Sri Aurobindo, radical constructivism, and me: how am I doing?
Assessing my way of thinking in light of Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Radical Constructivism and the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
In this communication, I want to examine where my way of thinking stands with regard to Radical Constructivism (RC), an epistemology developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld.
Radical constructivism
Knowledge or understanding, according to RC, is not something we passively receive, nor is it something that can simply be transmitted by a speaker or writer to a listener or reader. From childhood onward — RC is indebted to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development — we construct conceptual systems. Professional philosophers do the same, with the additional advantage of getting paid for it.
As young children, we begin by recognizing two kinds of experiential items. If a particular set of characteristics recurs in our field of experience, it constitutes the template to which future experiences can be assimilated as members of the same class. If the characteristics of a particular experiential item change in such a way as to make it possible to re-identify it after a lapse of time, that item will be said to subsist. As Piaget has shown, these two identities — membership in the same class and transtemporal identity — are built up within the first two years of a child’s life.
Example: While my judgment that this is a green apple goes beyond my immediate experience, it does not reach beyond my experience. It merely involves the claim that this experiential item is of much the same color, smell, taste, shape, and consistency as experiential items I previously judged to be green apples. “Representations,” von Glasersfeld wrote, “are (and cannot be anything but) re-presentations of experiential material that was present at some other time”.1
What distinguishes RC from more conventional epistemologies is the substitution of the concept of fit for the traditional concept of truth as a matching, isomorphic, or iconic representation of reality. A key fits a lock if it opens it. “Fit” describes a capacity of the key, not a feature of the lock. As professional burglars know only too well, there are many keys that are shaped quite differently from ours but nevertheless unlock our doors.
From the radical constructivist point of view, all of us —scientists, philosophers, laymen, school children, animals, indeed any kind of living organism — face our environment as the burglar faces a lock that he has to unlock in order to get at the loot.2
In the introduction to The Invented Reality, Paul Watzlawick offered the following analogy3:
A captain who on a dark, stormy night has to sail through an uncharted channel, devoid of beacons and other navigational aids, will either wreck his ship on the cliffs or regain the safe, open sea beyond the strait. If he loses ship and life, his failure proves that the course he steered was not the right one. One may say that he discovered what the passage was not. If, on the other hand, he clears the strait, this success merely proves that he literally did not at any point come into collision with the (otherwise unknown) shape and nature of the waterway; it tells him nothing about how safe or how close to disaster he was at any given moment. He passed the strait like a blind man. His course fit the unknown topography, but this does not mean that it matched it — if we take matching in von Glasersfeld's sense, that is, that the course matched the real configuration of the channel. It would not be too difficult to imagine that the actual geographical shape of the strait might offer a number of safer and shorter passages.
In the words of von Glasersfeld4:
The basic elements from which an individual’s conceptual structures are composed and the relations by means of which they are held together cannot be transferred from one language user to another, let alone from a proficient speaker to an infant. These building blocks must be abstracted from individual experience....
For the individual speaker a word often has a definite meaning long before he or she succeeds in generating an approximate understanding of what it means to other speakers. The process of accommodating and tuning the meaning of words and linguistic expressions actually continues for each of us throughout our lives. No matter how long we have spoken a language, there will still be occasions when we realize that, up to that point in time, we have been using a word in a way that now turns out to be idiosyncratic in some particular respect.
Once we come to see the essential and inescapable subjectivity of linguistic meaning, we can no longer maintain the preconceived notion that words convey ideas or knowledge; nor can we believe that a listener who apparently understands what we say must necessarily have conceptual structures that are identical with ours. Instead, we come to realize that understanding is a matter of fit rather than match. Put in the simplest way, to understand what someone has said or written means no less but also no more than to have built up a conceptual structure that, in the given context, appears to be compatible with the structure the speaker had in mind. And this compatibility, as a rule, manifests itself in no other way than that the receiver says and does nothing that contravenes the speaker’s expectations....
[W]hen conversation turns to predominantly abstract matters, it does not usually take long before conceptual discrepancies become noticeable — even among proficient speakers. The discrepancies generate perturbations in the interactors, and at that point the difficulties become insurmountable if a participant believes that his or her meanings of the words used are true representations of objective entities in a speaker-independent world. If, instead, the participants take a constructivist view and assume from the outset that a language user’s meanings cannot be anything but subjective constructs derived from the speaker’s individual experiences, some accommodation and adaptation is usually possible.
