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PESGB Gregynog Conference 2017

Unpublished Draft – Please do not circulate1

The Pedagogical Reduction of the World: the transformative potential of selection,

simplification, and representation2

David Lewin (david.lewin@strath.ac.uk)

Introduction

The central aim of this article is to consider the nature and scope of pedagogical reduction.

Pedagogical reduction either refers to a process of simplifying the world for pedagogical purposes

through selections, generalisations or examples, or to the object that results from that process (e.g.

an image, text or statement). But these kinds of selections entail significant normative

considerations: what is explicitly and implicitly valued by the selection process, and whose

interests are thereby served. Presenting something in simplified form affects what is presented or

affects the manner in which a thing comes to presence. What are the losses and gains within these

pedagogical reductions? Is it helpful to see pedagogical reductions as exemplars or pointers,

referring the student to wider knowledge, ideas or principles? Are there dimensions of the world

that we wish to teach which elude pedagogical reduction?

Pedagogical reductions are commonplace. Textbooks are an obvious example since they

select and simplify from complex phenomena in the world for explicitly pedagogical purposes.

Teachers engage in reduction, providing students with narratives, frameworks, and examples

intended to make particular things easier to comprehend.3 Contemporary educational discourse is

awash with ideas of levels, stages, accessibility, differentiation, personalisation and so on, ideas

1 Comments/feedback gratefully received: david.lewin@strath.ac.uk 2 My thanks to Norm Friesen and Valentin Gerlier for their comments on drafts of this article. 3 Debates about the development of curriculum often entail some recognition of the process of reduction, though the German pedagogical tradition tends to have a more systematic and developed discussion about the nature of pedagogical reduction. Martin Buber has considered selection of the active world as vital component in education; see Between Man and Man. Wolfgang Klafki has developed an influential Didaktic analysis which focuses on the exemplary ‘Didaktic Analysis as the Core of Preparation of Instruction’ in Westbury, Hopmann and Riquarts (eds.) Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktic Tradition (Routledge)

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which assume that knowledge, however defined, can be rendered through different layers of

sophistication, each layer entailing some kind of translation, interpretation and reduction.

Rather than see reduction as subtractive, necessitating some loss, I take it firstly to refer to a

relational condition that exists between the three points of the didactic triangle: the educator

(which might be a person, a text, or the self), the student, and the world. If reduction is an inevitable

process within education, the question is whether it is regretfully so, or whether it can be seen to

function constructively. My interest in these questions originated in the domain of comparative

religious studies where reduction generally gets a bad press 4 If we try to understand Daoism or

Hinduism through a Western Christian framing of religion, for instance, the inevitable reductive

distortions must at least be acknowledged if they cannot be avoided. In education, the German

pedagogical tradition provides a more developed account of pedagogical reduction than the

English-speaking studies of education tend to do, and so the following discussion relies rather more

on that tradition.

Methodological Questions

My use of the concept reduction assumes the discursive-linguistic nature of social life. The real

world is not mediated by concepts so much as lived through them; as Heidegger put it, “we live in

language”.5 From this tradition, it is reasonable to see reduction as a mode of revealing in which,

again referencing Heidegger, every revealing is also a concealing.6 This rejection of

representationalist theories of mind collapses the dualism of mind and world such that the world

and the self come to mutual presence through, as Paul Ricoeur put it, “signs, symbols, and texts.”7

Ricoeur’s contribution here is significant since, along with Heidegger and Gadamer, his work is

characterised as philosophical hermeneutics.8 The relevance of this tradition can be found in the

articulation of the interpretive condition of life; that our knowing and being are always already

framed by the contexts in which we find ourselves, contexts which are always already interpreted.

The educational consequence of this is the recognition that interpretation and reduction of the

world to the young is essential, and in a certain sense, precedes the formal educational encounter.

4 Segal, R. In Defence of Reductionism; Lewin, D. Educational Philosophy for a Post-secular Age (Routledge) 5 Heidegger 6 See Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ 7 Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans K. Blamey & J. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 15. 8 While Heidegger’s work has received considerable attention among educational theorists in recent years, the specific contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, particularly that of Ricoeur, is seldom discussed.

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In short, education is fundamentally hermeneutical; it intentionally draws the student’s attention to

aspects of the world for some perceived educational benefit.

I will raise some questions around pedagogical reduction and its relation to the general

problems of reduction by way of two pedagogical texts: Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, and the

Zen Buddhist training text Ten Bulls. This rather hasty juxtaposition takes some liberties with

methodological questions which I can do no more than briefly acknowledge. How can one compare

a seventeenth century European pedagogical text with a twelfth century Chinese spiritual classic?

