Rmcc/2012 glossary of concepts

My lingo

Affordance

The perceived possibilities for use that an agent recognizes in an object or situation1.

Agent, agency, agenda

Coming soon.

To act, actuality

Coming soon.

Capability, capabilities

Capabilities are modes of exercising control that persons and groups can exercise in seeking self-maintenance in life. Capabilities are both physical and cultural. They are numerous and diverse. Nearly every verb of agency describes a capability.

Capacity, capacities

A capacity is an actualized capability. A capability becomes an actual capacity when control of it has emerged and use of it takes place as a person or group interacts with circumstances.

To cause, cause, causalities

Causality is a mode of thinking by which the mind postulates necessary connections between observed phenomena describing a determinative sequence of action in time. A cause appears to determine an outcome or result according to its action in sequential time. Causal explanation indicates necessary connections between successive states in a temporal order, the cause preceding and the result following. Causes appear as existential phenomena in the experience of a living form, and they are moot within the absolute realm of things-in-themselves.

Circumstance, Circumstances

All that co-exists in time and space through a living form. Circumstance comprises all that takes place through the interactions a living form occasions in the course of its self-maintaining. Circumstance has a phenomenal presence at one or another level of sentience in the existential experience of a living form.

Commons

The physical and cultural resources built up through the sum of human efforts at self-maintenance that have taken place through historical time. The commons is prior to and inclusive of all enclosures. It may be thought of as the unbounded plane of human interaction, with respect to which there are no externalities. The commons is the net of human activity.

Complexity

Complexity arises because the scope, density, and variety of reciprocal interactions making accounting for each specific action taking place impossible. Hence, complex phenomena appear in experience as aggregates. Vital significance emerges from the complexity of innumerable reciprocal interactions taking place among countless centers of control over sustained periods. This complexity defies clearcut causal analysis. It is important to understand it as the existential field out of which education and all of human experience emerges.

To control, controlling

The effort by a living form to use positive and negative feedback to modulate reciprocal interactions of significance for its selfmaintenance. The possibility of control arises as a living form postulates a telos, relative to which it judges negative and positive feedback. Control takes place. An agent seeks to exercise it. Its success or failure is contingent on the capacities of the agent and the particulars of the circumstances impinging on the effort.

Co-existence (also, Simultaneity and Reciprocity)

Co-existence is to control, as sequence is to cause. What co-exists is existentially simultaneous in time and space for a living form, and all that co-exists reciprocally interacts through it,out of which emergent states take place. Co-existence does not pertain to the moot realm of things-in-themselves, but to the existential condition of a living form. The time scale for co-existence can vary from the instantaneous to an extended period of reciprocal interaction.

Commons

The physical and cultural resources built up through the sum of human efforts at self-maintenance that have taken place through historical time. The commons is prior to and inclusive of all enclosures. It may be thought of as the unbounded plane of human interaction, with respect to which there are no externalities. The commons is the net of human activity.

Complexity

Complexity arises because the scope, density, and variety of reciprocal interactions making accounting for each specific action taking place impossible. Hence, complex phenomena appear in experience as aggregates. Vital significance emerges from the complexity of innumerable reciprocal interactions taking place among countless centers of control over sustained periods. This complexity defies clear-cut causal analysis. It is important to understand it as the existential field out of which education and all of human experience emerges.

Control

The effort by a living form to use positive and negative feedback to modulate reciprocal interactions of significance for its selfmaintenance. The possibility of control arises as a living form postulates a telos, relative to which it judges negative and positive feedback. Control takes place. An agent seeks to exercise it. Its success or failure is contingent on the capacities of the agent and the particulars of the circumstances impinging on the effort.

Digital pedagogy

Existing educational institutions use a pedagogy deeply conditioned by the mechanical techniques of organization and communication developed through the modern era. The constraints and possibilities of digital techniques differ markedly from the mechanical. Most educational uses of digital technologies employ them to improve mechanistic educational systems marginally. To initiate and develop a digital pedagogy, we start by setting aside familiar educational forms and begin to develop a different set of educational principles to serve enduring human purposes.

