Education in a Time of Transition

Some potential wisdom inspired by Bruce Alderman's thinking path

I live-streamed a discussion with Bruce Alderman about his educational journey between legacy institutions and more unconventional approaches to learning.

On Saturday June 24th/June 25th Philosophy Portal will be hosting an online conference “Logic for the Global Brain.” Dr. Bruce Alderman will be presenting. To register for the conference, visit Philosophy Portal and sign up to the time slots you can attend live!

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The Integral Stage is a channel, website and intellectual-spiritual movement led by Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal. It is inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral thinking and various esoteric spiritual traditions, from Osho’s tantric school to Krishnamurti’s anti-guru guru school. Bruce is also a professor who has taught at the John F. Kennedy University in Consciousness and Transformative Studies, but that formal title does not do justice to the richness of experience and wisdom that Alderman embodies.¹

To illustrate that point a bit, last month, I came across an interesting Facebook post from Alderman where he was listing all of the courses he has taught in various contexts throughout his life. The number of courses was too numerous to list here, but basically could be summarised under categories like “spirituality, creativity and business,” “psychology and spiritual development,” “consciousness and transpersonal studies,” “integral studies in spirituality and spiral dynamics,” “world religions,” “living systems theory,” and “evolutionary spirituality.” In the post, Alderman was reflecting on his position as an educator in a time of great transition, both individually and societally, in large part due to the waves of technological transformation that constitute our current world.² How are we to think the role of the traditional professor in this world and what forms of spirit might such a professor need to have real experiential contact with?

In light of these questions I could relate deeply to two implicit aspects of Alderman’s post:

1. Being an educator/teacher whose work spans so many different disciplinary fields that it is literally impossible to categorise what you do;

2. Finding oneself in a type of endless point of transition where you never really fit anywhere, but rather only fit as non-fitting³

These two dimensions of our shared experience as educators fly in the face of conventional academic specialisation and positionality, and may actually be essential for educators in the coming transitions involving mass-technological change. Is it not the case of the great majority of academics spend their lives gradually narrowing specialisation to the point that you block out the general connection to other fields and thus lose the capacity to see the whole? I remember this was my dominant experience as I moved from an undergraduate interested in the evolutionary relationship between great apes and human beings, towards a graduate level study where I was reduced to studying a very niche aspect of primate behaviour in a very specific geographic location. Of course there is a need for specialisation. But when the only route for academic study leads to hyper-specialisation, something important, even integral, is lost.

Also, is it not the case that the great majority of academics spend their lives specialising precisely because it allows them to fit inside the categories of institutions and funding agencies that can get a predictive grasp of their intellectual unfolding? In this, the intellect is absolutely left destitute of any spiritual significance, because the intellect, however sharp it may be at making truthful distinctions, is only as good and beautiful as the spiritual telos which guides it. In hyper-specialisation, its connection to the larger social good and beauty of life movement, is often and unfortunately lost.

The question that comes to my mind is: is it necessarily the case that we need to have an intellectual life that is so antagonistic to generalist thinkers? Is it necessarily the case that the only way to fit into an intellectual community is to specialise to the point that we can fit someone’s intellectual journey into a very narrow box? For Alderman, as mentioned, his path has been constituted by many different fields of study, involving spirituality, psychology, development, evolution, religion, systems theory, and so forth. But it has come at the cost of fitting nowhere. For me, similarly, my path has been constituted by many different fields of study. My doctoral thesis, Global Brain Singularity, involves in-depth analysis of phenomena from the perspective of cosmic evolution, cybernetics and systemics, biocultural anthropology, political-economy, futurist speculation, and continental philosophy, but it likewise came at the cost of fitting nowhere.

Instead of finding your-being held somewhere, you have to hold yourself in the nothingness.

Perhaps the underlying reason why generalisation leads to not-fitting, as alluded to above, is that institutions lose the capacity for predictive context. Who knows what you might think next? The truth is, for an intellect genuinely committed to thinking the truth in the totality of spiritual unfolding of the self-notion, it is literally impossible to know what you might think next.⁴ The only thing you can know for certain is a type of positive negativity: that you will be thinking, and that your thought will be retroactively connected to your previous thinking (but only retroactively, in the moment, it will appear as a discontinuity of thought).