And why should this comparison be made? As well as the obvious differences in time and place, the

cosmologies, linguistic histories, social contexts, and authorial intentions of these two texts appear

almost entirely incommensurable. The hypothesis of this paper is that these two texts share

important pedagogical concerns and utilise pedagogical reductions in ways that are illuminating to

consider together. The argument assumes Gadamer’s view that reading a text entails a dialogue

between the reader, who brings a set of understandings and concerns to what is being read, and the

text itself which may address those concerns or affect those understandings.9 The dialogue between

the reader and the text is a universal feature of philosophical hermeneutics, but in the case of texts

whose intention is directly educational (in contrast to texts whose intention might be to simply

inform or entertain), we can say that the text addresses the relations between the reader and a

thing (what the text is ostensibly about). The highway code, for instance, addresses the relation

between the student and the ability to safely drive a vehicle. Hermeneutic pedagogy does not

require the reader to bracket out who they are, but, in fact, anticipates that the reader will bring an

interest in learning, or becoming educated, to the reading of the text. At the level of general

hermeneutical structure, Orbis and Ten Bulls are similar since they both assume the role of teacher:

their concern is with the readers’ relation to the world, and they are likely to be read with that

concern in mind. There are also similarities in terms of their formal structure, since they both

employ a combination of pictures and text. In both texts, the imagery might be said to have priority,

but for Orbis the images are used more directly to represent the world, while the Ten Bulls draws

more upon visual metaphor, using imagery in a way that cannot be called descriptive. Orbis could

be read more ‘ontologically’ as directly referencing the forms of (and relations between) things, and

thereby containing something like ‘content’. By contrast we might initially imagine that Ten Bulls

has no such ‘content’ reference other than the transformation of the reader. Such an interpretation

might be tempting, but probably tells us more about our tendency to read ontology and pedagogy

as distinct structures, a tendency I will try to avoid in what follows. This discussion offers an

9 Gadamer, Truth and Method

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opportunity to consider the place of pedagogical reductions and to locate them more positively in

the face of a suspicion (or, just as often, a general ignorance) of more systematic considerations of

pedagogical reduction among progressive educationalists. In the end, the methodological integrity

of the comparison is less significant than the opportunity it offers to consider the nature of

reduction in education.

The Need for Reduction

Structurally similar to Ricoeur’s arguments for the recognition of the place of ideology,10 or

Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice,11 I suggest that reduction gives something positive: an

essential orientation to the world. There are many forms of reduction: the reduction of a mass of

perceptual data to coherent experience;12 technical reductions of objects to devices or of human

being to users;13 phenomenological and theological reductions. Forms of reduction share a

recognition of the pharmacological nature of reduction: that what makes available, does so at a

price. Language itself could be taken as the primary pharmakon since it always fails to fulfil the

promise of absolute communication.14 As already outlined, I would resist the representationalist

view of language in which words themselves are regarded as reductions of ideas or experiences

that precede them, since language constitutes experience and ideation itself. Rather than seeing

language as failing because it reduces the complexity or depth of the world to discursive concepts, I

argue that language is, in fact, fulfilled by ‘transgression’; it is of the nature of language to exceed

itself. This idea will become significant when I turn to that which eludes or resists representation or

reduction, and what applies to linguistic reduction also applies to reduction more generally. It is

noteworthy that educational theory tends to gloss over foundational questions of representation,

especially given the fact that representation and its relation to reduction are central pedagogical

problems; it may be the key pedagogical insight to apply to wider philosophy.15 Indeed, educational

representation is not just the haphazard presentation of the world to the young, but could be said to

10 Ricoeur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’ in From Text to Action “At its three levels – distortion, legitimation, symbolisation – ideology has one fundamental function: to pattern, to consolidate, to provide order to the course of action…ideology has a function of consolidation in both a good and a bad sense of the word” (p. 310) 11 Gadamer, Truth and Method 12 Nørretranders, T. (1998), The User Illusion: Cutting consciousness down to size 13 Lewin, D. (2010) ‘They Know not What They Do’: The Spiritual Meaning of Technological Progress’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 25: 3, 347-362. 14 Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy 15 Mollenhauer provides some systematic treatment of the symbols for education, even if his point of departure is to bemoan the general absence of more discussions of the use of symbols in education: Klaus Mollenhauer, “The Function of the Symbol in Education” Phenomenology + Pedagogy (1991) Vol 9, 356-369.

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be the intentional representation of aspects of the world, albeit, interpreted and reduced to make

for structured learning possibilities. This definition of education as entailing intentional

pedagogical reductions of the phenomenal lifeworld will need further unpacking, as will its

implications.

