The Catholic Tutor

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Category: Epistemology

  • Foundational Metaphysics: Importance of order

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    The most foundational thing a human person can accept is the existence of things (objects) in the world. Barring any psychological anomalies, a human person, by default, notices that he/she is contained within a physical structure we call “body”. At the same “moment” the human person distinguishes between that “body” and individuated objects in the world. I’m using the term “world” referring to anything that is not a person’s physical body. This is an axiom. Something that is already established and has no need of proof. It is self-evident. Some logicians might claim that there is no such thing as self-evident declarations but this has never been the case in the history of knowledge and learning. From the ancient world, there were certain things that were accepted as true and unable to be challenged in a rigorous sense. Euclid even needed to start somewhere, which is why he laid out his five axioms before he moved to his postulates and propositions. For example, “The whole is greater than its parts.” A baby can tell if one thing is bigger than another. 

    If one can see the latent and obvious order that exists in the world, one is not far from asking the question, “How do I understand the world?” If there is an order to existence, then an ordered mode by which we encounter the world must exist. Babies and young children encounter their experiences of the world. They receive the things in existence through their senses by picking up and grabbing objects. The desire to know those things seems obvious, even if they may not know why they may have a desire. This never goes away when human beings grow up, it just changes and the encounters with existing things, and thoughts, become more complex. 

    Starting from Aristotle and moving into the middle ages, there was an understood order of the sciences, which developed throughout those centuries and culminated in the 13th century with Theology as the queen of the sciences, then philosophy, then the practical sciences such as mathematics, medicine etc. Each of the sciences had their particular domain that was termed its “object”. Theology studies the most abstract thing, God. Philosophy the “next” abstract thing, wisdom. Mathematics is the science that deals with quantity. Although Mathematics still deals with quantity, numbers, lines and shapes, it also seems to study and examine the behavior of physical entities. This is why it is the languages and “queen of the physical/empirical sciences”. The medievals considered Logic as part of or fundamental to philosophical inquiry. Nowadays Logic can be studies from within the Mathematical field or the Philosophical field. For more on Mathematics, see a future post. 

    This medieval/ancient order of the sciences is still relevant today and should be considered in modern pedagogy. The order of the sciences does not intend to communicate the superiority between the various fields, in that one is “better” than the other. It merely gives an appropriate structure for the human mind to encounter Creation. Approaching an understanding of the world, Creation, a human person needs to have an ordered approach. At least an understanding of that order. 

    In summary, the order of the world automatically structures the order of learning. We distinguish objects in the world and approach them accordingly. This is a fundamental starting point. If we dismantle or approach this foundation with nihilistic world views, there is no moving forward in human formation. For the most part, the division of the fields of knowledge that existed in the ancient and medieval worlds still apply. It is possible to make some adjustments concerning the objects of the various sciences as the collective knowledge of the human race has grown. The main point is that all of the fields of knowledge have an intrinsic order as they relate to one another, and this order must be acknowledged and accepted for the human person to have a good pedagogical formation. 

  • The disjointing of education

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    Current 21st century pedagogy is rooted in misplaced philosophy which stems partially from the Enlightenment period (1600-1700s) which sought to extrapolate knowledge of things by way of deconstruction and compartmentalization. In many overt ways, 21st century pedagogy is the developed Frankenstein of mad philosophers who seemed to have lusted over their desire to “overcome” the establishment and “overturn” long standing institutions of Catholic education. I’m thinking of Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon”, a direct jab at Aristotle’s “Organon”. It is the unfortunate case that modern pedagogical methods have seeped into the Catholic education system. The consistent devolution of the Catholic School system is caused by the subtle tentacles of secular philosophical pedagogy, which is categorically counter to the ordered realism found in the Catholic intellectual tradition with its center, the human person. Not only has disjointed educational theory dismantled, or is dismantling Catholic education, but also the socio-political environment pressuring individual schools to adopt unnatural anthropology causes genuine Catholic schools to rethink their future. 

    A wholistic pedagogy leads to a wholistic understanding of the world. How does one begin to understand the world so as to construct the necessary pedagogy? You start with what is real. How do we know what is real? You begin with certain axioms that you know are foundational to the world around us. For example, we interact with the world through our senses. Nevermind the complexity of how this happens (neurological perception etc), what all human beings notice immediately is that we interact with the world around us. People, places, things. 

    Generally speaking, Enlightenment philosophy, specifically Cartesianism (and before that Nominalism which questioned the existence of universals and abstract concepts), had the approach of deconstruction and compartmentalizing, which inevitably led to a compartmentalizing and deconstructing of teaching and learning. Everything has its own box, that does not and must not interfere with other boxes. Fast forward five hundred years and you have obscure specializations in every academic field imaginable with no common language between each other to communicate the meaning of the big picture. Not to mention each professional in these hyper-specialized fields thinks they have the key to the “one lock” that opens the door to understanding all things, when in fact they are all grabbing a different part of the same key pulling away from each other. 

    Not all Enlightenment thinkers were bad. Some of them had many good ideas and the philosophies of the Enlightenment were necessary for the mature development of humanity. Deconstructionism is not all bad. It is helpful to take something apart piece by piece to understand how it works. But this is for the purpose of understanding the functionality of a thing. When Theology seeks to understand God it does not “deconstruct” Him. In fact, it acknowledges that he is non-deconstructable. He is One. He is mystery. Theology starts with that and discovers what we cannot know in order to be left with what we can know. This is called theologica negativa or apophatic theology. 

    One of the effects of a deconstructionist educational philosophy is disintegration in the cohesive formation of a person. If order is not acknowledged as a fabric of connection between fields of knowledge, then how will the student journey through life in a non-chaotic way? If there is no order to what things shall be taught for the formation of a person, then any and all topics are seen as having the potential to “form” a person. Any brand new field of study tainted by the changing winds of society and propaganda could be seen as valid in forming a person. 

    I’m willing to propose that the unifying force of all things, the one “key” to the lock, that exists is the order that is present within those things and between them. Learning and pedagogy are the reception and the giving, respectively, of ordered existence. Any true pedagogy must have the goal of communicating the whole picture with all the necessary fabrics of the canvas beautifully interwoven and intrinsically connected to each other. This is why a re-discovery of classical pedagogical approaches, with a robust metaphysical foundation must be embraced.