How, one may ask, can knowledge be shared? The answer, in the words of Andreas Quale,5 is that
Knowledge cannot be simply transmitted: i.e., imprinted on the learner, to be retrieved in identical form for inspection later. The question is then: “What is the meaning of “shareable knowledge,” if we cannot check whether it is really shared? The answer ... is that knowledge may be considered to be shared between two persons only insofar as they can agree that they share it. In other words: they share it until something happens that lets them discover that they do not! ... Loosely speaking, then, we share, to the extent that we think we do!
Before quantum mechanics came along, Kant’s theory of science was compatible with RC. If there are perceptual invariants, then there are rules for associating concepts with classes of experiential items. Kant called them “schemata.” Again, neither Kant nor RC deny the existence of an intrinsically ineffable Reality. In the case of RC, it is the uncharted channel of Watzlawick's metaphor. Kant, for his part, did not stop at saying that if we see a desk, there is a thing-in-itself that has the power to appear as a desk, and if we see a chair, there is another thing-in-itself that has the power to appear as a chair. There was but one thing-in-itself, an unspeakable Reality that has the power to affect us in such a way that we have the experiences that we do.
While Bohr’s philosophy of atomic physics adds a significant twist to Kant’s theory of science, it does not depart from RC. Whereas Kant took for granted that there are no physical limits to the spatial resolving power of human perceptual experience — apart from anatomical and physiological ones — Bohr realized that the resolving power of perceptual experience was limited not only by biology but also by fundamental physics. Ineffable Reality reveals itself in the metaphorical shape of a cliff that wrecks Kant's ship. What remains true (von Glasersfeld would say viable) is that substance and causality — the categories corresponding to Piaget’s two identities — are the most important generic concepts that go into the making of a world of re-identifiable individual objects. But if the resolving power of perceptual experience is physically limited, then substance and causality are viable only as far as perceptual experience can reach.
It follows that talk about re-identifiable individual objects is viable only within a “classical” domain, while atoms and subatomic particles belong to a “quantum” domain which we do not know how to talk about. And to Bohr this meant that the only viable manner of talking about quantum objects is to talk about the instruments by which they are investigated.
If we want to talk meaningfully about quantum objects without straying beyond the bounds of RC, we need to recognize that: (i) theoretical physics deals with quantum objects only at the level of types; (ii) quantum objects are individuated solely by the experimental context in which they are observed; (iii) the only viable way of bridging the gap between quantum objects qua types and quantum objects qua individuals involves quasi-classical methods, generalized versions of Bohr’s correspondence principle, and statements that are true only for all practical purposes. This last point is not, as some have claimed, “the great scandal of physics.” It is merely a logical consequence of attempting to extend the classical universe of discourse into an intrinsically unspeakable domain.
Regarding the cliff that wrecked the ship of causality, many theoretical physicists and philosophers of science remain in a state of denial. They try to save causality by transmogrifying a calculational tool — usually the quantum-mechanical wave function — into a deterministically evolving aspect of physical reality. Yet it is this sleight of hand (which worked well enough in pre-quantum physics) that the indeterminism of quantum physics denies us.
On the face of it, indeterminism is but the denial of determinism. Yet nothing (no metaphorical cliff) stands in the way of putting a slightly more positive spin on it. We may think of it as imposing limits on the objectivation of two kinds of distinctions:
One: If, in our minds, we keep partitioning the world into smaller and smaller regions, eventually the distinctions we make between regions can no longer be considered objective. There is a metaphorical cliff that wrecks any attempt at their objectivation.
Two: If in our minds we go on dividing a material object, there comes a point where the distinctions we make between its component parts can no longer be considered objective, a point where the “component parts” become identical in the strong sense of numerical identity. While (or rather because) there is a metaphorical cliff that wrecks any attempt at objectifying their distinctness, nothing stands in the way of the claim that ultimately there is but one “thing,” and that this “thing” is (or constitutes) every thing.
In other words, what manifests itself to us here and now with these properties, and what manifests itself to us there and then with those properties, is one and the same “thing.” The manifestation of things (to us) thus can be conceptualized as a progression from one ontic level to the next, beginning with a single substance to which I refer as “the One.” (By “ontic level” I do not mean a level of reality that exists independently of conceiving subjects while at the same time, in and of itself, being just as it is conceived. These levels form part of an objectifiable — objecti-viable? — construct, one that does not run afoul of RC’s metaphorical coastline.)
The next ontic level contains particles that are fundamental, in the sense that they lack internal structure. At subsequent levels we have atomic nuclei, atoms, molecules, and finally the objects populating the manifested world which, being accessible to human perceptual experience, falls within the classical universe of discourse. Instead of being constituent parts of the manifested world, subatomic particles, non-visualizable atoms, and partly visualizable molecules mark the stages of its progressive manifestation (to us).
