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Chapter Two

The World of Facts

The tendency to reduce the universe to facts about the world is not new. Indeed, it may be traced back nearly 25 centuries to when Plato misunderstood the agreement between Heraclitus and Parmenides. “It was here,” as German philosopher Martin Heidegger has shown, “that western metaphysics began. It was also here that the forgetting of being occurred” (Seidel, 1964, p. 30). This statement should be troubling. If you’re not troubled yet, start this chapter over (it’s only a few lines).

This is the story of western metaphysics, a story that plays out today in high school integrated science laboratories, college philosophy courses, and alcohol-induced arguments around campfires. Heraclitus spoke of nature as a process—always changing. Parmenides spoke of nature as a thing—reducible to a matter of fact. In a contemporary classroom, only one of them can be correct. But in the fifth century BCE (Before Common Era), there was no argument about who was correctly using the term—there was no contradiction or ambiguity. Unfortunately, few of us can imagine this scenario: how can the propositions “a” and “not-a” both be correct? Were Heraclitus and Parmenides to have this disagreement today, both would probably defer to some “agree to disagree” bullshit, even though both would deeply resent one another for their intellectual challenge. We are deeply compelled by the idea that only one of the propositions can be correct, and being correct is what is important. This amounts to having the fact that is right. This is because we live on the other side of Plato in the history of western thinking.

Here’s how it happened. Both Heraclitus and Parmenides, when referring to nature, said the word “physis” (“nature”). Parmenides had in mind a thing while Heraclitus had had in mind a process. These two forms of the concept of nature may also be understood in their Latin equivalents: natura naturata(nature natured) and natura naturans (nature naturing). See how one is a noun and the other is a gerund? If nature is a thing that has already come into being, then we just need to report the facts about it. However, if it is constantly becoming, then stating a fact about it would merely be referring to it in some particular point in time. If I drove from Atlanta, GA to Grand Rapids, MI, I could summarize this in factual form by saying “I’m driving to Grand Rapids.” But as a process, I realize there are many little detours that occur between the two cities, like stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. When stopped there, am I really driving to Grand Rapids? Well yes, but not necessarily at that moment. With Heraclitus and Parmenides, both men understood that reality was both a thing and a process, and saw no point in deciding which was the most correct. Once again, this is like saying that they agreed that both a and not-a were correct. I’m both driving to Grand Rapids and stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. But for some unfortunate reason, we are somehow handicapped from thinking this way. Trying to hold two contradictory statements in our mind is akin to practicing cognitive gymnastics, so we eventually resort to thinking “it’s either a or not-a.”

With Heraclitus and Parmenides, there is no possibility of losing the universe to facts about the universe (this was referred to as abstractification in the Introduction). This could only occur were one inclined to decide whether nature was either a thing or a process. My smart phone is beside my laptop on the desk. It performs certain smart phone actions. I have confidence that, insofar as it remains a smartphone, it will be capable of performing these tasks. It’s a smart-phone-thing. If I received a phone call but couldn’t slide the unlock-bar, I would still believe that it is a smart phone, only that I am incompetent as its user. To call it a thing and a process would be to allow it to transform moment to moment. In any given day, it can be a smart phone, a dumb phone, a paper-weight, desk-clutter, and so on. Despite its regular and functional transformations, we still call it a smart-phone. This is not how the Greeks understood stuff like smart phones, quarries, or garden tools. Seidel explains, “Being reveals itself to the Greeks as physis, but both as the emerging dominance which abides and as the appearing appearance. In Heidegger’s view there is no opposition between appearance and being for the Greeks” (p. 35, emphasis added). A smart-phone is both its smart-phone-ness and its capacity to be a variety of other things—flashlight, alarm clock, vanity mirror, weapon. But we struggle to think this way. We prefer to say “it’s a smart phone, you idiot.” This way of thinking is a consequence of the efforts of Plato.

When Plato hears the dissimilarity between the physis spoken by Heraclitus and that of Parmenides, he thinks: well who is correct? We have been condemned to ask superlative questions like this ever since. “So who do you love more?” “Yeah, but which city has the best pizza?” “So how small of a penis is too small?” Today we are suckers for the really real. “As Heidegger has said, metaphysics says that it is interested in being, but it is rather things that it takes, or rather mis-takes, for being. This has been the tragedy of [Western] thought” (p. 40).

* * *

Today we ask our search-engine or smart-phone:

 “How do I know if I’m in love or not?”

