July 3,1995                           GS AREA II Assembly

 

INTEGRATIVE THINKING and AREA II

 

Good morning!  It is a pleasure to be here to have this time with you.  (By the way, I will be around at least some of today after this assembly and also at the concert tonight.  I will be glad to talk with you about this assembly, AREA II, or any other aspect of GS.]

     Acknowledge introduction by Bob and add anything

      left out of intro: GS '77; AREA II teacher;

 

I have entitled my talk today, Integrative Thinking and AREA II.  Integrative thinking, as I understand it, is what is essential about the AREA II component of GS.  This is an AREA II assembly, so it is only fitting that we should discuss the kind of thinking that AREA II aims at.

     But integrative thinking is not part of most people's ordinary understanding of education.  Probably you don't know what I mean by the term "integrative thinking".  So, let's approach the matter slowly.

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     First of all, why should we be concerned with integrative thinking?  That is, why is AREA II important in the first place?  Why does GS include as an essential element in its curriculum this program called AREA II? 

     I'm not asking these questions rhetorically.  I would like to hear your understanding of these matters.  Raise your hand, and I will call on you.  We'll take your understanding as our point of departure.

 

     Do you each have a copy of that longish document entitled Opening Windows Onto the Future, which sets out the theory of the school?  Or do you have access to it?  Have you read it?  (You should read it.)  Allow me to quote a few brief passages from it.  Listen closely.

          quote from p.3:"In this Area...a larger whole."

          and pp.36-7: calling for a study of the organization (and reorganization) "of the...structure of thought itself", because "knowledge itself cannot be dissociated from the structures in which it is     presented."  The idea here is that knowledge and understanding occur in the context of an overall world view, a larger structure of thought.  If one fails to grasp that world view, one will have difficulty grasping the developing knowledge and understanding in a given area of thought.  The larger structure of ideas, the world view, can be thought of as a framework of ideas and concepts within which we think, or as the structure of thought itself.  Compare it to the foundation of a house.  The foundation grounds and gives shape to the building built on it.  Well, a world view shapes how in general we think.  It provides the basis for understanding more fully the ideas in some more restricted subject, such as art or physics or music, etc. 

     So, integrative thinking is not just one concern among many, then, but arguably is the highest concern at GS.  Your AREA I subject is extremely important, but those who worked out the theory of the school clearly wanted AREA II to be the intellectual pinnacle of the school, the highest point of the mountain of ideas you are climbing here.  AREA II focuses on the AREA I subjects, and on any other ideas that arise at GS, but particularly on the AREA I subjects, on the ideas and developments that have been occurring in them especially in the 20th century.  AREA II looks for broader ideas and concepts that provide the larger structure of thought within which the ideas and developments in the AREA I subjects can be more fully understood. 

 

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     You were presented with the opportunity to engage in integrative thinking on the very first day of your very first week, your orientation week last week: remember the presentations on art, relativity, music, and architecture, and then the follow-up discussion?

     You have probably not been encouraged to engage in integrative thinking in your education before GS.  For that matter you may well not even have been exposed to it before GS.  You may well not even have been aware that reflective, critical thought could aim at and accomplish the integration of ideas.  So perhaps it was presumptuous of us to ask you to engage in integrative thinking on your very first day at GS.  But, you see, integrative thinking is so important that we had to orient you to it ASAP.  And furthermore, it is difficult, for you of course because you are not used to it, but also difficult per se.  We wanted to give you a small dose of it in a limited context, so that you would begin to apply this kind of thinking to everything GS presents to you.

 

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     Now that we have an answer to our first question, why be concerned with integrative thinking, let's turn to the obvious second question, What IS integrative thinking? 

     Well, "integrative" is just a cognate of, or adjectival form of, "integrate".  So, let's start with that word.  Roughly, to integrate is to bring together, to tie together, to connect, to make a whole out of parts.  To think in an integrating way, one finds broader ways of thinking that connect and make meaningful the often fragmented ideas and concepts that you encounter in the separate subjects and performances and events you are exposed to here.

     We said earlier that using integrative thinking we are looking for a larger structure of thought or a world view.  The ideas and concepts that make up the world view, that larger structure of ideas, are very general and abstract.  One way of discovering them is to find broad ideas and general concepts that connect up and make meaningful the ideas and developments in first-order subjects such as art, physics, music, the social sciences, dance, mathematics and so on.

 

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     That's a thumbnail sketch of integrative thinking and Area II.  But it's not good enough for me simply to present this rather sketchy abstract account and leave you with that.  I believe that you need to see it in action, so to speak, that you need to feel how to think this way.  Therefore, I will present some examples of integrative thinking applied to modern thought, for you to follow along with and try to get the feel of.  These examples are roughly correct, but I am not as interested in their detailed accuracy as I am with illustrating the kind of thinking at issue.  Then I will ask you to try your hand at some integrative thinking, and of course I will be here to help you.

