The blessings and curses of technology, whether we applaud or despair, need to be understood. Especially important is what technology does to our thinking, our consciousness, relations to others and to ourselves. While we may think of robotics and computers or satellites as the current metaphor for what is high-tech, the fact is that ordinary concepts such as the idea of history, how we listen, how we judge beauty and age and the quality of life, are heavily influenced by technology.

Technology, in my view, is what extends the human body. Obvious technology, like the telephone, extends us beyond this place, outside of what is here, beyond the visual and auditory range of ordinary experience. The accompanying fact of human experience is that we do not talk to one another in the same space. “Telephonese” is a special language by which we imagine one another visually, believing that there is someone on the other end. The result is that we create a social network which stands outside of the communities of those with whom we live and work.

Obvious technology, such as writing, takes some dynamic stuff such as talk, which is a muscular vibration of air waves, and makes it appear to be permanent; outside of the time of talk, outside of you talking to me. Writing permits us to talk to everyone, even to those who are not yet born. Before writing, in the pre-literate human society from which we derive, the notion of history was also negotiated through actual people, and their memories of others, up to five generations.

Now, with writing, we have actual records of several thousand years from some here-and-now of experience, to eras, to eons, to foreverness. With photography, we have two-dimensional images of what the three-dimensional. With movies and video, we create actuality out of 35mm and video, HD, and we relate to the community of others by means of movies and television.

Sitting alone or alone in theaters with others around us, we relate to some general stories or concepts. Now with some history of movies and of videos we can study the nature of aging, and be thrust into history through the power of visuality. We see through lenses, see by artificial light, and sleep when it suits us – not when the sun goes down. We listen to radios and stereos, amazed sometimes by what we hear, but we are not sufficiently amazed to study electronics.

We do not often remember that our music is all played on high-tech instruments: that the violin string is ordinarily under several hundred pounds of tension, that the modern violin bow is not so very old. Having been 35,000 feet in the air, traveling at speeds 100 times faster than our bodies can move, we have seen the earth from afar, and it has changed our vision!

As long as our bodies seem relatively still, we do not thrill to the speeds of cars, trains or planes. Yet they have altered the size and scope of the earth. We can now imagine the entire globe, but we do not have very good ways of imagining all of its peoples. We thrill more to the animals of the natural kingdom, and seem to worry more about “all” the world’s people.

Technology: wonderful, musical. Real as the pen that I use to write, and the glasses through which I look to see. Sitting here alone, I abstract from my experience to yours, and we meet in the courting of the printed symbols, to remake them into our minds’ workings. We are together in some sense of understanding, and increasingly alone in our experience.

Here we are: all together alone.

Via Curriculum Studies— Henry Giroux on Freire’s Lessons for Now!
Dec 1, 2010 … Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich. Tuesday 23 November 2010. by: Henry A. Giroux, …

Henry Giroux has been really ranting lately, inspired by Paulo Freire’s work and thinking: especially “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” – and especially the “political” understanding of education in these times of politics bending toward money and power… and control of students’ thinking.

I mostly agree… but a good bit of Freire has disappeared in the name of politics being overtaken by economic analyses and control of the very nature of education.

Education in the Western world – perhaps most especially – is being attacked by the rich and lovers of the rich – who oppose the public schools, the teachers who tend to find solace and power in unions, life tenure, pensions, and all. Charter Schools, private schools. Blah! On public schools and on the public.

Even most liberals (Obama…so far anyway) have gone for control of teachers and teaching, supporting “No Child Left Behind” – presumably as ways to “success” for students. Do what I/we tell you, and how we tell you, and…!

Giroux’ hero – rightfully, but for at least some different reasons – has been Freire whose book has sold well over a million copies. But his ideas continue to be fragmented by the would-be powers – and his “methods” of education, particularly “dialogue” have apparently yielded to the anti-politics of Giroux invocating money – now controlling politics. “Critical pedagogy” is Giroux’s Freireian term for what is missing increasingly in the current war for our future: thinking and being.

Freire would get (especially poorer) students to study and understand the power and motivations which got them educated effectively to prolong and promote the power of the few – by not attending to the “banking” and “telling” methods which the rich and powerful imposed on most students.

“Learn what I tell you!” Never mind contexts and methods which effectively keep most students in their “proper” places: learn what I tell you – never mind the fact that I-the-teacher – am guarding the status quo by convincing you that this is “way” of the world – no questions asked. Just learn what I tell you, as efficiently as possible. It’s all politics… but the politics remain “hidden” and y’all don’t ask no questions! The world of the powerful remains “distant” and effectively hidden to the students. Increasingly efficient!

So much to agree with – especially in these times of attacks on schooling, teachers – especially as so many education systems of other countries seem much more “successful” than ours.

But much, so deep, is left-out… omitted from this particular if not exactly narrow analysis. Particularly people, persons – everyone: teachers and students – have no clear “presence” in this world. Presence: persons, thoughtful, development of the very nature of clarity over the course of the entire course, so it can enter students’ being… perhaps especially after the course is “over.”

Here I’m quoting Freire – who I invoke in my book and course: “Teaching as Dialogue.” Freire’s major way-out of the power-pinch is Dialogue. And most of the educators who Freire-ise education invoke the term: but apparently only a few of us seriously explore and apply dialogue in our teaching-being.

I want to “touch” the futures of my students – I would love to be “remembered” as “inspiring” their futures. But much about “me” – a person – much about them being and becoming who they would be. Mostly the Freireians don’t seem to be “present” – strong, memorable… characters…who “remain” some places in “their” students’ ongoing thinking.

(Can I be remembered, have power without being very “oppressive” in their thinking? Am I “good enough” to deserve having some presence in their lives? Or is this just a “different” route to power and control from the past: more than inspiring “my” students to study and develop their own personal framings of… power and control.) Whew! (If Socrates only realized that his idea of dialogue was always to know all the “answers” to his question-ing!)

So: enough to begin/continue the study of Freire, amidst the facts of his being still inspiring me, most days as I teach, and am a teacher. Growing with my memories and appreciations of his work and thinking.

But a “true” dialogue? – a lifetime pursuit… and then some.

Why do so many teachers invoke their anti-politics, even as they (don’t find themselves) don’t enrich their own teaching in the practicings of dialogue?

The erosion between our sense of what belongs to life and what belongs to death, of what is life’s and what death’s, is increasingly in our thoughts. Driven by a gathering sense of economic dread, pushed by a government which needs active enemies to distract us from any concern with the living of life, we find it easier and more compelling to wonder why we are here – on earth – to conflate the everyday events of living into all of life…and to think it is all an illusion.

Salvation now! Salvation; once and for all, today is forever. Salvation wipes out, blinds us to the experience of living, of any yesterdays or particular tomorrows. Today and tomorrow become one. Life is not anything in and of itself. As I disappear from my own life, from living, others retreat into the heavenscape, become dim, misty. The occasional joys, the frequent pains of living are reinterpreted in each experiencing from some distancing perspective, as something other than they are…were.

There is no me, there are no others, I have fallen from Heaven into this, this vale of tears and fears. Safe from life. Save me, Oh mystifier of Life! Safe from life…a confusion between what is good and what is evil and whether they account for anything at all as they rob us of the life we are given.

Life-as-death. Who can refute this? Who would want to? What sense a God who would destroy Life as “He” gives it…?

There are seekers after knowledge who probe the material of our being, to know knowing. Inside the cranium, way behind the fronts of eyes seeing out, there is the thing we call the brain. The brain, the modern elect to be the center of our being that it tells us what is and what we do; and we do not understand how it works.

A finite thing, a contained tissue which lends itself, somehow, to knowing the infinitude, the finite become the imagination. The brain, the mind, a puzzle to boggle the imagination by which we know to ask. The focus on the brain drives itself backward, regressively into the self-caused cause which is called God the creator in other thought arenas.

Here, the steerer, the tiny man or woman within, the bottom line, informs us no more than if we knew nothing. The answer, for there must be an answer, must lie within; but where, but how? Not knowledge enough, yet; but wait. Somewhere, in there, the answer. Not anywhere else. I am certain. But…my life grows short, and I must know knowing ere I depart. To search, to search, where can I go that I can know…knowing?

The material, the brain, yet defines my understanding. I search for the seat of being elsewhere and find it is the last place I look: the dreams of night, that is where; deeply in the knowing beneath the consciousness of being…awake. I drive myself to the seat of being which precedes the emergence of being human and of being who I am.

The notion of Islam’s Jihad, life as a demanding struggle: a truth for all – for all of time.

But in some times of political polemic – to die in, to die for, a holy cause, the notion of Jihad can be invoked as a war of righteousness posed against whatever is proclaimed evil.

The confusion: a distinction…between what is life and what is not; what is real…and what is not.

The imagination that we know and also think that we can know: what are the limitations, what the form of the human imagination?

The story that is often depicted for the Sioux at Wounded Knee, battling for the land, the place which is the home and the Mother of all of Being: “Today!” “Today,” they say, “is a good day to die.” And who can say that is not a truth?

It is to take some notion of the inevitable, and turn it into the hardest of life’s currencies. We all (I suspect) have a possession which is such a story (even if it is a story about how not to have such a story…yet!).

Age and aging: the accession to progressive visions of death…The story expands in its nearing and hearing.

Finally: a theory located about the nature of what is progress and why is futurity!

Death and life. Life and death. Puzzles? Solutions?

The power of death: to inform life’s visions of death, and of life, and of all possibilities.

