PREFACE
Seminars in Integrative Studies
This work is designed to serve a distinct and special kind of learning. Integrative studies focus on searching for a principle of unity or integrity to hold together our knowledge and our life. These studies concern themselves with consciousness and conscience. Consciousness and conscience are different from mere knowledge and value judgments. Both consciousness and conscience are comprehensive and integrating instead of single, narrow and analytical. Consciousness integrates your understanding and conscience integrates your sense of the good. Each has a role in the work of integration.
We concentrate here not on offering a preliminary and superficial “exposure” to the concept and practice of integrated knowledge. Instead, we address those with a serious commitment to integrative research and to those working together as a permanent community dedicated to integrative studies. Thus, the idea of “seminars” in integrative studies refers not to classes in any ordinary sense of external enrollment but to personal intention, interest, and involvement. This work is not intended for casual readers but only for those who already have taken up integrated studies in a seminar and are currently involved in its work whether they are new to it or not.
Seminars are regular gatherings of those devoted to pursuing integration in knowledge and life. These seminars have formal and informal rules. They require an inner commitment and a desire to grow to knowledge of life through investigating the nature of life using the only concrete and direct perspective we have: our own existence.
INTRODUCTION
The title of this work, The Science of Life, is both ironic and misleading. It is misleading because of the word “science” and ironic because positive knowledge of life is impossible. Three qualities imprison contemporary science. First, science today means “objectivity.” It means that you must deliberately suppress yourself in your study of the world outside, or “objective to,” yourself. Second, “science” today means using a certain kind of logic exclusively – the logic of “yes” and “no.” This logic does not tolerate as “logical” the presence of contradiction and paradox. Finally, today the highest expressions of science are formulated not in ordinary language but in the language of mathematics.
That this modern “science” is enormously powerful and useful is obvious. Modern science, therefore, needs no defense just as success anywhere needs no defense. It is, however, severely limited and self-limiting when it tries to understand life, particularly human life.
Knowledge of life must start from the living self that seeks it. If you are after knowledge of life, you must focus on the life you know best and most intimately. That is your own life. Only in yourself are you alive. Any science that diverts you from your own life – away from yourself – and forces you to dwell only in the “objective world,” even though it directs your attention toward your own self and your own life “objectively” (your life and yourself as objects of empirical investigation), has lost the possibility of knowledge of life. It has done so even before it starts seeking this knowledge. Life is the relation between subject and object, neither object nor subject should be estranged from each other.
The “yes-or-no” logic of modern science that devotes itself exclusively to demonstrating, validating or proving non-contradictory propositions (hypotheses such as “viruses cause disease”) fails to reflect the logic of life. The logic of life contains contradictions and paradoxes. Every aspect of yourself and your life is a combination of contradictions, of yes and no, of good and bad. Thus, the logic of modern science applied to human life is worse than useless. It is destructive. It seeks to eliminate contradiction and paradox in thought and so to eliminate them in life. Death is the domain of modern science. When applied to life, science becomes nothing but anatomy. It cuts everything into pieces before it examines it. Anatomy is the study of dead things. Death is what modern science brings to life.
Once deadened by the logic of science, modern life is embalmed by its language, mathematics. Mathematics may attract you emotionally, but, even if you love it, you can never find your life in its constructs. The ancient Greeks thought they could, but for them “mathematics” was not the dry, desiccated thing it is today. They were more interested in geometry and the study of measure, balance, and harmony as opposed to formulas, calculations, and commerce.
Modern science is a coagulation of objectivity, logic, and mathematics. As such, it dominates all education today, from the primary to the post-doctoral. Paradoxically, critics of contemporary educational institutions claim there is not enough science in it. This is because they conceal, to themselves and others, how much all the elements in education represent science, not just the courses with a manifestly scientific content. The science in education does not exist solely in science courses. All courses today are rooted in a scientific orientation. For example, all standards of quality learning in courses are “objective” – achievements of students in writing and understanding novels are measured by standardized and objective tests whose results are embalmed in mathematical scores. That this is an educational travesty can be understood only by those who have sufficiently survived the deadening processors of modern education to trust their natural judgment of the absurdity of it.
