Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 102
Postformalism and Critical
Ontology—Part 2: The Relational Self
and Enacted Cognition
JOE L. KINCHELOE
Making use of our concept of difference and the insights provided by indigenous knowledges,
cognitive activities, and ways of being, we are ready to examine the relationship connecting the
epistemological, the cognitive, and the ontological. In a critical ontology, the teaching and learning
emerge as profoundly exciting enterprises because they are always conceptualized in terms of
what we can become—both in an individual and a collective context. In our socio-ontological
imagination, we can transcend the Enlightenment category of abstract individualism and move
toward a more textured concept of the relational individual. While abstract individualism and a
self-sufficient ontology seem almost natural in the Western modernist world, of course, such is
not the case in many indigenous cultures and has not been the case even in Western societies in
previous historical eras. In ancient Greece, for example, it is hard to find language that identified
“the self” or “I”—such descriptions were not commonly used because the individual was viewed
as a part of a collective who could not function independently of the larger social group. In the
“commonsense” of contemporary Western society and its unexamined ontological assumptions
this way of seeing self is hard to fathom.
ESCAPING THE WESTERN FRAGMENTED SELF
Enlightenment ontology discerns the natural state of the individual as solitary. The social
order in this modernist Eurocentric context is grounded on a set of contractual transactions
between isolated individual atoms. In other works I have referred to Clint Eastwood’s “man
with no name” cinematic character who didn’t need a “damn thing from nobody” as the ideal
Western male way of being—the ontological norm. Operating in this context, we clearly discern,
for example, cognitive psychology’s tradition of focusing on the autonomous development
of the individual monad. In postformalism’s critical ontology a human being simply can’t
exist outside the inscription of community with its processes of relationship, differentiation,
interaction, and subjectivity. Indeed, in this critical ontology the relational embeddedness of
self is so context dependent that psychologists, sociologists, and educators can never isolate