excessively apolitical, capable of a brief enthusiasm for the American and French revolutions yet content throughout to follow the despotic stricture, “Obey!” Kant quite explicitly espoused this outlook in his reflections on enlightenment, praising the despotism of Frederick the Great for permitting the free expression of thought provided his subjects willingly obeyed. Is our condition so very different under the Constitution with its First Amendment? Do we not often experience the functioning of our political and economic and social systems as despotic, requiring behavior contrary to what we believe desirable and right, to which we nevertheless obey for want of a plausible alternative? True; a few emigrate to Canada, an age-old answer to despotic excess. But far more often we find ourselves in an alienated condition, pervasively subject to the exercise of power in politics, at work, and in diverse institutions with which we dissent, unreconciled, but obeying all the same. Consider simply what has happened to the legitimacy of the American Supreme Court.

For many reasons, I prefer living under our 21st-century despotisms than under those of the ancien régime, not least because I’m living here and now, not there and then. But I do not accept the democratic complacency that the established order merits our allegiance in the processes of education. These are processes through we form ourselves as humans and as humans we should realize our full, autonomous humanity, personal and collective. For doing so, Kant voiced purposes more important and challenging:

Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

Freedom to reason publicly would best sustain efforts to emerge from self-incurred minority, immaturity, a lack of autonomy, Kant asserted. Kant recognized that most people faced numerous impediments to being fully able to speak for themselves -- most women had no legal rights to do so and a hierarchical, class society pressured both many men and women to defer to voices of power. Nevertheless, Kant thought that people had the power to think and speak for themselves, but they needed strong resolve and courage to do so. In his view, a process of enlightenment would ensue as “a few independent thinkers” asserted their reason publicly, disseminating “the spirit of a rational valuing of one’s own worth and of the calling of each individual to think for himself.”3

Kant averred that "freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters” would over time have an enlightening effect, enabling more and more persons to raise themselves out of their self-incurred minority. He understood minority as an “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another,” and he thought people self-incurred it through “the lack of resolution and courage to use [their understanding] without direction from another.” Everyone had the power to think for themselves. Achieving an enlightened age in which everyone in fact did so -- a far off ideal -- required more and more examples of people thinking without direction from another, which would inspire the resolution and courage in others to do so in their turn.

We now easily fail to grasp the power Kant attributed to the public use of reason. The public use of reason meant something different from simply speaking up in the marketplace of ideas. For Kant, the public use of reason constituted one pole of an ideal-type tension with reason's private use at the opposite one. We can easily misunderstand what he meant by the private use of reason, for people exercised typical examples of it in highly public situations. As communication, both the public and the private use of reason addressed a multiplicity of recipients. But as modes of reasoning, thinking and feeling privately proceeds within some given boundaries -- those of an office, a status, a role, a persona, or an identify, which significantly shape the reasoning. All but the most privileged among us have jobs to do, and even the most privileged must defend their privileges, not simply assume them. Private uses of reason take place as persons reason within bounded expectations, whether codified or set by convention.

In Kant's time and ours, numerous private purposes, the purposes that set people apart in endless subgroups, click in as people consider and discuss matters. How often do those of us working in educational institutions shape what we say and teach according to professional, institutional, and governmental norms, expectations, and requirements? Kant would have no problem with our doing so as long as in doing so it does not contravene our considered thoughts and convictions. If we find ourselves compelled to violate those, we ought to resign our posts. But he thought one's work within a role would normally leave one free to have and express views that differed with those fit for the private spheres, which one could and should address to the public sphere, views one could and should express freely, autonomously, making use of one's own reason to “speak to the public in the strict sense, that is, the world.” An enlightening effect would follow when someone uses his own reason "as a member of a whole commonwealth, even of the society of citizens of the world, and ... in his capacity [as] a scholar who by his writings addresses a public in the proper sense of the word."