Life: which seems more important, seems to have less power – at least in its theoretical nature. But, the arts, especially music – for me – have great power also.

Life as struggle…death as…?

Life wants to reduce itself to two dimensions; or less. A picture imploding upon vision’s fickleness, wiping out each previous picture, vivid in its penetration into our mental processes. See it once, see it ten times, it is yours. It is you. Colors ensconce words which are highlighted or diminished around the ideas as images sear eyeballs like newly risen suns.

Events are reduced to the outlines of words which we call objects, state the real to be non-images. And here we are…loving images; they guide thinking, direct seeing to seeing each next image. Imagine! Vision tells us we want to remain in each present moment pushing pictures into some sense of memory which only vision can access.

The control, a theory of images once confined to the interpersonally, to the socially experienced – parents, teachers, searchers after wisdom – now moved to the self: the editor of moving pictures constructed into a thing, an event whose experienced time is constructed and viewed outside its own time. Images recorded to tell a story. A story: images constructed to form another kind of image, a story…a story seems to have more thickness, more duration, than momentary image. Memory…images. Being…images. The real…images?

Slipping into the solipsism in which every I is some string of images of my own creation, so I no longer search for those which inform, stuck in the delight with those that entertain, my mind is some supermarket of images reflecting only upon themselves in the mirror which is me.

The way they have constructed their sense of human nature and of the world reduces all to discourse. Everything is a kind of talk. Knowing, thus, is analyzing talk. But how to analyze? Does it matter, how? The literary critics coming from derivations of a Hegel whose science is now reduced to talk and talk about, and the what of what it is about has disappeared. The current talk is all about “immediate consciousness,” as if anyone knows what that term means, except what anyone means it to mean.

They wanted to know how reading any particular author or text enters the mentality. Enters the mentality? Huh! Not knowing clearly how to think about mentality makes their thinking and conversation more distant, more vague, more remote. They talk about significance in some pseudo-statistical sense, not sensing what numbers might indicate, or about the contexts in which they occur…or from which they derive.

They are certain that knowledge resides in discourse…they who own discourse must own knowledge. Seeing the world through the grids and veils of how the world’s texts are interpreted, they are far away — far, far away — from anyone’s experience. This probe into (the idea of) experience is justified by stating that all of life has been interpreted through the texts of antiquity; we are its descendents in spite of our selves, whether we read or not. Do they really know that? Are we all really living out a fully packaged, textual life? Why, then, ask anyone to respond to a question: when the answer is already pre-packaged, and the knowers make it all up anyway?

Schemes of meaning, schemes of being, abounding in the ideas of textual revelation, where the only sense of time, of being, of experience is character, reader, and interpreter. The cynical metaphor likens this to some sort of anti-computer which is its own opponent.

No people, no newness, no antiquity: only discourse, talk about talk about talk about…?

I taught how people think about success, and he asked about self-satisfaction; perhaps the only thing which lasts, which serves the psyche more, the outside judges less (or damn them!).

Ooh-h-h! I breathed deeply, the breath expanding, invading all the areas of my body where the edges of hurt reside. Self, I thought, where are you so I can feed you, so I can satisfy you?

My self answered back, that place-in-me which ranges from a rather bitchy aesthetic which prefers the whipping of birch bark on frozen days, on sauna-ed flesh’s excesses, to a gluttonous obesity of countenance whose satiety is reached only at near collapse, that self answered back with some sort of sardonic grin which blinded me and turned-off thinking.

I worried. It worried me. It pushed, bent, I wanted to run into the mirror so its silvered surface would dissolve and welcome me into Lewis Carroll’s domains behind; so I could look out, protected, and glance at my self glancing at its self looking for some satisfaction, pleased…

[Download the PDF version or read the full text below. Updated from previously published version in Organization, May 2001; vol. 8: pp. 403 - 415.]

Abstract. My vision for the future university acknowledges the facts of rapid change in the world. It attempts to conserve the idea of the university as structures and process by centering the university on a study of changes as they are redefining knowledge. As vision, it asks that faculties join in Centers for the Study of the Present Age to discuss, teach and attempt to shape the futures of Science and Technology and their ramifications. Key words. future university; new vision; re-center the university; study of present age

The vision: when I speak and think of the university, I have in mind the largest institution, the greatest number of students at all levels, professional as much as academic; graduate and postgraduate, as well as undergraduate.

The curriculum is at its maximum: some 150 subjects/disciplines in which one can garner a PhD. I have in mind, then, the largest public research universities, especially those which (also) educate their students to serve their states in the traditions of Land Grant: including agriculture and the mechanical arts.

While there are ample reasons to describe a private (research) university of fame or privilege as the descriptor of the university – say, the top of the pyramid of American universities, an Oxbridge or a Berlin – I think it important for our understanding of the present toward the future to consider the university serving the interests of the widest public or publics. In this setting, I intend to focus on the structure-processes of the institution, but particularly on how the idea of a university will intersect with, even help to define, the nature of the future.

I will therefore use the institution I know best – the University of Minnesota located in that urban cultural oasis of Minneapolis and St Paul (the Twin Cities) – as example and metaphor. I will propose a new vision in the development of a truly important University of Minnesota: The Study of the Present Age (Kierkegaard, 1940).[1]

Whether this vision might apply to privately endowed universities – we shall see. Whether more than one university will survive? – this we shall also see. Whether Minnesota is metaphor or reality? – time will tell.  We all find ourselves afloat in a sea of market-driven forces in this moment of hype and reality of an online Phoenix University and the recently globalized university where the very idea of a university is constructed as new products for whatever its markets will turn out to be. I oppose the idea that the market alone will determine the nature of the university.

This vision is simple in its statement. The present University of Minnesota will expand to include and center itself about the Study of the Present Age. A number of Centers will be created which will literally study, discuss, publish in the contexts of the most important issues of these times. Minnesota will be the place where the changing and continuing world is studied, criticized, shaped.

Primary will be the Center of the Study of Science and Technology as they are developing and changing the very ways in which we operate and think about being: new products, new ideas, even moving our ideas of reality from the world or from texts to whatever virtual will mean: media…and. Other Centers will include the Study of a Sustainable World; Life in the World’s Cities; the Changing Nature of Work; Curing and Teaching; Globalization; the Crisis in Meaning; Ageing and Sageing; Integrative Studies. There may be other suggestions.

There will be a Provost or Vice-President who leads this Center for the Study of the Present Age; and there will be an intellectual leader or coordinator as well. All the present faculty of the university will be included within it for perhaps 10–20 percent of their time; to join it at different points, and for varying lengths of time.[2]

The curriculum of the university as it exists at present – especially in the Liberal Arts and Sciences – will (thus) be preserved. The undergraduate students will be educated broadly in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. But they will also be educated to be able to join in discussions in various of the Centers for the Study of the Present Age, at a high critical and intellectual level. To enable this, I propose a pedagogical-dialogic interactive approach to critical thinking.[3]

Centering the university round the Center for the Study of the Present Age, the central and current ideas and disciplines of the university will be preserved, essentially. Otherwise the idea of a university will drift with the winds and currents of monies, politics and, possibly, religion: the worries of permeability of integrity and academic freedom so carefully pondered by Hofstadter and Metzger (1955).

Our students – or, as they now say, consumers or products – will be quite capable in the context of (what I call) an unscripted time,[4] as they will be broadly educated, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking; able to think-out the world as it happens, and to perform within it at fairly advanced levels. Otherwise, the temptation in a time of great change is to derogate the history of the idea of the university, and to train rather than to educate students for a changing and clamoring market. The Study of the Present Age can both preserve the sense of the larger curriculum and provide for futurity and, to the extent that we develop an important University of Minnesota, it will also do much to shape that futurity.

I think that the Idea of a University in the Present Age likely will occur in an urban context, which can accommodate and attract the kinds of enterprises and businesses which these Centers will spawn; more than, say, Amherst, Madison, or Ithaca.

The moment seems ripe for the development of this vision. There is a large pool of older faculty-thinkers-wise-persons from around the world who could contribute to such an idea: many of the more creative minds have been forced to be quite narrow in their work, and would welcome the challenges of broad and critical thinking.[5] Many of them have fairly nice pensions, would require less compensation, and could contract to develop, lead, and contribute to such a global enterprise. They also would be attracted to a cultural center such as the Twin Cities. Many of them could also attract funding and followings in the context of an important University of Minnesota.

Similarly, a number of commercial enterprises would find it important to partake in these critical discussions with us. As we will attract many of the best critics, say, of biotechnology and virtual reality, so various businesses will find it most advantageous to discuss developing and changing issues in the areas of our Centers’ concentrations; more reasons to be located in an urban setting.

Early Brief Courses could be presented to entering students: An Introduction to the University; Culture and Technology; a Brief Course on America in company with entering International Students (a speciality of mine).[6]

Education would be directly, perhaps primarily, toward the students being able to enter into discussion in the various Centers at a thoughtful level. As the Centers both reflect and intersect the changing world, the criterion of students entering the conversations would be a good measure of educational quality and utility, enhancing their ability to enter the world as educated and critically thoughtful persons.

The University of Minnesota is sufficiently large to accommodate the Study of the Present Age, and is quite possibly geared for a large change as it seems to find itself at a moment of declining resources and reputation, a sense that the future is also likely to decline from a formerly great university, to a pretty good one, to…

So: the Vision!