Education used to be – a long time ago – the drawing forth of the self and soul into the world. Its function was to allow the budding personality to take charge of life by understanding the world but, more, by understanding how the true self could survive and prosper in and also re-create the world it inherited from its ancestors. Now, education has become a process of stuffing students with information and skills as fast as possible so they adjust to, and fit properly into, the worldwide political and economic machine. This change was not the result of a planned strategy. It evolved, out of forces operating in the world, in small increments and was, therefore, largely invisible. “Educators” felt increasing pressure to guarantee that the young entrusted to their care did not fall behind the young in other schools, states and nations in job-training. It also happened because of the ideology of individualism, an ideology particularly virulent in the United States. This ideology holds that all healthy individuals are adequately equipped to judge good and bad in the world and do not need social institutions to help them develop. This was paradoxical because in today’s world it is only by virtue of collective action that humanity can control the massive international machine. Under this circumstance, the ideology of individualism guaranteed the defeat of the person. Those who sense this defeat in the world, ironically blame the schools for not adequately educating their children to individual excellence. They have sought hopeless alternate paths of withdrawing their children from the public schools or withdrawing themselves from the world into some splendid isolation in the “frontiers” of Montana.
Higher education everywhere continues in decline. Once the universities renounced and began to abandon it and put in its place at the pinnacle of their institutions merely higher learning and job training, they committed it to oblivion. They masked their desertion of higher education by talking instead of “higher learning” or of “life-long learning” and insisting that they were devoted not just to job training but to scholarship and learning above all. While learning is necessary to education, not all of it is educational and much of it is downright anti-educational. Learning requires that the human self submit to scholarly studies instead of submitting scholarly studies to itself. Few realize how the recent radically reactionary revolution that has taken place on campuses has exiled higher education from the university. Now homeless, higher education wanders the land seeking a shelter.
Just how higher education got displaced is the subject of a long and complex history and is not our primary concern here. In brief, however, what happened was that the idea of education as the process of drawing out and developing our humanity to enable us to represent the human in the world and so to live as mature human adults shrank. Education was abandoned to the primary school. There it remained but only in the crude and primitive form of drawing out the child’s human potential through reading, writing and mathematics. Once it brought out and trained these talents, then the school had only to refine them and direct them to socially useful functions in a huge variety of specialized fields of study.
Three forces decided the fate of education. The first was the rise of the climate of individualism that held education to be beneath the dignity of anyone beyond childhood. Individualism as reflected in the Utilitarian thinkers of the past, viewed the individual as the best judge of the good. It rightly argued that others should not direct the free and mature individual. Later utilitarians omitted from this formula an adequate notion of maturity. They assumed that adults who had learned to read, write, and do mathematics well were inwardly mature and needed no more inner development. Since their minds were developed, they needed nothing else. Character and essence required no further aid to develop. Besides their primary education, they needed no further tools to help them perceive and understand the good.
The second force coalescing to undermine awareness of the need for continuing education at higher levels was modern social organization. It not only did not require mature human beings who could evaluate good and bad for themselves and live by their evaluations but also found that maturity in the work force (increasingly that includes all of us in different ways) was an obstacle to efficiency. Organizations needed, not independent thinkers who could consider for themselves what was good and bad, but obedience to the good established by the mission the organization defined for itself. To all institutions, from the schools themselves to the factories and banking systems and whole nations, human maturity became a dreadful possibility to be avoided at all costs.
The third and crowning force undermining higher education was advertising. It flattered the ego of all by encouraging individuals to judge for themselves (as it cynically manipulated their judgments psychologically) what products would best satisfy them. It got them to accept absolute individualism by the oblique strategy that created the notion that human freedom meant an ability to follow the standard of pleasure in getting products – emotional pleasure (in entertainments and amusements) as well as physical pleasure.
Because of these forces, neither the individual nor the society wanted higher education. They saw that higher education set up obstacles to production (society) or obstacles to pleasure (individuals). Enlightened by education, workers would start to judge for themselves whether the work they were doing was directed to a good end. Consumers would find that much of the pleasure in consumption was an escape from, instead of a fulfillment of, themselves. The production-consumption image of social and individual life came to prevail and it found higher education intolerable.
The emptiness and suffering thus generated in the depths of human life, however, drive more people to awareness of their unhappiness in the midst of all their liberty and toys. This unhappiness can become the ground for their return to higher education. It can motivate them to break away from prevailing realities. Unfortunately, the tools of higher education (the programs and courses that encouraged and permitted it) have disappeared from the universities. The rich resources, the product of millennia of effort, have dried up there. Thus awakened, however, personality can find higher education on its own. Until the arrival of reforms that would renew the commitment of universities to education, self-education emerges as the only practical way to encounter and engage the forms and processes proper to higher education. The integrative studies seminar is one formulation of a method for people to gather in communities to generate the necessary conditions for it. Such seminars can operate either within established educational institutions if they allow it or outside them.
This Guide was designed to serve dual purposes. The first is to introduce to those attracted to higher education the nature and methods of these seminars. The second is to help support those who have long participated in them.
