The following is a two part series on the images of knowing. Today I look at the images that form the idea of truth.
The message education should convey is not identified by words like “fact,” “theory,” or “objective”. Instead, the message is called “truth.” The English word for “truth” comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to the word “troth,” as in the ancient vow “I pledge thee my troth.” With this word, one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable and transforming relationship. To know something or someone in truth is to enter troth with the known. To know truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one’s whole self. To know in truth is to allow one’s self to be known as well, to be vulnerable to the challenges and changes any true relationship brings. To know in truth is to enter into the life of that which we know and allow it to enter into ours. Truthful knowing weds the know and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other’s life and fate.
Therefore, truth has nothing to do with manufacturing a world, keeping it at a distance, or manipulating it to suit our needs. Truth involves entering in to a relationship with someone or something genuinely other than us, but with whom we are intimately bound. Truth contains the image we are seeking – the image of community in which we were first created, the image of relatedness between knower and known.
Educating towards truth does not mean turning away from facts and theories and objective realities. If we devote ourselves to truth, the facts will not necessarily change. What will change is our relation to the facts. Truth requires the knower to become interdependent with the known.
The following is a two part series on the images of knowing. Today I look at the images that form the idea of objectivism.
The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living. Seeing people as thinkers requires that we acquire knowledge in a certain way, a way much different than seeing people as lovers. It also shapes the knowledge we trust and value.
If we are thinkers, we value worlds like “fact” and “theory” and “objective.” The images and metaphors developed from these words give us insight into not only on the knowledge we value, but also in how we understand our world and shape our lives.
The word “fact” is vital. Finding the “facts’ marks the turn from primitive superstition to modern science, from subjective knowledge based on feeling, intuition, and faith to objective knowledge that can be tested by our senses. Fact comes from the Lain facere, “to make.” This image of “making” suggests that a fact is something created by the human hand – meaning that is most clearly seen in our words manufacture and artifact. This tells us something interesting about our way of knowing: we are busily engaged in trying to construct a livable world with our facts.
Another key word is “theory”. Our facts do not arrange themselves automatically into structures we can inhabit. So we spin theories, webs of connective logic, to order and integrate our facts. Theory is the thread that weaves our factual world together.
“Theory” comes from the Greek theoros, or “spectator,” one of a complex of Greek words having to do with the sort of viewing and observing that characterize a theatre audience. This image suggests another feature of modern knowing: we regard what we know as “out there,” on a stage, and we relate to it from a distance. Our knowledge does not draw us into a relationship with the known, into participation in the drama. Instead, it holds us at arm’s length as detached analysts, commentators, evaluators of each other and the world. The Greeks regarded drama as integral to life, not a spectator sport but a soul-making force. We, however, made a rigid distinction between the observer and the observed for the sake of objectivity. Where Greek audiences were able to put themselves at the center of the play – literally allowing it to “play” upon them – we hold ourselves apart for fear of distorting the objective facts with our subjective needs. Read the rest of this entry »
How we think about education is linked to how we think about human persons. Too much of our thinking about education sees it as a matter of disseminating information precisely because it assumes that human beings are primarily thinking things. This understanding has moved into the Christian educational process. Christian education has adopted a picture of human beings that owes more to modernity and the Enlightenment than it does to the holistic, biblical vision of humans. In particular, Christian education has adopted a philosophical anthropology that sees humans as primarily thinking things. The result has been an understanding of education largely in terms of information; more specifically, the end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people. This has been most articulated in terms of a Christian worldview.
A Christian worldview is primarily a set of doctrines or a system of beliefs or a set of implicit ideas. This construction creates a Christian faith that is dualistic and reductionistic. It reduces the Christian faith primarily to a set of ideas, principles, claims and propositions that are known and believed. The goal of this is to create “correct” thinking. This relies on the description of Descartes: thinking things that are containers for ideas. This generates a rationalistic view of self where we are not only reduced to thinking things but are seen as things whose bodies are nonessential containers for our minds. This also creates our dualistic approach: There is a distinction between our bodies and minds and neither affects the other.
Humans, however, are fundamentally desiring creatures. We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our heart and aim it to certain ends. Humans are primarily lovers, not thinkers or believers. Read the rest of this entry »
“What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship,” says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.
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This is a great video. Watch and pay attention to the story that is developed and the way it is communicated. Also notice how drawn in to the story you are.
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