On the Poetic and Scientific Modes of Knowledge

 

The fact is, we are not moved by thought alone but by the integration of an idea and desire, the desire for union with reality, and all our composite being perceives reality as good. If education does not cultivate the natural desire for union with reality with understanding that the poetic and gymnastic modes are real knowledge, then it delivers something profoundly inferior to the reality and powers of the human being. For desire of the real to rise up, there must be something real to arouse it, and gadgets, computers, and gimmicks used to hold attention, all taking place in classroom environments technologically insulated from reality, are simply parts of the generally unlovable atmosphere of modern education - unlovable because they are all efficiency, utility, and no longer beautiful.

...Again, it is love, desire, that inspires real knowledge and far from being confined to feelings, this must include the love from the will... 

Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, does not, cannot, give an experience of the whole thing - only external reality, the surface, the parts are held as real. It is a priority of the scientific mode that it be free of emotional responses to reality. When this scientific view enters into education, then only the deliberative aspect of the will is emphasized, and effort to learn anything is considered a virtue.  

 

The School of the Poetic Mode in the Modern World

 

But the great question for students and teachers who would discover the poetic mode of knowledge is not whether it can be declared valid or not - it can, either by pointing to the long tradition of its recognition...or by simply reflecting on their own experience to see that such a mode exists within themselves. Rather, because the awareness of poetic knowledge requires, not exclusively but to a profound degree, a poetic culture found in daily life and in ordinary experience, the question is: Is such a life possible in a highly industrialized, technological society based on the idolatry of materialism? If poetic experience first play upon the beautiful, the wonderful, the proportionate thing that is intuitively pleasing to our senses, where are we to find this beauty in the noise, flare, and glitz, the noxious air, the tasteless food, the vulgar democratization of manners, the desensitization of emotions and resulting wanton violence from suburbs to cities to nations, that so inform the life of the [twenty-first] century? Are there even any tables, chairs, cups and bowls (outside museums or a few craft centers) whose handmade simple beauty caused the manly Odysseus to gaze in wonder on such ordinary objects? What ideas of substance present themselves from our daily life and work, so that at mealtime around the table (if anyone still eats together) is there conversation of some reflection on the permanent things? How often, if ever, do we encounter some setting, some person, some song, some moment where we can say within our hearts and minds that the experience was “something very much like perfection” (Homer)?

...The modern world, indeed, has gone a long way in destroying the occasions for a normal sensory life in contact with natural beauty and the occasions of poetic experience. In cities, towns, homes, and schools, it is largely a life insulated from reality, a world of electronic images and music, machines in the home and in the office that separate us from our work, exercise machines and professional sports and no real gymnastic sense of the world. For the poetic sense of life to make a real “comeback,” to treat just one area, both atheistic communism and liberal capitalism would have to disappear as well as the huge and crushing industrial-technological nations they have produced. An economy based on working and living proportionate to the whole human being within a stable family unit, and not relative to the State and its materialistic ends, would have to come into being. Frankly, it all seems impossible viewed this way, without, perhaps, some enormous global catastrophe first.

Without a sympathetic culture that reflects the poetic sense of life, teachers who work in the poetic mode have very little to point to for present examples; we prove our position often in the negative, by the absence of poetry. Yet, the close of the twentieth century also forces us to look more closely, for there is still a nature, and a human nature, that can respond to reality and to the permanent things. It is simply more difficult now. Therefore, it seems that poetic education can be engaged in now, but on a small scale, perhaps as small as one home and family at a time, but I would hope one classroom, one small school at a time. The recent rise in private schools and homeschooling are opportunities for the application of poetic education without the constraining bureaucratic requirements from state and federal agencies. 

But what is needed is a school completely dedicated, I would say, devoted to the education that observes first of all the poetic and gymnastic modes of knowledge. And a school, based on the tradition from Socrates to the IHP [Integrated Humanities Program]...is also based on that great species of love: friendship. As Senior says, a school first of all is a faculty of friends. Before buildings, before books, even before students, a school is a gathering, often just of a few friends, learning together, who love the same things and love to reflect and remark about them in conversation. The presence of such friendships and their love of concrete and mysterious realities, is what attracts students to such a school. 

...Small is beautiful, less is more, in this case, and students of such a school will not only regain the proper use of their senses, they will at the same time discover their reason which, while being good in itself, would also answer the charge that such a school would not prepare the students for the “real” world.