Disclosing the commons

As enclosure has privatized more and more vital resources and distributed their benefits more inequitably, pressure increases to disclose the commons, to reassert the prerogatives of humanity, in common, over its accumulated achievements. As enclosing private property has been the driving endeavor in the modern era, disclosing the commons is becoming the essential concern in the postmodern era. Disclosing the commons is taking place in large part as communal activities emerge through self-organizing interactions over information networks and prove far more useful relative to their enclosed counterparts, quickly displacing them. Thus, Wikipedia has wrenched the encyclopedia out of the privatized realm and put it into the commons, disclosing anew the status of accumulated knowledge as an essential component of the human commons.

Education

Education is not to be enclosed in the work of special institutions. Education takes place ubiquitously and continuously throughout all of life. Education is an ongoing emergence of vital capacities taking place as the person, from infancy on, acquires her instantiation of human culture. Persons and groups are the agents of their own education, not the recipients of it.

Emerging, Emergence

Emergence indicates a new or different state taking place through a critical transition, or change of phase, evident in a pattern of complex reciprocal interactions. Numerous forms of emergence take place in the material world as changes of phase occur in the ways reciprocal interactions take place in response to ambient conditions, as when a liquid freezes solid as the surrounding temperature drops. Emergence in life, in the vital cosmos, includes an aspect of control that the agent of the emergence exercises. As a result, the vital changes of phase take place relative to a self-maintaining intentionality, as when a bike rider shifts his direction of fall by steering against the one he senses taking place. And in a universe capable of endless recursion, intentionality, itself, manifests its multifarious forms as successive states of an elemental indeterminacy take place through emergence.

Enclosure

Enclosure is the operational principle defining the modern era. It results when people privilege the category of causality. All statistical thinking requires and act of enclosure that establishes boundaries and then applies various operations to things within the bounded set. Conceptualizing networks constitutes the alternative to statistical reasoning, for the dynamics of interaction conceptually extend to infinity. Enclosure involves projecting postulated boundaries on selected portions of the material and cultural world, differentiating what is inside from what is outside, which makes it easier to simplify and normalize random complexities within the enclosed area, reducing them to a simplified, causal action of one matter on another through a temporal sequence within the enclosed space. As a mode of thinking and acting, enclosure has proved enormously productive (think internal combustion engine, etc.). It has limits, however, especially as it produces potentially disruptive side-effects by ignoring externalities left out of account in attending only through an exclusive reduction to selected elements of what has been enclosed.

Enough

Enough is the balance of negative and positive feedback relative to the purposes that a living form postulates in the quest for selfmaintenance. All forms of control exercised in living life require the judgment of what is enough—neither too much nor too little. Enough is never precisely evident; it is approximated through continuous use of positive and negative feedback. Inability to judge rightly what is enough complicates or overwhelms a living form's capacity for self-maintenance.

Externalities

Externalities are matters not taken into account as a result of the simplifications introduced in thinking and acting on what has been enclosed. Externalities are side-effects not taken into account within enclosure. As a result of leaving externalities out of account, the apparent costs and benefits arising from enclosed activities may differ greatly from those that would be evident were the externalities (e.g., air pollution, resource depletion, climate change, etc.) taken into account.

Feedback, (positive and negative)

In the exercise of control, through feedback, an agent recursively senses what is taking place within reciprocal interactions relative to its postulated goal and uses what it senses to amplify or modulate what is taking place in order to more closely approximate realization of its goal. Feedback enables living forms to engage in self-maintenance, to conduct their lives purposively. And again, the universe being infinitely recursive, feedback serves living forms, not only in their efforts to approximate their purposes, but also to evince new, more suitable, sustainable purposes, as complications with established ones become evident.

Formative justice

Problems of justice arise whenever people cannot have it all, that is, whenever they must choose between competing "goods," positive and negative. Different types of justice arise because people find themselves constrained to choose between different types of goods—public goods with distributive justice, human rights with social justice, enforcement of norms with retributive justice, and the pursuit of potentials with formative justice. Problems of formative justice arise because persons and groups, always facing the future, find more possibilities and potentialities before them than they have the energy, time, ability, and wherewithal to fulfill. They must choose among these and in doing so they are struggling to form their unfolding lives. Conceptions of formative justice advance principles for choosing, in the face of an indeterminate future, among controlling aspirations, for allocating effort towards desired fulfillments,personal and public. Formative justice is difficult because people must make consequential choices, uncertain whether they will prove to be successful and sustainable, and it is important because persons will suffer or enjoy, as the case may be, the lives they attempt thus to form.

