Society and Education

An Outline of Comparison

Stavros Moutsios

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138698154
• eBook ISBN: 9781315519715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Society and Education explores the relation of society to education in Europe, as well as its comparative perspective towards overseas societies and their institutions. It is an enquiry into the social-historical institution of education and cross-cultural studies in Europe.

Elaborating on the Castoriadian ontology, the book delves into the magma of social imaginary significations that characterise and associate pivotal epochs of the continent's history, Classical Greece and Modernity, and exemplifies their incarnation in educational systems and in the formation of the European and, in general, the Western comparative gaze. With a particular focus on our epoch, Postmodernity and globalisation, the study traces the pervasive dominance of capitalist significations in social institutions, forms, and activities, as well as in education and the way it is compared across countries. Nevertheless, as Moutsios suggests, the European tradition, notwithstanding its ideological usage by much of social sciences, contains an indissoluble critical and self-reflective dimension, which needs to be sustained and advanced in education and its cross-cultural comparison, perhaps, more than ever before.

The book demonstrates the embeddedness of education in its cultural context and should, therefore, be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students who are involved with comparative education, the sociology and history of education, education policy, and European studies.

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Social imaginary, culture and education as an institution

Human imagination and society

To access culture, one should access the web of meanings constitutive of society. Meaning is realised through imagination. The etymology of the word indicates the presence of images, which is also the case in the Greek language (phantasia from phantasma) as well as in German (Einbildungskraft from Bild). In Kant’s definition, ‘imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition’.¹ However, amongst other philosophers, ancient and modern, and in psychoanalytic theory, imagination is perceived as a faculty whose activity does not depend on the prior presence of an external object or incitement. Most notably, Aristotle, who essentially discovered imagination and elaborated on its properties, in his treatise Περί Ψυχής (On the Soul), went beyond understanding imagination as merely a faculty of reproduction of sensual/perceptional experience. For the Greek philosopher, the psyche (or soul) is a substance qua form of a natural body that has life potentiality.² Imagination is a movement in the psyche that takes place as a result of actual sense or perception.³ What makes imagination produce movement is desire.⁴ Moreover, Aristotle notes, as sight (or vision) is a sense par excellence, the term imagination derives from light (φάος), since without light, we cannot see.⁵

The Aristotelian thesis emphasises two very important characteristics of human imagination. First, it stresses that imagination consists in an incessant flux of images that takes place beyond visual perception or intention. Sights appear to us even with the eyes closed.⁶ Secondly, it posits that imagination in humans, in contrast to animals that possess this faculty, is the condition of thinking. Although imagination cannot be identified with perception or thought, without imagination, there can be neither perception nor belief.⁷ Animals have imagination, too, but they do not have beliefs, because their own imagination is capable of perception but not of inference.⁸ Human imagination allows for thought and decisions about the future in relation to the present.⁹ That which can think, therefore, as Aristotle writes, thinks forms in images.¹⁰ Through this point Aristotle arrives at a fundamental conclusion in his understanding of human imagination: although it can represent or recall something at will, believing is not up to us, for we must be either in trueness or in falseness.¹¹ In other words, there is always image, we always imagine and, thus, we formulate unavoidably a view because it is necessary to be either in trueness or in falseness.

Aristotle’s insight that the soul never thinks without an image¹² would be supported today by neuroscience, with a notable example being that of Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman’s and Giulio Tononi’s research. In their book A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination, the two biologists underline that the brain, contrary to conventional claims, does not work like a computer.¹³

