Another View 2-14

In one of the classes I teach, I raised the long discussed question (at least philosophically), which do you imagine came first, epistemology or ontology? I raised it at all because it relates to a larger question, perhaps – “How does one find meaning in life?” Does meaning come through acquiring knowledge, or does meaning come through experience? Or, of course, is it both, and if so – which has precedence.

The conundrum of “chicken and egg” is not so important to me, so I will not lose myself to this distraction. What seems of greater importance is the loss of balance and reciprocity that lives between the two. As in anything, when the part becomes the whole, imbalance occurs, and when it becomes thus imbalanced, it becomes consuming, and partial. It peddles half-truths that appear to be the whole truth, and in neglect, thinks itself complete.

Giambattista Vico differentiates in the New Science between rational metaphysics and imaginative metaphysics that begins to open, for me, the margins between knowing and being. He writes, “As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when…he does not understand he…becomes them by transforming himself into them.” Causally, these work from two different kinds of “spaces.”

Rational metaphysics works from “limited space,” while imaginative metaphysics from “open spaces.” Both are important, even necessary. One finds its home in reason, while the other finds its home in myth. Why the split? What has caused us to delimit one to the exclusion of the other? Being children of the Enlightenment, and especially Scholasticism, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have toppled us into this distinction. We now live within the domain when Reason has become God, the results of which are a “burned-out skeleton” with the particular, i.e., limited space, being the measurement of an over-explained world. More became, in fact, less.

Hence, as well, the constriction we are experiencing in the realm of education. The Latin for education is educare, meaning “to pull from.” And, of course the opposite is how we have lived the meaning, i.e. “to pour into.” There is the radical difference. Our formal educational process teaches us about the world we have participated in creating. By its very nature, it is virtual reality. Our recent (400 years) of virtual reality have taught us that reason, technology, measurement, and a linear movement have become our telos. They are realities based on illusions of human power, domination, and control. Who would ever believe that the rise of literacy would also mean the end of education? Knowledge as information has become the vicarious usurper of reality. Bottom line “give me the facts” has been substituted for wonder and imagination.

The tricky part, for me, is the way that “knowing” has exhibited preeminence over experience and “being,” realms far too phenomenological for most. I mean, how would you measure “experience,” much less “being.” And so, at stake here in some ultimate way is the realm of spirituality, or spiritual experience. For knowledge has, in its particularity, become crushing -- even suffocating. It is a pretender, owning far more of Truth than ever it truly could “know.” It is a “disguised knowing.”

What education is not is an initiation into mystery. Hence, we live our lives in the way of this constrictive partiality. In a way, you might say, in doing so, our lives have been lived already, and as we move, we are merely occupying spaces laid out for us in advance. What has been ignored is an enormous range of potential experience, of “open space.” That space is the realm of wonder and imagination. With the rational as our singular and therefore delimiting experience, we have ignored another whole universe of knowing and being. They are a connective tissue, and reciprocal worlds.

In a world bereft of wisdom, the path to regaining the “loss of soul” so vast in our culture, is to impart both knowing and being, epistemology and ontology, as the vital arteries of our whole and unitive experience of life. Wisdom is the experience of the inner universe. Knowledge is the experience of the outer universe. It is the same universe. May our children, and their children, not have their lives lived for them before they are ever born. May we give back to them the world as a totality, and may they know a universe complete as it is whole. May this view of their universe heal a society enraptured with a partial knowledge, a world become stingy with “proof and technique.” May the authority of Scripture subject itself once again to this greater knowing, and thereby, enhance once again Another View of so great a God who knows and is nothing less.

*nous – The word has various uses in Patristic teaching. It indicates either the soul or the heart or even an energy of the soul. Mainly, the nous is the “eye of the heart,” the center of all true seeing, or the purest part of the heart. It is where attention is at its keenest. It is also called “noetic energy, and so is not identified with the faculty of reason.