E. Making Emancipatory Knowledge Visible
[INDEX]
01. Publish While you Research
Articulation is among the core principles to follow if one wants to experience Bildung, ever since Humboldt. In articulating a position, we create a space between ourselves and our views. Our views become visible to us as quasi-objects. Prior to that quasi “materialization” of a position, the thinker and what they think about, or what Husserl calls the “ego” and its “cogitatum,” that which the ego “cogitates” or is thinking about, are so close together they are basically one.
This identity of ego and cogitatum makes us experience challenges to our views as literal challenges to our very persona and personal identity. We react to such challenges very much in the way we react to a physical threat to the integrity of our unity and well-being as an organism.
Bildung is supposed to create a gap between the ego and its cogitations. It’s supposed to help the ego witness and observe its cogitations and disidentify from them. In articulation, we take the first step for this to be achieved; we halt the flux of consciousness and pick out what we see. What we see, we bring into linguistic form.
This form of written articulation comes at a cost, though. It mostly happens in private. Unless, of course, you publish a book, which is a lot of work.
Furthermore, many such articulations are just not apt to be published. They might be important medium steps for you, thus you jot them down, but they don’t deserve their own publication. Sadly, it is often precisely in these unpublished articulations that one sees the source of an emerging perspective. We thus tent to not publish precisely that which would make comprehensible what lead us into a position.
With new media, we have the possibility of publishing these units of articulation. And it is precisely their fragmented and partial nature, often unpolished and raw character, that makes them so valuable to others. Because thought in its genesis is just as unpolished and raw as our articulations of it.
To make these articulations public in their own step, though, would amount to unmanageable additional effort. What we can do instead is to use new media to track these articulations on the go as we research. And then to be easily able to make visible those notes that we deem relevant.
While our actual views might be literally a few years ahead of our published work — since refining ideas and making them presentable sometimes takes half a decade — it is through such articulations that we could make visible where we stand right now. And this truthfully and rawly so. Without attempts at embellishment. With all the doubts and open questions. All of which are necessary because they, as a fact, are part of any actual real perspective.
02. Inversion of Control
For consciously chosen commitments to be possible, we need significant changes in how we grade students. One of the reasons academic teaching is so ineffective is grades. Grades per se are important, and they truly express something about the teacher-student relationship. Obviously, there is an inherent value judgment on the side of the teachers that passing their course with the best grade is “better” than passing it with the worst. “Excellent” literally is better than “Failing.”
I personally welcome that inherent value judgment because it would simply be a lie to claim that from the standpoint of the teacher or the institution, it makes no difference whether a student passes just barely or with excellence. Of course, the institution and the teachers assume excellence in what they offer is a norm worth striving for. Why would they be teaching what they teach if they didn’t assume inherent value in it?
But the issue with our grading system is that it allows for basically one mode of commitment, namely full commitment or being a “good girl” or a “good boy”. If you end up having a lesser grade, not only are you a lesser human being, but you must have ended up there against your will; because who would voluntarily want to be a lesser human being? But why shouldn’t students be free to choose consciously whether they want to submit to these norms or not?
Never has it been as important from a multitude of perspectives to decide which ones are important to you and to consciously choose your commitments. Students need to be active learners, to be capable of saying “no”. I believe this to be one of the key abilities of our times, to be able to enter and leave learning spaces consciously, with awareness of how norms influence our self-image.
Now, what is the problem with learning for a lesser grade? Can’t I, as a student, just decide to learn for the lesser grade consciously? The issue with that is that courses are usually set up with the best grade in mind. The content is not presented in a way as to be as effective to you unless you give it your full commitment. Different commitment levels require different content.
03. Accumulation
There is a potentially productive outcome for any level of commitment you are willing to give. If you have one hour to commit to a text, in this one hour you can still come up with something that can be integrated as a part of the overall communal engagement with the text.
Given meaningful tasks of clear commitment, you can come up with meaningful solutions. If your task is to merely summarize a paragraph and define and look up certain terminology, that’s something you could do in that one hour. And that summary would be potentially useful to others. You wouldn’t have done the job of reading and understanding the whole text, but you would still have done a useful job for the community.
That’s how we can make contributions cumulative. By assigning meaningful co- related tasks that are manageable, standing on their own, we can step-by-step cover an entire complex of ideas. Everybody can provide what they can provide. If it is just to point out a link to a different source, to translate a term, or rephrase a passage in a more comprehensible manner.