Their review of the anatomy and dynamic of neurons shows that the brain has special features of organisation and function that are incompatible with the conviction that it performs calculations or follows instructions. The billions of connections of a brain are not characterised by accuracy, nor are they identical with other brains, even on the smallest scale – and this applies to monozygotic twins, too. Although one can identify patterns of connections in a given area of the brain, the variability existing in the more refined ramifications of the neurons on a microscopic level is enormous and testifies to the uniqueness of every brain. Every brain is ‘printed’ by the development and experience of the individual, which constitute his/her subjective history. Individuals’ thoughts, inner deliberation and mental representations indicate the presence of images that can be created, as the authors note, even in the absence of external stimuli. Dreams testify to this: although they have their peculiar characteristics (e.g., loss of thinking capacity or absolute concentration on one thing), the states of dreaming and waking consciousness are very similar. As Edelman and Tononi point out:

We are truly imagining, and short of schizophrenic hallucinations and dreams, we know it. Given the close relationship between perception and memory in a complex brain whose functional connectivity matches the statistics of the environment, it is perhaps no surprise that what we perceive or image in the waking state and what we imagine in dreams is remarkably similar.¹⁴

In their study of consciousness, the two researchers clarify that their concern is the material arrangements in the brain that allow for conscious thinking, but as thinking has to do with meaning, it cannot be limited to energy or matter, though it includes both. This is an important qualification to be made in the context of nowadays’ biologistic accounts of human behaviour spurred by neuroscience. Indeed, most of contemporary brain research regards essentially all individual experience and conduct as outcomes of electrochemical processes in specific regions of the brain. Heavily sponsored research projects employ various techniques of brain scanning and measurement, claiming that thoughts, feelings and ethics have a physical locus, thus reducing human personality to molecular functions in the cerebral cortex. This trend – an earlier version of which was to attribute everything that people do to their genes – has not left uninfluenced social sciences. Manuel Castells, for example, identifies now the mind with the brain and conceives the latter as a processor of internal and external stimuli aiming to ensure the survival and increase the well-being of the ‘brain’s owner’¹⁵ – something that, of course, would hardly apply to an anorexia sufferer or to a suicide bomber.

The reduction of the human being to its biological functions is not new, nor is the critique to biologism. William James, regarded as the father of American psychology, disputed the claim, widespread also in the 19 century, that thought is a function of the brain. He pointed out that this would amount to the false statement that steam is a function of the kettle or light is a function of the electric circuit. Thought, as he observed, is generated spontaneously and created out of nothing.¹⁶ The fact that brain damage disrupts mental functions does not entail, as James remarked, that consciousness and mind (or the psyche, in our terms) are generated by the brain. In the metaphor used by Beauregard, a present-day neuroscientist and psychologist, this would be the same as to conclude that the loss of music, after one demolises a radio’s receiver, proves that the radio creates the music.¹⁷

In other words, neuroscience contributes to the study of the biological substrate of mental phenomena but it has nothing to say about the psychic life of the individual. Neuroscience places emphasis on biology, which does away with value and meaning. Neuroscience can tell us, for example, as Blass and Carmeli point out, of the biology of the mind while dreaming or having an affective experience, but not of the meaningfulness of that biological substrate.¹⁸ The

same thoughts or ideas have different meaning depending on time, context, personal biography or psychic state. Thus, biological explanation cannot advance our understanding of the influence of latent meanings or psychic truths. As they write characteristically, neuroscience as a domain of knowledge gives prominence to ‘the sensory, the physical, the visual, at the expense of psychological meaning, truth, and ideas that cannot be captured in the images of a PET scan, no matter how technologically advanced’.¹⁹

Indeed, psyche and therefore imagination fall into the domain of psychoanalysis but also of philosophy, starting with the pioneering work of Aristotle. However, according to Castoriadis, imagination has essentially never had its proper place in either of the two knowledge areas. As he observes, the importance of imagination in Freud appears through his reference to the significance that the phantasm (or image) has for the soul and the relative independence of phantasmisation, though Freud never refers explicitly to imagination. In philosophy, after Aristotle, imagination was re-discovered by Kant, whose reference to it, however, was reduced in his later writings, then it was taken up again by Heidegger, to be eventually abandoned and, finally, touched upon hesitantly by Merleau-Ponty.²⁰

The same applies to Marx, who acknowledges imagination as the distinctive capacity of humans in his illustrious comparison between a spider or a bee and an architect (who raises a structure first in their imagination before they erect it in reality), as well as his references to commodity fetishism, but never develops these ideas further.²¹ In most philosophical traditions, as Castoriadis notes, imagination was understood as a reproductive, imitative and combinatory capacity, but not in its radical sense, i.e. as a faculty of invention and creation.