We must leave moot the question whether the public use of reason could have had the effects Kant envisioned: a progressive enlightening through the free use of public reason eventually bringing to fruition an enlightened age. Living in a despotic time, Kant wrote aspirationally. Communications developments in late 18th-century German lands were such that he could aspire, for himself and others, to speak as a member of the whole community, even of the society of citizens of the world. He was aware of difficulties, without doubt insufficiently so, but he participated, self-aware, with others in the public sphere, attempting to further enlightenment through the public use of reason. Together, over several generations, they had inspirational effects moving historical action in progressive directions. But as Habermas and others have shown, the public sphere also changed significantly, which, ignoring a heap of complications, leads to the practical question for our time.

How can intellectuals in the early 21st century aspire to the public use of reason? Many of us have thought, or think, that we use public reason in our work through institutions of education, particularly in universities and research organizations. I’ve spent much of my career acting as if that were true, as if it were a potentiality that we might bring about by acting insofar as possible in accordance with it. I’ve been around long enough to see that wish recede further and further towards implausibility. All sorts of OK things -- peer review, departmental and disciplinary organization, raising standards of competence and promoting mobility between institutions -- and lots of not-so-OK things -- external accountability regimes, the inexorable growth of overhead, mortgaging the system through student debt, over-publication and over-specialization for fear of scholarly mortality -- shuffle academic discourse into a multiplicity of private spheres. The public sphere seems shattered into an incoherent multiplicity of private spheres.

Kant believed that enlightenment required only the public use of reason in all matters. I can grasp fairly clearly what Kant meant by the private use of reason, but I have difficulty pinning down the clear meaning of the public use of reason, which he understood as "that use which someone makes of it as a scholar [as Emerson's person thinking] before the entire public of the world of readers." What did “reasoning as a scholar before the entire world of readers” entail as Kant understood it that would set it apart from the private use of reason, employing the assumptions and conventions of one or another group of readers? Both the Gelehrte, a learned person, and the Leserwelt, the world of readers, an inclusive assemblage of learned persons, were ideal-types, then difficult to approximate in realities and now probably quite impossible to realize. I think, however, implicitly through the terms, Kant was calling for a high level of detachment and generality in reasoning, a drive for Allgemeingültigkeit, universal validity but less in the logical sense and more in that of effective in all situations, generally in force. The public use of reason concerned ideas and propositions applicable not in special instances of some concern, but to all possible occurrences of it.

Let's put a question to ourselves and move on, resolving to hold the question in abeyance, awaiting further reflection, as we explore another matter in the light of Kant. The question: What relation does the use of public reason by writers and an active, inclusive audience of peers, all seeking ideas that stand up with reference to any and all instances of a matter, have to do with learning liberally?

Let's hold that question, not putting it out of mind, but rather keeping it in the periphery of our attention while we turn to a different immediate concern, namely an attempt to specify a set of concepts sufficient for generating all possible forms of educational experience. I try to do it in a Kantian spirit, but without having yet ventured to emulate Kant's systematizing drive. Additionally, I need to preface the effort with some stipulation about what I understand "educational experience" to consist in, for it departs from the understanding implicit in most contemporary discussion of education.

In order to ask in Kantian fashion -- "How is educational experience possible?" -- we need to be clear what sort of experience it involves, and I would like here to simply stipulate without trying to fully give my reasons that educational experience involves the experience of acquiring characteristics. There is no "nature versus nurture" in educational experience, for we experience what might be nature in the process only through our nurture of it. If educational experience consists in acquiring characteristics, it follows that the experiential actuality is that of the acquiring agent, the inward locus of perception and action with which the agent controls the (well or ill) the process of acquisition. This stipulation has consequences for how we should try to talk about educational experience.

For instance, most discourse about education attends to "teaching and learning" as a central concern. I think that teaching as a primary form of educational action lies outside the bounds of possible educational experience, for it is not what the teacher does as such that determines the acquiring of anything, but how the agent receives and construes the teacher's actions. Teaching is important, but secondary to the learners' actions. We need to attend to "learning and teaching," as much good learning theory does. A full understanding of educational experience should generate as Kant's critiques do, both a Lehre, a sound doctrine, a set of tenets, and a Dialektik, a clarification of deceptive appearances commonly accepted. I intend what follows as a preliminary draft of a part of a critique of educational experience that would serve a function analogous to Kant's Analytic of Concepts in the Critique of Pure Reason. Thus, it would be a part of a Lehre or doctrine of how humans construct their experience of acquiring characteristics. A full effort would include a Dialektik of educational experience showing how we displace educational agency onto the institutions, programs and practitioners of what we call "education," losing phenomenological contact with the subjective agent acquiring characteristics. The discussion that follows presupposes many fruits of such a Dialektik, but I cannot provide it here.