But if, on the other hand, you approach sources that by definition require higher commitment than you have available, you will end up taking nothing from them and also contributing nothing to them. Skimming an article because you don’t have the time to read it in depth and leaving comments like “that’s interesting” is useful to nobody. You might even end up hating the topic you picked out when facing such a dilemma between available commitment and required commitment.
Full commitment would require you to delve into literature that is way above your head. This takes much more time and commitment to be productive. You’d have to annotate, write a lot, really think. If you approach delving into primary sources with little commitment, the result will be catastrophic for you. You just won’t take anything from it but frustration — and a bad grade on top.
So when designing a course, those guiding the process should be acutely aware that the less structure and concrete commitments they design, the higher the likelihood of students being dragged along against their will and taking nothing from the course. For a unit of meaning to be consequential, it must be wrapped to meet different knowledge interests and commitment levels.
This would require much more preparation from the teachers. But what we have available today are multiple learning cycles; teachers often hold a lecture over years. Each year they could add something to the content for a specific commitment mode.
And what we also have are the students. Teachers could make students produce content for other students on the memex. And this, even across departments, across universities, across age groups, and countries. This way, the students together with the teachers could, in the course of time, gather more and more courseware for every level of commitment, from abstracts to key quotes, to essays, guiding questions — the whole thing that teachers have been doing forever anyway.
04. Absolution
I’ve heard people suggest that we need to get rid of exams. The argument usually has been hinged around the impossibility to truly map and evaluate competence. Plus, exams trigger fear, and most of us don’t perform well or learn well when in a state of fear.
I personally don’t know that many people who believe that exams represent and picture your competence to deal with a complex situation. I grant that. And I’ve always found the ingenuity to make teachers hear what they want to hear and fake that you know something much more interesting and ‘real-world’ competence than learning to the test.
But that’s not the only reason why we have exams. As with most human actions, testing also is an over-determined phenomenon; there are multiple good reasons for it. One of these upsides is that testing performs a function of absolution.
Feel into it. How does it feel to pass a test? Do you feel like now it has been objectively and timelessly proven you are competent on an issue? Why do we usually give the advice to people to finish off what they have started? What does it mean to ‘start’? Is it because otherwise they wouldn’t be as competent or objectively proven to be competent?
One of the major positive sides of testing is the feeling after. That you feel absolution, you feel free to devote yourself to something else in your life. And this experience itself doesn’t come from testing. It is something existing prior to all testing in many other areas of human life.
The most useful function of testing from a psychological perspective is to represent the ‘closing-off’ of an act of commitment — that’s what ‘starting’ is — and opening up for a new one. That’s why people who never challenge themselves and put themselves in a situation of possible failure can’t experience the form of pride and also liberation that you get after enduring an ordeal and feeling that you have met a goal. Whether you’ve met the goal is secondary; what counts is that you feel like you did. And that’s what tests provide us with, the feeling that we met a goal.
The point is not that the ordeal truly proves something objective about you; the point is that the very scene of the ordeal is valuable to us as human beings. Exams are a form of useful fiction, and it is precisely when we take them to be much more than that that we face the danger of exams becoming more harmful to identity formation than they are helpful. It is not the end of the world to fail an exam. But it is ok to feel proud of yourself if you pass an exam. It is ok to feel pride for an effort you put into something.
This being said, setting up proper conditions for failure is not trivial. You have to actually think about it, adapt it to commitment levels, and find the right measure of challenge and compassion. Between making people feel special and proud and also including everyone with their particular gifts and abilities. Doing it properly, such as setting up proper commitment levels and content for them, will require several cycles of trial and failing. But even informal learning spaces will most likely have to implement some form of trial and challenge structure to remain relevant.
05. Normative Discharge
Think of a classroom. It has chairs, but it’s not the kind of chairs that you would put in your living room. Why not? It is as if they were designed to be used in a ‘proper’ way and guide your attention. It just feels weird to feel comfortable in a classroom chair. It is as if the chair was demanding you sit straight and with your focus on the subject at hand. Or think of practice rooms. If you want to have a practice room, it’s actually not a good idea to make it cozy. On the contrary, all you want there is empty walls and a piano.
The idea behind such intentionally designed spaces is to get you into a mindset that is appropriate to the space. Once you enter such a space, if it is well-designed and you have the right person guiding you, you will feel the norms of everyday life be replaced with the norms of the room.
