User talk:Jinankb
From Tgc
PARADIGMS OF KNOWING An enquiry in to man’s alienation from knowledge K B Jinan
Dependences on codified knowledge - memory, text, digital - has supplanted our spontaneous creative nature. It makes us distrustful of own body, instinct, insight, intuition, and nature. Our tragedy today is that even our needs, need to be taught. Why is this so? Our process of knowing, and hence knowledge, has undergone four fundamental cognitive shifts: - Experience as the means of knowing led to the experiential paradigm. - Memory as a source of knowledge led to the memorizing paradigm - Text as a source of knowledge led to the textual paradigm - And in our more recent history a new paradigm has entered: the Illusional Paradigm. Each shift has dramatically affected not only content of the knowledge but also the knower. Every living being possesses existential biological knowledge, the knowledge of nature, the ability to sustain life. Every organism is born with it. The human organism differs from other organisms insofar as it has codified its complex language system into text. And with this tool he has effectively removed himself, lost himself in the maze, she has lost touch with her inner nature. And is effectively in the process of destroying his host the earth. Every child is born with natural knowledge. Over and over again. The knowledge that reminds the human organism of its connection with nature -perhaps the knowledge that all living beings possess, to lead a harmonious life. Experiential Paradigm If we take ‘Knowing' Paradigm a bit further we will see it encompasses all non-codified Knowledge. Natural knowledge is the result of collaboration between people and their surroundings. Knowledge that has sustained the life on earth for centuries; knowledge that makes the coconut tree bend to access sunlight, or the hen find a place to lay her egg, or a human being find a way of communicating with language. We are all part of this knowledge, but it does not belong to us. The autonomy of the senses guides us to access this life-sustaining knowledge. This is the knowledge of the experiential paradigm. Experience, which is experienced through all our senses, all our being. It needs us to be fully awake and alert, because this establishes our connection to our world, the inner and outer. Experiencing is the basis for knowing in Experiential paradigm. The teacher and teaching is absent but learner and the learning is the permanent and continuous fact of life. In the non-literate “doing” societies, every situation is a learning situation. Here to live means to learn. Children are left completely free to explore their world. Free to wake up when they want; free to sleep when they want; free to eat when they want - the time is regulated by nature. Time to sleep is when the sun sets. Children in these communities become very independent very early. None of this means chaos. In fact since children are never punished nor are they asked not to do anything, the children never learn or acquire the need to be angry nor protest.
Memory Paradigm
Our cognitive crisis begins with the misuse of memory. There is the memory, which is in our bones, which is remembered unintentionally. Every natural action is informed by this memory. Even language is learned as a child naturally calls on this memory. Then there is intentional memory, when something is memorized. Only rigid ritualistic rules are memorized - religious texts, The Old Testament, the Koran, The Gospels. The Vedas, the Upanishads again were written but they had some possibility of re-knowing. For example, Sri Ramakrishna who did not read came to the same point as the Vedas.
Textual Paradigm
In the course of time, text replaced memory. It released the burden of memorizing. From being an assistance to record experience, text replaced experience as the means of knowing. In doing so, text dropped all aspects of knowledge that could not be textualised. Text denotes the absence of the real. It removed the need for communication. It takes place in a past, removing the experience of the present. The senses cease to function in the absorbing act of the mind and making sense of the word.
Text also brought new experiences: like imagination, conceptualization. All these could happen in the textual world with no relation to concrete experience whatsoever. Text replaced the necessity of experience. Text became the authority.
Knowledge/experience/world view in the textual paradigm underwent several changes and knowledge got restructured in the process. Textualisation of knowledge altered the notion of what constitutes knowledge. When knowledge got textualised, the feelings and emotions were dropped. The word intuition was out of use for many years and it came back few years ago when textual cultures started addressing its fragmentation, alienation and rootlessness .The overuse of reason and logic, and the neglect of intuition is due to textualisation of knowledge, and by extension to the corresponding experiential mode it created. The textual experience is linear and fragmented which is the only way text can mediate. Imagination is a word overused by textual cultures as text demands imagination where as in experiential cultures the reality is always present. At several levels, one can see the fragmentation in textual cultures. The internal fragmentation has made us to fragment our perception, and compartmentalize and reorder the world to suit our textual notions about life. Textual experience being personal and independent of others separated the self from community. The individual and the ego must have began at this point. Textual cognition must have caused fragmentation, alienation, boredom etc
The self is fragmented as male and female, as body and mind, and as childhood, youth and old age. Spontaneous activities were broken up into planning and doing thus thought and action got fragmented so are beauty and ethics. Entertainment and boredom have become the new dichotomies. Boredom is also another of those qualities typical of modern mindset and so is waste.