Notes toward the Definition of Study

Here are some definitions that may help clarify how educational experience is possible. Such experience takes place in and through an agent acquiring characteristics. I set forth the concepts with attention here neither to nuance nor amplification. I want them to achieve Allgemeingültigkeit, being discernable in any and all educational experience and effective in elucidating what the agent does in any particular educational experience. Additionally, the concepts should be effective in common ideas about education that involve matters outside the scope of possible educational experience, usually by attributing effective agency to actors external to the actual acquisition taking place.

In principle, the bare definitions should make a systematic ensemble, but I have not worked out the principles that would organize them as Kant did for his table of categories. As presented, part of the meaning of each concept arises from elsewhere in the set. Unfortunately, they must be written or read in some order. Indeed, their sequence has some meaning, but some terms ineluctably appear in a definition of another before its definition appears on the page. Hence, one must read them through, once to get the components of the set in mind; then a second time to grasp their reciprocal interactions, critically assessing each in the context of the entire set.

These definitions are epistemic, not ontic. Ontic definitions answer a What-Is question. Epistemic definitions serve to answer How-To questions. One tests epistemic definitions by using them to build up sound understandings of how phenomena take place. The purpose is not to define in some lifeless abstraction indicating what education is. What education is, is a given -- living organisms acquire characteristics in the course of their living. How do they make that possible in their life experience? The purpose is to define how we think about the process of self-formation that takes place through our experience? How do we determine what we can and should be? What follows here are general concepts for thinking about that process. We have here a preliminary table of categories in a critique of educational experience, one done in the spirit, if not syntax, of Immanuel Kant.

The Pedagogical Process

Culture

One's culture comprises all capacities, skills, and cultural characteristics, all that the agent acquires through life experience. Even biological endowments develop from inception on through a significant admixture of culture.

Education

The processes by which an agent creates and acquires culture, any and all of her particular characteristics manifest through her life.

Pedagogical Agents

Inquirer

The person who experiences education. Learner might serve as well here, especially for the acquisition of conventional information, ideas, and values. Inquirer, however, stresses generality and includes place in educational experience for all a person's acquirements and extensions through their expanding culture.

Pupil

An inquirer who assumes that the relevant domain of the mentor is its universe.

Student

An inquirer who believes that the relevant universe may exceed the domain and horizon of the mentor. (Note: the modifier "relevant" here implies that existentially a person can simultaneously be a pupil in some things and a student in others.)

Mentor

A person or persons formally or informally helping an inquirer in the acquisition of culture. Teacher might serve as well, but we need it for a more specialized meaning. Educator serves as an encomium for a mentor of high repute.

Teacher

A mentor whose domain in an educational process includes and exceeds that of the inquirer, e.g., the teacher knows the subject better than the student.

Coach

A mentor in an educational process in which the inquirer's domain includes and exceeds that of the mentor, e.g., the player can outperform the coach.

Pedagogical Space

Domain

The person's cultural resources directly involved in the educational experience taking place: the educational attainments available as grounds for the inquirer's current educational effort. Each inquirer and each mentor has a unique domain that has nevertheless morphological continuities to those of everyone else.

Universe

All possible cultural resources that an inquirer might master in the full course of her education. A person’s universe becomes manifest through the sum of her experience, waxing and waning through the life course.

Horizon

The portion of the inquirer's universe that her domain enables her to perceive, however dimly. The horizon includes what the inquirer knows, her domain, plus what she knows she does not know, the part of her universe yet outside of her domain of which she is aware.