In your everyday life, all kinds of norms surround you, like ‘be fashionable,’ ‘be beautiful,’ ‘be cool,’ ‘be innovative.’ Do this, don’t do that. Everyone brings their own norms to the table, not only individuals with their particular views, but even institutions, cultures. They all have their own expectations about what matters.
The idea of learning spaces is to be the opposite, namely normatively discharged. The idea is to liberate yourself from all these norms of everyday life and focus on only one or a few consciously chosen ones. The fact that we have developed special spaces for learning tells us that learning is not as trivial as it might seem. You just can’t do it everywhere equally well. For it to happen, we need special spaces performing special functions of preparing our minds.
The problem with norms is they take away attention span. And they make you feel guilty if you don’t live up to them. Sometimes these norms are transformative, but all too often if they are not consciously chosen, they can cause harm and blockades. Sometimes the norms in place can be mutually exclusive or outright pathological. Without norms or expectations, there is neither action nor development. But unconscious norms and harmful norms can just as well make development and action impossible.
The trick of normatively discharged learning spaces is to help you focus on one consciously chosen activity. To rest your awareness in one spot and sink into it. Whether it is the practice of a musical phrase or looking at historical events or just witnessing the breath. Complexity is reduced down to the most simple unit digestible by and useful to your mind. Without such spaces, our lives would be an endless cacophony of meaningless signals that we blindly react to; there would be no distance between the signal and ourselves.
When we are designing online spaces, we should have this in mind. The more open the space, the more normatively charged it will be with norms competing for attention from all kinds of directions. Norms brought to the table by the teachers, norms brought to the table by other peers, norms brought to the table by everyday life, and norms brought to the table by institutions themselves, by the unconscious, or even by malevolent players. That’s why the more open a learning environment is and the less focused on a specific goal, the more difficult it is for it to not end up in noise and trauma. We, this includes even students, end up traumatizing each other without even noticing it.
A way out of norms running amok is consciously designed learning spaces, where the norms the community is to be bound by are made conscious and written down. Precise instructions are given regarding what is expected from the students and what counts as successfully living up to an expectation and what doesn’t.
Online spaces, as they can be implemented in the form of study groups or focus groups on a specific topic or article, have the disadvantage that you have to build them from scratch. You have to define the norms that constitute a learning space.
But this is also the good news. You have to make the guiding norms of a space conscious, and you can create multiple spaces with different norms. For example, there can be a space for those with minimal commitment. This space has its own rules and expectations, clearly distinct from spaces that are about full commitment. Entering and leaving such spaces could be ritualized and a conscious act, something that one fears a little bit but also cherishes.
06. Bias
Every principle can be used against itself, including the principle of doubt and questioning all assumptions. As I recall, Gadamer’s point was that bias is not only not bad per se, but without bias, we become incapable of meaningful experience. Bias sets the stage for us to see things we otherwise would never grasp.
Being purely unbiased actually amounts to being inexperienced and incapable of seeing the obvious. It is a philosophical ideal that disconnects us from the world and makes us fail at the simplest things, such as a sense of purpose and identity.
What helps us decide to pick out meaningful questions against hopeless ones? How do we, prior to all experience, as a blank slate trusting no one and no tradition, decide where to start looking? Or as Alan Chalmers puts it, how do we know that our shoe size is not connected to the size of the moon and that we shouldn’t spend time researching and proving this point?
Our selection of meaningful questions, the topics that we choose to research and pay particular attention to, are not the result of solid scientific research but of bias. Our personal bias shapes how our minds find the world meaningful, and our collective bias has shaped our minds to be capable of perception. Without bias, our perception would become a mess of meaningless bleeps.
Every knowledge tradition carries productive bias as a core element of its wisdom. This bias gives us a hint of how to approach a problem, how to frame it. Bias is just as much a part of the knowledge tradition as testable propositional content. “But bias is bad.” But it isn’t, at least bias that reacts to the world and adapts.
It is not a coincidence that even one of the strongest defenders of doubt as a method and the necessity to drop all bias in favor of building knowledge on solid foundations, Descartes, insisted that while you build your new home, you still need a provisional shelter and take certain things for granted. What he took for granted are precisely the things we doubt today. Namely, he trusted in the goodwill of those around him, he trusted the world is knowable and that we are not deceived by an evil demon, he trusted in the tradition he was born into, and he trusted in his idols.