The internal fragmentation has made us fragment the outer world. Thus beauty and knowledge which is an integral act is divided in to art, science and language, and into artists and scientists. Politics, ethics religion were also separated. Education has been the most powerful tool to condition and colonize the people as it has completely overturned the worldview of the so-called educated people of the world all over. It just replaced religious superstition to scientific superstition. It turned us into believers of a different kind. It turned us from active creators and inventers of knowledge to passive believers of text and experts. We no longer use our senses and feelings and experience to know the world. We are taught about everything-including beauty.
Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. Beauty is what truly makes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world. Beauty is what creates culture- the food, the architecture, the music, the artifacts, various dance forms and agriculture (knowledge). Even the spiritual state of being here and now also became impossible with the textual culture. A total act of being in the present encompasses both past and the future. Our relationship with the text is itself an absence of the present. Textualisation removes the present and creates only the past or the future. Another word that got popularized is abstraction. Textual experience is an abstract experience. As far as authenticity is concerned, experience is authentic and original. It cannot become second-hand. Text by its very nature is second hand. Our relationship to the unknown, which was of awe and wonder probably changed with textualisation as the knowledge is acquired within the comforts of the non-threatening text. The same must be the case with "controlling" nature. Even beauty, which is an exclusive domain of the senses and experience, got textualised and has become a matter for intellectual activities. Music gets written down as text which can be “read”. Children because of their natural tenacity remained outside the textual world. I would further claim even true scientists who have at different points in time disproved the conventional educational systems also belong to the experiential paradigm. The crises in modern schooling is precisely due the conflict in these two paradigms. The adults who belong to the textual culture are attempting to textualise children as early as possible. This can also be seen as a conflict in intuition and reason and in two ways of knowing. The one which wants to recreate, reinvent and relive and the other which wants to impose. The left brain/ right brain division is actually the result of fragmentation caused by the textual schooling process. Even at the activity level, mechanization brought in mechanical and repetitive act further alienating the person from the present. Both at the level of activity and mind being here and now became unnecessary. With the removal of unknown from our experience, predictability / planning and reasoning became the dominant relationship to the outside. Many people belonging to the textual culture are realizing the crisis and are also coming out with several solutions but are unable to break free as all these solutions are textual. Systems thinking/ holistic approach, their engagement with spirituality etc are attempts in overcoming these crises. The solutions to make the learning holistic is by adding more 'sensitive' subjects like ecology, gender, study of other cultures etc. ‘Whole’ is not a result of adding fragments. The infinite is not the addition of finites.
This is the quality of the mind, which is holistic, spiritual and in communion with beauty all the time. De-textualisation is essentially recovering the autonomy of senses and experience; it is a reconnecting to the life sustaining knowledge accessible only to the selfless minds.
Illusional Paradigm
The genesis of the digital paradigm has its roots in pictorial text - movies, television, and finally the computer. It was the popularization of television - sound and images - that accelerated this paradigm. Long forgotten words became popular again: 'Intuition' comes back around this time. Textual cultures started addressing the fragmentation, alienation and ‘rootlessness’ they found around them. A spiritual crisis and spiritual exploration began in the West. The rise of feminism is around this time. However the boundaries were firmly masculine: intuition harnessed by reason; spirituality within the scientific framework! And now with the information technology, text is being replaced by computer. The computers criterion for dropping various elements from the textual knowledge would depend on the manageability and softwareability. Like text, it would also bring in new elements in the realm of what they claim as knowledge.
To quote from a writing on 'Human Nature and the Digital Culture: The Case for Philosophical Anthropology' by Dennis M. Weiss of York College of Pennsylvania,”Where this world is chaotic and difficult to comprehend, the computer offers us the image of a world of order, logic, reason, and transparency. While we may have lost our cosmological map in this world, the computer offers us a ready replacement: the pristine, orderly lines of the flowchart, which becomes the new image of an orderly and computable nature. Flowchart, program, and microchip become part of the new cosmology. To the homeless and the rootless of this fragile world, images of the web spanning the globe, of the Internet encircling the world, of Netscape providing us with connections to the world are comforting on a metaphysical level. They assure us that we too may once again master the world and hold it in our hands. Our own lives gain a sense of order and stability when reflected back to us in our Web pages. While we may have little control over the world around us, we can define the world and our links to it via our own home page". The calamity of virtualization of knowledge will be far more destructive and elusive. The ultimate loss is that of human creativeness and the life at large – for if our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be distorted and destructive.