Often the object of pedagogical interest is a principle that we are seeking to impart, some

aspect of general understanding that is accessible by way of a particular narrative, experiment or

other piece of data. In other words, the goal or end of education is often a universal theme, idea or

concept, mediated by a particular object or representation; as Wolfgang Klafki puts it, “any specific

content thus contains general substance.”16 The educator might select a particular object because it

is exemplary of a principle, its pedagogical potency coming from its ability to exemplify some

general point.17 For example, we might better understand the general nature of electricity and

conduction by using lemons, cables and a light bulb to show that the acid in the lemons acts as an

electrolyte, producing a voltage.18 Or an examination of World War Two and the holocaust may help

students understand human nature and the banality of evil. The particular objects, processes or

events open windows onto general principles. But what of other, less than concrete beings, like

music, beauty, or justice? How are they to be mediated pedagogically? One might say that universal

forms require mediation in a more elaborate sense, through what Shakespeare in A Midsummer

Night’s Dream has Theseus call “local habitation and a name.” The manifestation of the general or

universal idea through particular concrete objects is supposed, through the Neoplatonic lens of

Shakespeare, to open a window to being itself.19 This suggests that the representation of the thing

makes it visible, and that this is the nature of ‘making present’ (poiesis).20 The role of the teacher

seems to be to mediate the universal by drawing attention to the particular. What, then, does the

teacher present to the student: is it the particular object, or the universal that is thereby made

present? Or is the teacher’s role to highlight the relationship between universal and particular, as

16 Klafki, p. 150 17 There is a significant literature on the nature of this relation and the uses of the exemplary in the German pedagogical tradition. To my knowledge, Martin Wagenschein provides the best account of these ideas that have been translated into English. See http://natureinstitute.org/txt/mw/exemplary_full.htm 18 One might use also potatoes, apples or other fruits or vegetables to demonstrate voltage. The point is, of course, that the principle can be illustrated in a variety of ways. 19 For discussion of Shakespeare’s Neoplatonism see: Michael Whitmore, Shakespearean Metaphysics. (London: Continuum, 2008); Jill Line, Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love. (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2006). 20 Heidegger’s attempts to link poiesis (making present) and noein (seeing or understanding) in An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), offers significant parallels with the argument developed here, but would take me too far to develop more fully. The central idea is that seeing and making are co-constitutive. See 21.

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Shakespeare seems so concerned to do? Is it better to say that being comes to presence and that it is

up to the student to behold the principle (airy nothing!) to which the particular gives local

habitation and a name?21

Examples of this mediating tension are not hard to find: a teacher of religious education

might want to explore the nature of suffering and injustice, alongside developing a knowledge of

the Bible and some familiarity with hermeneutical principles, and so might discuss the story of Job

from the Hebrew Bible.22 Job’s perplexing story is well known: Job is a righteous man who suffers

greatly, and demands some explanation for his great suffering, a demand that cannot be fulfilled,

even by God. The universal theme of the meaning and necessity of injustice and suffering is

explored, and readers might see their own trials and tribulations played out, recognising therein

universal principles of finitude and transcendence.

Although addressed to particular objects or texts, the focus of learning seems to be, from

this point of view, something universal, since an apprehension of this would unlock a knowledge of

(if not familiarity with) all things. As we will see, the structure, and perhaps the intention behind

Comenius’ Orbis suggests such a universalist orientation. These ideas indicate that pedagogical

representations are less about simply making present what is absent, than about inducting children

21 This is more complicated than I have presented it here. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, poetry’s unique capacity is that it “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.” Sidney further shows that neither philosophers nor historians can bring particular and universal into divine union without diminishing either side: “The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both not having both, do both halt.” It is poetry alone that can maintain that mediation. This capacity to mediate is demonstrated by Shakespeare who, in his castigation of the muses in Sonnet 101, shows that universal and particular are mutually served by their opposite. Universals are better off left uninstantiated, without concrete form (best is best, if never intermixed), and yet the poet must engage in making present (Poiesis), for without this making, those universals are never seen, while remaining ‘airy nothing’: O truant Muse what shall be thy amends For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed? Both truth and beauty on my love depends; So dost thou too, and therein dignified. Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say, 'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed; Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay; But best is best, if never intermixed'? Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb? Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee To make him much outlive a gilded tomb And to be praised of ages yet to be. Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now. 22 This obviously locates the discussion in a context where religious education is understood to be a legitimate subject within public-funded schools. This is the case in the UK and much of Europe, but not, of course, in the USA.

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into universal knowledge by way of the symbolic order through mathematical number, textual signs

and metaphysical ideas.23 Indeed, as Heidegger points out, ‘mathemata’ in Classical Greek refers to

that which it teachable, and is, then, the substance of all education. On that basis, Plato’s academy

requires a commitment to geometry, to symbols and representations.24 These reflections on the

philosophical place of representation in education introduce, and lend some support, to questions

developed by one of the most important figures in German post-war educational theory, Klaus

Mollenhauer.

Mollenhauer explores ideas around pedagogy and upbringing with refreshing clarity and

directness. It is in his best-known work Forgotten Connections: On culture and upbringing, that

Mollenhauer makes the key distinction between presentation and representation.25 For

Mollenhauer, representations are pedagogically essential. As he says, “[w]e long ago accepted that

the realm of schooling consists of a huge montage of images and representations which are not “the

things themselves” but that instead “point out” things and phenomena.”26 This pointing out on its

own is not quite enough since representation does not fully and comprehensively encompass what

it represents, even if it can make everything present. For Mollenhauer, the modern era of

industrialisation and specialisation brings with it a need to construct pedagogical spaces and

models that are distinctive and set apart. The need for representation in education arises out of its

need to engage in the reduction of complexity, broadly coincident with the emergence of childhood.