 “How can I get her to like me?”

 “How much money will I make with a psychology degree?”

For each of these, there is an assumption that a complicated process can be best understood as a matter of fact. Love™. Romance™. Success™1. These are things of which few people would denounce the importance. Yet we are gullible enough to believe that these are things that people can somehow acquire—as if they may simply be added to their shopping cart. Here they have been trademarked in their superlative forms. My partner and I have the least romantic™ history imaginable. Friends have even shared, candidly, that they were impressed that we actually admit our internet match-maker story publicly (rather than making something up that has more spontaneity and whimsy). The assumption is that the fictional story would tell others more about ourselves than our actual romance! The first time this happened (and it has happened more than once), I couldn’t believe it! To me, it couldn’t have been any other way. It certainly won’t become a Nicholas Sparks novel anytime soon, which is fortunate, because then there’d be a bunch of hapless love-seekers trying to orchestrate their own serendipitous internet-dating match.

The problem is not that we are capable of referring to love as a fact, or even that we sometimes do. The problem emerges when we are no longer satisfied with our unique and personal version of love. I have actually had friends walk out on their partners because their love didn’t have a close enough approximation to its mid-twentieth-century billboard representation—you know, 2.5 children and picket fence. It was impossible to this friend that a loving and meaningful relationship could have come without these things. The “love thing” replaced their unique—and unique it was—loving relationship.

I am advancing the claim that it is impossible to capture who you are by a list of facts. It is, however, possible to summarize who you are by a list of facts. The danger here is to let the summary of who you are replace the continuously changing person that you are becoming moment by moment (who can, gasp!, change her/his mind!). Keep in mind that facts are abstractions about you. As I explained earlier, abstractions are not wrong, they just fail to provide an adequate account of the process for which they stand. They are without context and without meaning. It would be more accurate to say that as a person, you are both a list of facts (helpful for describing who you are in a pinch) and a process of becoming. Fortunately, there is an easy way to remember this, and it begins with a return to the pre-Socratics.

For the pre-Socratic philosophers (Heraclitus and Parmenides, remember?), nature was not alone. Indeed, at the time it would have been impossible to think of a concept that exists by itself, but we do this all the time today. When we ponder a word—e.g. “physis”—we immediately think of its definition, like whether it is a process or a thing. By doing so, we forget the process by which the concept itself has arisen; for example, the context of people in conversation in a particular time and place, like Heraclitus and Parmenides on the bank of a river. The process of communication, the exchange of knowledge, the sharing of ideas, the act of understanding—these are all part of the meaning of a word. A concept’s meaning is a product of its conceptual history and the context out of which it arises (as is the case with all things). The Greeks had a word for this, and it is a word that is still paid lip-service in the academy: lógos (as in Bio-logy, psycho-logy, eco-logy, and so on).

We can understand that, for the Greeks, “physis and lógos were intimately united” (Seidel, p. 44). Lógos had originally meant “collection, the happening of uncovering, of revelation, of truth.” I hope this sounds familiar from your experiences in the college classroom, but most likely it will not. Instead, academic disciplines proceed with the positivist assumption that there is but a single pile of knowledge that represents all that can be known about such-and-such a discipline. There is no creation or revelation of truth. Instead, as Seidel has observed, lógos has eventually come to mean a “statement in the sense of correctness or rightness, the exact opposite of the place of truth” (p. 44). That is to say, a statement is either right or wrong; it can never be both right and wrong.

Parmenides and Heraclitus both say physis. The former has in mind a thing; the latter, a process. Their apparent disagreement only occurs when lógos is forgotten. Indeed, the observations of each man come together in service to lógos. However, by separating lógos from physis, the underlying theme of collective truth is lost, and these men are suddenly found to be at odds with one another, locked in the familiar ego-based pub argument. “For after the pre-Socratics the question as to what being may be is no longer ‘What is the being?’ but rather, ‘what is the thing?’ And ultimately it becomes a mere questioning after the ‘thingliness’ of things” (p. 44). Hence the tendency to argue in terms of how much, how little, how long, etc. and have the idea that what’s being argued is the reality of the universe. Seidel echoes Heidegger in his conclusion: “Plato drove a wedge between things and being, between things and their being. He put them in different places as well” (p. 47).