Formative Media

We work with an expansive understanding of media, including in it all the different conduits through which we interact with our life circumstances. As McLuhan said[1]—"The medium is the message."—for the affordances, biases, and limitations of media exert great formative influence on our potentials, aspirations, and actions. We seek to understand those workings in order to exert some control and shape our lives as well as we can. In discussing Formative Media here, we aim at such understanding, partly by sharing insight into how and why different media have formative power in our lives, and partly by reflecting on ways, public and personal, to act with and on them to more effectively form and realize our purposes. let's try to couch those reflections in the form of brief narratives, vignettes that exemplify an idea in action.

Freeloading

Freeloading is the proper name for profit, which arises from economic exchanges in which the calculation of costs and benefits does not accurately account for significant externalities.

Fulfill, Fulfillment

Persons and publics pursue fulfillment, seeking to self-maintain the greatest meaning and significance possible in their lived experience. Fulfillment is never an attained condition; it is always a sought objective. Persons and publics seek it as the goal or telos, something not presently secured, of their living effort. Seeking fulfillment, they maintain themselves by postulating objectives and using their inner senses of control to attain those in the flux of their lived experience. Fulfillment denotes a utilitarian norm for living in which attainment of the goal can never be simply measured. Fulfillment is the present pursuit of future possibilities, which continues until death. Throughout life, persons and publics must continually interpret and adapt their pursuit of fulfillment in the midst of the ever-changing experience taking place. Fulfillment is always a dynamic prospect.

Full employment

Full employment indicates the optimum development and use of the capacities with which persons and publics can pursue their fulfillment, seeking the greatest possible meaning or significance in their lived experience. As with fulfillment, full employment is a utilitarian concept subject to interpretation, not simple measurement, for the full use stands relative to ongoing processes that are at once real and indeterminate. That these utilitarian matters are ones of interpretation makes them no less real and no less objective than they would be were they subject to measurement. It simply redefines the way reasonable people must examine their reality and objectivity, namely in deciding how to live, making potential capacities actual, pursuing fulfillment with them, and suffering or enjoying the consequences in the actualities of their lives.

Individual, the individual

Coming soon.

Instruction, Instructional

Instruction causes groups of students to learn pre-selected skills, values, and information as a result of actions by teachers using specially designed materials in enclosed times and places for schooling. Instruction has been the basic method of education developed and used during the modern era. Used in standard ways with almost all children in every part of the world, instruction has become one of the most successful and representative examples of modernity's strategy of enclosure. Instruction creates numerous, extensive educational externalities that impinge on different children in different ways, some highly inimically.

Intend, intending

• This states the intention of APTS, not the idea of intention active through the place. What we call the reflective side, accessed through the left navigation column, concerns the intention, rationale, and procedures of A Place to Study. The site exists for a purpose, to facilitate self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. This page routes users to discussions of that intention, generally, and under two headings, Reasons to study and With a digital pedagogy. People go to most websites for something, to get something. Here they come to do

something, to act with and through the site, engaging in their own self-formation and liberal learning.

Interaction

Interaction takes place between things, states, ideas, and the like that co-exist in time and space in some way. Co-existence means that it is not possible to confine the action of one thing on another with a direction defined by a temporal sequence (time’s arrow), for the coexistence entails simultaneity and reciprocity. With co-existence, action dissolves into interaction. Rather than a state appearing as the caused outcome of something prior, with attention to interactions, it becomes evident simply as something that has taken place in the course of complex interactions through processes of emergence.

Leisure

Yes! Leisure is the basis of culture, especially self-culture. But leisure is protean; it takes many forms; and we all assert it in our life experience. We let our minds wander; we wait, follow routines, passively go along with whatever comes up. Much of the time we find ourselves in circumstances in which the resources for making spontaneous leisure intentionally meaningful in shaping our lives are out of reach. Hence, only the favored few enjoy leisure in a full sense, and many who have it let it slip by unused.

