Of Persons and Things

It is a great honor for me to have been invited by Dr. Muire to address you, future educators in the field of science. By way of disclaimer, let met say that I am not a scientist. Some of you probably know me as a teacher of French or Philosophy. It is in the philosophical mode that I address you today. Philosophy is distinctive among the disciplines in that it may be said not to possess a subject matter of its own. So it is free to wander about and converse with people in other areas, in order to reflect on the ultimate significance of what they are doing in their area. I would like to begin with a memory of my own experience in what we used to call grade school or grammar school. The memories are perhaps from the sixth grade. All this took place at a time before what I will call, provisionally, the great divide. Ones interests could be directed outward, toward the world, or inward, toward the self. In a basic sense I believe that we as knowers are naturally directed toward the outside. Our eyes and ears direct us to the reality coming at us from without. The world of subjectivity is probably a later developmentwhen man takes himself as his own object of study. Introspection, philosophy, know thyself. Humanism, eventually humanitarianism. But in the sixth grade there was a moment, and it was a time when boys and girls had different spheres of interestin the sixth grade we boys were turned loose headlong on the world of things, and we were fascinated by science in a sort of nave enthusiasm that went beyond the science class. A well-meaning older lady who

followed the textbook closely knew that she had a herd of wild things athirst and running for the waters of knowledge. She felt no doubt that she could have been trampled at any momentfor the pupils were a pack of mad scientists who had received their erector sets and chemistry sets and were out to discover the world, the universe, the cosmos of the infinitely small and unthinkably large. Stars and molecules, the periodic chart of the atoms, the speed of light, electrons, magnetsthen on to bugs and oceans and mountains and all the natural wonders of the world. We chattered among ourselves as if drunk with a plethora of heady informationour imaginations vying with the unlikely, the counterintuitive, the miraculous that lay on every side. The turgid world of sexuality and the consternation of sociality had not yet assailed us. We were as light as intellectual angels dancing our way through maps and lavishly illustrated textbooks, full of rumors of wonders more real to us than parents, grades or teachers. We were independent, unrestrained, fanatically happy pranksters and tellers of insane jokes. Mrs. Murphy kept to her sober pace in the science class but knew the boys were already way beyond her. Let me leave that evocation aside now and return to a more theoretical level of considerations. The first division or great divide I mentionedbetween the outward and the inwardcannot account for a more complex set of experiences from later years. For in the outer world what gradually came into view was not just more and more things: people began to emerge as being quite differentor as quite different beingsfrom things. Not that the people who really counted were not already there in our lives. But they were of the order of what one child psychologist called super things. Like a house. Too big to be a thing, one is in it. Similarly, our parents were so big as to overflow the field of vision. They stood in back of uswere not within the scope of our intense but

severely circumscribed rationality, the field of objectivity. They were not thinkable, could not be detached from the psychic fabric that ran clear through us. It was this category of persons as opposed to things that would eventually open up a new realm of the unknown. And at this point I will offer the hypothesis that the innerouter dichotomy was a highly artificial one that did not really apply to our experience. There was nothing but outer. But in that outer world it was those curious beingsother peoplewho would eventually lead us to ourselves. Things we were fascinated to know. To know was to break apart, examine, analyze, as if moving toward an ever-receding inside. People: can the word know be applied to them in the same way? Language itself, the way we speak of such things, seems to want to offer a clue to the difficulty. That which we know, the object of knowledge, is always a what. Not only do scientists deal with what things are: philosophers ask, with a special nuance What is justice? What is truth? And even: What is a human being? But is there not an intrinsic difference between the who and the what? Can we know another person? It is common knowledge that in scientific observation certain changes may take place as a result of our very observation of them. How much more obviously true this is of our observation of other people! In fact, to know another person is to go beyond the careful separation between the knower and the known. To know another person is to encounter of meet him or her, to be in what we call a relationship. And those of us who have taken more than a few steps in the direction of knowing another human being know that there is flight, and feint, and confrontation, and disguise. All the movements of the dance of human caring and despair: the drama of human relationships.