As thinkers in a time of educational transition, can we think the discontinuity as such? This seems to be the place of the subject. The subject is not the linear continuity of evolved phenomena. The subject is the discontinuity (or the cut) in the linear chain of causal determinations. The subject is the rupture in causal determination, the element of freedom, that retroactively constitutes the chain linked fence of substantial phenomena. Thus, in a time of transition, we should expect the emergence of more and more cuts that cannot be neatly categorised, but rather share with us their bleeding in the cut. That is why, in our discussion about education in a time of transition, Alderman and I spent a lot of time focusing on how, we need to focus more on, not only the education of the individual (providing the individual with general categories of the understanding), but also the transformation of the individual. This involves teachers who can hold space also for emotional processing, space for confronting conditioning, the roots of motivations and orientations, and enclosures for openness to personal trauma and relational work. This type of education is the transformative education that may build bridges to a different type of world.

In the current world, in current academic institutions, what we usually get is the appearance of continuity without the capacity to include within themselves the discontinuities necessary for the life of knowledge. Academic institutions want to fit the subject into given and known categories that lend themselves to precise and controllable prediction in regards to results serving ultimately utilitarian ends (within the context of neoliberal capitalism). But if these utilitarian ends are themselves questioned or themselves falling apart as capable of holding the subject, then the subject will start to bleed all over these ends, to the point that we will need to think again, the role of the final cause in spiritual-intellectual thinking processes.

If we think about how the academic institutions of the modern world came to be what they are, we necessarily need to include the way genuine knowledge emerges as a discontinuous rupture (from the curiosity and wonder of a knowing subject) that is only retroactively accommodated by an institutional structure. The subject as a singularity cuts into life and wins a new knowledge which must then be transmitted to the rest of historical subjectivity, universally. This cut into life cannot be categorised a priori, since it is a singularity, the uncategorisable source. If in the process of institutionalisation this source is obfuscated with purely utilitarian ends, then it leads the pathway to dead abstraction, abstraction cut from the sheer unrest of life itself.

In my work, I often express this fact in reference to four figures in different fields: Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Einstein. Although each of these subjects represents a major advance in a radically different field, what they all share is the cut into life which was only retroactively integrated/accommodated/structured into academic institutional contexts. Consequently, each of these thinkers represent forms of subjectivity that spanned multiple disciplinary boundaries, could not be easily categorised by the institutions of their time, and thus had to become comfortable precisely in non-belonging, had to become comfortable in not-fitting.

Such is the position of absolute knowing and, perhaps, the fate of absolute knowers.⁵

For a time of educational transition, we can ask ourselves: is a “community” of absolute knowers even possible? Is this educational transition like a middle point between the collapse of one meta-system and the emergence of a new meta-system?⁶ It is a question that is introduced and entertained in Daniel Garner’s Belonging Again. My personal views, which are developed in a paper titled “Global Commons in the Global Brain,”⁷ is “no, BUT.” The answer is “no” in the sense that absolute knowers cannot “fit” into an “integrated whole” that is a “community” (with clearly defined shared boundaries and goals). However, the answer is “no, BUT” in the sense that absolute knowers as non-fitting elements can form networks that overlap in synergistic temporalities that are too complex for any integrated model but are nevertheless a type of conceptual integration that is impossible to represent.

The gap between the “ego’s desire to fit in a community” and the “fitting in non-fitting” is a gap that must be traversed as an abyssal self-mediation, from Being riddled by negativities to the self-concept that is the result of a long work only recognised by others after the fact.

