We must begin our conversation by clarifying what this book is not about, for the word ‘experience’ is easily misconstrued, and its presence in the title might suggest some kind of advocacy or promotion of a specific kind of pedagogy. This book is not about advancing experiential education agenda, or promoting hands-on learning, or endorsing vocation-based pedagogic systems, or anything like that. To put it differently, the argument is not primarily about privileging physical-experiential education over representational-symbolic learning, although it might appear to be so, as we set off with a critique about the exclusive role of the mental in conventional education. Instead, the book is about the ontology of experience, addressing the need for a critical comprehension of the process of experiencing in its relation to education. The book attempts to tunnel beneath our ordinary assumptions about experience in order to discover emergent spaces untainted by polarizations or pedagogic oppositions of yesteryears. It must be emphasized therefore that the rational-intellectual is not being opposed to the manual-experiential here. Rather, the intellect is seen as just another element in the cognitive construction and bringing forth of experience, not more or less important, but nevertheless to be restrained from being the hegemonic filter for all other types of engagements that are just as basic. In other words, we must pedagogically restrain ourselves from falling into the trap of homogenizing qualitatively different forms of experience, and not make the products of intellectual reason the universal benchmark for judging other types of experience.1 We must immediately ask, what are these other categories of engagements we are talking about? I include in our deliberations here the status of the somatic-vitalist and the psychic-intuitive dimensions as equally pressing in the construction of authentic experience, and reject the over-reliance on the symbolic and the discursive; the latter stands accused of having resulted in the production of a second-hand (ostensibly reliable but privately diminishing), uncreative, and unredeemed reality that is incapable of producing a viable ground for emancipatory education.
It would be wrong to understand the position espoused here as though there is the suggestion that the psyche, the soma, and the intellect are somehow fundamentally opposed, isolated, or distinct. It may appear so only provisionally, insofar as our examination of these have not gone far enough or are incomplete. Rather, we are saying that there is a way to understand all of these faculties—the somatic, the psychic, and the symbolic as arising out of a single substance to which one must make one’s way by means of a special conatus. This is slow and deliberate, and essentially constitutes the pedagogy and the birthing struggle of the twice-born. The latter must take its second birth largely in the theater of its own phenomenological experiments that mobilize all three domains simultaneously, rather than simply become adjusted to an overwhelmingly techno-political reality that severely limits the path of the being as it struggles toward phenomenological disclosure.
The pedagogy of the twice-born takes us to possibilities beyond the jaundiced and global ways of looking and experiencing reality, beyond the second-hand normality that is constructed through overarching social agendas and unexamined habits of thought. This world of commonsense, so rampant in hegemonic potential, is able to blindly approve the annihilation of significantly other ways of thinking and becoming. As an anecdotal reference from my own experience, let me mention the case of students who present the most excruciatingly thought-out objections as to why another (likely more liberating) way of experiencing the world is not possible. They find all sorts of excuses as to why we cannot experiment with something or change a certain practice. Or else they want to be sure of the outcomes before they will engage in a new practice. It simply speaks of the extent to which intellectual sloth, fear of life, experiential negativity, and existential conservatism have gotten into the marrows of even the young, not to speak of the older generation which has contentedly settled down to a slow decomposition. There is no glow or illumination in sight, no direct insight of which one speaks, no quickening of the soul, no real hope of any kind, only heartless repetition of humdrum. The educational experience has been beaten into pulp till it no longer yields any true mission in life or a sense of creative vitality.
In view of the above, the present work poses the following question: Is there within education the systematic possibility of phenomenologically raising ourselves, not to the experience of this or that, but to the true potentiality of experiencing itself—bringing up the level of existence to an immediate rhythm, meaning, and intensity—rather than merely focusing on the routine absorption of representational regimes and playing symbolic truth games? If there is possibility of such an experiencing, how do we create the conditions for it? Can we any longer discover something in education that opens a path to creative becoming beyond the entanglements with the politico-historical reality that we presently take to be the world? If yes, then what is the path to such an experience? It is the considered view here that we cannot dismiss the possibility of such experiencing, but such a surge of life is imaginable only through a protracted and multi-layered struggle against dominant commonsensical positions. Further, only a proper mobilization of the psychic, the somatic, and the intellectual, as well as their (disjunctive) synthesis can bring this about. This is what I have called the pedagogy of the twice-born.