• Develop some — leisure as interstices in constrained time that we intentionally use to shape our life capacities and world.

Life, living form

Life, a term used throughout Enough, denotes a counter-entropic, emergent capacity for self-maintenance in nature. Taking place through primordial indeterminacy, as something that maintains itself by controlling the mechanisms of matter and energy, living form thereafter works to maintain itself by converting matter and energy into meaningful resources that serve its self-postulated, self-sustaining purposes. Life creates itself through its living forms, each instance of which is mortal, but which together interact continuously with themselves and with the material chaos, cumulatively bringing more and more of it within the cosmos of vital experience. Owing to death, life is profoundly recursive and through the recursive work of life, the universe is becoming alive. And in doing so, life imbues the senseless universe with sentience, meaning, and value.

Lived experience

Experience as lived in an immediate present as our life takes place both bodily through somatic interactions and mentally through interactions involving subliminal and conscious awareness. Our lives take place through lived experience, which is the seat of judging, thinking, feeling, doing. "Lived experience" is a redundant term, but it is useful and perhaps necessary, nevertheless, because much of what people call "experience" merely grasps the afterglow of lived experience in ex post facto thought. Lived experience takes place in a vital present facing an indeterminate future, but most discourse about experience pertains to what happened in a determinate past. Education takes place as important capacities emerge in lived experience, with respect to which even the breathless "Ah ha!" is after the fact.

• To live — Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. Do you see the enormous paradox that is wrapped up in this? A being which consists not so much in what it is as in what it is going to be: therefore in what it has not yet become![2] To dwell — To endure — To exist — To flourish — To persevere — To persist — To prosper — To reside — To survive — To thrive
• To live — the ground of everything. Without living, nothing can be said.
• To live has few synonyms, but the verb lends itself to further precision through many adverbs—to live wisely, to live well, to live desperately, to live dangerously, to live securely. . . . See further /What lives? To live:
• To be alive; to possess life, either as an animal or as a plant; to be capable of vital functions.
• To sustain oneself in life, esp. with food; to feed, subsist; to support oneself by means of a source of income.
• To procure the means of subsistence, esp. habitually; to obtain a livelihood, make a living.
• To pass one's life in a specified fashion.
• To speak about living life active verbs work best. The verb "to be" is best used as an auxiliary verb or as a copula to tell us what a named thing is.

Participants

That's us! The list of active participants draws together to community working to create the worksite. It enables participants to know each other and interact more effectively. Their doing so may clarify the changing character of scholarly work as it shifts more and more fully into a digital ethos. Extrinsic incentives to digital scholarship are low and will probably decrease as the digital commons by intention generates little cash flow. What are the satisfactions of digital scholarship, the impediments to it, the constraints on it? Working with few extrinsic constraints and incentives, how does a person want to present their work, for what reasons? Does all this have effects on what a scholar chooses to do and what he seeks to accomplish through in doing it?

Person, persons

Enough: A Pedagogic Speculation refers to persons throughout the text. "Person" stands for the human being whose life consists in lived experience, which is immediate, unique, and integral to the person. A person is a human agent seeking continuously to exercise diverse forms of control while interacting with circumstance. The person is prior to and independent of "the individual," who is an abstraction relative to various forms of "the society," and other collective abstractions. Enough has been written with conscious effort to confine use of "the individual" to mean, not a person, but a single member of an abstract class, the characteristics of whom are not those of a living person, but those of the abstract class. Pupil (also Infant, Child, Student, Adult, Citizen, and many more) These specialized nouns appear throughout the text. They refer to a person, a human being—an infant, child, pupil, student, adult, citizen, and many more. In doing so, they usually refer to a person engaging immediate, unique, and integral lived experience, who happens to share an accidental characteristic such as infancy with other persons. In actuality, the integral person is prior to any class to which she may belong. Thus the person who is a pupil is prior the abstract class of "pupils." Within the text, maintaining the primacy of the person consistently in using these specialized nouns proves unfortunately impossible, for common usage often hypostatizes abstract classes, treating them as prior to and definitive of the people belonging to the abstract class. For instance, in common usage there are beings, pupils, who exist on numerous days of the year from about 8:15 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. and whose lived experience consists only of that much reduced set of behaviors recognized as characteristics of the class, pupil—generally various good and bad learning behaviors, along with some quirks of comportment that facilitate and impede their basic learning behaviors. Readers need to attend to the context to tell whether discussions using terms such as "pupils," concern the lived experience of the persons sharing a characteristic or the stereotypical actions of hypostatized abstractions. Usually if the term is the subject of an active verb, it refers to a living, integral person. However, if the term is in the predicate, particularly of a verb in the passive voice, or an indirect object of prepositional phrases, it is likely to refer to an abstract member of a reified class.