 

FIRST EXAMPLE) (from the 1500s to 1600s):

We'll look at religion, politics, and chemistry--Protestant theology (i.e. religious theory),  democratic political theory, and the scientific theory of chemical elements:

         

     ITEM #1] In the early 1500s, a new way of thought shook up and divided the Catholic Church.  A wide variety of people protested and rejected the religious authority of the Roman pontiff (the Pope) and the Catholic Church's hierarchy of bishops and priests.  These protesters, who came to be called Protestants, which essentially means troublemakers, held basically that the authority to interpret Scripture ought to be at the level of the worshipers or at least at a level of an institutional church more responsive to the worshipers.

       [OPT]  E.g. Baptists.  They relied on two fundamental

       principles that structured their sect: 

     --Priesthood of the believer:  They rejected

          the idea that there should be priests who

          have authority to dictate truth or falsity

          of religious matters to their worshippers.

          Each worshipper, each believer, should be

          as a priest, with the authority to find his or

          her own responsible interpretation of religious

          matters.  Even the minister (note: not called a

          priest) would be simply another worshipper, with

          no more religious authority than any other

          worshipper, and the minister's task would be

          more like that of a guide.

      --Autonomy of the local church: Each church would be

          able to find its own understanding of religious

          matters, would be able to set its own policies,

          and would not be told what to believe or to

          practice by some other local church or some

          higher body.

 

In other words, religious authority was to be decentralized and placed more or less in the hands of the people.

 

     ITEM #2] By the late 1600s, a democratic political theory had been propounded and had achieved some acceptance.  The English philosopher John Locke wrote his 2nd Treatise of Government, and it was a key writing at the time. It profoundly affected the English revolution in the late 1600s that gave representative government its first huge boost, as well as influencing the French and American revolutions of the 1700s that aimed at an even higher degree of political freedom and popular political representation.

     There was a long movement to strip political authority from kings, i.e. from the top of government or the State, and show that political authority instead resides in the lower levels of the State, namely, in the people.  Instead of the State being conceived of like a body whose parts are supposed to serve the whole blindly, a new conception of the State emerged: the State as a community of the parts, the people, designed to serve and protect those parts.

     So, political authority was placed in the hands of the people.  They could constitute or dismantle a particular government or an entire political system.  People were the basic political units. 

 

     ITEM #3] In the 1600s, the English chemist Robert Boyle was the first to articulate a modern conception of chemistry.  The new modern concern in chemistry was to found a "science of discovering the composition of [mixed] and 'compounded' bodies in such a way that we can produce them at will and foretell their mutual interactions."  Boyle developed "the [modern] conception of the chemical element...: a substance 'perfectly homogeneous' and not, so far as we know, capable of further simplification."   It was Boyle's (and other's) work to found the science of chemistry on this theory of chemical elements that led to the atomic theory of chemistry that we still accept today.  Substances were taken to be composed of amounts of one or more chemical elements.  In other words, the elements were the basic substances, out of which everything else was formed.  Elements were the basic chemical unit.

 

     AN INTEGRATING IDEA -- the idea of atomism.  People were the religious atoms; people were the political atoms; and elements were the chemical atoms.   The most basic reality, according to atomism, is at the level of the atom, whatever the subject.  The larger wholes that are part of our world--a church, a State, or even a chair--are built up from and rely on their smallest parts or units or "atoms".  A subject matter can be understood and appropriately organized by treating the wholes as composed of parts.  The parts are the basic reality; the wholes are simply compounds or collections of the parts.  The only way to understand a subject is analytically, in a bottom-up manner, by looking to the parts that comprise something and that account for its nature and its behavior.  In political theory, religious theory, chemical theory, look to the parts.

 

Before we go on, any questions or comments?  Did you follow the move towards integration of the three theories?  I might point out that some have claimed that atomism is a plank in our modern Western world view, often called scientific materialism.  By carefully locating the integrating ideas of our time, we can elicit the larger structure of thought we operate within, our world view.

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SECOND EXAMPLE): (from the 18th the 19th centuries)

We'll look at philosophy, optics and art--Hume's philosophical theory of the mind, optical theory, and the artistic "theory" behind Impressionism.