Mollenhauer discusses this in the context of the emergence of explicit pedagogical representations

of the world through the 1658 publication of Comenius’ Orbis Sensualius Pictus generally translated

as The Visible World in Pictures, though this translation raises a few problems.27

Mollenhauer refers to this textbook as the paradigmatic example of the emergence of the

realm of intentional pedagogical representation, one that involves a pedagogical reduction of the

complexity of the world.28 As has been noted, any representation involves some kind of framing of

23 This is rather simplistic since, in fact, Shakespeare’s approach is precisely not to allow the universal to stand without the particular, as though the principles might be abstracted from the plays. Nothing could be further from Shakespeare’s view. 24 Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” in Basic Writings, ed. Krell. (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 271-305. 25 Klaus Mollenhauer, Forgotten Connections: On culture and upbringing, trans. N. Friesen, (London: Routledge, 2014). 26 Mollenhauer, Forgotten Connections, 34. 27 Orbis Sensualium Pictus could be literally translated as the world of the senses in pictures or images. 28 There is an additional dimension of Mollenhauer’s account that would distract from my own use of the term representation, namely the systematic distinction he makes between presentation and representation. My account of representation might well also apply to Mollenhauer’s conception of presentation, hence I have avoided discussion of this systematic element of his account.

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the world that draws attention to certain features of interest or significance, while obscuring

others, of less interest, or simply too complex at a given pedagogical stage or moment. Official

knowledge is inevitably framed, structured, and reduced, particularly in the context of compulsory

mass education. While there are many political and ethical questions concerning the interests that

are served by official knowledge,29 someone has to write the textbook. Good students don’t take

those representations to be the last word, and good teachers are constantly exploring how and

when to draw attention to the inherent tensions and contradictions contained within the textbook.

This could be regarded dialectically: that knowledge must be established through a rudimentary

thesis, which then must be called into question, and refined into a synthesis that becomes a new

thesis to be called into question, a process which resonates with Wagenschein’s theory of

exemplarity. But as important as a general dialectic might be, we could also note here the

development of a hermeneutical awareness: that we become aware of what we bring and what the

text brings.

In addition to the pedagogical reduction that allows for this kind of development,

representations also facilitate what Mollenhauer has called “pedagogical rehearsals.”30 These refer

to the spaces of education which offer students the opportunity to rehearse complex actions,

knowledges, and attitudes before they are performed for ‘real.’ It is important to note that rehearsal

and reduction are central features of education, rather than inauthentic distractions to be avoided

or apologised for. Recognising the positive role of reduction and rehearsal is vital because it is not

uncommon among progressive educators in particular, at least since Dewey, to claim that education

should strive for authentic experience of the world, and that the educational space should be, as far

as possible, continuous with, or indistinguishable from, a putative real world. For Dewey himself,

the concept of the pedagogical reduction was a familiar notion though framed in terms of an

educational environment being a selective and simplified form of the adult world.31 However, the

progressive tradition has developed in more polarised form, in which pedagogical reductions and

rehearsals appear to some as dimensions of inauthenticity. In his book, Shop Class as Soul Craft

Matthew Crawford begins with a quotation from Doug Stowe that captures something of this

tension:

29 Michael Apple, Official Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 2014). 30 Mollenhauer 31 Dewey, Democracy and Education, (1916), 23f, https://archive.org/stream/democracyandedu00dewegoog#page/n6/mode/2up

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[i]n schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be

contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement…the world remains

abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.32

Such complaints must be taken seriously but not uncritically. They aspire to make education ‘real

world’ rather than abstract or rehearsed, but often these rhetorical moves reveal a tendency to

throw out the baby with the bathwater, since the learning environment also works precisely

because it is contrived and abstract. Contrary to the desire for authenticity, I suggest that if

reduction leads to inauthenticity, then education must be taken as intrinsically ‘inauthentic’. It is

precisely because the original concept of schooling suggested a space and time in which the

assumptions of the supposed real world can be interrupted, that recent educational theory has

begun to (re)make a coherent defence of school.33 Ilmi Willbergh has provided an analysis of the

appropriate deployment of authenticity in education which further makes the point: “it may be

claimed from the Bildung perspective that instruction should be inauthentic to make possible an

authentic meeting between student and content.”34 Nevertheless, and to recognise the legitimate

concerns of progressive education, the foremost criterion for determining the worth of these efforts

to interrupt should, in the words of Klafki, be “whether the activities can come alive and be effective

outside the school’s walls.”35 But this may be addressed more by Willbergh’s authentic meeting

between student and content, than some putative authentic encounter with the world. It is

necessary that someone, the teacher, considers whether the lesson will indeed be of significance for

the student’s future, since this is difficult to do for oneself, a point that also undermines some

stronger conceptions of child-centred education.