Here is where the field of literature and the arts opens up. Here ethics unfolds. For is Kant not right that to treat a person as a means rather than as an end in him or herself is immoral? I would add that to pretend to know a person the way we know a thing is to evade or to betray that person. The surface we know opens out upon unfathomable depths. Psychologys challenge and ambition is to know a subjectivity objectively. Psychologythe logos of the soul. But the heart, as Pascal said, has its reasons that reason cannot understand. This new dichotomy I have just traced, between the person and the thing, appears to be reflected in the structure of the academic institution. Science versus the humanities. But it was not always so. A cursory consideration of the history of academic institutions, going no further back than a few centuries, reveals that the counterpart to the humanities was not science but the divinities. There was a science (the word meant no more than systematic study and knowledge) of man and a science of God and other celestial beings. Science referred not to a field of knowledge but to a way of knowing. The beginnings of a scientific method! But as the systematic knowledge of the physical world advanced so dramatically through the Renaissance period and the 18th century, the period of enlightenment, science began to define its own field, that of the physical universe, as the knowable par excellence, and to identify it as a reality with special prestigeor even as The Reality. In this new dispensation, God and his angels fell largely to the lot of man and the humanities. Today, despite some fundamentalist complaints against secular humanists, both philosophy and religion are significantly lodged together or in close proximity within the humanitiesalongside literature and the arts.

Surely the fact that Science now occupies the place vis--vis the Humanities (and Liberal Arts) must give us pause. In replacing the Divinities, has not Science brought with it a world view that is as powerful and the Divinities were? Without attempting to meet the question head on, we can at least say the Science as an institutionalized world view makes a strong, and perhaps exclusive, claim to talk about Reality. Ultimately, the view that all is made up of subatomic particles suggests that it should in principle be possible to reduce all other phenomena (even those that make their own claim to reality) to scientific data. To reduce means nothing more mysterious than to lead back, or trace back to a simpler, more fundamental reality. These preliminary developments were necessary in order for me to make my thesis understandable to you. As future teachers of science, you will be equally involved in the domains I have described as persons and things. But you will be dealing with the scientific study of things through people. and those people, your pupils or students, will mediate what you dothe way you teach. Of particular interest to you will be the work of such child psychologists as Jean Piaget, the Swiss child psychologist (1896-1980). His research should be of particular interest to you because he was the first to take the logical workings of the childs mind seriously. He was not a pedagogue, but it is not difficult to see what important applications in practice such statements as the following might have on your field. Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves. The childs explanations of natural phenomena may not be scientifically correct, but what a window they open on mental development, or what has been called genetic epistemology. Piaget discovered that children of similar ages

made the same mistakes on science quizzes. What makes the wind? he asked a child. The trees, was the answer. How do they do this? By waving their branches. The principle of efficient cause is already in place. How is it that if you pull the tablecloth very quickly from under a plate the plate stays on the table? The plate did not have time to realize what was happening! It didnt react! Anthropocentric thought, but vigorous, active thought nevertheless, seeking an understanding on its own terms. The future science teachers role, like that of any teacher, is to begin where the student is. Your explanation will only be assimilated if it offers material that the child can use to build his or her own system with the elements you bring. Let us reverse the role of the question. A child psychologist suggests that parents do not always understand childrens questions. Mommy where did I come from may not be a question that seeks a scientific explanation at all. It may be the question where did I, this unique person, come from. Can there be a beginning of subjectivity. Consciousness, once it has established itself, cannot really imagine a time when it was not, a beginning. As one child put it, Mommy, when did we have me? Here, the dizzying hypothesis seems to be that the child associates him or her self with the mother to the point that the advent of the child as a separate individual must have been the originbut only a relative one. Consciousness would be a dividing, an autonomy, and not an unequivocally welcome one perhaps. Let me close these remarks with the following thought. The work of Piaget and others owe much of their power to a recognition of the dignity and wonder of childhood. It is this respect for the child and the nature or spirit of childhood that must be preserved throughout the teaching/learning process. The child is not an imperfect adult. Teaching

children must always be preceded and constantly accompanied by studying children. Let us be sure that we appreciate and relish the state of childhood in order that we not precipitously take ill-considered measures to eradicate it. The child, according to an old saying, is the father to the man. The role of the teacher in all this isand here I take my inspiration from Socrates, is that of the midwife: maieutikos, in Greek, a method know in English as maieutics. It is based on the notion that the truth is latent in the mind of every human being due to his or her innate reason, but it must be given birth by questions asked by the teacher and answers given by the student. This reverses the usual order, in which it is the student who asks and the teacher who answers. But as my earlier remarks suggest, I believe there is a role for questions from both sides. And to describe this process, let me resort to another philosophical term taken from the Greek: the dialectic. A dialectic process, which can be illustrated by the way we make progress by walking, involves a dual process. The left foots role is relayed by that of the right, which takes up the effort of the former but carries the common body forward, although even as it does so it consents to fall behind and be superseded by the other . . . . But now it is time to put that mutual questioning and answering into practice. Let us begin the discussion!