    

     ITEM #1] In the 1700s, the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed the view that all of our perceptions of the world take the form of appearances, what he called impressions.  There are simple perceptions or impressions and complex ones.  The simple ones are, for example, impressions of color, taste, smell,--ways that the world appears to you that cannot be simplified or distinguished any further.  You can have an impression that says "red" or one that says "sweet".  Complex impressions can be divided into simple ones.  An impression of an apple can be divided up into an impression of a red color and an impression of a sweet taste, etc., so an impression of an apple is complex.

     Hume contended that all our perceptions either are or are built up from simple impressions.  And all our thought and reflection uses the data of perception alone to reach new thoughts or new conclusions.  But now here is a problem that arises for Hume.  If all we have available to us for data about the world is appearances, i.e. impressions, how can we confirm that the appearances we are aware of put us in touch with an external world?  All we are aware of directly are our impressions or our thoughts which are based on impressions.  We do not have direct access to the external world per se.  And while practically speaking we may not choose to ignore the apparent external world around us, when it comes to justified knowledge, we have no justification for the belief that there is an external world that corresponds to our impressions.  If there is an external world of objects, we cannot in principle have any knowledge of it.  (Yikes! And I might add, all Hume was trying to do was work out the new view of perception and knowledge that underlies modern science.  No wonder he concluded that science rests on a scandal.)

 

     ITEM #2] In the 1800s, the new optical theory was that vision basically is the perception of light rays reflecting off of surfaces and that differences in the kind or intensity of these light rays determine what we see.  In other words, in vision we are directly aware of light only.  We are not directly aware of the surfaces light reflects off of.  To put it crudely, we see light, not the objects lit.

 

[OPT] "Physicists, such as Helmholz [and note the title of one of Helmholz's major works: Physiological Optics], made discoveries about the component prismatic parts of white light, and pointed out that the sensation of color has more to do with a reaction in the retina of the eye than with objects themselves.  The color wheel also demonstrated that two separate hues of a wheel at rest are fused by the eye into a third hue when the wheel is in rapid motion.  And when all the colors of the spectrum are rotated, the eye sees them as tending toward white."

 

     ITEM #3] In the middle to late 1800s, some painters came to believe that

"form and space...are not actually seen but implied from varying intensities of light and color.  Objects are not so much things in themselves as they are agents for the absorption and refraction of light.  Hard outlines, indeed lines themselves, do not exist in nature.  Shadows, they maintained, are not black but tend to take on a color complementary to that of the objects that cast them.  The concern of the painter, they concluded, should therefore be with light and color more than with objects and substances.

     A painting, according to [these so-called] impressionists, should consist of a breakdown of sunlight into its component parts.  ...They intended to paint not so much what is seen but how it is seen."

The impressionist painters (and there were also impressionist composers and poets) moved away from the traditional approach of representing objects as they are in themselves.  They painted small dabs or dots or swirls of color, combined to give the impression of an object seen in some light. 

    

     AN INTEGRATING IDEA:  loss of an objective world.  There has been a weakening of the belief that there is an objective external world of objects that we can have sensory experience of and therefore have any knowledge of.  Now I don't mean by this that we are starting to bump into things.  But when we follow out the apparent implications of our deepest intellectual commitments about the world, we are led to doubt the possibility of knowing an external world.  We are cut off from the world; we come to doubt objectivity-- i.e., we come to doubt that there is a world, independent of our experience of it, that we can discover through our judgments and experiences.  Philosophy, optics, and art--all rejecting objectivity in their subject matters.

 

Any questions or comments?  Are you beginning to get a feel for how this "integrative thinking" works?  I'll note, again only in passing, that some have claimed that the rejection of objectivity and the commitment to subjectivity is another plank in our modern Western world view.

 

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THIRD EXAMPLE:  (from the 20th century); now it's time for you to try your hand at integrative thinking in what time we have left.  This time I'll mention some 20th century developments and you can do the integrative thinking needed.

    

     Painting: "Kandinsky, the first artist who risked the decisive step towards [a] completely abstract [painting], was not able to commit himself to it until he had become aware that material was changing into energy, until, that is, he ceased to regard the banishment of objectivity from the sphere of painting as a brutal assault.

          "Thus abstract painting emerged as a contemporary form of the image of reality--and it was born simultaneously in various places, a fact which shows quite clearly...that this form of painting was closely bound up with the outlook of the new century.  Kandinsky ventured on the first abstract picture in 1910.  This was the first time that a picture was created which had no basis in perceivable reality."

 

     Music:   By the 20th century, music was questioning and often abandoning virtually every traditional device and structure: melody, harmony, time signature, musical notation, sense of direction or goal, scales and key, and other accepted musical forms and constraints.  In the music of John Cage, well, you surely know now what Cage's works reveal, don't you?

