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jessicarizzo's picture

compromise

But how does the notion of homogeneity as the enemy of real learning coexist with that of individual subjectivities always being "richer" than collective ones?  It sounds like you're saying that intersubjectivity (or co-constructed reality) is always a compromise, whereby we neccesarily sacrifice some of the depth/nuance/idiosyncracy of our personal way of perceiving the world... but that's just the price we have to pay in order to exist in communities.  We're comfortable agreeing to tradeoffs like this as they apply to a bunch of other areas of our lives... Freud says we'll just always have to be a little sexually repressed because, if we let loose, civilization as we know it would collapse in a chaotic libidinal frenzy... Hobbes says we agree to hand some of our freedom over to the state because the alternative to living in regulated communities is a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," life in the state of nature.  I see a similiar tradeoff implied in this piece of writing, but that seems to be at odds with the dreamy new image of "education" I had suspected we were on our way to, an image that involves a creative, rather than limiting, convergence of potentially conflicting wills/minds. 

Based on what we've seen so far... It makes sense that if there is no empirical reality, our brains are most fit, best equipped for survival if they're really comfortable with fluidity, plurality, if they're nimble rather than bloated with overconsumption. The old ideal of an educated person with his head packed to capacity with facts becomes ludicrous when there are no facts.  Does any crystallized knowledge, in fact, become a liability?  Just weighing you down?  I worried in my post last week about the impotent, self-pleasuring solipsism of "creative" thought that has no relationship to or capacity to impact the life-world.  For these adventures in thought/creation to be anything else, the key has to lie in communication, intersubjectivity... different ways of saying education?  Isn't education going to be about exposing ourselves to diversity?  Diversifying ourselves, our own consciousnesses... trying to get more, different brains talking to each other, so that each individual brain becomes more flexible, elastic, more comfortable holding together conflicting perspectives and maybe unresolvable tensions.  This seems "richer" to me.. a single brain that's more like a generous and socially adroit host entertaining its eclectic group of friends in the parlor of the mind.

Also, I agree that structure is not "bad." "Structure," as such, is neutral.  And it's absolutely neccesary.  Still, imposing structure is, I think, always going to involve a tradeoff like those mentioned above.  Because the other, totally neutral half of reality is chaos... and we have to find a way of allowing this in, rather than always assuming that we have to tame or subdue the "destructive" powers of chaos by strangling it with structure.  Since if there is no empirical reality, our impulse to impose the structure that will allow us to feel like we've got it all figured out, like we really are the "masters and possesors of nature," should in fact be viewed as the destructive or hindering impulse at work here.  An attempt to indulge our control-freak anxieties... when the only way to palliate them is to let that "need" for control go.

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