It is essential to the reduction that, through selection, it determines on behalf of the student,

what is worthy of attention and interest. In other words, pedagogical reductions are constructed

because they are thought to mediate principles, ideas, and processes more effectively. Though a

notoriously complex and controversial idea, this could be a criterion for distinguishing higher from

lower cultural forms, through the curation of a canon; a perspective on the best that has been

thought and said.36 In any case, some acknowledgement of the educator’s role in pedagogical

32 Crawford, M. Shop Class as Soul Craft (Penguin 2009), 11. 33 See Masschelein and Simons, In Defence of School: A Public Issue (Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers). Masschelein and Simons refer to the Greek idea of scholè as “free time for study and practice afforded to people who had no claim to it according to the archaic order prevailing at the time” (p. 9). 34 Ilmi Willbergh (2015) The problems of ‘competence’ and alternatives from the Scandinavian perspective of Bildung, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47:3, 334-354, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2014.1002112, p. 343 35 Klafki, p. 152 36 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

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reduction is essential. Much as progressive educators might seek to disavow the authority of the

teacher in determining the orientation of the student in this way, or critical pedagogues might draw

attention to the hegemonic nature of this selection process or ascriptions of ‘high art’,37 this view of

pedagogical reduction seems both irresponsible and impossible to entirely disavow, and indeed,

something that the student hopes for, if not quite demands of the teacher. It is an essential service

to the student that the pedagogical reduction of the world takes place so that an entry point to

education is possible. Indeed, it may be the way in which the world is made present. From this point

of view, reduction is intended to make some aspect of the world available to the student, despite the

fact that reduction and representation are sometimes associated not with revealing the world, but

with concealing it.

Demystification and the negation of the pedagogical reduction

From the rough and steep ascent out of the cave in Plato’s allegory, to the absurdly overdramatic

fight scene in John Carpenter’s film They Live, or the stylised violence of the movie The Matrix, an

education which entails violent struggle from comfortable illusions has been a favourite theme

among philosophers of education. Critical pedagogy, as a progressive educational project has a

more direct concern with demystifying the socio-political interests and hegemonies that govern the

pedagogical reduction. It is perhaps easier to rail against those authorities governing pedagogical

reductions in general, than to offer a rationale for different choices concerning a necessary

reduction. It is too easy to interpret critical pedagogy as lifting the veil, or revealing the truth,

without recognising the principle of hermeneutics, that this always entails a different reduction:

that every revealing is also a concealing.38 This is to recognise our hermeneutic condition: that

interpretation, reduction and education belong together. The danger is that critical pedagogy would

seek to do away with the pedagogical reduction itself, thereby failing to recognise the constructive

mode that reduction entails. This suspicion of representation seems predicated on too simplistic a

binary between appearances and the real. The ambivalence towards representation goes back at

least to Plato’s (ironic) banning of the poets in The Republic.

37 Michael Apple, Official Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 2014). 38 Heidegger’s ‘concept of truth’ (a phrase that strikes me as almost too great a reduction), involves a creative retrieval of aletheia, translated an unconcealment, emphasising the hermeneutical condition since every revealing of what is, is also a concealing. See Heidegger,

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In Plato’s Republic, poets are problematic firstly because they imitate aspects of the world,

and secondly because they rely on rhetoric to do so.39 In tension with this account of mimesis, is

Plato’s argument that the mind ascends from the world of senses to mathemata – what can be

learned and therefore taught. Mathemata might be understood here as being that which is

intrinsically teachable because it already exists in the soul and requires remembrance (anamnesis).

The process of remembrance, of learning what we already ‘know’, presupposes a form of the

Neoplatonic ontology outlined earlier, in which the learner recalls universals by way of encounter

with concrete objects; learning as recollection and ascent.40 One subsequent question occurs: are

representations of things mimetic or mathematical? Do representations imitate imitations (as Plato

suggests of the poets in Book X), or do they make universals accessible through recollection (by way

of the particular). Without a recognition of the nature and limitations of representation, knowledge

can (and has) become fragmented and parochial, rather than general and universal. But how are we

to acquaint ourselves and our children with the general and universal? I turn to the text of the

seventeenth century Czech pedagogue John Amos Comenius which, through the lens of

Mollenhauer, suggests one answer: by way of the pedagogical reduction everything is made

knowable/accessible to the child.41

The (In)Visible World in Pictures

First published in 1658 in Latin-German and then only a year later in Latin-English, and arguably

being one of the first pedagogical works for young children, Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus is a

curious text when it comes to the question of representation, for, despite its title (usually translated

The Visible World in Pictures), it seems concerned with both the invisible as well as the visible

(sensualium). It would be anachronistic to expect the ‘visible world’ to mean today what it meant in