While Bohr was right to insist that quantum objects can only be described in terms of statistical correlations between events that happen or could happen in the manifested world, thinking of quantum objects as instrumental in the manifestation of the world makes it possible to understand something Bohr did not consider. It makes it possible to understand why the general theoretical framework of contemporary physics is a probability calculus, and why the events to which it serves to assign probabilities are measurements or their outcomes. What’s more, it makes it possible to conceive of the manifestation of the world as proceeding from the One.
Going beyond radical constructivism
This is the point where I must say goodbye to RC. It has been and remains tremendously useful, but it is not sufficient. Going beyond RC, however, should not give license to rampant speculation. It is justified only if it is grounded in experience if a higher order.
This is also the point where I begin quoting from the writings of Sri Aurobindo, starting with a passage that reads like a ringing endorsement of RC. It is from a series of essays he wrote in 1910, shortly before his departure from Calcutta. The series is included in Early Cultural Writings (2003) under the title “A System of National Education: Some Preliminary Ideas.”
The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught. The teacher is not an instructor or taskmaster, he is a helper and guide. His business is to suggest and not to impose. He does not actually train the pupil’s mind, he only shows him how to perfect his instruments of knowledge and helps and encourages him in the process. He does not impart knowledge to him, he shows him how to acquire knowledge for himself. He does not call forth the knowledge that is within; he only shows him where it lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface....
The second principle is that the mind has to be consulted in its own growth. The idea of hammering the child into the shape desired by the parent or teacher is a barbarous and ignorant superstition. It is he himself who must be induced to expand in accordance with his own nature.... To force the nature to abandon its own dharma is to do it permanent harm, mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. It is a selfish tyranny over a human soul and a wound to the nation, which loses the benefit of the best that a man could have given it and is forced to accept instead something imperfect and artificial, second-rate, perfunctory and common. [ECW: 384]
Four years later, Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Synthesis of Yoga:
Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him.... All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. [SY 54]
I caught a glimpse of this fact during my first year in Pondicherry, when the Birth Centenary edition of the works of Sri Aurobindo was published. I devoured the volumes as they came out, albeit slowly since my then rudimentary English called for frequent dictionary consultations. Reading Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus, The Life Divine, in particular was like being reminded of something I always knew, but of course could not have expressed in my own words. (This does not mean that on the second or third reading, I did not gain fresh insights.)
In a chapter titled “Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge,” which Sri Aurobindo added to the 1940 edition, he describes our kind of knowledge:
Our surface cognition, our limited and restricted mental way of looking at our self, at our inner movements and at the world outside us and its objects and happenings, is so constituted that it derives in different degrees from a fourfold order of knowledge. The original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, is a knowledge by direct contact associated at its roots with a secret knowledge by identity or starting from it, but actually separated from its source and therefore powerful but incomplete in its cognition; the third is a knowledge by separation from the object of observation, but still with a direct contact as its support or even a partial identity; the fourth is a completely separative knowledge which relies on a machinery of indirect contact, a knowledge by acquisition which is yet, without being conscious of it, a rendering or bringing up of the contents of a pre-existent inner awareness and knowledge....
In the cognition of external things, our knowledge has an entirely separative basis; its whole machinery and process are of the nature of an indirect perception.... [W]hat we get by our sense is not the inner or intimate touch of the thing itself, but an image of it or a vibration or nerve message in ourselves through which we have to learn to know it. These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know little or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion. But there intervenes a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image or vibration and equates it with the object, a vital intuition which seizes the energy or figure of power of the object through another kind of vibration created by the sense contact, and an intuition of the perceptive mind which at once forms a right idea of the object from all this evidence. Whatever is deficient in the interpretation of the image thus constructed is filled up by the intervention of the reason or the total understanding intelligence.