...Keep in mind, then, that at a school in the gymnastic and poetic mode, designed to truly recover education, is not a “romantic” idea, or an easy school, especially when compared to the cushy surroundings and “feel-good” methods of most modern education. Students in the real school, for example, would be cold before the room took the heat of the wood stove, and they would be hot unless a breeze could be found to enter through open windows. But like the memories of light and shadow, the memory of cold and hot, the smell of the open field for playground and science, the drowsy afternoons after a simple but healthy lunch, the sometimes tedious drills for math, would all be recalled in a sympathy that had joined the passive and active powers of body and soul. And recall at this point...an order based largely on self-discipline now so foreign to the average school setting as to be disbelieved as possible without the aid of threats, bribes, and even the presence of police. And yet, order as viewed by Charlier or Senior (or Socrates, Aristotle, or Aquinas for that matter) is also part of nature; therefore, in spite of human perversity, or call it original sin, the sense and satisfaction of order as a species of beauty still resides within the soul and can still be drawn out by the alert and sympathetic teacher.

Teachers and parents often want to know about books for such a school and how they would be taught. In the school of the poetic mode of education, there are very few books indeed, and the ones used, in a sense, choose us before we chose them; that is, these are the books of our tradition, which is the Western tradition...

Furthermore, to teach in this integrated way, so that students see that knowledge is not a set of discrete subjects to be mastered but rather a whole that instructs by delight, one book could suffice for an entire curriculum…

...But the end of such an education is not more and more books or even necessarily smarter students. Poetic and gymnastic education has as its end the cultivation of the senses, the imagination, and the will, not the elevation of the I.Q. Not is there the presence of the twice-removed distance of the impersonal textbook or the cumbersome bookkeeping with work sheets, handouts, or the conventional means of evaluation under this way of teaching. My students examinations on what they read was determined by writing something about the experience of the book, talking about it, drawing about it. Even the “hard” subjects of math, where perhaps calculations for distances were determined, always had the full context of the story underneath them as the foundation of reference, rather than the cold black and white numbers in a lifeless story problem in a textbook.

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...The books...are not the end of education and certainly not intended to produce “bookish” students with overstimulated minds. It is not a school for parents to be able to say: My kid is smarter than your kid. The books, while being good in themselves, are first of all to be enjoyed. They are also occasions of something more important. 

The philosophers recognize such distinctions by speaking of causes or ends; that is, in addition to reading the book for enjoyment, the student is able to learn about life in a vicarious way and also in some specific ways...as well as learning more about the living language. Students become better readers and writers by reading and writing, not by methods of attacking the discrete topics of a language arts program. These ends would be called immediate and proximate causes.

But there are also remote and ultimate ends. The reward teachers and students experience when they abandon all the cumbersome paraphernalia of scientific education and confront one another and the truths of the subject at hand directly and simply, is friendship. It is friendship, a species of love, spoken of by Andre Charlier and John Senior, that defines such a school and echoes that first image in the West of the teacher Socrates, whose students playfully, affectionately detain him one day so that he will talk to them about justice, as seen at the beginning of the Republic. And this is why Senior says that first of all a school is a faculty of friends…

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...the presence of the teacher and student, and the teacher illuminating a book with the student - the object that has been placed between them - produces the third thing, like the note created by two notes played in harmony, the mutual delight in some aspect of the true, the good, and the beautiful, those transcendentals that are harmonized in the One. To have shared and loved the experience of the good, true and beautiful, through some concrete or vicarious experience is to begin real friendship, for as Aristotle observed, true friendship is based in part on the mutual love of the good.

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When we compare the ends of modern education, be it in the public schools and universities or in the majority of private academies and colleges, with the ends of education as conceived by the much longer and vibrant tradition recorded in this study, we see that there can be very little friendship between students and teachers and between the students themselves, at least in the sense spoken of here. First, the faculties of most schools have been brought together to instruct students in certain subjects so that they master certain skills. Students are present because by law they have to be, and by the “law” of economics, so they are told, they must use an education to get a job. Now, faculty members within this setting, as well as students, may indeed become friends, but it will not ordinarily be because of a remote or ultimate cause of education but because of the nature of human beings who tend to form friendships of some kind in social settings. Furthermore, since the pervasive influence of Dewey and his overzealous disciples have firmly implanted the idea throughout the education of teachers that there really are no transcendent truths to be seen and experienced outside their utility in solving economic, social, or political problems, then there is nothing left for teacher and student to gaze upon beyond immediate and proximate ends, nothing for them to love as good in itself. 

