Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postformalism and Critical Ontology—Part 2 895
The processual and relational notions of self structurally couple with the sociocultural context
and can only be understood by studying them with these dynamics in mind. These characteristics
of self hold profound implications politically, psychologically, and pedagogically. If our notion
of the self emerges in its counter-colonial relationship with multiple dimensions of the world,
it is by its nature a participatory entity. Such an interactive dynamic is always in process,
and thus demands a reconceptualization of the concept of individualism and self-interest—a
reconceptualism that leads to the postformal self. The needs of self and others in this context
begin to merge, as the concept of self-reliance takes on new meanings. Notions of educational
purpose, evaluation, and curriculum development are transformed when these new conceptions
of the personal domain come into the picture. In the first decade of the twenty-first century we
stand merely on the threshold of the possibilities this notion of selfhood harbors.
POSTFORMALISM AND ENACTIVISM: PSYCHO-ONTOLOGICAL
POSSIBILITIES
A critical ontology understands that the effort to explain complex cognitive, biological, social,
or pedagogical events by the reductionistic study of their components outside of the larger
processes of which they are a part will not work. It will not move us to new levels of understanding
or set the stage for new, unexplored modes of being human. The social, biological, cognitive, or
the pedagogical domain is not an assortment of discrete objects that can be understood in isolation
from one another. The fragmented pieces put forth in such studies do not constitute reality—even
if commonsense tells Westerners they do. The deeper structures, the tacit forces, the processes
that shape the physical world and the social world will be lost to such observers. As I argue in the
introduction to The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Consciousness, and Education (1999), Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity could not have been produced without this ontological understanding
of connectedness, process, and the limitations of studying only things-in-themselves.
For 250 years physicists had been searching for the basic building block of gravity—some
contended it was a particle (a graviton), others argued it was a gravity wave. Einstein pointed out
that it was neither, that it was not a thing at all. Gravity, he maintained, was a part of the structure
of the universe that existed as a relationship connecting mass, space, and time. This insight, of
course, changed the very nature of how we conceptualize the universe. It should have changed
how we conceptualize epistemology, cognition, pedagogy, and ontology. Of course, it didn’t—
and that’s what we are still working on. The emphasis on studying and teaching about the world
as a compilation of fragmented things-in-themselves has returned with a vengeance, of course,
in recent educational reforms and mandates for use of only positivistic forms of educational
research.
In this context the work of Humberto Maturana is instructive. Maturana and Varela’s Santiago
Enactivism employ the same ontological concept of interconnectedness that Einstein’s used in
the General Theory of Relativity to explain life as a process, a system of interconnections.
Indeed, they argue, that the process of cognition is the process of life. In Enactivism mind is
not a thing-in-itself but a process—an activity where the interactions of a living organism with
its environment constitute cognition. In this relationship, life itself and cognition are indelibly
connected and reveal this interrelationship at diverse levels of living and what are still considered
nonliving domains. Where mind ends and matter begins is difficult to discern, a situation that
operates to overturn the long-standing and problematic Cartesian separation of the two entities. In
Mataurana’s and Varela’s conception, mind and matter are merely parts of the same process—one
cannot exist without the other. A critical ontology seeks to repair this rupture between mind and
matter, self and world. In this reconnection we enter into a new phase of human history, new
modes of cognition, and dramatic changes in educational psychology and pedagogy.