Beginning with Plato, it has been customary to separate nature into things and processes. This set in motion all of the problems with contemporary science and schooling that will be outlined in this book. Plato’s historic blunder gets systematized when Aristotle subsequently engineers an entire system of categorization of things and processes called logic. One cannot categorize a process without it first being abstracted. With logic one can construct proofs and identity statements without ever going to a concrete experience. Sentences like “if a, then b” are logically sound, even though a and b are propositions that do not stand for anything in particular. What is important to understand about Aristotelian logic is that, since its inception, it has become perfectly normal, even beneficial, to deal exclusively with abstractions. As Whitehead (1958) observes, “The disease of philosophy is its itch to express itself in the forms, ‘Some S is P’, or ‘All S is P’” (p. 194). Moreover, it has become increasingly unfathomable to think of propositions a and ~a together. This is why my friend above thought that either families in the 1960s were actually miserable, or our relationships today are somehow deficient; it’s impossible to believe that my love might be different from your love, or even that the love I have for one person could be different from the love I have for another.

In the above discussion, we have two different ways of understanding the stuff of the world. It can be a process where the experience of investigation is just as important as that which is investigated. In Chapter 3, I will be arguing that the process of discovery is the important part of scientific investigation (and not the new way of organizing or categorizing understanding into facts).

Unfortunately, today, at least in the majority of institutions, there is no process; nature is no longer understood as emerging but as completely emerged. It’s that stuff that you see when you look out your window. Eventually we’ll understand all of it—discoveries that are the mere burden of observation and time. “What can we point the experimental method at next?” Consequently, the “thingliness” of nature has been privileged to the neglect of the process of nature. Below, I will describe how continental philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) and process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1938/1958) alike think that the present-day conception of nature—all thing and no process—is a terrible shame. Heidegger calls this an “ontic” nature while Whitehead calls it “lifeless” nature.

The words “ontology” and “ontological” will appear frequently throughout this section. These are important words when it comes to understanding how we learn. We don’t typically think about ontological questions because we have been led to believe that the final ontological questions were answered between the 17th and 19th centuries (so why bother asking them any longer?). Heidegger argues that this is precisely why it’s so important that we begin asking them once again! We pretend that we already know what being is and that it has already been established. Yet, we are all exceedingly inept at describing what this means, exactly! Can you describe what it means to “be” in a way that doesn’t simply use synonyms like “exist” or “live?”

It’s interesting to try and do this exercise. We all know what it means for something to be. “It just … is.” This is usually a sufficient explanation. But once you start asking others, you will begin to realize that nobody has any clue what it means to be. We take this for granted like the motion in Newton’s famous laws. If being is the most basic part of existing, shouldn’t we know this most intimately? Why the hell is it the process with which we are least familiar! Why can’t we describe what this means? Let’s unpack being. This is going to take us down the path of ontology.

When Heidegger uses the word “ontological,” he has in mind the kind of understanding modeled by the pre-Socratics (Heraclitus and Parmenides). For a quick breakdown, “ontic” means “beingthe thing”—that something exists or takes up physical and temporal space. If something is ontic, it is a thing—a noun. When you refer to yourself or someone else, do you refer to them as a thing—that is, as a noun? “Meet Jim. Jim is a heterosexual, cisgender man. Jim is 6’2.” He is a high school music teacher. He makes $35,000/year.” Check, check, check—the attributes of a thing. “Jim” is ontic.

“Onto-logical,” then, if you remember the earlier discussion, recognizes the becoming of that which exists. It refers to a process—that is, being as a gerund, like walk-ing and skiing. It would be you as an undetermined set of possibilities unfolding in the present. “Meet Jim. Let’s see what Jim does next.”

With “ontic” being, we find that the process of dis-covering and becoming has been removed, leaving one with simply ontos. Once more, following Plato’s ontological wedge, ontos is nothing more than an existing thing—that is, the lump of nature outside the window that one may point at or go outside and stand in. Macquarrie and Robinson (1962) summarize the difference in the translator footnotes: “Ontological inquiry is concerned primarily with Being; ontical inquiry is concerned primarily with entities and the facts about them” (p. 31, emphasis original). What kind of thinking are we taught to do in school?