Aristotle set down...what had already been observed in common experience for as long as anyone could reflect on such things, that there are friendships based on utility...where what love there is is not based on the good of the other but opon what each can get from the other. It is for the good of ourselves that we befriend another person in this case. Then, there is the occasion of love based on pleasure...still not based on the good of the other but upon what pleasantness we derive for ourselves from that person. Aristotle says such friendships are incidental and are easily dissolved, because if one person ceases to be useful or pleasant then there is no reason to love them. Of course, Aristotle also points out that true friendships contain a measure of usefulness and pleasantness, for, after all, these are goods of a kind, and the truly good desire to be useful and pleasant to their friend. It is just that the useful and pleasant between real friends must be of a higher order and not subject to change and whim. But perfect friendship, says Aristotle, can only take place between those who are good and are alike in virtue. This bonum honestum is reserved for those who love the good, where we desire, above all, the good of the other. So it is not difficult to see that the immediate and proximate ends of things are closer to the utilitarian and pleasant goods; whereas, the remote and ultimate ends rise to the bonum honestum, that is, the honorable good, which, beginning with at least Socrates to present-day Christianity, is recognized as true friendship.

...It is clear from all experience that youth do not really from the higher degrees of friendship - theirs is mainly at the level of what is pleasing. But given the presence of teachers who are friends and who love their students in the highest order, desiring their good, and understanding and patient of their age, students will have the model in their memory, the form of love in their minds, in a time where as a nation, as a world, we either destroy our youth in unjust wars, or by overindulgence, or by neglect and deprivation.

And now we need to take a deep breath...and found a school even with just a few teachers and few students, for a few years. Who knows how far the spark may leap? With all the experiments in education...it would seem there would be some room somewhere for one small experiment in the recovery of education.

...our land, our homes, the heavens and the earth, those dear and those distant from us are important not only in their nature, but, like ourselves, have meaning and purpose far beyond the reach of the current means of analysis and measurement. By rediscovering poetic knowledge, it is possible to see and teach once more that the world - seen and unseen - and the world of ourselves within, mysteriously but actually possess a life that is “something very much like perfection.”

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On Literature

 

When I saw [three boys I had taught in high school] about twelve years after their graduation, they were eager to tell me how much they had enjoyed my class...they only remembered that we read the Illiad and The Count of Monte Cristo together, and that they were the best books they ever read...they recalled little of what I had said, but...their memory of the experience of the class was one of overall great fondness. I think this was possible because those books were read in an atmosphere of pure enjoyment - no notes were to be taken, no pop quizzes. We read a great deal aloud and would talk whole hours about one scene, recreating it in our minds, savoring some moment or event that seemed true to us.

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On History:

 

Historically important dates and names are not only necessary to know when learning history, but for students these can also be enjoyable, if those precise things are left embedded in the stories of history. With older students, reading the histories written by the makers of history - Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, for example - gives an immediacy to the subject and deepens the vicarious experience of the events. In either case, textbooks of history should be avoided, for these are far too abstract for young minds, books about books, usually, that merely summarize events. Even for older students, in high school for example, the best foundation for Ancient Greek history is still Homer - the Odyssey and the Iliad.

 

On Science:

 

When a flower is taken apart and examined as pistil, stamen, stem and petals, each part is seen exactly and a certain curiosity is indeed satisfied; however, curiosity is not wonder, the former being the itch to take apart, the latter to gaze on things as they are. Curiosity belongs to the scientific impulse and would strive to dominate nature; whereas, wonder is poetic and is content to view things in their wholeness and full context, to pretty much leave them alone. Stated as simply as possible, science sees knowledge as power; poetic knowledge is admiratio, love. In other words, take the students outside, regularly, and turn even a backyard into a laboratory of the open fields. Once again, textbooks at this level are a burden; they get between the student and the things of admiration. Let them make their own notes and pictures, poems and stories, about what they have seen. Biology is the observation of living things, not dead things. And this includes the elements of nature…

So, with dissection or isolation there is no longer an experience of the flower - only parts - and the thing called a rose is gone…

...it is also to be remembered that the human mind is limited - one of the great lessons of poetic knowledge - and even under the power of connatural knowledge, or formal metaphysics, it cannot fully account for the presence of flowers, rain, the sun, or anything. Scientific knowledge accounts for the material world even less because of its necessary attachment of observing externals. This is why scientific knowledge can give the impression of dominance over nature, because only material reality can be disassembled, manipulated, and destroyed, giving the appearance of complete dominance to the finite mind. An education that rejects the poetic mode actually rejects the essential stage of discovery of reality. Advancing to the conclusions of science without the gymnastic and poetic foundations casts an aura of unreality on all knowledge that follows…