Perspective

The portion of the inquirer's universe that the mentor's domain enables him to perceive or vice versa. Note the cross-over here: perspective involves the mentor's view of the inquirer's domain or the inquirer's view of the mentor's domain. Imperfect perspective on the part of inquirer or mentor leads to much confusion in educational experience.

Pedagogical Purpose

Objective

The particular capacities, the skills, the acquisitions that an inquirer seeks to master through an educational experience, that is, the specific culture the inquirer seeks to create or acquire in an educational experience. An inquirer can formulate an objective only about matters within her horizon.

Intention

A general aim in an educational process arising from the inquirer's sense that all specific objectives evident within his horizon do not exhaust the possibilities of his universe.

Note:

A common pedagogical difficulty arises when the perspective of the mentor leads him to define something as an objective when the horizon of the inquirer is such that she can only pursue it as an intention. Thus, classroom teachers at every level often ask questions that students don't get because they don't see the connection to the objective as they experience it.

Pedagogical Outcomes

Development

An educational process that extends the inquirer's domain further towards her horizon. Development can purposefully result from the pursuit of both objectives and intentions.

Discovery

An educational process that extends the inquirer's horizon further into his universe. Discovery can purposefully result from the pursuit of intentions, but not strictly speaking from objectives where students see work leading to a preset end. Serendipitous discovery can result from the pursuit of objectives when the unexpected happens and the inquirer responds intentionally to the possibilities it reveals over and beyond the objectives.

We need several sub-definitions because the domains of the inquirer and the mentor overlap but do not coincide. How their domains overlap distinguishes between different ways people can participate in educational processes.

We also need several sub-definitions because the objective of an educational process may refer to the pertinent domain, or beyond the domain to the broader horizon. Where the objective stands in relation to domain, horizon, and universe distinguishes between different forms of education (i.e., acculturation, training, instruction, research, study).

Education as acquiring culture.

Acculturation

Mastering available capacities, skills, and acquisitions that differ from those set by the objectives of the educational experience. The structure of classes and periods acculturates students to the

Training

An educational experience in which the objective lies within the domain of both the inquirer and the mentor, for instance when a tool or procedure is a given for both trainee and trainer, and the latter must ensure that the former masters its use. Practice makes perfect.

Instruction

An educational process in which the mentor believes that the objective lies within his domain and within the horizon of the inquirer. The instructor must impart the skills and knowledge he possesses so that the inquirer acquires them as part of his domain. Instruction can result in training or learning.

Learning

An educational process in which the inquirer believes that the objective lies within her own horizon and within the domain of the mentor. Learning can result through acculturation, training, or instruction.

Education as the creation of culture

Research

An inclusive educational process in which the inquirer pursues an objective within her horizon, without direct help from a mentor.

Study

An inclusive educational process that results as an inquirer pursues intentions, with or without operative objectives, with or without the help of a mentor.

Note:

An inquirer can engage in study during acculturation, training, learning, and research, all of which derive their teleological structure from objectives. Study is a responsiveness to intentions either in the midst of work towards objectives or as unstructured pursuit of felt intentions. Objectives point to specific goals within the horizon; intentions to unspecific possibilities within and beyond the horizon. Intentions are more general, fuzzier, and inward than objectives.

As with our reflections on Kant's ideas about the public use of reason, let's leave these "pure concepts of cultural acquisition"in this tentative, undeveloped form, suspended for subsequent improvement. Kant thought that all people constructed their phenomenal experience by construing the given raw data, situating it in a conceptual space and time and synthesizing the situated data using the pure concepts of the understanding to make synthetic a priori judgments, judgments that construed the raw data into apprehended experience.

Very careful, well-prepared, patient readers find The Critique of Pure Reason, through which Kant analyzed and presented how people constructed their phenomenal awareness, extremely difficult. But we should not lose sight of the fact that their construction of phenomenal awareness that he analyzed was something that any and every person incessantly engages in, generally quite successfully. His text is seriously esoteric, but it concerns everyday, ordinary experience, common to us all.

