No matter how they try to say it, in the attempt to define education sponsored by the church, religious orders or societies, the word “whole” takes a prominent place. In a most recent addition, “Pathways”, the word appears again. One wonders what they mean by the word.
Since I can discern no clear meaning of the term based on their actions, maybe if we ask how they are using the term might be helpful. The Positivists who surround us will make the term really mean less if they have their way. The whole of positive science is less than the whole of human thought.
Education, if it means anything, is designed to lead one out of the cave of darkness into the light of truth. It is blinding at first, but it takes time to see. Otherwise you are stuck in the narrow understanding of one thing by another, never one thing or the other by itself. You’ll always know, or should know, that there is something you don’t know about what I do know. When you are finally free, when you have finally thought about how and why you think, only then is your consciousness satisfied. Only then are you in the truth.
The thought-thought always triggers the thinking-thought. If this doesn’t happen to you, if you are not trained along these ways, you are not being educated. The wholeness of thought, its rules, its practices must be inculcated for a whole person to emerge.
Truth has always been in the Western World, where it is intimately associated with the Greek language, a process, a dispelling of the darkness, what is then an understanding of things as they are in and of themselves. Our spirit has to be freed from partial understandings, from the so-called “positive”, to see things as they are in and of themselves. Things that are always already there, but hidden from the untrained and from those who do not think about thinking and fail to spell out what the wholeness of thought must be. No matter how they use the word “whole”, it will not have any meaning or usefulness until they associate it with the whole meaning of thought. A student striving toward a baccalaureate in the liberal arts would not be wholly educated if he/she were educated in any lesser meaning of thought.
This has already been thought out, much better than I’m saying it. It’s found in all the Platonic dialogues where the method of thought comes through at the beginning of each one when Socrates responds to the question, “Can you tell me Socrates what is …” by his immediate retort, ” before I tell you anything I must tell you what telling is”.
His student Aristotle spelled it out for us and Newman repeated it in the idea of the university when he said, “While the world lasts, will Aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle, we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we might not know it?”
Aristotle wasn’t too successful in Athens where hemlock was a thriving business. Cardinal Newman wasn’t too successful in Dublin. Is that going to be our fate too? Untrained minds could be pathways to nowhere. Trained minds could be pathways to full and whole human personhood. Cardinal Mercier once said that without metaphysics you have a cathedral without a sanctuary or an orchestra without a piano. Our pathways to the future must be an occasion for the whole person to be educated.
The Rev. David Boileau is a professor in the philosophy department.