In agreement with Aristotle, Castoriadis maintains that there is no thinking without images, either in the visual sense or in the general sense of representations or forms. With the exception of dreamless sleep, human psyche is always characterised by a flux of representations (visual, acoustic, verbal etc.), which arise, congest, leak, refer to other images, reappear and disappear without necessarily external stimuli.²² There is psychic life precisely because of this incessant flux of representations. Human psyche differs fundamentally from animal psyche in that whereas in the latter representation happens as figuration of a real object (e.g., a lion imagines its prey), in the former representations do not necessarily have a particular referent. This is why human imagination is radical according to Castoriadis: because it is capable of creating ex nihilo, from nowhere (but not in nihilo, out of context, nor cum nihilo, with no means), representations and forms or eidē (εἴδη), in the Platonic sense. Psyche exists through what it forms and how it forms it. Thus, radical imagination is an a-causal vis formandi, whose seat is the psyche of the singular human being.²³ In this regard, meaning is realised in the domain of imagination. However, whereas in the animal soul, meaning exists as exclusively organ pleasure, in the case of the human soul, it is realised predominantly as representational pleasure. Namely, for the human being, pleasure ceases to be a sign indicating what is to be sought and what is to be avoided, but it becomes an end in itself, even when it is against the preservation and existence of the human being itself. In other words, representation and pleasure in humans are defunctionalised.²⁴

The defunctionalisation of imagination takes place following the socialisation of the human psyche, a process starting right after birth. However, in Castoriadis’s account of psychogenesis and sociogenesis, the newborn psyche is not a tabula rasa, but a homogeneous, undifferentiated flux of representations; it forms, while at the same time, it is subject to formation. Representations are at this stage undifferentiated and homogeneous because the newborn infant is incapable of distinguishing between itself and the other and between itself and the world. The infantile psyche realises itself as omnipotent, omnipresent and self-sufficient. Castoriadis distinguishes this state from the Freudian ‘primary narcissism’, which means that the psyche is absorbed by itself to the exclusion of others. This is rather a state of ‘totalitarian inclusion’, as he argues, as the newborn psyche does not yet have the capacity to make distinctions.²⁵

The omnipotence of the singular psyche is challenged when it realises that the world is not subject to its command: the other is the master of pleasure and unpleasure and thus the source of ‘must’ and ‘must not’, namely of social norms. The infantile psychic monad moves on then to the ‘triadic phase’, where it is now capable of distinguishing between itself, the other and the object, though its original ‘monadic closure’ never ceases to be a driving force. Thus, the psyche is altered and opened up to the social-historical world and its institutions – the mother and the father, as parents, initially, and, through them, language, which is also socially instituted. Thereby, society destroys what until then was meaningful for the psyche (its ‘solipsistic’ pleasure and self-closure), and it ‘compensates’ by furnishing it with the meanings incarnated in its institutions. This is how the socialisation process takes place: the psyche sublimates meanings available in the social-historical world and forms its flux in accordance with them. The product is the social individual, deeply immersed in a world of meaning, which, however, can never absorb the psyche as radical imagination. As Castoriadis writes, ‘society and psyche...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Social imaginary, culture and education as an institution
• 2 Self-reflectiveness, education and cross-cultural inquiry in Ancient Greece
• 3 The institution of education and comparative studies in Modernity
• 4 Total capitalism and the (de-)Europeanisation of education and cross-cultural comparison
• 5 From comparison to syncrisis
• Bibliography
• Index