In the first critique, Kant addressed the linkage between his difficult analysis of the pure concepts of the understanding and the ordinary awareness of the external world that everyone seems to acquire and share. As Kant saw it, the living person starts facing a jumble of impressions -- as William James later put it, the infant, "assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion." Kant contended that for everyone and anyone, "experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions." And he observed that anyone and everyone used three types of necessary connections to construct their experience of the external world -- the persistence of substance, cause and effect, and simultaneous interaction. The beer the barman poured over there a few moments ago is the same beer in the mug in front of me (substance); raising the mug to my lips, tilting it, and swallowing has the effect of my drinking some of it (cause and effect); looking my companion in the eye as we raise our mugs and click them together reinforces a bond of camaraderie (reciprocity or community). Necessary temporal connections of persistence, temporal succession, and simultaneity are the necessary elements of these three forms of experience. Relative to lived experience, Kant arrived at his analysis of the pure concepts of the understanding in an effort to explain how the necessities inherent in the experiencing arose, accounting for the possibility of the experiences. Why bother? Because without understanding what makes experience possible, we all too easily believe in the actuality of impossible experiences, connections outside the bounds of possible experience.

In what immediately follows, I want to extend the tentative set of pure concepts of educational experience by reflecting on five experiential forms of educational experience, of acquiring culture. I will introduce these very much in the ordinary language of everyday experience. I think we can and should, in the spirit of Kant, work back from a clear understanding of what happens in acquiring culture in these ways, improving our pure concepts of cultural acquisition. Doing that, I think we can and should become cognizant with much greater confidence than at present about what sorts of apparent educational experience lies outside the bounds of possible experience. What follows may initiate such an effort, but it falls far short of fully achieving it. Beginnings, however, are necessary.

In leading to these considerations, I have concentrated on the three analogies of experience in Kant's first critique. The second and third critiques also each have an analogy of experience in them and in this section I write with the five implicit in the background. But as all five are features of ordinary experience common to all of us, I make little reference to Kant's texts. Thus, in this section, I am trying to indicate what kind of necessary connections in sensed data people make as they are acquiring culture. In doing this, I am using Kant's texts, not as sources of authority, but as heuristics, and I am rather skeptical that the five forms of educational experience that we might identify with a Kantian heuristic exhaust the possibilities. But the five are a good place to start and cover substantial ground.

Let's ask, What principles, applicable to any and all instances of study, yield the necessary connections making educational experience possible, enabling subjective selves to acquire their cultural characteristics?

Study results when the inquirer pursues intentions in addition to the operative objectives. Intentions suggest to the inquirer that the universe harbors more possibilities than those charted by the operative objectives. Intentions arise because the inquirer intuits that interesting possibilities exist beyond the horizon. Study guided thus by intention is an openness to possibility, a readiness to respond to it. We need to understand how people respond to possibility, how they move from the known to the unknown.

Let us reflect on five ways of extending the cultural horizon into the universe—recognition, production, control, commitment, and selection. I do not suggest that people use only these five capacities to respond to possibility. I do not pretend to give an exhaustive account of the modes by which people can move beyond their horizons into the realm of unperceived possibilities. Likewise, I do not suggest that people use these five capacities exclusively in intentional activities. Quite the contrary, people may use these capacities also in learning, in pursuing objectives.

Our interest here, however, is in understanding how people use these principles in pursuing intentions, possibilities beyond their horizon that they cannot define precisely as objectives. Let's briefly introduce the five and then return to reflect on these capacities to begin developing the principles of study. [This text is still in progress and fleshing out the principles of study still needs considerable further work.]

Recognition.

This is the "Ah ha!" experience, the sudden awareness that in the buzzing confusion something substantial, identifiable inheres. An objective may activate recognition. For instance, if you ask June to find Jim to tell him that you need his help, she will have the objective of recognizing Jim. But much more often recognition arises in response to a general intention. Thus, when I'm walking down the street thinking deep thoughts and I see a familiar face which I suddenly recognize as Jim's, I recognize Jim, not by objective, but by intention. Intention, a responsiveness to possibility, most deeply guides recognition of something new, something hitherto vague, murky, incoherent. Recognition often involves attaching a name to a perception, linking it to a noun, a "substantive," a word that calls attention to the substantiality of the object of perception.