Because the first composite intuition is “working on an image, a sense document, an indirect evidence,” and because “the image or vibration is a defective and summary documentation and the intuition itself limited and communicated through an obscure medium, acting in a blind light,”
the accuracy of our intuitional interpretative construction of the object is open to question or at least likely to be incomplete. Man has had perforce to develop his reason in order to make up for the deficiencies of his sense instrumentation, the fallibility of his physical mind’s perceptions and the paucity of its interpretation of its data. [LD 543‒48]
In the surface consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from outside, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality. Our surface mind is obliged to give to itself this account of its knowledge, because the wall between itself and the outside world is pierced by the gates of sense and it can catch through these gates the surface of outward objects though not what is within them, but there is no such ready-made opening between itself and its own inner being: since it is unable to see what is within its deeper self or observe the process of the knowledge coming from within, it has no choice but to accept what it does see, the external object, as the cause of its knowledge. Thus all our mental knowing of things represents itself to us as objective, a truth imposed on us from outside; our knowledge is a reflection or responsive construction reproducing in us a figure or picture or a mental scheme of something that is not in our own being. In fact, it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowledge of the object, the object being itself part of our larger self; but owing to the double veil, the veil between our inner self and our ignorant surface self and the veil between that surface self and the object contacted, it is only an imperfect figure or representation of the inner knowledge that is formed on the surface. [LD 560‒61]
The philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit. [LD 137]
Here Sri Aurobindo settles on matter as the lowest pole, wheras later in the book, once the concept of Inconscience (or the Inconscient) has been introduced, he presents matter as “the first emergence from the Inconscient” [LD 629], and he writes: “Out of the Inconscient, Existence appears in a first evolutionary form as substance of Matter” [LD 710]. About the Inconscient/Inconscience, Sri Aurobindo has this to say:
[E]ven the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite’s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit’s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves.... [LD 333]
In previous communications I have referred to both the Inconscient (from which matter emerges as a first evolutionary form of Existence) and the Spirit (or rather the Superconscience in the heights of the Spirit) as “the One.” About involution — the downward evolution out of the One qua Spirit — I have written here, here, and here. About the emergence of matter from the One qua Inconscient I have written here. The downward evolution gives rise to a series of levels of consciousness and a corresponding series of supraphysical worlds. The physical world differs from these typal worlds in that it evolves. As the penultimate stage of the downward evolution, before the plunge into the Inconscient, it sets the stage for the Spirit’s adventure of evolution.
The world of matter thus has a twofold origin. On the one hand, it is the culmination (or rather, the nadir) of the process which is responsible for individuation. Its individuals are what we call “fundamental particles.” Their interactions are constrained by what we call “the laws of physics.” On the other hand, the world of matter emerges from the Inconscient. In this post I described its emergence from the One qua Inconscient in the following terms:
By entering into reflexive spatial relations, the One gives rise to both matter and space, for space may be defined relationally, as the totality of existing spatial relations, while matter may be defined as the corresponding (apparent) multitude of relata.6
The world of matter has yet another origin. As was shown by Jean Gebser [see here and here], human consciousness as it evolved underwent several mutations. Specific to each of the resulting consciousness structures is a distinct dimensionality. Our very concepts of space, time, and matter are bound up with our present consciousness structure, inasmuch as this made it possible to integrate the characteristically two-dimensional outlook of the preceding consciousness structure into an effectively subject-free world of three-dimensional objects. Matter as we know it was the result.
In the first section of this communication, in which I described the manifestation of the world (to us) as proceeding from the One, I stayed without the bounds of RC. My claim was that such a description does not run afoul of the metaphorical coastline. But when I speak of the One qua Inconscient, placing it within the philosophical framework of The Life Divine, I no longer comply with the tenets of RC. I remain, however, grounded in experience — just not my own. I conclude this communication with a few statements by Sri Aurobindo about his philosophy.
There is very little argument in my philosophy — the elaborate metaphysical reasoning full of abstract words with which the metaphysician tries to establish his conclusions is not there. What is there is a harmonising of the different parts of a many-sided knowledge so that all unites logically together. But it is not by force of logical argument that it is done, but by a clear vision of the relations and sequences of the knowledge.7
Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher! How I managed to do it? First, because [Paul] Richard proposed to me to cooperate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse: and then he had to go to the War and left me in the lurch with 64 pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there, automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!8
My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.9
E. von Glasersfeld. Facts and the self from a constructivist point of view, Poetics 18 (4‒5), 435‒48 (1989).
E. von Glasersfeld. An introduction to radical constructivism, in: P. Watzlawick (ed.), The Invented Reality, pp. 17–40 (Norton, 1984).
Ibid.
E. von Glasersfeld. Who conceives of society? Constructivist Foundations 3 (2), March 2008.
A. Quale. The epistemic relativism of radical constructivism: Some implications for teaching the natural sciences, Constructivist Foundations 2 (2–3), 107–13 (2007).
Although the multitude of relata is an apparent multitude (the relata are all identically the same One), the multitude of their relations is as real as the material forms that they constitute.
Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 66.
Loc. cit. p. 70.
Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes, p. 113.
Great reading. Wow. I would like to publish in book form your articles. I have a small publishing unit.
Regarding the Inconscience, I am reminded of a sentence from Savitri." Inconscient too is infinite".