 

     Physics:  You have been exposed to some relativity theory already here.  In Einstein's account of the universe, as you know, there is no objective time and space; they are both relativized to the observer's frame of reference.  In the work of Heisenberg, one apparently cannot in principle determine both the location and velocity of a particle such as an electron, because the process of measurement affects the particle measured.  The subject (the scientist) affects the object.  Or take Bell's theorem, now experimentally confirmed but whose interpretation is still controversial.  A pair of particles is created from a particle collision, and they are moving in opposite directions at high speed.  A certain feature or property of them is undetermined, comparable to color.  If one of the pair is then made to collide with yet another particle in a way that determines that yet-undetermined feature, the other member of the pair then immediately takes on the opposite feature, no matter how far apart the pair are at the time.  And there are other problematic findings, such as the slit experiment that shaped the belief in wave-particle duality.

 

     Social thought:  It was accepted for most of human history that there was a "natural" order even of people, whether it was a biblical justification of wives being subordinate to their husbands or a feudal justification of lords and serfs.  In the early modern era, there was a growing concern with the equality of people, and even then theorists such as John Locke thought that there still was a natural moral order holding between people.  But belief in a moral order has been weakening for a long time.  In the 1980s Robert Bellah, returning to the cultural analysis of America first undertaken in the 1830's by De Toqueville, concludes that "American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation."  That is, we no longer can seem to find a justifiable way of ordering our inner selves.  The moral values we appeal to in order to structure our lives and selves seem ultimately to be arbitrary.  And so the shape of our lives, ultimately, seems to us to be arbitrary.  And so we have no defensible moral basis for structuring our common social order. The idea of a natural moral order is breaking down.  As an example, the idea of human rights, or natural rights, is systematically being rejected as a superstition.

 

     Drama: In the 20th century dramatic "movement" known as the Theater of the Absurd, the playwrights wrote plays that "have no story or plot to speak of", that "are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets", that "often have neither a beginning nor an end", that "seem often to be reflections of dreams or nightmares", and that "often consist of incoherent babblings."  The playwright Eugene Ionesco said "'Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose....Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." 

     And before you dismiss a play with mechanical characters, no plot, no beginning or end, and with meaningless dialogue, you should keep this quote in mind:

        "'What have you done to our humanity?' one feels

         like complaining to the artist.  'Why have you so

         mercilessly laid bare the dark corners of our soul,

         why have you so dislocated and dissected our

         natural beauty in order to reconstruct the parts in

         such artificial and disturbing patterns?'

         But the artist can with justice throw the challenge

         right back at his accuser: 'My images reflect what

         I see What I have been watching is yourself....

         I am not trying to paint you as you look, or would

         like to look, from the outside, but as you really

         are or fear that you are, within.  I am not judging

         you, but only trying with compassion and sympathy

         to give expression to your own secret, inarticulate

         image of yourself.  You should thank me, rather

         than blame me for having revealed to you the hidden

         face of your own soul."

 

So, here we have art, music, physical science, social science, and drama.  These 20th century ideas and developments call for integration.  What sort of integration can you come up with?

 

One governing idea, i.e. an idea with significant integrative power here, is that there is no objective order to be acknowledged: none in nature and none in art; no norms; no forms or structures to be discovered or that one should follow.   As one author puts it, all that is solid melts into air.  Or as that 20th century Irishman William Butler Yeats put it in his famous poem The Second Coming:  "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer./Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

  

 

One phenomenon that I believe is almost a signature of modern thought in general and 20th century thought in particular is what we might call the breakdown of form, the abandonment of structure, the rejection of norms, the denial of an objective order of most any kind.   If I try to articulate a broad or general idea that accounts for that phenomenon, it would be the breakdown of the traditional belief in an objective reality and the growing belief in only a subjective reality.      

     Now for the application of the idea.  I want to focus on the 20th century, but I believe that one needs to have some cultural context for understanding the 20th century, which is a century of very strange ideas.  So, let's be a bit heretical and look first behind the 20th century.

     By the end of the 16th century (1500s) and the beginning of the 17th century (1600s)s, problems were emerging with the new modern world view, a view that some have called scientific materialism.

     Philosophers:

Descartes on the self; degodding/disenchantment

Hume: relying on empiricism, loss of objective world

Our modern world view, our larger structure of thought, has generated profound problems.  Both the outer world and the inner self have become intellectually a problem to us.

     Poets:  Donne (early 1600s); Blake (mid 1700s); Arnold (mid 1800s); Lindsay (early 1900s); and Eliot (early 1900s) are fairly representative;

 

in the 20th century, theater of the absurd, DaDaism, Surrealism, anti-novel, Cage, abstractionism and expressionism in painting