Context and Setting: Gradual Changes Since the 1950s

As the world is enmeshed in torrents of change, the very idea of the university is also much in flux. Newman’s ‘winds from the North’ (Newman, 1976) – from industrial England of the 19^th century – invade both our thinking and the funding of the institutions which until fairly recently seemed somewhat removed from the currents of ordinary life: the Ivory Tower now overgrown with weeds, hanging vines; exposed to the elements.

But it is not only money which offers – or threatens – to alter the university. There is a much larger set of changes which challenge the very idea of a university as it has endured with some centrality and continuity of purpose from Plato’s Academy to these times. I am thus cautious about the ideas of the university which we all bring to this discussion.

Some of these changes have occurred fairly gradually, if profoundly. As example, I take it for granted that the university is primarily its faculties and curricula. But most people seem to locate the idea of the university in its organization or administration. And many of the changes of the past generation seem to remain outside our thinking as they characterize the university as most of us have actually experienced it. Which/whose idea of the university are we attempting to preserve or reinvent?

So this section will be a brief analysis of changes that have already occurred by the time most of us got to experience the university.

The very nature of work is undergoing a change – literally – as great as the Industrial Revolution and the technological developments of the 19^th century. The rising power of the sciences and engineering – more recently biology – the decline of the liberal arts, as well as the sense of the importance of a university degree in order to find mostly monetary success in the working world . . . all this has backgrounded ideas of a good, contemplative, educated life, or of the education of the good citizen (almost gone from the modern secular university). Perhaps this is driven much by the fading of the very idea of the nation-state with such vast sums of money passing across the world each day (Readings, 1996).

In the context of work and education, numbers of students who attend the university increased radically during the moment of the maturing baby boomers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Minnesota, for example, increased its student population from about 17,000 to 35,000 in just four years: 1958–62. The idea of leadership of the university was radically altered in that moment of necessity in managing such multitudes.

Federal and foundation funds increased after World War II, but especially after Sputnik in 1957, paralleling and driving the vast increases in attendance. Any community of scholars as it may have existed prior to that moment in Newman’s sense (Newman, 1953), splintered into those areas where there was external funding and those which had none. The Institute of Technology at the Minnesota literally stole the hard sciences from Science and Liberal Arts (SLA) in the late 1950s, and biology went its own ways to affiliate with medicine or agriculture. The two-culture split between sciences and humanities, noted by C.P. Snow already by 1959 (Snow, 1964), persists to this day. Faculties went their own ways. The only common interest or issue, already by 1963, was that of finding parking spaces (Kerr, 1963).

In the 1960s, the rise of grantsmanship further splintered the faculty into individuated entrepreneurs, as careerism gradually replaced vocationalism.

And, in the early 1970s, when the expanded and newly created institutions slowed down their expansions, administration consolidated its hold on the university.[7]

I think it was during this period that the structural idea of departments overtook the more conceptual notion of disciplines. Whereas disciplines developed and largely remain the outcome of particular questions, problems, or issues, departments are collectivities whose identity has become largely bureaucratic; places to house faculty whose power and importance are directly related to the size of its budget, more than to any intellectual import of its disciplined-thinking.

Whenever – perhaps especially now – that the society (government, foundations, especially corporations) wants new or other questions addressed, the department has often been found to be intransigent and closed-in. The obvious solution has been to direct research across or among multi-disciplines. But the actuality of multi or interdisciplinary work often disregards or loses the centrality of disciplined thinking, as it often directs itself to externally generated problematics. Current pressures on the idea of a university, then, seem to be largely integrative: trying to construct an administrative soul for a very loose collectivity in which department backgrounds discipline.

While much of this seems obvious and productive, there is often a loss of history and reason for differently disciplined thinking, at least some of which seems to be at the heart of the Liberal Arts. The question of the future of the university surely involves questions of the importance or integrity of disciplined thinking across a vast curriculum. As example, much of botany and zoology have literally been replaced or overtaken by microbiology, the biology of the cell; a form of chemistry which is certainly both important and yielding of monies. But many important questions about humanity and life have simply disappeared, unasked: morphology, taxonomy. Geography, physiology, philosophy seem about to fade, as well.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the very nature of administration changed in what Bruce Wilshire characterized as the moral collapse of the university when administrators began reading paper more than judging the quality of their faculties, or asking questions about knowledge and the meaning of the university (Wilshire, 1990).

During this time, there was also a democratization of the university: first, ethnic Europeans (primarily male Catholics and Jews), then (mostly white, younger) women, and not so many persons of color. While this was a wonderful and democratizing occurrence, I think that these events took notice away from the administrative and bureaucratic changes that were also occurring. One result was that there has been very little criticism of the idea of the university during this period. Another has been the training of most administrators to think of the university as effectively without much sense of purpose: to judge one’s own institution with respect to others, more than with respect to some idea of what a university ought to be and do.

Another aspect of the democratization was the vast increase in the numbers of students who came to the university, also contributing to its bureaucratization. The notion of a credential gradually began to replace the idea of an education (Kerr, 1991). A degree – any degree – replaced most deeper questions of the meaning of an education. As a result, the institution became increasingly opaque to the multitudes of students (parents and community, as well) as the faculty gradually disappeared into their productive modes.[8] The sense of isolation in universities increased markedly for students – perhaps more particularly for faculty.

Visibility and image – as in the media – overtook the harder work of personal judgment. University presidents began to look at other places a bit better – a bit worse® – to see where their institutions (and careers) were situated (Cohen and March, 1974). This set up and continues to confirm the current pyramid of universities in which reputation largely determines quality, while actual work is done for like-minded colleagues in other places. Little occurs in one’s home department or university of any institutional value. Visibility and celebrity have overtaken authority… One could go on.

Related is the rise of the knowledge society in which our Colleges of Education see information, access, and use of knowledge as keys to a good education. Teachers who might purvey wisdom have become managers and facilitators as the importance of education as a profession has dwindled. John Dewey’s School of Education at the University of Chicago was phased out recently – placing an apostrophe on an era when we might have had a dialogical interchange with a sage. This is to say that information and knowledge have overtaken education as wisdom has faded from our ideas of the course of a long life: something about the technologicalization and bureaucratization of life.

All this analysis affirms that the current wonderings about the future of knowledge and the university are set within an institution which hasn’t thought too much about questions of its meaning since at least the early 1970s. My concern is that we are asking questions about futurity within a model of the university and knowledge that has been running as much on inertia as substance for quite a while.

The Recent Past

None of this analysis of the depth of change should be understood as a downgrading of any current sense of crisis and sudden change that have been occurring within the university. To return briefly to the vision of the Present Age, it is the pace and directions of change which have moved me to suggest that the central function of the important University of Minnesota will be to study seriously the changing nature of these times.

Where to begin? . . . a crisis in meaning (Sarles, 2001). This crisis – first noted by Nietzsche well over a century ago as the rise in ‘European nihilism’ (Nietzsche, 1968) – has deepened. Television is a prime suspect in which authority has been replaced by celebrity. The pursuit of truth, and that faculty and universities can certify it as such, has weakened considerably. Techniques of revisionism such as Spin and PR are by now so common as to be cliche.  Fame and becoming a star professor is the current measure of competitive quality. A much longer story, but central to our concerns.

Here the Internet and email have opened up opportunities for us to communicate easily and rapidly. No paper necessary to communicate all across the world – to develop conferences, to arrange…whatever. The downside is that questions of truth and authority become more in flux. Truth, logic, knowledge, reality?…Whew!

The idea that the world is politics/economics (in either order) – and nothing else – also seems increasingly attractive, and awaits (new?) theories of global governance, whenever an apparently insatiable capitalism must eventually(!) overstep itself. This, too, is a developing current of postmodernism, in which most left-leaning neo-neo-Marxists are searching against, but also for, new directions. Within the context of the meaning of the university, however, the notion that all is politics/economics tends to be undermining.[9]

As I often taught the Sciences and the Humanities course at Minnesota, and as I have that on my mind: whatever ‘postmodernism’ may mean or convey, the rifts between science and humanities have deepened a good deal. I characterize the differences being between the World-as-Text and the Text-as-World. As technology continues to rise with amazing power, science is backgrounded, and the notion of narrative – that all is talk about, but any real-reality is located in texts – seems very attractive.

The rise of religious fundamentalism is related – as such thinkers are actually scholars of religious texts, which they use to determine/specify the ongoing reality: thus, the Text-as-World. None of this can be overestimated in its possible powers. The intellectual impact of this is to replace ideas of history and linear development of our being with concepts derived from prophets whose sayings may overtake all of thinking (Sarles, 1999).

The Future

It hasn’t helped that science (thus rationality, and the politics of liberalism and democracy) is increasingly seen as self-serving: scientists working for/with corporations that fund research at universities more cheaply than they could do it. Isn’t everyone for sale?[10]

Aren’t our deans all urging us to apply for grants, never mind questions of integrity? Who can judge quality, anyway? And endowed professorships seem fairly open to those who can pay the prevailing price: professorial stars; or ideologues?

Increasing senses of globality have entered our thinking and actualities.  Movements of vast sums of money each day and night have helped blur the conceptual boundaries that we have called nation-states. Bill Readings (1996) wondered poignantly if the Kantian idea of the rational university which would teach the citizen of the rational state is now passé, and its meaning adrift. Where, then, may the idea of a university locate itself?

Relations between structures of economic and social life now rise into contestation, as transnational corporations operate between and around the concepts of nationhood and law. This further destabilizes or blurs our positioning in the world.