Production.

This is the "Look, Ma!" experience, the activation of a causal sequence to the point of suddenly doing something one could not do before. Like recognition, production also can be done by objective, as often occurs in offices and factories where managers have carefully planned the causal sequence to come to a well-specified conclusion. But frequently people produce works in response to an intention in which the precise outcome is fuzzy, the result creative as in artistic work. Simple speech gives us endless examples. Under certain circumstances, diplomats and lawyers may shape an utterance precisely according to a conscious objective. Most of us, most of the time, in contrast, produce our utterances more spontaneously in response to our intentions, sometimes surprising ourselves on discovering what it was that we really had to say. What is true of speech is true of most creative making: the maker has intentions and produces unexpected results through the sequence of causalities that translate the intention into a completed work. The sequence carries the maker beyond her prior horizon.

Control.

This is the "I got it!" experience, the maintenance of complex interactions in a dynamic equilibrium that one can steer or guide in useful ways. Many examples of control involve objectives, like the simple thermostat that keeps room temperature close to the objective set for it. But many other examples of control equilibrate around intentional goals, states of mind and states of being—curiosity, fun, health, happiness, fulfillment, influence, power, love. Control consists in the capacity to maintain approximations of these states. Efforts to maintain control are deeply, integrally intentional because one cannot limit the significant interactions to the predictable ground within one's horizon.

Control often overlaps with production, but they are conceptually distinct. Production results from a distinct sequence of causes and effects; control manages a complex of reciprocally interacting simultaneous influences. Take riding a bicycle as a simple example of the overlap. Peddling the bike forward is a clear example of production. Most anyone can effectively explicate the sequence of causes and effects that move the bike forward. Balancing the bike is the example of control. Few people can clearly explain how they do it and it depends heavily on the cyclist's ability to coordinate multiple senses to register the reciprocal interaction of many forces, continually wielding those he can to shift the center of mass of the system towards the direction of its fall, catching the bike and himself so to speak, overcompensating a bit and beginning to fall in the opposite direction. Thus we see saw through life!.

Commitment.

This is the "Here I stand!" experience, the conviction that this or that course of action is worthy and right regardless of the immediate consequences that will come of it. One can form objectives while carrying out a commitment. But insofar as a commitment is a conviction that something is right independent of the specific results that come of it, commitment IS an intentional act, one that does not reduce to a set of objectives. The person acting from commitment reaches beyond his horizon to take a stand in a world in which foreseen consequences cease to matter. The committed person acts simply because he experiences the intention entailing his action as right, as worthy of action.

Selection.

This is the "It fits, it suits me!" experience, the formation of preferences through judgments about form and beauty. Selections can be managed according to objectives, otherwise major industries—cosmetics, advertising, public relations—would not exist. Yet selection more deeply offers individuals and groups the opportunity to express their intentions. We might say that people choose in response to their conscious objectives, but that very often they find that these do not suffice to effectively discriminate between the available alternatives. At that point, people select through judgments that reflect their intentions, their sense of possibility, an ineffable sense of form, fit, beauty, compatibility.

[*** While experiencing, we engage in recognizing, producing, controlling, selecting, and committing as discernibly different modes of perceiving and acting. In the flow of experiencing, however, as living agents, we integrate these together and bring them to bear as an ensemble in the ever-fluid specifics of our lives. Our personhood, our inner life, our autonomy arises, uniquely and ineluctably, not only from the different ways we develop these five capacities, but further and most importantly from the immediacy and finality with which we bring them to bear in our lived experience.

