idea that gravity compels bodies does not substantiate itself; it is a way of describing the relationships between bodies. Gravity helps us better understand physical relationships, but by itself, and outside of any meaningful context, that fact of gravity is useless.
Matters of fact are little medieval superstitions masquerading around as scientific currency. It is not simply that facts are over and done with. Facts have made it possible for us to relinquish the bit about ourselves that makes each of us unique. Facts take the place of individuality, critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and personal meaning. As a result, we lose trust in ourselves and in others, and become alienated from anything even remotely personal. This has been known in contemporary philosophy for over a century, and scientists—at least the earnest ones—have known this for a little bit longer.
I’m not arguing for the end of facts but for a release of the compelling hold that facts have on us. Any belief in a fact is way of shifting responsibility for understanding from yourself and onto somebody else—an expert, a textbook, a scientist, or a for-profit fake news website. It relieves you from having to invest yourself in the importance of whatever detail to which the fact pertains. That schizophrenia has a hereditary component is interesting by itself. It allows us to speculate as to why a given person may develop the disorder. But any psychologist who has studied this phenomenon (or student who has taken the time to better understand it) will explain that the hereditary component is more complicated than the fact suggests. To believe in the fact is to ignore all of the decision-making, judgment calls, research design, and explanations that the researchers were responsible for. Such a fact requires the scrutiny of hundreds of cases—real people and recorded files. This work cannot be easily summarized into an eighteen-word sentence. A great deal of significant information will be left out.
We do not need to be more careful stewards of the news. Reputable and non-reputable news-sources will still print articles that have been carefully shaped into attractive stories that protect the way that they interpret the world. What we need to do instead is to teach our students how to think for themselves. In addition to the creativity, curiosity, and insight that this encourages, it also empowers students to realize their own responsibility in their educations. Now when Peter memorizes the fact that LogbMN=LogbM+LogbN for use on his next math exam, he can admit that he is blindly taking his instructor’s word for it because it would take too long to test it himself. If it doesn’t work out for him on the exam or in life, then it was his own poor judgment that got him there (and not the fault of the instructor or textbook or political figure). I’m talking about solving logarithmic proofs, but I’m really talking about important stuff like well-being, happiness, and life-satisfaction.
In this book, my aim is to convince you of the shortcomings of fact-mindedness. This is going to challenge how you understand yourself and the world around you. It’s also going to challenge the methods that you have learned are the best at understanding yourself and the world around you. This means that I’m also going to suggest that you change these things too. The entire foundation of science, the institution of formal schooling, and even popular culture seem to be opposed to this project. Everywhere there are roadblocks to being (human or otherwise); instead we find instances of what “is in fact.”
“Is” is an ontological signifier; it amounts to the assumption that something exists in fact, and that this something can be placed neatly into a box. The boxes demarcate one thing from the next. Our world, we have learned, is full of such things. When combined by the verb “is,” we understand that the complicated networks of experience that make up “college professors” and “fisheries biologists” are nothing but the particular box in which they can be found. Facts are profoundly limiting.
To be sure, something like this has been done before. There has been a century and a half (or more) of men and women like me, every one more ambitious, audacious, insightful, and well-spoken than I. They have argued against the dominant ideology that sought to codify the complicated universe into systems of predictability and manipulability. Moreover, they have done so at times when it was decidedly inconvenient to do so. Their insights were more timely, and in some cases, even prophetic. Unfortunately, these authors seldom trickle down into general education curricula. Instead, they are often dismissed in a de-facto manner. They say “We don’t have time to wait for people to understand the complicated interrelationships between things!”
This book will look at the problem of habitually replacing experience with facts. German mathematician-turned-philosopher, Edmund Husserl, criticized modern science for requiring that we replace experience with facts. German philosopher and economist Karl Marx criticized capitalism for making it impossible not to do so. English mathematician-turned philosopher Alfred North Whitehead explained that such an approach to science and to learning is “the most useless bore on God’s earth.” German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that science and philosophy have “left the question of being behind.” There have even been students of these scholars who have written definitive texts on the subject. However, many of these texts have been written in a foreign language; they have seen a small readership from obscure academic presses; and they ultimately remain largely obscured from the lay public. My goal is to connect you with their insights and to beat you over the head with a theme that runs through each of them: you are capable of understanding the meaning that the world has for you—you do not need to take someone else’s word for it!
I never really decided to write this book. The book chose me. I keep sitting down to write something else and end up working on this instead. I wish I could say that this was annoying because that would make me a serious academic author, but I cannot. I began writing it while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, continued it as I was drafting my textbook, and again while I was editing my first monograph. Now I’m supposed to be writing articles, conference presentations, book reviews, and hyper-specialized academic monographs, yet here I am punching these words out on the keyboard. This one just seemed like more fun. It is where my intrinsic motivation is directed.
Finally, I have “decided” to do this now because I’m tired of being empty handed whenever a student, friend, or family member (okay, that one never happens) expresses interest in the idea that we are more complicated than things. I hope to write it in a manner that is comprehensible—simple even. My wish is that you will read it and say to yourself, “no shit, Patrick.” I hope you read it once and that the arguments within quickly become obsolete. I hope the arguments are so obvious that you could hardly believe that you used to reject your own awareness of the personal significance that people, experiences, and knowledge had for you, preferring instead to rely on something your professor told you.
Introduction
The Crisis in Science: Where it All Began
The tendency to replace experience with facts about experience wasn’t always so routine. Indeed, scientists used to compare observations about the universe with experience of the universe throughout their research. But this forever changed in 1934.
Let me set the stage. It’s 1934 and we’re in Prague for the eighth International Congress of Philosophy. The Congress, which convenes once every five years or so, reviews the continuing relevance of philosophy in the academy and beyond. In 1934, the Congress had much to celebrate. But what sorts of exciting things ever happen at a philosophy congress? In order to understand the gravity of such a meeting, it is important to back up half a century to re-examine the relationship between philosophy and science. At the close of the nineteenth century (1800–1899), philosophy and science were inseparable.
You see, in the nineteenth century it was understood that philosophy was the cornerstone of the sciences. Most people find this statement to be ludicrous today. We do, however, still have some relics from Philosophy’s heyday. The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), coined in the middle of that century, is still recognized as the highest degree that can be held in any scientific field. It was the philosophers who examined the methods, questions, and areas of emphasis for scientists to explore.