Within the recent rise of cosmology, the sense of our being has diminished radically. After a few centuries of forms of humanism which urged us to center our being upon our lives and our experience, we find ourselves in the vast universes of sci-fi and more blurring of boundaries: in these contexts, between life and death, and the questioning of the meaning of life being determined outside of our very existence.[11]

One more arena of large change in the academy – one which has reflexes of a cycle from the late 19^th century. We can note that the amazing concentration upon money as the measure of the quality of life, the developments which drove the ‘Re-Organizing Knowledge’ conference, (where this essay was published) also led in the 19^th century to the kinds of biology, evolutionary psychology, and neurology of determinism, which are in increasing vogue right now: then they called it eugenics.

Here again, the temptation to ask questions of meaning of our lives and of the university, are obscured in the excitement of MRIs (magnetic resonance – brain – imagings) and the idea that we are close to finally solving the problem of the human. Evolutionary psychology – by any name – is very similar to the Social Darwinism which accompanied the Gilded Age and Robber Barons of the 19^th century. Much of it seems like politics in the name of science, especially if one takes seriously the political applications of eugenic theories in Hitler’s realms. As an increasing portion of our being is being seen as predetermined by our genes, the nature of our actual experience is background and unimportant, or uninteresting…or not-psychology or not-biology.

As money replaces meaning, and the game goes to the most competitive, the notion that these aspects of our being are particularly hereditary becomes first interesting, then compelling. Education is directed toward success; success determined by the opportunities and fads of each day. And the idea of a university floats…

If the experience of the early 20^th century parallels the excesses of the current love-affair with money, here at least there is some direction: some form of retrieve or return to a progressive pragmatism along the lines of thought of John Dewey et al. (Hofstadter, 1992: Chapter 7).

What this presages is an increasing concern with experience and doing, replacing the sense that how we got here is more determining than how we experience and live our lives. And we have to re-earn some of the authority which has so diminished in this era of celebrity and consumerism.

Conclusion: The Study of the Present Age

Much of this analysis of the university and the contexts in which it finds itself, our wonderings about the future of knowledge and of the idea of a university, seem to be as much in flux as one can imagine. It is primarily for this reason that my vision of the Study of the Present Age seems like a good path for solution to the future university. In this essay, I’ve taken the position that the Idea of the University remains an important one, both in developing and preserving.

I assume, believe, trust, as well, that there must remain some deep sense of integrity to the institution; that we can and must pursue the truth. I don’t mind the polemics or arguments – at least most of them. The splits between the sciences and the humanities, and the curses or cries of joy of postmodernism, rifts like those between the notions of rationality which abound in economics, psychiatry, philosophy, and law, seem to me really interesting. I try to study and discuss them.

Except: they get very little public discussion and less awareness. We have tended to retreat into our protective and protected spaces, rather than explore and confront those who are different from us, or those who disagree with us. The politics of academe are not always pretty. But I think that the differences and depths of disciplined thinking remain very important in the human condition. And I remain somewhat confident that disagreements or passings-by can be brokered, understood, sometimes reconciled; but not within the currents of isolation which presently make the university easier to administer or to compete with others.

There are, in fact, several universities within the one that is the University of Minnesota. For example, many of the disciplines promote thinking which depends on case studies and abstracts to generalities later (Law, Medicine, Anthropology, Engineering and in some ways the Humanities often use texts as cases), while others begin abstractly and come to specifics much later (maths, physics, much of biology). In this context, the notion of theory is often used as a bludgeon, a bit of politics attempting to raise the import of certain studies, persons, or claims, while the theorists often relegate the case studiers to lesser status.

It is similar with those who tend toward the analytic and reductionistic talking past their colleagues who are more holistic. In this context, there are palpable cycles whose patron saint may be likened to Humpty-Dumpty. Here, philosophy is presently seen as coming to an analytic impasse, with a call back to a renewed American Pragmatism.[12]

We have also been creating institutional distance and disparity between research and teaching, stemming from the 1960s, but continuing.  In our recent attempts to distinguish the university from (apparently) competing private and public colleges, we have been playing games with teaching, making it burden more than joy. In the Center for the Study of the Present Age, students will want to study with the best thinkers, not merely seek the easiest or most convenient credentials. Lecturing with Power Point is most often telling much more than it is teaching.

I have to think that good management can enable us to get beyond the social definitions of whose teaching, thinking, knowledge is more important, simply by virtue of their belonging to a field which is currently prestigious/hot. All of this tends toward the bureaucratic, neither attractive nor intelligible. Vast differences in pay scales represent image and visibility and the incursions of markets, and continue to erode the institution. And this has also contributed to the notion that credentials are more important than education.

Not! – at an important University of Minnesota.

The Study of the Present Age admits-commits to the idea that the world is changing very rapidly and in ways that we cannot fully understand or penetrate in any moment. The Present Age is a concept that may enable us to grasp the present, and to move it toward the futurity of its students (what parents, community, legislator, businesses really desire – they’re running scared for their childrens’ futures!). In an unscripted world, the university has to become and remain some sort of anchor.

It is necessary to be the important University of Minnesota, because we have to have (earn and assert) sufficient authority to continue to claim to be persons who profess and pursue truth. It seems OK not to know everything at once . . . if we can show that we possess and continue to pursue the wisdom(s) of this time and of all of time.

The Center for the Study of the Present Age is a concept (soon, we hope, to be a reality) that will study, monitor, critique, and interact with these times. It will engage the entire faculty in a joint enterprise and regain us the sense that we are a community of scholars: in it the distinctions between research-scholarship, teaching, and service will meld into a singular pursuit.

The university must remain open to various communities, inviting them to participate and join us on occasion. Here, I include the global community, perhaps especially those persons of wisdom from the entire world who wish to continue their pursuits in conjoint contexts.

Leadership will be paramount. A central commitment – of the President or Chancellor – is crucial because she or he will have to have sufficient nerve to take Minnesota away from the secure comforts of pyramidal location (a pretty good university – e.g., 3^rd best public research university), and to take or support us as we go our own way. Similarly, parents, students, citizens, legislators will have to swallow deeply as we all have to relocate ourselves globally, then locally. And we have to adjust to the conceptual sense that Internet, email, and virtual reality are us.

We will have to rethink our ideas of ageing, ageing faculty and the ageing of the developed world with some study of the traditions in which teacher-as-sage is the direction and path of a very good life (Peterson, 1999).

All of this will be done with the integrative sense that disciplined thinking can be done within the contexts of particular ideas, problems, and histories. It is paramount that some of us can explore, broker, and explain the nature of knowledge and the broad curriculum with and to one another.

The Study of the Present Age will preserve the idea of a university by entering the world at a level and in senses where we can do what it is important to do, as much in our own terms as possible: call it the pursuit of wisdom in changing times. We do this by studying and critiquing the world as it is occurring: carefully, well, thoughtfully, continually. We will need constructive criticism from the global community – and hope that they will join us frequently in our deliberations.

In this way, we will also be able to preserve, conserve, continue the Liberal Arts and Sciences as they pursue knowledge in their variously disciplined modes and manners. The curriculum is vast, often competitive, and whether it serves the futures of our students is at much risk in the momentariness of vogues, fads, and ready markets.

I hope that having a Center that pulls everyone together some of the time will enable us to know and to study one another, and to stop much of the splinterings and talkings-past that have characterized the bureaucratization of the university in the past few decades. Careers belong to the ephemeral world and political economies, so we have to reinvent the pursuit of character and of vocation, which will help us to be models for and inspirers of our students.

It is we, the thinkers, the teachers, those of us who attempt to be real professors who can attempt to guarantee or underwrite the sense that students’ futures can remain hopeful and doable. It is the Idea of a University in the Present Age which is the vision for this coming reality.

Notes

[1] Kierkegaard’s principal critique is of the rise of bureaucratic thought and thinking. In this context I have crafted an analysis of the University: “The Nature of the University: Bureaucratization of the Mind and of Knowledge.” (ms)

[2] The faculty will also be asked to develop their own – new or renewed – plans for their future work: one-, two-, five-, 10-year projections. Within disciplines and/or across disciplines.

[3] My own thought and work in teaching has been interactive, toward the Deweyan idea of becoming a self-thinker, an autodidact (see Sarles: “Teaching as Dialogue”).

[4]. I mean by ‘an unscripted time’ that the future looms without much certitude about potential or real vocations or careers which the university qua university can train them toward. In a world in which ‘temps’ are the leading career at present, and even some professions (e.g. medicine) are changing almost daily, it is unclear that the largely historical university can train students and retain any sense of its integrity or reason for being. Much of this discussion hinges about the perception of the pace and depth of changes which we are presently experiencing. I presume that we must educate students to be able to deal with their futurities, irrespective of the university’s particularities.

[5] I don’t mean that this envisioned university will be a mere retirement haven for ex-academics.  Rather, it will draw the very limited number of older persons whom we can think of as master teachers or sages in the contexts of other traditions in the world which have highly respectful wisdom traditions of ageing.

[6] I taught such a course for several years to incoming Foreign Fulbright Graduate students from all over the world, and propose it as a good introduction both to our own history and to global thinking (see Sarles, 1998).

[7] I note with dismay that there are very few (any?) current university presidents who have national intellectual stature.

[8] My metaphor continues to be the curriculum handbook of the University of Wisconsin Madison when our son went there in the early 1980s: 135 pages of majors and courses and not a single mention of any faculty. Not one!

