Unmaking Sense

We name things but the totalities we name are not usually coherent, so we necessarily simplify and generalise. But when we go back the other way we should avoid thinking we are describing those totalities as they really are. There is nothing legitimately called “The French” or even “Socrates”; we each are large; we are each a multitude (from Walt Whitman, adapted).

We render the ragbag of incoherencies that accumulate into coherent patterns by chopping off or stretching the concepts. We need to be careful how we use the power this gives us to simplify and generalise.

The totally autonomous individual is as big a fiction as the totally dictatorial society: we are interdependent and mutually defining, changing dynamic entities in a permanent state of flux, and so we should be.

When we have doubts in private we bring to bear a range of socially-induced values in our self-criticism, but it may not always be right to adopt and endorse them. How can we tell the difference?

How and when should we stick to our guns when assailed by social disapproval rather than allow our peers to persuade us to adopt their point of view?

Truth as what society currently endorses and thinks reliable. As such it is revisable, temporary and fallible.

We need to see life and all its features as experiments in existence. Whether it be philosophy or religion, science, mathematics, history, geography or anything else, all we are doing is a series of experiments in trying to find better ways to live our lives. Were we to devise an education system that taught children that, we would all learn to live together in more harmony and humility.

A summary of some of the general characteristics that will accrue to someone who follows an educational trajectory such as we have been describing. Some of the ways the world tries to silence us, in particular by inducing shame.

Because each individual unique learner learns everything and places it within the trajectory of their personal unique life, every learnt process, every new piece of learning, every newly-acquired piece of information generates new knowledge. Objections and implications.

Far from becoming less and less individual, as Hegel suggests we should, education helps us to become more individual and so make our unique contribution to the world, a contribution perhaps we alone can make. This raises the important question of the right creative balance between being part of society and a being a critic of society.