Bias doesn’t just appear out of the void. It’s not like I just come up with bias. Bias is the result of collective evolution preceding us. What is given to us, the narratives we grow up with, are the result of the actual real-world friction of our ancestors. As some put it, our a priori is the a posteriori of our ancestors. Our conclusions, on the other hand, will be the starting point for our children and become their bias, unless they are too biased against bias and stop speaking to us because we are supposedly too biased.
Your learning can and will be guided by your own biases. This is unavoidable. But if you have made the biases driving you conscious and visible, if the frames driving your thinking are visible to all, taking a left turn and running with a frame for a while isn’t that much of a problem anymore.
The moment you see the frame to be too limited, you then have the choice to try a different bias and frame to make sense of a given problem. You don’t become unbiased but capable of shifting your bias and adapting it to the expectations of reality.
The memex is helping us to do precisely that, make our bias conscious. It makes visible how we approach a text, which questions we ask. But it also makes the bias of others visible. In doing so, we gain emancipatory knowledge of distinctions we were not aware of we made from the start. We gain emancipatory knowledge of how differently someone’s claim could be interpreted and approached from different biases and knowledge interests.
When someone, on the other hand, insists they are not biased, it usually leads to the kind of discussions where you are being sold only one version of reality, and all other attempts at approaching a situation are by definition excluded as invalid. These discussions are tedious because neither will you learn anything new, anything really convincing. You will have the feeling of being sold something you don’t want while at the very same time you will be told you can’t but want it.
07. Truth-Conditions
In discussions around what is true or not, I rarely see a reflection on the involved truth conditions. I find this concept to be highly illuminating and helpful, though, to properly contextualize a position and make us ‘construct-aware’. In our naive attitude of the lifeworld, we find ourselves either believing or disbelieving something. What this realism lacks is a clear sense of why we believe or disbelieve something.
Adding a layer of philosophical reflection, on the other hand, would require us to think about what makes us believe something in the first place. This is to become aware of our reasons for believing or our ‘reasoning’. Instead of asking whether something is true on this level of meta-reflection, we ask the question of what would have to be the case for it to be true. And how much of that which would have to be the case for it to be true have we actually checked and made sure is truly the case.
These are the so-called truth conditions — I’m not sure they are called that way; I just like the term. Truth conditions are all the ways in which reality makes itself visible to our consciousness. For something to be true, other things have to be the case. The often-used example is whether it is raining or not. The fact of whether it rains shows itself not immediately to us but through other signs. Truth conditions for rain are droplets from the sky and proper cloud formations. If you just have droplets but no clouds in the sky, it is most likely not raining, but something else is going on.
What counts as the proper truth condition for a claim, e.g., whether it rains or not, depends on your knowledge interests, though. If your knowledge interest is to know whether you can go hiking this afternoon, a mere look out of the window will do the job of checking the truth conditions for rain given this context. If, on the other hand, you are a meteorologist, these truth conditions aren’t sufficient anymore to have a valid opinion. The truth conditions available to meteorologists are inaccessible and incomprehensible to a layperson. Yet both are dealing with the same question: will it rain or not? And given both knowledge interests, there is a way to legitimately say that you ‘know’ whether it will rain or not, precisely when you have met the respective truth conditions for a given knowledge interest.
This is one of the ways in which truth is ‘relative’. Truth isn’t just out there but related to an entire knowledge practice that defines what counts as ‘proper’ truth conditions for a claim. This is why socialization into a knowledge practice teaches you much more than facts. It teaches you truth conditions that you wouldn’t have dreamt of as a layperson. Figuring out the possible truth conditions for a phenomenon oftentimes is the result of the actual scientific research and progress done over decades. And oftentimes, knowing the truth conditions is the cognitively most challenging part of ‘knowing’ something.
What we gain with the reflection on truth conditions is an awareness of what truth conditions we would have to check if we wanted to truly know something. This, on the other hand, makes our opinions much more context- and construct-aware. In other words, we become aware of the many ways in which we might be wrong. This opens us up to real discourse and differentiation of our position. It, in other words, makes us sociable and self-aware human beings who don’t just believe or disbelieve but are aware of what would make us change our minds.
08. The Unknown
Major expansions of the mind often start with becoming aware of your limits and sensing that there is something out there to embrace and enact. As Winfried Marotzki says, an aspect of Bildung is not the act of knowing itself but the act of becoming aware of the unknown; as if it were a room you know you have not visited yet. Once you feel drawn enough, you can then choose to enter the room and properly commit to its demands.