[9] I usually agree with postmodernists that politics are involved in almost everything, but think that, with ongoing awareness and cultural critique, much of the politics can be overcome; cf., this essay.

[10] Personal communication, Philip Regal, a now retired ecologist at Minnesota, and a close colleague. He was at one time the lead scientist in a lawsuit directed against the FDA to require the Government to label all genetically altered foods…(Oh well!)

[11] In a recent course, I taught ‘Philosophy’ to a group of middle-school children. I observed that these arenas (stories, movies, videos, games) pervade their thinking, most of it remaining floating and uninterpreted (Minneapolis Metropolitan School).

[12] Donald Davidson, a leading analytic philosopher, made just this point in a series of lectures at the University of Minnesota in 1998: ‘The Resurrection of Truth’ pointed back to the work of Pragmatists, particularly John Dewey.

References

Cohen, M.D. and March, J.G. (1974) Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstadter, R. and Metzger, W. (1955) The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hofstadter, R. (1992) ‘The Current of Pragmatism’, in Hofstadter, R. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Kerr, C. (1963) The Uses of the University. New York: Harper & Row.

Kerr, C. (1991) The Great Transformation in Higher Education: 1960–1980. Albany: SUNY Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1940) The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-religious Treatises.

Translated by A. Dru and W. Lowrie. London: Oxford University Press.

Newman, J.H. (1953) University Sketches. Dublin: Browne & Nolan.

Newman, J.H. (1976) The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage.

Peterson, P.G. (1999) Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave will Transform America – and the World. New York: Times Books.

Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sarles, H.B. (1993) Teaching as Dialogue. A Teacher’s Study. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Sarles, H.B. (1998) ‘Explaining Ourselves through Others. Cultural Visions: A Mini Course on America”, in J.A. Mestenhauser and B.J. Ellingboe Reforming the Higher Education Curriculum: Internationalizing the Campus, pp. 135–49.  Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Sarles, H.B. (2010ms) Prediction! or Prophecy?

Sarles, H.B. (2001) Nietzsche’s Prophecy: The Crisis in Meaning. Buffalo, NY: Humanity Press.

Snow, C.P. (1964) The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilshire, B. (1990) The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation. Albany: SUNY Press.

The meanings and concepts of our being in the world reduced by language; reduced to a language in which opposites proclaim each other’s territories: War is Peace, and Peace is War, and so it is in the actuality of 1984.

1984 – the novel; 1984 – the year of our being; appear so different.

1984 – the novel, dark, brooding, each day rewritten, revised so there is no longer any sense of tomorrow. Each next moment is promised, then stolen. Time is guaranteed, robbed, promised…a theoretical exercise in “Doublethink.” The concept of time, of history reduced is going, going…gone

1984 – today, this weekend; our experience, not Orwell’s imagination.  Yet here we are pondering what he said, wondering what was warning; what was prophecy. What is this time, 1984, the year of our being, here together? The wars, vague; the blanket upon our lives the darkness and dystopia of nuclear holocaust that each next moment does not rewrite the last moments, but that Life itself may disappear and all our concepts flow down some Divine drain: opposites, metaphors, histories, ironies, concepts, words, gone; all gone.

1984 – the novel, warned us that we would not recognize 1984, the year of our being, for what it would be, and what it is.

1984 – our being cast into a deepening quest and search for meaning, not that words and history reduce, revise, but that the concept of existence is cast in deepening doubt.

It was a purple colored paperback book
I borrowed from my niece,

the selected or collected works of Nietzsche

…which I only read much later,
as I slowly gathered time
and nerve.

Perhaps it was that the pain I had in those days
was so close to each moment’s experience;

perhaps I was generally down and depressed,
waiting for something to happen
which would not materialize,

but it was then
I began to read his works.

And I went with him
everywhere that he went,
and; I imagined, beyond…
if that is possible.

The will to power,
the will to will,
the rise of European nihilism,
the proclamation
of the death of God,

the transvaluation of all values…

the stirring prose,
the power of the aphorism
coming hard on the trail
of Machiavelli’s “Discourses,”
pulling me up
upon Zarathustra’s Mountain,
licking my wounded vanities,

grappling for the first time
seriously
with my ignorances
and bluster
and arrogance which seemed then to pale
next to his.

A ready kinship as philologist
and amateur musician,
I tried to feel
as substance
and author.

Into every nook and cranny,
the dizzying pace of somersaults
trying to know each critical point
in thought,

to move beyond each next beyond,
always aware that his had led to
an enduring insanity
in which he assured himself
that his destiny was fulfilled
because he had fulfilled destiny.

His attack upon morality,
upon the meekness
and weakness of a love preachment,

redirected
into my own becomingness,

revolving through my own being
as I was myself
attacking the foundations of language’s preeminence,

took me up to the heights he praised
and into the depths
he seemed to think
were necessary;

to climb up to the next place.

Who am I? A deep and developing question. But I did have several teachers who helped me to formulate my thinking and directions.

Above all, Ray Birdwhistell – the originator of “Kinesics,” the study of the human body-in-interaction. He was an Anthropologist who was the best observer of people I’ve ever met – observer in the sense of seeing people in careful and detailed senses. He was trained as a “classical” dancer, and seemed to see all others as performers in life’s dances. And he didn’t only concentrate on each individual. He also/always noted how they interacted: in groups, in life’s varieties of social contexts from infants to older, the ordinary and the exceptional in every sense; richer and poorer, healthy and injured and “odd” and…; ethnic, linguistic. His ways into the world were always expanding. Life is social, interactive: the individual…?

My Teachers (click image to enlarge)

Ray was a student of the Chicago School of Symbolic Interaction – heirs of the American Pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, and the anthropologists who wandered the entire world. His work wandered from American Indians to the average family dynamics, to the sick – physically and, particularly, mentally. And he directed me to the U. of Chicago, Anthropology, where I continued my studies with linguist Norman McQuown – under whose tutelage I (and family: J, and infant daughter Amy) studied a Mayan Language (Tzotzil) and lived in Chiapas, Mexico for two years deeply immersed in both Indian and Ladino (their term) cultures during this time.

Ray was also a student in the line of thought and active fieldwork (life is fieldwork!) of Franz Boas: Margaret Mead (especially), Gregory Bateson, influenced his thought. Boas’ observation and insistence that the study of the human includes the Physical, Cultural, and Linguistic – (and his friendship with John Dewey, G.H. Mead’s buddy) – all floats in my being and work. Boas’ work on the nature of the shape of the human head/body as cultural, has yet to be fully heard. This tradition, which insists that all humans are equally part of the human condition – and that it takes continuous observation and wonderment of how we are…including oneself…to begin to understand the human condition. Many of the ideas of Human Rights developed within and from their work.

I met Ray Birdwhistell at SUNYBuffalo, where he joined linguists George Trager and Henry L. Smith, Jr. – who had previously led the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Dept. They had recently been dismissed (all the anthropologists-linguists) – from the FSI – and began the study of Anthropology and Linguistics, where I was one of their first two students. With Smith and Trager, I got deeply into questions of language and expression: how language “works,” as grammar, but also as sound – in the various contexts of culture and society.

Trager’s wide-works were more embedded in the works of some other former colleagues (e.g., “The Silent Language” – written by Edward T. Hall) which became part of my thinking on intercultural communication, “proxemics” – the spaciality of interactions, always expanding to questions about “how the world works.”)

We spent a summer with Trager in Taos, N.M. examining “paralanguage” in the Taos Indian language: i.e., how language sounds and “pitch” are bound together in speech and interaction. Some of my work (“Language and Human Nature” – resetting many issues surrounding “artificial intelligence”) flow from this thinking.

From Smith, more the involvement with one’s native language, and how to see and examine oneself speaking, observing; he was well known, as well, as an expert on American English dialects. My concern with language, expression, context sprang deeply from these connections and teachings which continue to frame much of my thinking as I approach the world of people: talk, interaction, the body, context…culture, institutions, history.

The work and thinking of my teachers at Buffalo is more expressed by others (e.g., E.T. Hall), and by Birdwhistell’s student (also sent to Chicago), Erving Goffman, whose work and thinking (“Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” etc.) elaborates much of Ray’s conceptual and intellectual orientation toward the study of the human.

Again, the two years of fieldwork in Chiapas under McQuown, taught me to observe and think (with several other co-students) about other languages/cultures. The opportunity there also provided me with two years of “hanging” around home, where I could observe daughter Amy learning language (actually two languages), and where being outside in the tropics afforded me the ongoing opportunity to see everyone and their families, etc., in the context of a fairly small community of Venustiano Carranza where both Indian and Ladino cultures and languages were spoken. Living in other cultures, speaking other languages, has been powerful in my being and thinking.

Beyond this were various teachers I had throughout my schooling: some very good and fairly memorable; a couple with whom my interactions were, frankly pretty terrible (in a year’s study in Medical School – which experience still resonates powerfully in my thinking – dissecting a cadaver remains in my thoughts.) The couple of “bad” experiences with teachers has strongly influenced how I think about and actually teach students: my book and practice, “Teaching as Dialogue.” (See the movie, “Paper Chase” to get the taste and flavor of those experiences – I try to pursue kindness and critical thought, social critique, more than directed study or lecturing!)

Resonating in my being, still, are also a couple of violin teachers from age 8 until my college days. Paramount in my thinking is Bernard Mandelkern who helped me to become a kind of “self-teacher” on the violin, whose study I continue to pursue most days in the vague hopes of being able someday (soon?) to play (perform?) J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas.