What results, precisely, from multiple absolute knowers is, not a community, but a “scene” or a “subculture.” This is an idea that I take from the Young Žižekian’s, comprised of David McKerracher, Michael Downs, Andrew Flores, and Nick Castellucci.⁸ A scene or a subculture emerges from a network of absolute knowers, who cannot be neatly categorised, and who thus do-not-fit in a common way. Such a “scene” or “subculture” is what I hope to be building with Philosophy Portal. Philosophy Portal is a scene or a subculture that is not possible to categorise in a traditional academic way, and has, consequently, attracted intellectuals that do not fit in the traditional academic way. Together we are not really a community mind that all thinks the same way, or is destined to integration, but rather, we are potentially a networked form that can overlap in synergistic temporalities too complex for any integrated model but are nevertheless a type of conceptual integration impossible to represent.

We are a scene or a subculture.

This is education, perhaps not in a time of transition, but education as transition as such. In Hegelese: this is education as a permanent becoming-other to itself. This is education that holds space for the cuts into life, that holds space for the discontinuous ruptures that cannot be predicted or contained or controlled. What will be the result? The result will be, hopefully/potentially, a civilisation that includes within itself, again, philosophical mind. Without philosophical mind, all of the specialised sub-disciplines and their categories lose their meaning or purpose (telos). Without philosophical mind, all of the specialised sub-disciplines and their categories become mechanism that does not know why it is doing what it is doing.

Funny enough, Bruce Alderman's life path seems to fit here. Alderman never really fit in any single academic home. How could modern academia accommodate a thinker developing his thought in “spirituality, psychology, development, evolution, religion, systems theory” and so forth? What will he possibly think next? The only place such a mind can fit, or integrate with, is with a networked form that transcends integrated models but nevertheless finds a type of conceptual integration that is impossible to represent. Things will fall into place on their own accord, without the ego’s desire for integrated modelling. And indeed, it seems like Alderman is finding his place, whether in The Integral Stage or the emergence of a new academic position that can accommodate generalists (which seems to now be real).

Does this mean that, on the largest scales, things will eventually transition to a new world that finds again new types of belonging or home or community? Perhaps what we have here is a dialectical relation between philosophical minds that will never really fit, giving birth to new structures where there can be new holding containers for processes of becoming to fit in a new way. Perhaps what we have lost is community as a moment for larger processes of becoming that can never fit. What will it look like? Like the old legacy institutions? Like an eastern spiritual community? Like a hybrid between physical and digital spaces? Bruce Alderman and I will be discussed, speculated, pointed in various directions here.

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REMINDER: I live-streamed a discussion with Bruce Alderman about his educational journey between legacy institutions and more unconventional approaches to learning.

REMINDER: On Saturday June 24th/June 25th Philosophy Portal will be hosting an online conference “Logic for the Global Brain.” Dr. Bruce Alderman will be presenting. To register for the conference, visit Philosophy Portal and sign up to the time slots you can attend live!

1. For a discussion with Bruce Alderman on education, hosted by Layman Pascal, see.

2. I recently hosted a discussion with David McKerracher and Ann Snelgrove of Theory Underground on McLuhan’s critical media theory in the age of intelligent machines.

3. I reflected on this aspect of my personal experience in my article on Daniel Garner’s Belonging Again in relation to Dr. Todd McGowan’s idea of “belonging in the universalisation of non-belonging.”

4. As Hegel knew, thought as such is negation, bringing one to the power of the negative, which is the anti-thesis of prediction. This is why the core of Hegel’s philosophy involves accepting our inability to predict the future (its a type of symbolic castration, to use the Lacanian psychoanalytic jargon). I will be teaching a course on Lacan’s Écrits starting July 16th 2023, you can find out more here.

5. For more, see: Last, C. 2022. Neessity of Absolute Knowing. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Garner, D. & Last, C. (Eds.). Philosophy Portal Books, Independently Published, p. 284-304.

6. This question represents a kind of motivational background for Part II of my doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity: “Challenges of a Global Metasystem.”

7. See: “Towards a Commonist Discourse” in: Last, C. 2017. Global Commons in the Global Brain. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114: 48-64. DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.06.013.

8. Check out two of my discussions with the Young Žižekian’s on Theory Underground: here and here.