1658, so it is not helpful for Charles McNamara say that the text weave’s between the visible and

invisible?42 Such a view is misleading since the category of the ‘invisble’ is foreign to Comenius’

39 The Republic 535b. 40 For the purposes of this essay, the important distinctions between the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Proclus, Shakespeare etc, are not taken up. But as implied earlier, Shakespeare’s concern for the universal could not be interpreted as being in opposition to a particular, whereas more ‘classical’ forms of Neoplatonism might affirm the ‘one’ rather too strongly: in ways that deny the singularity of the particular. 41 The following argument could be further developed with reference to Comenius’ idea that things are universally knowable as pansophic. See Comenius, Way of Light. Thanks to Norm Friesen for drawing attention to this connection. 42 Charles McNamara, “In the Image of God: John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book,” https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/05/14/in-the-image-of-god-john-comenius-and-the-first-childrens-picture-book/

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cosmology which, in fact understands all things to be available to the senses. So the reference to the

visible (or sensible - sensualium) is not in contrast to some other ‘invisible’ or hidden order, but

rather that the order is very much present to the reader, and is reflected in the systematic

treatment of the world understood within Neoplatonic terms of reference, even if Comenius

appears to explicitly assert a focus on the sensory.43 Unsurprisingly, the structure of the book

reflects the organisation of the late medieval cosmos. Following an exhortation to wisdom,44 the

text addresses the reader to very concrete and visible matters. Beginning with what might be read

as an early version of ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm’, drawings of different animals are presented

along with their names and characteristic animal sounds. This naming of the world introduces the

alphabet (the text explicitly references Adam’s naming of the animals in the book of Genesis45)

through the concretely visible, which is immediately followed by an analysis of God in himself (as

Blessed, everlasting, spiritual and so on). McNamara appears to be puzzled by this transition, saying

that the text “abruptly shifts to the philosophical and the invisible, perhaps hoping that a firm grasp

of ducks and mice is sufficient for understanding the divine.”46 From an approach that is roughly

recognisable to most parents, we appear to leap to metaphysics. It should be asked whether God,

heaven and the soul might have been aspects of the ‘visible world’ to the mid-seventeenth century

child (or to Comenius), for whom the secular age is some way off, and for whom visible does not

have a simply opposite. The text moves on to creation (heaven and earth) followed by the elements

(fire, air, water, vapour, earth), and through a great list of inanimate and animate objects, to human

beings, then to things arising through the interaction with things, onto objects of higher culture and

learning, virtues, and social ideas, culminating in religion. So rather than abrupt or haphazard, the

text is organised along the lines of the great chain of being and the order of creation in Genesis.

Everything here has its place in the cosmic hierarchy, whilst also being systematically presented for

pedagogical purposes.47 This systematic representation of the world can be regarded as complete,

offering the child access both to the symbolic order of literacy, as well as to the universals that

encompass everything.

43 Comenius prefaces the text with the assertion that “there is nothing in the understanding, which was not before in the sense” (p. xiv). This is not simple empiricism because, as it later made clear, ‘sense’ is not reducible to the outward empirical senses, but includes internal senses (common sense; phantasie; and memory) (p. 53). 44 Comenius… 45 Orbis, p. xii. 46 McNamara, “In the Image of God.” There is a clear systematic reason for the inclusion of these sounds at the start of Orbis, namely that the student is introduced to the alphabet before proceeding to things visible. 47 Although the text introduces the reader to geometry (p. 126) it does not introduce mathematics or ‘number’ as such which seems significant, but beyond the scope of this essay.

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As mentioned in the introduction, it is plausible to argue that the organisation of the text

has both ontological and pedagogical significance. One might venture that ontology is pedagogical

since, from the perspective of late medieval philosophy, Divine providence ensures that the

organisation of things is towards being known. The intention of Orbis is primarily to say something

true about the world, which indeed is explicitly stated as the first principle of the teaching of the

text itself.48 The contrast I will draw out is that the primary concern of Ten Bulls is distinctly

pedagogical without this notional ontology. In order for everything to be present through a

pedagogical reduction, Orbis mediates universals that are its real concern. In other words, the

visible world here makes reference to what is often taken to be invisible: universals which

particular objects provide essential instantiations of.

A pedagogy of the irreducible

So far, this paper has developed the view that education entails reduction to present the (visible)

world to the child. These ideas are in tension with the category of the unrepresentable or

irreducible. Although we have seen that Comenius is unlikely to recognise this tension (because

there is no ‘invisible’), we might do so where religious or aesthetic ideas refer us to irreducible

phenomena, or in reference to a Zen pedagogy as present in Ten Bulls. Nevertheless it is by no

means clear what is meant by the claim that a thing is unrepresentable.49 At a certain level of

modern logic, anything thinkable can be represented; any phenomena reduced. But, as I suggested

earlier, what understanding grasps when it avails itself of the representation or reduction is

obscure. Moreover, it is common to see the ultimate reference point of religious traditions

(God/truth/enlightenment), or the ‘sublime’ in the realm of the arts, as that which resists, subverts,

or denies attempts at representation or reduction. The logic of my argument at this point boils

down to this: 1.) if education requires representation and reduction and 2.) if there is something in

the world which is intrinsically unrepresentable and irreducible, then must we admit that

education has no place when it comes to the unrepresentable (e.g. the referent of religion or art)?