This is not the same as knowing what you don’t know. I don’t know much about biology, and obviously all I would have to do is pick up a biology book to learn something about it. But I won’t, because I can’t bridge my lifeworld and biology. To me, ‘biology’ is a vague abstraction.
I kinda ‘know’ what it is about, but this is as much as ‘knowing’ what ‘music’ is about by learning about the Phrygian scale, semitones, and relationships of frequencies mapping to intervals at school. You would know nothing about what ‘music is like’ with all that knowledge. To know what music is like, you would have to listen, listen carefully, and have someone show you what to pay attention to.
The same applies to biology. Our diverse disciplines don’t simply provide us with propositional knowledge to learn by heart and recite at the push of a button. They reveal entirely new ‘worlds’. And these new worlds are already perceivable with very little propositional knowledge. Good educators in all fields are capable of making you sense the potential import and impact on your personal lifeworld of a discipline.
I think most of us have had this experience of a burning fascination with something that, on the one hand, we factually don’t know yet, but on the other hand, it feels familiar and sucks you in. I have not seen anyone fully understand this process, let alone institutionalize it. But some people just can do it. And I’m not sure they know how they do it. I suspect it has something to do with them showing you how you do something. And that’s what becomes visible with the memex. It gives you an actual sense of the unknown. Not as something you cannot relate to but as something that you intuit is out there to be discovered.
09. Empowerment
One of the most empowering learning experiences for me was when I heard a professor for the first time say that he didn’t know something. He actually opened a class by telling us a story about how somebody had written him an email, and he had realized he had been totally wrong in his interpretation of a text that was dealt with in a previous class.
Even though that professor wasn’t from my own university or curriculum, that was the first time I, as a student, felt like I could make a difference, that I had a voice that might matter, and that I could contribute something to the discourse, even though it wasn’t me who wrote that email. I felt empowered by the fact alone that I realised other people are not all-knowing.
I have always found it fascinating how certain cultural movements run against such empowerment. Take, for example, the ‘cult of the genius.’ In this mode of thought, the genius is a superhuman being, blessed with a divine spark of inspiration, incomparably more valuable than the ordinary person, and worthy of unconditional praise. The cult of the genius, like all cults, requires absolute submission to the authority of the genius. And it is an incredibly strong force.
I think we all know the feeling when a holy name is dropped. One can literally get goosebumps from just invoking the holy name, whether it be a literal religious figure, artist, or scientist. And it was and still is taboo for the glorified persona to be in mundane contexts. Think of opera singers here, who refused to practice while others could listen in. They in other words refused to be seen and even imagined in a state of not-knowing, learning and failure.
All the challenges to Bildung we described so far are challenges to empowerment. Bildung runs on a different assumption. It does not oppose the genius in the untouchable dominant position and the common spirit in the eternally serving position. It rather operates on the assumption that in certain contexts, we all need empowerment, a sense of making a difference and responsibility. And in other contexts, a sense of trusting those who lead and drawing inspiration from them. There is no leadership for life. Just as there is no passive servitude for life.
Bildung is based on the assumption that in all strata of society, everybody, every single locus of consciousness, every single subject, can make a difference and that we should be an integral part of society and knowledge societies. From the most basic democratic principles to the most specialized knowledge work and research. For this ideal of Bildung to become a reality, we need differently structured interactions, differently structured institutions, and mechanisms of communication and validation, which I hope to have pointed out so far.
On one hand, emancipatory knowledge is the kind of knowledge that gives us a sense of agency. A sense that we understand ourselves, our environment, and the world to a degree that we can consciously make a difference. On the other hand, without systems in place to contextualize our contributions, to make our voices be heard and shine, our agency would be limited in the social sphere, where it is not enough to just understand something, but you also need to get your voice heard.
Empowerment in learning processes and in Bildung can be enabled at any level and in many respects. It is empowering to be able to choose your commitment. It is empowering to be able to choose the opinion leaders you want to learn from. It is empowering to see how your annotations can make a difference to somebody else. It is empowering to experience absolution. It is empowering to take responsibility for the learning path of others. It is empowering to see how within a knowledge community, one can achieve collective goals.
[III. Where we are at: A Real-Case Study of Using Hypothesis to Foster Bildung]
