The Indigenous Source of Knowledge

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Georg W.F. Hegel. Philosophy of Right.  (From the Preface.)

Recently books bearing titles like Neil Postman’s The End of Education and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End are appearing, because we are at the end of an established philosophy of education.  As Hegel describes above, as philosophies these books do not rejuvenate current education, only enable us to understand the shape of its life grown old.

If education is to take the lead in rebuilding civilization it must show leadership. To do this it must, paradoxically to the superficial mind, return to first principles and peoples. These are the essential principles, the simplest notions, the foundation, the Source.  For  individual psychology, this means to lead with the heart’s connection with the sacred, not because the heart is at the bottom, the first rung on the ladder of consciousness, but because it is at the center, the mid-most point of creation, the first principle and context from which all others unfold.  The return to first principles is not to advocate a return to the historically primitive, but to consciously incorporate the psychologically primitive, to be childlike--for we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless we become as little children. 

The rejuvenation of human culture begins with the renewed spirit of religion, which is the eternal, the archaic.  The spirit of religion always reappears during periods of intense social and psychological upheaval, like now, when reason fails because things must be renewed and not just reorganized.  Hence this term, the spirit of religion—as opposed to any of its historical forms-- refers to the fundamental structure of human thought and feeling, the vision indigenous to our souls.  It is not the antiquity of indigenous culture which makes it a structural principle of civilization but the permanence of it, the fact that centuries of exploitation and murder and other forms of castration have failed to eradicate it. The failure has occurred because the indigenous is the permanent part of the human condition.

The mighty powers of prophecy and myth, of poetry and magic, the indigenous modes of perception, apprehension and expression, were the foundation of ancient civilization and are to be again not because the cycle of fortune turns in mindless fashion and by accident we have found ourselves born at the origin again. It is because whenever civilization needs to be renewed these are the powers that do it.  Hence when we tap into these powers we initiate the remaking of the world.  But to these ancient powers we must add the modern powers of science and rational thought, so that education for civilization today must combine the oracular with the scribal, the circular logic of the imagination with the linear logic of intellect, the looser, fluid rhythms of feelings with the tighter, solid rhythms of concepts.

Education will not rebuild civilization by doing better what the materially advanced are already doing, for this shows more regard for our own preconceptions and learned experience than for the complexity and reality of the truth.  I mean that at this time the need is not for a coherent doctrine of education.  These are plentiful enough. Rather we should know and adopt the proper attitude toward education, which is humility.  A humble posture of learning is needed, because the greatest barrier to new knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowing. That is, to understand is to stand under.  We believe that we know about education.  But do we?   We can not know enough about it until we learn to again listen to the regular and ancient song and heartbeat of the indigenous and become primitives again.

Culture or civilization is a colossal creative work in-formed by a gigantic vision. This vision is fundamentally a religious one because it fuses (re-ligia) disparate elements into a new order even as it separates the new order from the old.  The ancient and modern, scientific and artistic, advanced and perennial, are parts of a single totality which vision is supposed to encompass, so that within the vision each thing becomes a metaphor for everything, so that every student “may become a symbol denoting the sublimity of the true Educator of humankind, and that each, even as a crystalline mirror may tell of the grace and splendour of the Sun of Truth." (Compilation: Bahá’í Education p.8#30)  Thus the new vision is actually both a renewal of an ancient perennial vision, and that vision in new form.

It is also a religious vision because it is essentially eternal and always with us, like the air surrounding our bodies.  The progress of civilization is said to be, in religious terms, toward a Golden Age of peace, which is also where it came from, as the ancient myths tell us. Hence the Golden Age is placed, metaphorically, either at the beginning or end of time. But really is in both places because it is from eternity and is, therefore, outside time.  It is the vision, the divine looking through us. When we build and then live in such a civilization we have recovered our collective identity.

Spiritual education, or bringing forth the spirit within, is supposed to enable the individual and collectivity to recover that lost identity by identifying the human being metaphorically with the nonhuman worlds around and within us, namely, the natural and the divine.  The formula of metaphor is, “let A be B.”  Of course if this is true, then B is A, and finally we are also left with A is A, and B is B; the same yet different, the glorious structure manifested by “He Who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, through Whom the letters B and E have been joined and knit together.” (Baha’i Long Obligatory Prayer).   The “same yet different” structure of the symbol is human self-identity and also its identification with what it is not.  The symbol is necessary because human nature does not appear directly.  Rather it appears in spiritual, social, intellectual and natural contexts.  The world, too, does not present itself to us directly, but appears within a mental context called knowledge--i.e. science, art, history, etc. which are conventions of organized awareness. Finally, the divine does not appear directly but, rather, in the form of the Word, which is both a Figure and His Message which is traditionally called Logos, or a revelation.  All these are also aesthetic experiences when communicated for they are not communicated in anything like the way they were experienced.  They must be transformed to be communicated and shared.  This is the work of metaphor.

Thus symbols are more than figures and parts of speech. They create us as intellectual and social beings, especially does the sacred symbol do this.  But even on the human level the verb copula of language unites both subject and object in thought and Subject and Subject in Being, because the grammar points to and expresses an inner experience of regeneration in new but renewed identity.  What is new in real education is really the renewed in different form, for the universe is enfolded within each human being.  Symbol and metaphor are an imaginative identity of separate things. It is union, separation and reunion. It is human knowledge.