PEDAGOGUE LENS PEDAGOGY

MANUAL April 9, 1973

BACKGROUND NOTES ON RATIONALITY

Lecture IV
  1. The cultural dynamics of society which illuminates our common existence and interrelations, i.e., the ground of the great social inventions that comprise histories today is in transitional state of collapse, or in a state of transitional collapse. The powerful economic dynamic has moved into this cultural vacuum, and taken over, and perhaps rightly so. The symbols, styles and images of our common life are defined today by the economic dynamic of society and especially by the overgrown internal dynamic of production. Such a state has placed a chasm between the cultural dynamic and the ultimate, the irrational mystery before which every culture comes into being.

2. Herein is the reason for the deterioration of the cultural institution that has to do with education, the family, the local community, religion, and the like, and has thereby thrown the individual, isolated now from social structures (significant relevant socia1 structures) into a state of radical alienation and final estrangement from the ultimate. In the broad historical sense we have and are experiencing the passingness of all previous cultures, both East and West and this all at once. Inside the individual this has understandably been a moment of darkness, bewilderment, suffocation, of anxiety, as with death itself. He is without a context, without an adequate value systems­­ ours is a profound, therefore, human crisis. It is however, somehow a boon to grasp the fact that the occasion of the sense of the cut­off­ness that the individual experiences is fundamentally socially occasioned (at least it's been that way for me).

  1. Strange, indeed paradoxical as it may seem, this very axiological failure has enabled man to recover his senses. Man has rediscovered that he is a rational animal, that he most comprehensively relate harmoniously all his experience, (and I mean harmoniously there at that moment), i. e. his whole life. To do this he must have a perspective beyond reason itself. This is his story that relates him to the transrational, to the mystery, to the incomprehensible, to the ground, invisible as it is to all cultures. Out of this story, cultures are built. Men live their lives and die their deaths. Without it, all is chaos and personal despair. The story enables comprehensive means that builds the necessary structure of commonness and personal fulfillment.

4. Out of this invention of a new story about (this is pretty well Don's lecture) the meaning of humanness, a new and this time global culture will emerge and a sense or fulfillment within the individuals which comprise it and in principle, therefore, all men. In the sense of fulfillment there is an awareness of certainty in the midst of the irrationality upon which reason rests­­ a problemless peace in the midst of a11 the contradictions to this perspective of certitude, all of which releases a spontaneous joy of life, and occasions a state of endless relating to both the past and the future. Obviously what is needed today then is the story which rebalances culture itself; that in turn then will empower the common relations that define our polities and delimit our material sustenance, or which restores for this moment an operational balance in the social dynamics which will create our future. Herein is the resurgence in this profound moment of history. It is the ground of an emerging new social vehicle. It is the transfiguring force of the family in a community and the individual in it. It is the reconstruction of all educational systems. It is a new grasp upon the political dynamic and the meaning of our commonly sustaining ourselves.

ONTOLOGICAL RATIONALITY 4 X 4

Lecture IV ­ Column III

I. DEFINITION OF RATIONALITY

A. Man is propensity to relate himself exclusively to all that he encounters.

B. Encounters are not reducible to the rational forms.

C. Patterns the familiar with bombardment of the new.

D. Symbolically represents the motivities of vitality, emotion and aestheticis.

II. CONSCIOUSNESS VS. REASON

A. Man is consciousness first, secondly reason.

B. He is consciousness of being a conscious being.

C. Reason is only one creative force of consciousness.

D. Rational forms are not synonymous with consciousness.

III. FORMS OF RATIONALITY

A. Whole of culture gives forms to consciousness.

B. Style is a form of consciousness to grasp time and space.

C. Art is the form that releases imaginative consciousness.

D. Education of man depends upon creative images of self­consciousness.

IV. RATIONALITY OF RATIONALITY AS POETRY

A. Product of language is the verbal creation of actual events.

B. Metaphor bridges the meaning gap between unlike realities of experience.

C. Fulfillment of meaning has to do with intentionally investing everything with its inherent significance.

D. Poetry makes the reality of mundane life into symbols of life and motivity.