I’ve also had “teachers” as I have been engaged in studying the world, people, institutions, ideas…two years as a mathematician-programmer at Cornell Aeronautical Lab in Buffalo, and four years in Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh doing research on the dynamics of Psychiatric Therapy.

As a critic-commentator of the (idea of) the University, Stanley Williams directed and joined with me on how to study and understand how such institutions work (from his experience as Manager of a Research group in Surgery); Phil Regal, on how to think about biology and most everything else; Mischa Penn who urged me to broaden my thinking and framing of all of knowledge; and various of my students, some of whom remain close co-thinkers, especially Jerry Timian and Glenn Radde; and members of the “Body Group” with whom I studied the body with observers, curers, athletes, musicians, etc. (especially R. Hruby).

And there are teachers of Alexander technique, tai chi, and ongoing yoga study with Nancy Boler – which I practice most days. Dan Latorre is my teacher-guide to the internet: I have much to learn.

Above all, hovers the wisdom and critique of partner Janis Sarles: my major teacher for over 50 years.

“Like the possibility of knowing, now, the entire earth reduced to jet planes’ speeds and missiles’ trajectories, the sense of what we are became all-too-knowable and ultimately explicable, and the mysteries of the metaphysics which whispered, hushed, in our innards, began to speak a little more hurriedly with an excitation like storm clouds’ beginning gatherings.

…

Be in process, exist, experience, love life, transcend your history, be moral from strength and self-possession, not from a weakness which is battered, not from a music which escalates but does not elevate. To deserve a deity, is to be a person of character, to be for, to be against, to be what can be…a person is a will, a willing to, and one who can talk to the inner dialogue.”

It began, I guess, several centuries ago, the proclamation of the end of the era of metaphysics.

For a while it was banned: that is, talk about metaphysics, as if banning talk would remove the ideas and thoughts. Metaphysics as talk and term, became a way of spurning the obscure, when all that was needed (they said) was care in observation and in experimentation. In the name of objectivity and rationality, and perhaps of progress, metaphysics was banned and bannered and kept in a closely lidded casket as if it were some hornet’s nest.

Except…except that somewhere in our lives, some of the visions of our own being, lurked a metaphysician telling us what was a question, what was an answer, what we are and sometimes, why.

The lurking thinker carried within a big bag of inner dialogues, a mix of wonderments which were kept mostly quiet. How? By naming the stuff which came up, came out, rose to the surface…

The word was consciousness. Consciousness was coherent in some sense of whatever is coherence, connectedness, logicality, it seemed to remain calm.

Metaphysics banned questions of who and why we are, removed, suppressed, pushed to depths in our being, hidden from ourselves, rose to the surface only rarely, and often then in the form of some passions which could be dismissed, if not controlled.

God’s voices spoke still loudly, if not always so clearly, and we wondered about the human understanding: as if understanding understanding would tell us answers to questions whose framing stood still mostly at some place of hum and murmur within us.

We still had some depiction of ourselves as outside of nature, an afterward and afterthought of the physics and material which had made us up, had led to us, but which did not, could not explain us.

As history, knowledge, geography all increased, we began to inventory the world. The other species gained, the earth diminished and we with it, and Nature tamed, rose up with once-buried questions.

The firmness of Euclid’s planes and spaces and forms of forever-is, then became spongy, attacking destiny and the resoluteness in a sense of what we know and what is knowing. The Grand Design, a theory to account for us and myself and what is time and all of that, reduced from fact to theory any other myth or story by which we get to sleep at night. No more design, no progressive sense of evolution, nature invoked itself to explain itself, cause and causality became answers to questions: not much more; mostly considerably less.

Like the possibility of knowing, now, the entire earth reduced to jet planes’ speeds and missiles’ trajectories, the sense of what we are became all-too-knowable and ultimately explicable, and the mysteries of the metaphysics which whispered, hushed, in our innards, began to speak a little more hurriedly with an excitation like storm clouds’ beginning gatherings.

Characters steeped in the religious tellings of their times and of history, Darwin, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, said all was not so right, and they struck out to right things round.

Where are we and how did we get here, and why are things and us not better, not more productive, more wonderfully human, they asked, suspecting, accusing the purveyors of some of the words of a god who did metaphysics, that there are other ways of being…or we know not yet who and what we are.

Nietzsche said Plato set us up with an outlook, a metaphysics which was so powerful that it framed our thinking and could not be gotten “beyond.” Trapped!

We were trapped, humbled by a control of thinking in which the highest success of our being human was to humble ourselves, to be meek and to seek excuses rather than our own strength and power.

Be in process, exist, experience, love life, transcend your history, be moral from strength and self-possession, not from a weakness which is battered, not from a music which escalates but does not elevate. To deserve a deity, is to be a person of character, to be for, to be against, to be what can be…a person is a will, a willing to, and one who can talk to the inner dialogue.

Arrayed against some sense of Nature which wanted it controlled, subsumed, a fateful increase in nature’s technology propelled us here.  But our theories, our metaphysics still discuss, just below passion in our kidneys and livers and intestines, a sense of Nature which is older and longer ago.

Here we are, our public selves driving at multi-human speeds on not so free-ways, purveyors of each new day’s technologies, while our metaphysical selves still maintain the inner conversation, finding themselves, somehow, increasingly at odds with today’s-tomorrow us, and pushing, as it were, backwards, toward a sense of Nature which had its roots out there somewhere, outside of us; not, as they say, “man-made.”

The philosophers now technicians of ideas, much as engineers but with less imagination, are trying still in this century to proclaim the end of metaphysics, lacking either nerve to kill-off Plato lest reality disappear (appear?), or the sense of how to do it.

How to proclaim that metaphysics is over, yet still have a business? Losing their home-base of a logic which holds still, they fight new knowledge as it erodes their belief and position of the foundations of what is human, rather than taking hard looks at themselves.

Removed from their own human-ness, at a distance from inner mumblings, they suppress, deny, and still proclaim the end of metaphysics, trying with all their might to preserve it in the self-same sentence and sentencings. How many centuries to end an outlook? What reactions, what new messianisms will it provoke talking out of its two-sided mouth, mouthing revolution…but not just now.

Instead the world moves on rapidly, much as we, in the freeways of global talk and understandings and refusals to talk and understand.  Metaphysics, hardened into trench warfare.

Always almost over…always ending, never-ending?

Not knowing just exactly what I was for, I found it more direct early in my scholarly life, to be against some ideas, some thinkers…to sense and test who I was not, what I would not do, and where the edges of my ideas or focus reside.

I argued vehemently, strongly, perhaps harshly against what I thought was wrong, was untruthful. I was a critic writing polemics; trying as well to explore new paths which had no particular history, no negatives.

Now, I occasionally discover that much of the thinking I call my own, is directed… against, opposed. So much so, I sometimes think (and am told), that I do not say what I think is correct, except in the terms of some opposition, some polemic.

I wonder if I am anyone, in these times, except some enemy’s enemy, defined less by  personal integrity or by my friends with whom I think, but more by the ideas which I oppose. Where is truth located within these forms of disagreement and battles?

Who am I, positively, on the side of some ideas or thoughts; more than the armored battler always arguing against ideas or thoughts of others?

I note all the students sitting there, not merely at ease, or with various sorts of questioning appearances. Rather they are mostly staring at me, “their” teacher; rather staring “through me” looking to see…what, who? Am I, can I ever be, who they want somehow to penetrate; to be…?

In those instants, beyond the talk which I talk of the course to come, I wonder who they are, who they see in me. And who am I, runs so rapidly in my being, that I find it difficult – so difficult to grasp my own “presence” – and remain the teacher I would be, even as I am anthropologist to them and to my own being.

Writing in response to Christopher Kelty’s post on Savage Minds about Experimental Philosophy (x-phi), I am pleased, perplexed, pensive… I have lived (still do!) the life of the Anthropologist who would be doing philosophy, and imagine that we might one day find each other. Soon?! Maybe.

Trained principally, to study language and behavior and sociality/culture, I begin by including “myself” in the study of anyone’s language, culture, thought…Who am I, where am I, how did I get here, how to be the “measurer” of all things?

As a self-proclaimed “Anthropologist of the Ordinary,” I understand the temptations to study the “exotic,” but note that the ordinary human is much more exotic than we have noted. The human body which exists in the world with others’ bodies (the Pragmatism of G.H. Mead inserts itself into this approach) is a brilliant and ongoing piece of work, that we seem to want to underestimate as some derivative of the idea of mind.

This, to state that Experimental Philosophy which would be Anthropology, should begin not only be “asking” others, but observing others and oneself (asking). We note that the infant “attaches” itself to its m/other – survives and “emerges” to become a self. The infant, in effect “joins” or “becomes” its m/other; it is student, thence studies her presentation of the world and language.

On the questions of our being, not “cogito ergo sum.” Rather I “am” because; because m/other sees “somebody there” and the (philosophical) anthropologist observes the small and large of the persistent interactions between infant and m/other. “Eventually” the social child “emerges” from these intense interactions to become it-self. Be there, and try to see…

The locus/origin of morality is located here – out of the (moral) commitment which m/other invests in her child’s being: confirming that there is “somebody there” (as Elaine Morgan stated it), and engaging its being. The nagging question of “certainty” of knowledge is located here, as well as the locus of morality.