While it is possible to imagine a type of thinking that might include both, Heidegger (1962) sees that modern science has been more concerned with things than their being. He writes,

And although research may always lean towards this positive approach, its real progress comes not so much from collecting results and storing them away in ‘manuals’ as from inquiring into the ways in which each particular area is basically constituted … —an inquiry to which we have been driven mostly by reacting against such an increase in information. (p. 29)

In this passage, Heidegger contrasts the practices of ontic- and ontological-scientific investigation. Ontic-scientific investigation is after a rough and naïve outline of subject matter, and this necessarily happens prior to any actual investigation. The practice of science conceived this way begins and ends with information. It would be possible to perform a study without even venturing into or consulting nature! If nature is never consulted, then this practice is tautological. One begins with the answer before one starts! This is the antithesis of scientific inquiry! The task of ontic-scientific investigation seems directed towards the collection of information about nature, which might subsequently be stored away in manuals. The information found in manuals is an abstraction of nature—useful, perhaps, for understanding nature. However, Heidegger here identifies a curious reversal that has increasingly taken place; the focus of such investigation seems to be in service to the proliferation of these manuals and not to the nature from which the manuals have been derived. For example, one’s understanding of the complexity of inter-personal relationships is not real—cannot be attributed to nature—until it has been published in manual-form.

This procedure could be called an ontological abstractification understood as follows: the initial abstraction—publishing a new bit of anthropological learning in a journal as a fact so others can be informed about it. This is useful, but it does not make the reader an anthropologist any more than does a college degree in anthropology. But now the bit of knowledge—the anthropological fact—is increasingly understood to be in service to its own factuality while the process is increasingly ignored; finally, the process is completely replaced by information concerning the thingliness of things.

From Heidegger’s perspective, the practice of ontic-scientific investigation seems to be chiefly interested in the increase of these manuals. Today, there are new academic journals—online and in print—that are popping up every week. I get two e-mails a week explaining how I can turn my research into academic currency though a short publication process. These journals—Heidegger’s manuals—are in service only to more journals (and, allegedly, tenure). That is, journal articles may be written despite exclusive consultation from other journal articles. Here information produces more information; things produce things. Processes come to be ignored almost in principle. Further investigation yields nothing more than the reproduction of itself.

If, at any point during this procedure, one endeavored to consult nature—an anthropologist investigates a people group by visiting with said group instead of merely consulting what has been published about said group—it becomes increasingly difficult to reduce these people to mere facts. We find that psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists who are in the field have difficulty reducing observations to basic facts about behavior. This is because people, provided you actually interact with them, resist being boxed into a category.

Suppose, for example, that a psychotherapist knew all about the nature of human psychopathology as it has been published in manuals. She understands psychopathology inside and out. However, as soon as the psychopath is consulted—interviewed or whatever—suddenly the diagnoses all seem ill-fitting, somewhat appropriate but also somewhat missing the bigger picture. There is, of course, a manual devoted to defining, with exacting detail, all of the diagnosable psychological illnesses that have been “discovered.” It’s called the Fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders (DSM-V). According to it, two people can be diagnosed as depressed and not share a single symptom in common.

Each of the academic disciplines have become entrenched in particular assumptions about Nature to such a degree that the Nature has eventually been reduced the pre-ontological assumptions about it—the abstractions about nature have replaced the concretions of nature.

We have been looking at two different ways of looking at nature: as a process and as a thing. Alfred North Whitehead differentiates these two approaches with terms that are delightfully informative: living and lifeless.

Where we have understood that Heidegger has discerned the ontological from the ontic, so too might we understand how Whitehead (1958) has discerned living and lifeless nature. Like Heidegger, Whitehead cautions against a science whose focus is restricted to what he terms “nature lifeless.” He explains,

Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of Physical Science lies in the fact that such Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat—or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental. (p. 211)

The detrimental consequences of “Natural Science”—that is, Heidegger’s ontic-science—are evident in the words of Whitehead. It is important to recognize that Whitehead does not have his arms crossed indignantly. Indeed, few have waved the flag of modern science more valiantly and piously than he. Whitehead is simply intent on pointing out that science, in its haste, has ignored the most fundamental part of Nature: the living part!

