The essence of consciousness is being with the world and this behavior is permanent and unavoidable. Accordingly, consciousness is a way towards something a part from itself, outside itself which surrounds it and which it apprehends by being of its ideational capacity. Consciousness is thus by definition a method in the most general sense of the word.1
Paulo Freire
Consciousness is the way reality reaches us; in waves of what we might identify, with attention, as endless, unpredictable phenomena. Words are a vessel for this passing phenomena from which goodness can interact with self and become a guide for fulfilling the needs of the soul. Consciousness cannot be a vessel and any creation of a vessel such as words are inherently flawed; pure truth cannot be held stagnant and so a translation of it is imperfect. However, its imperfect translation into the experience of the self is necessary by the inconceivable nature of it and the imperfect nature of man.
By the power of words we always mean their power of illusion and error. But thanks to a providential arrangement, there are certain words which posses in themselves, when properly used, a virtue which illuminates and lifts up towards the good … What they express is beyond our conception.2
Simone Weil
Purpose lies in the ongoing task of following goodness as closely as possible.
To know the true good of the community is what constitutes the science of legislation. The art consists in finding the means to realize that good.3
Michael Oakeshott
There is an incongruency between our experience of reality and what we are taught the world is in order to participate in society. Beginning with the hierarchy of thought, the reverberation of this falsehood echoes out into all of our hierarchies; in leadership across the board. It can seem that the pure intention of delivering people the inheritance required for every human to participate in being human has resulted in an unintentional consequence of a large quantity of shallow content; a flurry of fitting in every bit of cultural information leaving no more than a fleeting glimpse of anything in particular. It might seem an asset to simplify ideas into neatly packaged abridgements to have masses of people be on the same page with the same goals by sacrificing teaching the ability to go beyond recognition in learning to a level of an encounter.4 However, I think that these outcomes perfectly align with the goals embedded in the arrangements of our society.
The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behavior in which those purposes are already hidden.5
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott defines politics as “the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together.” It is maintained that this activity beginning, as it must, with the conscious experience is followed by interaction with it, then the creation of knowledge from it, the forming of an ideal to work towards as a goal, action out of that ideal, changed behavior and ultimately reaching the goal. However, what we see is more as follows; conscious experience, reaction, behavior, forming an ideal and creation of knowledge. We see the making of arrangements for our society as we might see a snake that eats its tail; in a viscous circle of reaction.
The difference between these two paths toward social order is that missing in the latter path is an awareness of being with the world and a process of creating knowledge from that awareness, which might look light a completely different process to that which we have now.
Our society is arranged by an industrialized economy whereby the ideals we practice and strive for are largely productivity and monetization. These become most successful when awareness of being with the world and the process of creating knowledge is taken away from people. We see this in the culmination of the process of realizing these ideals; in consumer culture and a punishment, reward dichotomy by which a citizen takes action – elements of social order that exist so far removed from conscious experience that we are numb to it in the practice of them. Instead, like we do for a machine incapable of its own ends, data is uploaded for the optimization of these ideals. The process of data-entry applied to educating humans does not adapt to include human needs or qualities; it is made for machines and oppresses that which is not machine-like. Furthermore, the information presented to a machine must be static and dualistic. The lack of awareness of being with the world and a process of creating knowledge is an oppression of the self and it has alarming effects.
On a macro scale we have a reactionary rigmarole of abstract abridgements systemized for mass consumption, complementing this we have an ontological approach to knowledge that leads to an ideological understanding of the world that is inherently erroneous and in which creativity can only be imitated in the form of dichotomy. On a micro scale; it is a virtue to be disconnected with self and so people are left with their conscious experience to fend for themselves because what it means to be with the world without skill is fending for yourself, it is what it means to be with the world without freedom.
On the creation of knowledge Oakeshott explains:
Michael Oakeshott
Facts, rules, all that may come to us as information, itemized and explicit, never themselves endow us with an ability to do, or to make, or to understand and explain anything. Information has to be used, and it does not itself indicate how, on any occasion, it should be used. What is required in addition to information is knowledge which enables us to interpret it, to decide upon its relevance, to recognize what rule to apply and to discover what action permitted by the rule should, in the circumstances, be performed; knowledge (in short) capable of carrying us across those wide open spaces, to be found in every ability, where no rules run. For rules are always disjunctive. They specify only an act or a conclusion of a certain general kind and they never relieve us of the necessity of choice.6
The process of data entry it antithetical to dialogue, it is anti-human. In this way dialectical education is an antidote to the objectification of students and people, it changes a taught understanding of the world from rigid, static and dualistic, where tension arises out of a learned practice of repressing self and experiences of reality, to an interaction with conscious experience that becomes a practice of feeling, true action and reflection.
Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in the situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated. Thus the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teachers student meets with the students teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks themselves what they will dialogue with the latter about.7
Paulo Freire
Anti-dialectic education presents the object and subject under a veil of an objective reality in which all of the facts of the world can be memorized. In this, there is no space for reality.
When a word is properly defined . . . it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis – to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.8
Simone Weil
Consciousness is the method through which we are with the world and words and dialogue are ways that we interact with consciousness – these are processes that bring us to true action. This means that a relationship with self, interaction with the physical world and our experiences are interrelated whether we are aware of it or not. If we are not aware falsehood arises. A relationship with self is unavoidably a part of a practical contribution to society even if there is no self-awareness of the process. And so we must learn from a place of truth to be skillful in the ever present and dynamic essence of experience.
Our lives are lived, in fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly by related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.9
Michael Oakeshott
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎
- Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. P.96 ↩︎
- Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.140-141 ↩︎
- Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.21 ↩︎
- Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.143 ↩︎
- Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.50 ↩︎
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎
- Weil, S. and Miles, (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London : Penguin. P.242 ↩︎
- Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.242-243 ↩︎
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