It is the m/other who confirms being until…until the child grows and become “dangerous to itself” as it moves, runs, jumps (especially with gravity). Her “job” – at this point – is to get her child to “take care of itself as she would” – the onset of morality, conscience, consciousness, which has perplexed us for…ever.

So, now we can begin to examine how each of us comes to trust oneself in the ordinary: driving on the freeway at 80 mph, knowing “where” one is and is going, whether the architects and builders of my 20th floor condo knew what they were doing – rises excitingly as each next storm floats into my vision’s sightings.

What is the human face – so complex – what does the face do when it sees others’ faces – a great deal! How do we “know” others: mainly by and as their faces! What is a face? – how do faces “happen” – get their shapes, genders, ages, beauty…? Very complicated, but essentially absent – so far – from the quest for knowledge?

How does a powerful person: body, facial presentation, “convince” anyone (students?) to hear what they want us to hear? Where is the locus of our integrity: how to tell oneself, trust one’s knowing? What is the nature of our “contract” with others and the world? – ask our m/others, whose contracts with each of us who got to here, was and remains powerful and enduring.

So, ask others, but also observe them, and oneself observing! Toward a “wedding” of Experimental Philosophy and an Anthropology (of the Ordinary)…

The technical mind, looking out at a world which it wants to work, wants to know how…and now. How to do this or that, better, more efficiently, and with the least cost?

I said, read, think. Read the masters, the great minds. They set the problems, framed the questions, the visions which we call common sense. Their believers, followers celebrated and granted continuity to those claims and understandings.

It is a view of a reality which we think is the great reality. The response: lacking history or intellectuality and wanting, instead of ideas, some notion of proof that it will convince, and show us what and how to do…”To do what”, I asked. “Why”, I asked. “The world is not so well,” she replied. “It must be made to work better. I want, how I want, to make it work better; soon, now!”

“Work; better?” I mused. To keep idlers busy? To make us strong, rich? Because there is something so wrong with indolence that its cure must be sought? Are you doomed to be, but not to live? Hungry, desperate…to do?

Lacking history, lacking some sense of why and what, but only how, she accepts uncritically some sense of doing which her experience of the present turns into the ways of the world. Is living in the immediacy sufficient? For what? For whom?

To begin: more than 3,000 people were there – from all over the country – who agreed that the media are in the hands of the rich, corporate, greedy: thus powerful. Worse, that the rich (Rupert Murdoch comes to mind) are acquiring more and more outlets for journalism as are the politicians who use their money to get more and more power: control most of television, radio, and the faltering newspaper “business.” The only outlets right now are Public Television, NPR, and a very few smaller outlets of public radio –(I do listen to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” most days, as well as the evening daily presentations from the West Coast and weekly Counterspin…and the blogosphere).

Questions of the FCC (two of the Commissioners were present) being tempted to permit unlimited ownership of and in a nervous time, raised questions of journalism, truth, and the very possibility of whether other than the rich and powerful can have and maintain a voice in America and the world.

How to oppose the rich and powerful and their friends: by getting together this past weekend. Bill Moyers was at his brilliant best – exploring the realities of these complicated times – and urging us all to become even more active – each of us. There were also other fine speakers, and many smaller discussions. Bill and others explored the internet and its possibilities for gaining power and voice. Arianna Huffington told her story, and did many others (Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, David Sirota, John Nichols of the Nation, Lawrence Lessig and many more who told their stories and how they worked and focused on changing or creating new outlets to get everyone’s story into the world: including the poor, ethnic, immigrants… any and all of us who oppose the rich and powerful, and who worry that this country and democracy are at great risk.

Here’s the full video of Moyers’ energizing keynote…

I’m excited, exhausted, feel very fortunate that we were able to hear all these people, gather their excitement and give them our support and best wishes.

My concerns have to do with the concentration (absolute necessary, but…) on the “mechanics” and how-to-do all this. The job has to get done, or else!

What’s not much up for discussion are the times we’re in and the history of how such times were displaced: the Gilded Age of the late 19th century which led to the Progressive Democracy, and the boom times of the 1920’s leading to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s rethinking toward the New Deal. The current plutocracy and control of money and power is not a new story, and it’s useful to study how the others happened and how; and how they fell.

Also the question of ideas, of PR (public relations) which has gotten us to this moment needs to be studied: the power of TV (especially) and how it works for or against us, happened and got us here – but how it worked, where it might be going, how to re-frame and re-cast it – is a lot about ideas. We are not all innocent in adopting similar ways of thinking and doing – and it’s important to try to gain various perspectives on us, these times…

And last: I think it’s terribly important to think about these times: us, global, how to envision the future of democracy. The rich and powerful have been playing with ideas and visions at least since the early 1970s with think-tanks, and many other directives and ploys. We – who oppose – have been too occupied with opposing the peoples in power, less on questioning the nature of power into possible futures.

From Knowledge to Wisdom

Nick Maxwell’s recently republished book – “From Knowledge to Wisdom” – may be reaching its time. First published a quarter century ago, it got many good reviews. But its ideas didn’t “go” much of anywhere in terms of thinking or practice; a palliative with little action; a “feel-good” approach which we could ignore until…right now – says Nick.

Nick asserts that we are heirs of earlier ideas, committed to the exploration of the universe, but without the thoughtful (moral) bases which gives philosophy and life its groundings and meanings. Philosophical knowledge has taken us far and wide, but…leaves the human condition with little more than promises of the ultimate utility of that knowledge. It contributes little to the “best hope of helping us progressively to resolve our most urgent problems of living…a more humane, a more just, a happier, a saner and more cooperative world.”

As the book takes us from several century old ideas of knowledge to the “needs” of the current era, Nick guides us through the history of thought which has dominated (philosophical) knowledge then and endures to the present moment: what is the universe, how do we study it, how do we know, what is truth? We have come far, in many senses, but now seem to be at some impasses.

He urges us to rethink where we are, how we got here, and the deep necessity to broaden our explorations toward (philosophical) wisdom, rather than being bound to particular and narrow historical ideas of what knowledge consists in.

Wisdom is the perspective that how we go about thinking and pursuing knowledge must include its effects on and implications for the human condition. In so many senses, knowledge has “overstepped” itself, and has endangered our very existence: e.g., the blights of the 20th century – holocausts, atomic bomb, GMO’s, and so much more.

As important, we have paid very little attention to the questions about what is good in life, and how our pursuits of knowledge should help enable us to make the human condition good, better, and inclusive of all persons. The Enlightenment philosophes took their ideas to be correct thence (ultimate) solutions to the socially problematic. But their ideas which dominate philosophical and scientific thought and practice to this day, are not correct.

Nick’s arguments run broad and deep: he analyses how our universities have been dominated by the quite successful attempts of the Enlightenment philosophes (Bacon-Newton-Enlightenment philosophy of knowledge) to detail and effectively confine knowledge as it was developed by the thinkers who led to that time. Then he argues that this dominating approach to knowledge is both very narrow and particular, and it does not much take into account the effects of knowledge and its “products.” It demands a particular notion of rationality, and a pervasive sense of unity in thought and practice.

And it was not only science as a central focus of knowledge, which carries this history to its work: the idea that scientific explorations would ultimately “benefit” us. From these ideas, there developed the parallel sense that the good world of science would lead to the social benefit of the social sciences. But all this remains little analyzed or criticized in the contexts of wisdom.

Here, this reviewer deeply agrees with the thesis of the book, and should point out that my reading of knowledge and wisdom seems to be very similar to Nick’s. The notion that the Social Sciences would and should lead to a “good life,” is widely assumed. But the reality has fallen far short of its assumptions and hopes, or led us on paths which are narrow.

I would point out, however, the works of [my] school of Anthropology led by Franz Boas whose students went out into the entire world – demonstrated that all human languages all are of the same order, that their cultures may differ for various histories and reasons, but that all humans are pretty much alike. This work led to the UNESCO statement on Race in 1946, and contributed much to the U.N. Human Rights Declaration of 1948. This work remains in the contexts of philosophical wisdom – certainly as Nick Maxwell embraces them. It surely helps inform my positive assessments of “From Knowledge to Wisdom,” and reading this book has been a continuing lesson in framing my own work and thought.

Nick is very “encyclopedic” in this book: he explores, then assesses and refutes each perspective – leading, of course, to the necessity for the perspective of wisdom in our thinking and work. Titles of the early chapters, pretty much in order, reveal and describe the outlines of his thinking, though his analysis is systematic and more than ample in its details.

The book sets the stage in Chapter One: “Human Suffering and the Need for a Comprehensive Intellectual Revolution.” The enduring claim to the rationality of philosophical knowledge which would “enhance the quality of human life,” is actually profoundly and damagingly irrational, unrigorous. We need to think and act in new ways…beginning right now. Rational thought – rightly constructed – will lead to wisdom, not mere knowledge in the Enlightenment senses.

Nick’s analysis goes deeply into the idea of knowledge: “sought as a means to the end of achieving that which is humanly desirable and of value…social progress, human welfare and enlightenment…the intellectual aim of acquiring objective knowledge of truth. Truth, not that which is humanly desirable must be the central intellectual concern of rational inquiry.”

But truth – the very concept of truth – depends on much a priori knowledge, and…and we go back in time to questions of what and how we know; and what is the nature of truth. All this rises to question in these times, as Nick wonders about the concepts of the a priori and how necessary it is to consider the world to be fixedly mechanistic, continuous. After much thought, he will want to rethink the very nature of the rational, and the very underpinnings of rationality.