Currently, “educating the whole person” once again is drawing considerable attention, a welcome development, but one that strikes me as slightly skewed. As a phrase, “the whole person” invites an objectified view. We want to see the person as a whole, even though we know that unpacking the phrase requires adding in all sorts of internal qualities and states of mind and the person before us still has a lot of future living ahead of her. “Hence, in “educating the whole person” we are trying to do something that lies outside the bounds of possible educational experience. How might we save the concept? I think we can do it by saying that the whole person is educating herself, all the time, forming herself, bringing all her powers as then integrated to bear on the situation at hand. Of course, Homer nods, in many ways for many reasons. Hence circumstances, among them teachers, serve students well by inspiring the student to bring himself fully to bear: Think! Pay attention! Be alert! Try! Persevere! It is not that we need to be educated for virtue; we need to see that we educate ourselves with and through virtue. Virtues and vices are recursive life conditions and we shape ourselves as best we can by managing them as harmoniously as we can. ***]

With these five modes of educational experience in mind, let us summarize the essentials in this and the preceding section as they have so far unfolded and introduce one further concept. Education is the process by which people create and acquire culture, the sum of their characteristics. At any particular time, a person has a domain, consisting of previously mastered culture, and a horizon inside of which she perceives things that she knows she does not know. Cultural possibilities within her horizon can serve as her objectives for learning. In addition to her horizon, she has a more encompassing universe in which there are cultural possibilities that she does not perceive distinctly but that may nevertheless be very significant possibilities for her. Intentions are general aims that a person senses, suggesting that all her current objectives do not exhaust her possibilities and that, in addition to the objectives, those possibilities are worth pursuing intentionally.

Intentions can be powerful motivators in the creation and acquisition of culture because the person intuits that it is worthwhile to be receptive to prospects that are significant yet indistinct. We have defined study as an inclusive educational process that results as an inquirer pursues intentions, with or without operative objectives, with or without the help of a mentor. It is educational effort motivated by intentions, pushing one's horizon to fill out one's universe of possibilities. I further indicate five significant forms of activity in which intentions, as distinct from objectives, can be highly significant. These are recognition, production, control, selection, and commitment. Broadly, educational intentions aiming to make study fruitful will challenge people to use their capacities fully to recognize things (actual and potential), to produce works, to manage systems, to affirm principles, and to judge fitness. How?

[As a work in progress, I feel there is a jump here that I should work to fill it.]

To answer “How?”, we need to think about design, how we shape resources and efforts that will help us do things. One item that we have not yet defined is design. How should we think about design in order to make sense of the infinite particularities of it, among them designing educational resources to support these five forms of educational experience?

Design

A process through which people apply synthetic a priori judgments, using epistemic definitions, criteria, and models, to shape the stuff of experience to accord more closely with their knowledge, principles, and preferences.

Design builds conceptual understanding into the world we make. "Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome."3 Design is that troublesome effort to act according to our thought; it makes judgment easier and opportunity more stable.

Take any example of design. Central to it will be an effort to render the work knowable, understandable, predictable in one way or another, to imbue it with affordances. What drives the design of a tool, simple or complex? The user wants to know that the tool will work for the purpose which guided its design. The worker gets angry at his tool when it fails at the task for which it was designed and abashed when he breaks it trying to use it for some purpose for which it was not designed.

[I cannot here fully develop the point, but I think that design applies synthetic a priori judgments to all sorts of matters in our lifeworld, with highly transformative effects, especially since roughly 1750 or so. But here is a glimpse.] For instance, diverse a priori principles of testing and classification have given rise to the design of raw materials, which serves to make the performance of materials knowable, predictable. Handbooks of specifications and standards give ready access to the knowledge built into such materials, clear statements of the stresses they will bear. Manufacturing design serves to make the outcome of production predictable, foretelling both the character and quality of the product and, even more, making its cost knowable, an essential component in designing its marketing.

Design, understood as action that embodies knowledge in the stuff of life and matter, has come to hold a fundamental place in our culture. Hume and Kant destroyed much metaphysics, ushering in the era in which epistemology had primacy over ontology. Increasingly, people recognize all the sciences to be cognitive sciences, describing the world that our knowing reveals, giving an account of how and why we know it, and adopting a principle of uncertainty about all the rest. The positive test, complementing the negative one of falsification, is not verification, but suitability as grounds for design, if not of practical applications then of further cognitive experiments and explorations. Hegel laid down the ontology of the emergent universe-by-design that the human spirit makes as its habitat. "What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational." This is absurd if said willfully about things in themselves and the random flux, but it makes fine sense said, as Hegel said it, about a reasoning spirit that draws itself out of itself, that educates itself, to design itself as the actuality of the inchoate chaos. So too, Kant's claims about a synthetic a priori, in which propositions are at once prior to experience but substantively informative about experience, make simple sense in the context of design. Categorical principles are prior to experience but informative about it because we can act with those principles to design the experience, to give it human form, substance, and significance. Kant’s critical philosophy, deeply constructivist in character, however difficult, analyzes our imperfect ability to act according to our thought.

"Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent"

Now I am going to stop; it might even result in a conclusion of sorts. In the best of all possible worlds, I would like to insert a reflection on the role of design thinking in the construction of the modern lifeworld, but that would be a big historical tome. I would like to reflect further on Kant's ideas about the role of synthetic a priori judgments in our construction of experience, but that would be too convoluted and abstract.

In abbreviated form, I will assert, however, that design thinking can construct systems of experience based on principles, the fruits of which people experience as alienating and unfulfilling. As they take effect, the results of such misdirected design prove difficult to question and powerfully resist displacement by systems of experience based on other principles. In this essay I am trying to express in potential the idea that modern educational systems have been constructed over the past four or five centuries on some misconceived principles about educational experience. The primary educational agencies in that historical construction have been the school, the curriculum, the teacher, acting to educate the pupil and the student. I think if we analyze carefully the possibility of educational experience, we will find that the school and the curriculum are outside the bounds of possible educational experience, and teachers are within it only with respect to their human capacity as acquirers of characteristics.<i

Throughout the construction of instructional systems, the history of educational thought and practice includes a steady critical counterpoint, often satirical, sometimes caustic, objecting to its illiberal and inhumane effects. Broadly speaking, this critical counterpoint constitutes the historical case for liberal learning as an alternative to formal instruction from the ancients to the present. In the historical lifeworld, however, its different forms, from instruction in the liberal arts to progressive education, have proved highly susceptible to co-optation and suppression by the four forms of greed driving formal instruction that Nietzsche astutely described.

I began by observing how people have easily said that liberal learning consists in the pursuit for its own sake of knowledge, culture, self-formation, but they have difficulty actually doing that, for we do not confidently understand what it actually entails in practice on an historically significant scale. The prime exemplars of liberal learning have usually exerted influence as loners, one voice speaking to different persons about their personal lifeworlds. Why?

Here I must beg indulgence for some historical determinism. Up until very recent times, the efficacy of design thinking has depended primarily on principles of production, the design of cause and effect. Pervasively, we experience a lifeworld in which causal effort, large and small, utilizes recognition, production, control, commitment, and preference to shape the experiential flow of our lives. It both empowers and alienates. The design of systems for the autonomous control of ongoing interactions has not developed to a similar degree. Examples exist in nature as flocks of birds coordinate their flight in interaction with one another. But control through ongoing interaction requires conditions of simultaneity within which interactions take place and until recently effective simultaneity has required close proximity among interacting agents. Electronic networks are greatly expanding the scope and duration of simultaneous interaction with the horizon of possible experience broadening substantially.

I believe the dominance of causal action arises when people pursue purposes external to their interactive intentions. Interaction takes place in a domain of simultaneity in between sequential cause (before) and effect (after). I think learning for its own sake must be an autonomous interactive process and the difficulty in implementing such processes under past conditions accounts for the interstitial character of liberal learning. It takes place in those interstices where the causal programs have no force.

I am going to here close, for I think I have arrived at the point at which Wittgenstein's admonition takes hold. We structure our discourse about education and learning around the attainment of objectives, which brings with it a causal framework for thinking. I do not think we really know how to be clear about learning for its own sake. Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent. But that is not the end of the matter. As Goethe said, &quot;where words fail, deeds speak.&quot; We can try to create ways to advance learning free from the use of private reason, where we insulate ourselves from extrinsic purposes. I'd like to invite those who might care to do so to join, in a spirit of conviviality that Ivan Illich commended, in creating an online worksite, a Collaboratory for Liberal Learning. For more on its rationale and some on its particulars, see my forthcoming invitation, &quot;Let's Put Liberal Learning into Action.&quot;

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