Does this suggest that the unrepresentable/irreducible referent of religion cannot be the object of

learning within education? I am not sure whether such a question is meaningful outside of the

context of a particular religious tradition? But perhaps this suggests that can at least question the

48 Orbis, p. xiii. 49 Representation and mediation in have quite different connotations and contexts when considered from within different theological traditions, from Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic etc. This makes any general statement about unrepresentability of limited value.

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idea that education always involves the pedagogical reduction? The hypothesis here is that there

may be a substantial link between a text whose pedagogical style is less direct, more metaphorical –

such as Ten Bulls – and the idea that the object of the text is, in some significant sense,

unrepresentable, or subversive of representation. One might hesitate to speak directly, as it were

‘ontologically,’ about that which eludes or subverts direct speaking. That hesitancy is pedagogically

significant; the indirectness of the pedagogical form that employs metaphor, takes on a more

substantial role in making present (poeisis).

Something more can be said about the relations between reducible/visible and that which

exceeds it. Generally working within the Protestant tradition, the theologian John Milbank has

argued that to see the beautiful is to see the invisible in the visible: “[i]n the High Middle Ages, the

possibility and experience of seeing the invisible in the visible, or of seeing the invisible as

invisible…was generally assumed and pervaded life, art and understanding.”50 The point draws on a

much larger argument that the categories of visibility and invisibility are not stable (not just about

the functioning of eyes, for instance). The invisible framed the visible and, in a sense, made it

possible, made it visible. In Kantian terms, the invisible provides the transcendental conditions for

the visible. The point is to draw attention to a dialectic between the visible and invisible, or

between the representable and the unrepresentable: that they are relational, rather than absolute,

terms. One might even say that this could be read as ‘non-dual’ (that one cannot exist without

another) suggesting a link with Zen Buddhism to which I will turn in a moment.

God/truth/enlightenment is simultaneously unrepresentable and representable, invisible

and visible, irreducible and reducible. Philosophers and theologians have had various ways of

addressing this complex relation; this is a central facet of Western theological tradition, from

Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Eckhart, and so on. For the purposes of my argument I suggest that the

visibility and representability of a thing is not a property of it as such, but is a relational property

existing between the beholder and beheld. The act of making particular (visible) that which is

universal (invisible) always entails a reduction that both reveals and conceals, and so is a process

or relation that is never complete. From a broadly Neoplatonic perspective, our human condition is

betwixt and between, in motion among the visible and the invisible. But the phenomena of the

visible world make the invisible visible. Again, referring to Shakespeare’s Theseus, we are like poets

who:

50 John Milbank, ‘Beauty and the Soul’ in Milbank, Ward, and Wyschogrod, Theological Perspectives on Art and Beauty, (London: Continuum, 2003), 2.

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Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.51

In short, unrepresentability seems less an intrinsic quality of a thing, and more a practical or

pedagogical orientation, a recognition that what is visible always leaves more to be seen.

Ten Bulls

I now turn to a text from Zen to explore an alternative perspective on the questions of pedagogical

representation and reduction. Notoriously difficult to systematise and rationalise, Zen Buddhism

provides a strong contrast to the approach of Comenius and yet, the basic journey described by Ten

Bulls could been neatly summarised:

Way out of suffering = eradication of afflicting passions = transformation of the energy that

flares in the passions into Buddha-Nature = gentling the bull = becoming human = the

realisation of the No-I = the end of all fear = insight into the nature of change = deliverance =

insight into the way all things really are = the end of suffering = awakening.52

Is this ‘way out’ an education as formation? This question might offer us with a conceptual

understanding of Ten Bulls, but to go beyond the conceptual requires a particular pedagogical

intervention which the text provides. The set of ten poems, pictures, and commentaries that forms

the text, uses the different relations between a bull and a herder that arise during a process of

taming or gentling the bull, relations which describe the various stages towards enlightenment.

Although not regarded as a pedagogical textbook in the sense that Orbis is, it is intended to act as a

pedagogical device, offering a tool for, and representation of, stages of spiritual practice. But since

Zen is particularly subversive when it comes to representations of the path to enlightenment,53 the

approaches the text takes are more directly allegorical and metaphorical. In a sense, they are more

explicitly sketching the dialectics between visible and invisible; they are more self-consciously

subversive. Both texts operate pedagogically, but the form of that pedagogy in Ten Bulls, through

51 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I. 52 Myokyo-Ni, Gentling the Bull, (London: Zen Centre, 2001), 17. 53 See…

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the use of metaphor, is indirect, and, I would suggest, therefore potentially more transformative

(this claim needs more defence).