The analysis proceeds systematically through the next four chapters, as Nick presents the critical (always!) exploration of the Philosophy of Knowledge, presents The Basic Objection to that, then the Philosophy of Wisdom, which is reframed into what he calls “Aim Oriented Rationality;” completing his critical expositions.

While I can’t claim to judge his critical expositions deeply within the contexts of the Philosophy of Science, my considerable experiences with philosophers and historians of science (and technology) are quite congenial, at least parallel, with Nick’s. Their focus is particular, narrow, and does not seem to leave much open for discussion.

In the end, the book lays out a critical exposition of a “new” sort, of “refined” ideas of rationality, and how we might go next in expanding our thinking about thinking.

Nick wonders if the kinds of change he explores – toward philosophical wisdom – might come more from the social sciences than from the Philosophers of Science. Here, I want to portray my own positions from which I have been reading/studying this book. As I deal with Boas’ ideas of anthropology: culture, language, physical anthropology – in which we have to observe all the world’s peoples – one is faced with more ancient and somewhat different senses of the history of ideas.

And my background flows also from the ideas of Pragmatists – especially Dewey and Mead – whose ideas of the human include the notion that we are in social interaction with others. The “self” emerges from a relationship with an infant’s m/other (now included under the rubric of “Attachment Theory” in developmental psychology). The very concept of who and what we are, changes considerably, and will continue to embrace a philosophy of wisdom.

As Dewey and Mead attempted to “get beyond or around” dualism, we no longer deal with ideas from the past several centuries. Instead we are taken back to the Greeks whose ideas continue to dominate ours in many senses.

Here, I wonder – in considering —Protagoras, that man is the measure, what is the nature of the “measurer.” In examining the human body, beginning with one’s/my own – I find that much has been neglected. The body, which is totally “obvious” in Dewey’s lament, continues to be dominated by the Homunculus theory, recently encapsulated by the new ability to envision the “workings” of the brain.

So the battles between Heraclitus vs. Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato, resituated somewhat in Aristotle’s still dominating ideas, resonate loudly in rethinking the human: the one who (whose body) is capable of observing “objectively” No small task: how do we do that?

Faces – above all – the fact that we live and move “out-of-balance” complicates our bodily being, and asks how to wonder how we are, become, live both is and as change and permanence. Here we have taken the ideas of Descartes – flowing from Plato, especially – to captivate the dualisms of mind and body as being an “accurate” depiction of the human. To examine the world, it seems primary to examine the measurer – and to ask which is us…then which is the world.

Thus, my viewing of wisdom – possibly less the philosophy of wisdom – than expanding the practice of observing oneself observing, calls for us to devote increasing thought to the nature of the human. Where are we, how did we get here, how do we “move forward” in this global moment in inclusive manners?

Less, in my thinking, as an homage to our forebears; more to pursue the thinking which has led us here – toward being able to transcend our own thinking. We must walk with more than idolize the thinkers and prophets of all of time and places. Toward wisdom. The challenge: how to help create a good and meaningful life and attempt to include all persons now and toward the future?

These are some of lessons, confirmations, rethinkings which “From Knowledge to Wisdom” has inspired in my life and work.

Toward wisdom as we live and experience ourselves and the world. Thank you Nick Maxwell.

One wonders: what is wisdom? Wisdom may surely be described as states of someone’s being, thinking, and knowing. Wisdom includes the ability or desire to expand one’s thinking beyond the usual or ordinary. The notion of wisdom includes extending one’s knowledge to reframe that knowledge in increasingly wider and deeper contexts.

But wisdom is also a concept depicted in the thoughts and texts of various thinkers who have somehow risen above or beyond the more usual thoughts of those who know, merely. It is surely historical, may be prophetic, and often difficult to portray in any present moment.

For those of us who might wish to move beyond or transcend the contents of our knowledge, wisdom is also an ongoing personal dialogue. Sometimes clear, often an existential struggle, it is also an attempt to move on, to grow, to place our knowing in new, more complicated, or transcendent contexts. It is an attempt to locate new positions from which to see and to say what grows in meaning, and perhaps how and why.

Here, I will not attempt to frame the widest -deepest meanings of wisdom. Instead, I will attempt to describe some of my personal perorations both to locate and pursue some paths toward wisdom.

Some ponderings in one’s (my) internal dialogue: I have grown beyond some earlier thoughts and thinking. Where do I go next; whom to read or re- read, what next to study? These are hopefully framed within judgments of integrity and self-critical trust.

Other personal dialogues ask to be updated from time to time: Whose ideas in which traditions – ancient, current, “timeless” – inspire me; upset me? Whose works, ideas, thinking are aspects of my thinking – aware or not so aware? I trust myself, usually and mostly, but…

And I am not alone. I have a life- partner and some few others whom I engage-with mutually as critics and mentors: inspiring, tempering, sometimes fomenting. Who else do I trust, use as a critic or respondent? Are they also “growing” in their own quests?

In other contexts, I ask different sorts of questions, or desire some senses of personal growth. These seem to involve forms of “expansion” of my knowing. I want to get beyond, to think more universally; to include all people (pasts, present, and “visions” into the future), grow in aspirations, often searching for “more.”

I am quite certain that some of the foundations which have led to these yearnings, involve various experiences of “amazement” – my first intellectually captivating time was (I still tell myself) when I was dissecting the hand in my course in Gross Anatomy in a brief excursion into Medicine. At that moment, I was also re -taking up the violin after an extended lay-off. Still today, I look at my left hand both as some sort of complicated object, and as a source of knowing and doing which are truly astonishing.

My hand “knows” so much, can do so much with this instrument. It urges me to go in many other directions: to the instrument. To the sounds it/I make; the music rings out in so many directions. Amazed I was; amazed I remain, and wonder every day if I really-actually can play and perform. Yes.

Time and change: my favourite courses in college were embryology and geology. The idea of a single – fertilized cell becoming a person (me, perhaps especially) – the time of a life, the time of the earth. The idea of looking at the Mississippi River most days, wondering whence it comes and flows; what preceded it over eons?

My first job: involvement with the earliest commercial computers was much about microseconds -now nanoseconds – extends fairly easily to the universe, to history, and the present. I fell in love with Heraclitus’ thinking when I first met his ideas, and pense most days about the ways in which Pythagoras et al affect/afflict our lives, trying to “stop” the world, to undo change.

I was not educated to the idea of ideas. It was the harsh facts of the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics – invoking a long-dead Descartes – which led or forced me to ask how “cogito ergo sum” has anything to do with the human. (My “work” was toward studying the human body in interaction with others’ bodies: gone, any reception or market for my works. Perhaps soon?)

I began reading backward and forward in the history of philosophy to fathom how an old idea could have “overtaken” my career. I discovered ideas and their “powers” – and the idea-makers and shakers who were said to be the foundation thinkers of Western (and other) thought. Still in our “heads” after 2500 years: how, why? This is today, I sobbed, and we must help create or invent and envision the ideas for a just future. Wisdom? Mere vacillation?

Several thinkers exhorted me to ask about ideas: their history, politics, the marketplaces for ideas – and what is the human? Why do we think we know what we claim? Why does so much of this seem so “obvious” that we proclaim knowledge without studying the human interacting with other humans? Darwin’s last book has disappeared under the power of his earlier proclamations of our being aspects of nature. But this argument over our nature turns almost immediately into politics and religion…as the underlying ideas seem to fade from our thoughts.

I became a teacher-practitioner of dialogue with “my” students. Dialogue mainly because I want both students and myself to be “present” in the contexts of teaching. I read in other traditions where teachers and mentors find honour and ask: why not honour teachers here? I do apparently “inspire” the future for some. What are the relations between teaching and wisdom: a question hovering above all my classes?

More abstractly: what is Western thought, that we have apparently “lost” the idea of wisdom? How do I do what I claim to do, try, think I am doing? As a teacher, I am, “responsible” for knowledge, but particularly responsible for the students.

On the ways toward the present, I studied many of those who have been said to be “wise” – have tried both to understand their works, and to bring them into my sense of the present. I learned much about how to “philosophize with a hammer” and attempt to undo/ redo the power of ancients to shape the present. Or – in moments of wonder and lamentation – do I ask them to aid me, save me, tell me?

I try not to neglect (tempting as it is…and easier to tell myself I am…wise), the sage coming into the real world of “retail” ideas, or of youth developing in their quests for meaning in life, without which the sage-ideas of old sell so well to those who would have control more than wisdom.

Life: how to expand oneself, to make a contract with one’s longest life, to be able to tell oneself-myself I have lived “a pretty good life?” And to continue to explore, expand, and attempt to understand ever more and deeply where we are, and where there is to go in this so-changing world.

How do I see the progress of the FOW, as a society or organization, in relation to my perspective on wisdom?

The grand idea is that of Nick’s whose critique is that the already large idea and actuality of knowledge can and must expand toward a wider and deeper notion: wisdom. By opening up an arena in which there is an actual and developing conceptual realm(s) beyond knowledge, he has declared – exhorted, inspired me and others – to explore ourselves, our thinking, with renewed openness.

FOW has appealed to thinkers over much of the world, whose thoughts and education have developed within differing traditions. It has confirmed, for me, I/we can travel within and without the thoughts of all the world’s wisdom seekers. It has provided, for me, at the least, the sense that we can join the world’s wisdoms in a time of everyone coming to the party together: life, hope, peace!