To be sure, the “rules of succession” that Whitehead sees in natural science are helpful in understanding the life of science. But these rules are not themselves alive—they are not capable of demonstrating enjoyment or creativity. When scientific discussion is restricted to the rules, one is left with “the grand doctrine of Nature as a self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts. It is the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science” (p. 180). This includes manuals for the sake of still more manuals. Science takes on a life of its own, but rather than concrete experiences, it has only a succession of facts. This would be like mistaking a person’s coat for who they are as a person! Conan Doyle wrote a series of novels about such an approach to the world: Imagine that your niece has begun seeing somebody about whom she has grown increasingly serious. With talk of marriage, you decide to investigate said romantic partner. Upon their arrival to a family gathering, you take her partner’s coat and smuggle it into your laboratory. Here you proceed to do a comprehensive material analysis á la Sherlock-Holmes. From stitch-pattern and patchwork, you discern pedigree and aspirations; from an absent zipper-tooth, you discern frugality and trustworthiness; from oils lodged deeply into the fibers of cuff, you discern avocation; etc. Meanwhile, your niece and her partner are available for conversation in the adjacent room. The subject—now loading up on snack mix and polite conversation—has been ignored in dogmatic favor of the physical world of things! The coat might be a useful abstraction of the concrete process of being, but it cannot replace the person entirely.

Whitehead and Heidegger alike have identified the problematic consequences that stem from a fact-oriented science. For both of them, the fact-orientation focuses on the most lifeless and least interesting aspects of nature. Whitehead likened fact-orientation to mistaking the coat for its owner while Heidegger likened it to the superfluousness of writing manuals for the sake of more manuals. Although both men are critical of the fact-oriented contemporary sciences, neither are as critical as Husserl has been. You will remember that he was the mathematician from the Introduction who was asked to comment on the state of science just before the Second World War. Instead of applauding modern science, he argued that it was in crisis! Here’s what he has to say about the fact-orientation of this scientific program:

This “fact-world,” as the word already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as a something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. “The” world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points “other” than I supposed, this or that under such names as “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the “it” remains ever, in the more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naïve lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge which offer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciences of the natural standpoints. (2002, pp. 55–56)

It is apparent that Husserl is not impressed by the reduction of nature to a list of facts. If the consequences of maintaining such a perspective of nature are not evident in his description above, Husserl (1970) goes a bit further in his Crisis. He explains,

Merely fact-minded science makes merely fact-minded people …. [Fact-minded science] excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, find the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.… Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion …? (pp. 6–7)

In each of these excerpts, Husserl demonstrates the lack of meaning inherent in a world that is exclusively interested in objective scientific fact. In the first instance, the anomalies in human perception—“‘illusion’, ‘hallucination’, and the like”—are understood to inhibit the recognition of nature. As such, they are to be struck from experience. Husserl argues that this is tantamount to striking the life out of nature and reducing it to mere objective fact. In the second instance, he goes a bit further in tracing out the consequences of a “fact-minded science.” This he defines as an institution that is in principle committed to extricating anything meaningful from experience!

In demonstrating the detrimental consequences of a materially-objective, modernist conception of nature, Husserl also insinuates the solution that he sees. In the first excerpt, the implication is that human perception—anomalies and all—must not only be included, but that this must be the starting point; and in the second excerpt, the constitution of nature is understood to come by way of meaningful human existence. In each instance, Husserl demonstrates the second tendency of a viciously bifurcated nature—that wrought by the humanists. Merleau-Ponty (2003) will be used to address this in the following Section.

Okay, so we have seen the tendency to reduce the universe to facts about the universe—that is, replace actual experience with facts about what experience should be. We have seen the history of this kind of thinking beginning almost 25 centuries ago, and we have seen a century of criticisms against this approach. So are we condemned to an eternity of a lifeless universe? This last section describes an alternative approach to nature that recognizes that it is processual; it is a nature in which we participate and in which we find meaning. To describe it, I will consult the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

What’s neat is that a lot of Merleau-Ponty’s later work has only recently been published. In his final years (before an unfortunate and early death), he was teaching courses at the distinguished Collèges de France. This is the kind of position that academic folks dream of; you get paid very well to research whatever you want and teach a single course on the topic. Merleau-Ponty decided to teach a series of courses on Nature. The notes from his students were eventually edited into a volume titled Nature decades after he had passed away. The notes of what he had been working on were also published posthumously into a book titled Visible and the Invisible. It is remarkable to think that one’s spiral notebook (or, more contemporarily, a personal computer desktop folder of unfinished notes) might find their way to publication without you.

In the first course he teaches on nature (2003), Merleau-Ponty devotes some class time to Whitehead’s insights. Whitehead, you recall from above, was the one who introduced the idea of living and lifeless conceptions of nature. Indeed, the section that Merleau-Ponty teaches on Whitehead provides the climax to the course! By considering these two men together, a conception of nature emerges that blends processes and things.