Many versions of the bull-taming pictures have been identified, ranging from 5 to 11

images. The most well-known version (which is today kept in the Shokokuji Temple, in Kyoto) is

that produced around 1450 by Shubun, a 15th century Zen Monk and one of the most celebrated

painters of the Ashikaga period.54 Shubun is thought to have copied the pictures from Kakuan, a 12th

Century Chinese Zen master. The images have long been a favourite training analogy for Zen monks

and are still used today. Each image is traditionally accompanied by three sets of poems, that

address the Zen monks but also acquaint other interested readers with the fundamentals of Zen

training.55

A brief sketch of the content will be helpful. The first image is called ‘In Search of the Bull’. It

shows the herder looking lost, illustrating the human condition as one of being in question, at odds

with self and world, where the bull cannot be found. The second and third images show the stages

of the herder discovering the bull’s hoof prints and a brief perception of the bull itself. Stages four to

six show the herder catching, taming, and riding the bull. This is followed by transcending the bull

in the seventh image and the transcending the self and bull in the eighth. Following transcendence,

the ninth image is called ‘reaching the source,’ and in the tenth, the herder returns to the world.

To say that the bull and herder represent different aspects of the self is both correct and

misleading, since the text is not primarily to be grasped conceptually, but to be practiced: it is to be

read, meditated upon, and experienced. I have argued that the text is primarily concerned with an

indirect pedagogical form precisely because it takes its referent to be, in some significant sense,

unrepresentable. This is consistent with Buddhist teaching that the truth of enlightenment is not

something to be told directly.56 So, on the one hand it is hard to say that the text represents

anything: rather it performs a pedagogical act, inviting the practitioner into an approach or

practice. As a pedagogical device, the text presents something metaphorically or allegorically. On

the face of it, this would seem simply like a representation. But unlike the numbered images in

Comenius’ textbook, where students can learn the names of visible things in their own language as

well as Latin, the imagery and poetry of Ten Bulls is not so directly representational; it demands an

interpretive act in a more explicit way. As spiritual analogies and metaphors often do, the text

forces the reader to pay attention to the hermeneutic conditions of living and of learning, disrupting

54 See Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism, (London: Rider, 1974), 127-144 55 Myokyo-Ni, Gentling the Bull. 56 See…

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the possibility of a descriptive account of the world. This foregrounding of hermeneutics is

primarily pedagogical. More speculatively we might say that the invisible is visible in the visible in

this radical (nondual) way. The paradoxical nature of the invisible being visible might even suggest

that there is no invisible: that what you have in Ten Bulls is superficially unrepresentable, because it

is what it is. Enlightenment does not appear to lift a veil, revealing a truth that hitherto had lain

invisible. Hence the return in the tenth image.

Consistent with the practical orientation of Zen, Ten Bulls prioritises the pedagogical

ordering of the text. The linear progression of the images and text is designed not to explain how

things in the world are, but to bring the student into a transformed state through some kind of

change. This seems to contrast with Orbis, in which the hierarchy of beings is not only practical and

pedagogical, but ontological and epistemological. In Orbis, the ordered cosmos is a thing to be

known through the representations that make the world present.

Conclusion

The concern of this paper has been to develop some implications around pedagogical

representation and reduction. I argued for the necessity of pedagogical reductions and seeing them

in terms of a fruitful exploration of the relation between the particular/concrete and the

universal/abstract. Perhaps, then, the idea of reduction must also be related to a kind of expansion;

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand”.57 I suggested the idea of non-dualism, where one cannot

eliminate either particular or universal, as a way to connect different elements of the argument, but

I would need much longer to develop this argument fully. I have suggested the idea of non-dualism

to indicate some of the tensions with pedagogical reduction and representations, basically wanting

to suggest that reduction and the irreducible are actually mutually creative rather than

antagonistic. But I have only begun the task of developing a systematic conception of pedagogical

reduction in light of traditions that deny or complicate the idea of representation and reduction.

Further questions could be developed about whether the unrepresentable is a coherent category at

all, or whether the representational reduction is essential to education. But the nature of the

reductions orient readers either ontologically, which is pedagogical, in the case of Orbis, or only

pedagogically, in Ten Bulls. Orbis mediates universal principles by way of representations of the

visible world, though raising significant difficulties when it comes to drawing a line between what is

visible/invisible. The pedagogical orientation of Ten Bulls suggests a greater emphasis on the need

57 Blake, Auguries of Innocence.

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for metaphorical reading, subverting any idea of an ontological order being present to the reader.

Framing the argument around the unrepresentable risks invoking precisely the kind of dualism of

representation and reality, or visible and invisible (based on some notion of transcendence) that

Zen would refuse. My aim has been to place hermeneutics at the centre of the tension between

concrete and universal, immanence and transcendence; reduction and expansion. Engaging in

hermeneutics is the transcendental condition for holding these elements in creative and fruitful

tension.