Among the essential pedagogical tasks in developing a path to the discovery of this second birth, the commonplace opposition between sensuous learning and symbolic learning must be closely questioned and dissolved through a proper understanding of the true nature of experience. I try to address this hiatus and the path to its overcoming in the pages that follow. In fact, it is the view here that intellectual labor is strengthened when we simultaneously engage in psycho-somatic labor, which itself is not devoid of intellectual content as Gramsci had noted in his reflections.2 It is the view here, that the ways of the body—the Eros of embodiment—are strange and mysterious, and the intellect is a mere child before this miniature cosmos. It is assumed that any leap in perception with regard to experience would have to include the body in a central way, which we attempt in these pages. Besides, it would be my endeavor to intelligently mix the philosophical and the practical in a manner that we are able to stretch beyond commonsense oppositions and reach toward a wisdom of practice that is presently out of sight in education. This wisdom of practice or Phronesis is a mix of sensuous intelligence and intellectual intuition that is central to the project of the twice-born.
But before we can proceed further, let us first dwell on the word ‘experience’ briefly in the context of learning as used by some noteworthy authors. Our approach would be to start from very near in order to go far; in other words, we will begin by looking at general use of the term such as in experiential learning, before we move farther afield inquiring into the metaphysics of experience itself.
A common usage of the term “experiential learning” defines it as a particular form of learning from life experience; often contrasted it with lecture and classroom learning. Keeton and Tate (1978) offered this definition, “Learning in which the learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied. It is contrasted with the learner who only reads about, hears about, talks about, or writes about these realities but never comes into contact with them as part of the learning process.” In this view of experiential learning, the emphasis is often on direct sense experience and in-context action as the primary source of learning.3
Most would agree that there is a vital difference between reading about Indian pottery and discovering it by being (even briefly) apprenticed in an Indian pottery workshop. Again, the experience of horticulture would be different than, say, listening to lectures about plants. Similarly, taking care of animals at a care center is different from merely reading about animal husbandry. And the difference in each case is not trivial—the sensory contact develops an intuition, sometimes called a sixth sense, that displays an understanding and capacity to handle things—a million little things—that cannot be developed through second-hand or bookish knowledge. Also, the sense of concrete accomplishment that is afforded by successful horticulture cannot be matched by reading about gardening techniques. This is not to dismiss symbolic or conceptual learning, which offers a generalized knowledge that is not possible to acquire through specific experiences, but to assert that without the former, the latter becomes one-dimensional, bereft of the Eros of embodied engagements.
But are empirical experiences not already overlaid by culture? The later Dewey seems unconvinced about the possibility of pristine experience and appears worried about the notion:
Experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh naïve empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by the wisest historical scholar to track all of these absorbed borrowings to their original sources.4
Again, this is too much mind and too little body—worrying about ideal situations is not very fruitful. When I learn to take care of my sick cow, I don’t worry about the cultural overlay that keeps me from having a pure experience of the situation. Albeit there is a theory about what is wrong with the bovine, but this theory merely helps set up a reciprocal movement between the animal and myself that must work through both enfleshments—nervous corporeal entanglements—hopefully to a therapeutic situation. Speculations about ‘naïve empirical material’ (i.e., uncontaminated experience) are only fit for intellectual ivory towers; what the rest of us need are heuristic opportunities toward becoming adepts at handling a variety of emergent situations and receiving little doses of fulfillment on the side. This does not however mean that we embrace naïve realism and become blind to conceptual difficulties. It means that we set up a dialectic between what we are experiencing and the limits of those experiences as far as their educational and emancipatory value is concerned. Besides, this does require us to reorder our priorities and adjust our vision.
In the over-eager embrace of the rational, scientific, and technological, our concept of the learning process itself was distorted first by rationalism and later by behaviorism. We lost touch with our own experience as the source of personal learning and development and, in the process, lost that experiential centeredness necessary to counterbalance the loss of “scientific” centeredness that has been progressively slipping away since Copernicus.5
As Hannah Arendt had noted in The Human Condition, the extreme formalization of science has left the average person too far behind for it to be of any use to her/him in their growth or becoming.6 Occas...