Reciprocity

Coming soon.

Recursing, to recurse

To perform the same sequence of operations on successive results. To repeat a process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage. Actions that verbs indicate recurse, they work recurrently, repeatedly, continuously for a time through successive instances of themselves, shaping their outcome in the light of prior results. Hence "it ain't over 'till it's over." Verbs denote a process, a sequence that unfolds or recurs in time, comprising the recursive reiteration of its constituent operations. People often examine recursion in a rather abstract ways by studying how recursion works in special domains like language, mathematics, computer science, as well as art and music. I think recursion operates fundamentally as a biological phenomenon, a key to embodying cognition, something close to the essential process of life through the cycles of death and reproduction. The world of matter and energy has numerous repetitive phenomena, but they are not recursive. In the physical world some processes maintain themselves for a time. Under the right conditions, they form, then sustain themselves as long as the conditions last, and then they expire. Perhaps life began when some natural cycle of repetition became recursive. Life, living processes, seem to have been self-sustaining physico-chemical process that acquired recursive capability, the power to call forth a new instance of itself before expiring. However the living origins of life came about, life has continued, life continues, and life will continue despite the mortality of its constituent members, and even more, by virtue of it. It has continued to maintain itself through cellular division and eventually through sexual reproduction. Despite the mortality of every instance of life, life itself defies mortality. An interesting literature on recursion has developed, although I think work on various forms of recursion such as computer-based artificial life generally proceed by relying on recursion but saying little about what must take place in the recursive cycles to properly say that the process lives. How should observers distinguish between actions that maintain a process and those indicate the selfmaintenance of the process? Douglas Hofstadter's large but impressionistic work, Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (20 Anniversary edition, 1999) did a great deal to bring thinking about recursion beyond the confines of computer science, mathematics, and linguistics. The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization by Michael C. Corballis (Updated ed., 2014) provides an excellent recent survey emphasizing the development and importance of the recursive power of language. In a highly speculative mood, I wonder whether time itself constitutes an encompassing recursive function by which the universe, natural and vital, continually calls up a new instance of itself? But only time will tell.

Recognition, to recognize

Coming soon.

School, Schooling (also College, University, Higher education, etc.)

Schools, etc., are institutions constructed through techniques of enclosure in order to impart a privileged set of skills, values, and ideas to a class of abstract individuals—pupils, students, youths, undergraduates, etc. Properly speaking, education takes place as capacities for control emerge through the reciprocal interactions integral to a person's lived experience. Common usage, however, abstracts education away from the lived experience of persons and attributes it to the program of causal actions that institutions such as schools carry out with the individuals attending them—most concretely in institutional rhetoric "the whole person," an abstraction perhaps best visualized by Al Capp's lovable shmoos.<a class="anno" href="http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo" title="English Wikipedia article on shmoos"> [ Wen ] </a> With the enclosure of education, it becomes what schools do—schooling. And people need education in order to become good or bad, a condition which eventuates, depending on whether their schooling did what schools do well or poorly. Such ways of thinking are excellent examples of superstition, attributing non-existent causal power to abstractions of the mind.

Self-maintaining

Self-maintaining is the essential activity of all living forms. For a living form, death occurs when self-maintaining activity stops. To live is to maintain oneself against the entropic forces of the mechanistic universe by projecting goals that seem conducive to the maintenance of self and by exerting control in an effort to approximate the purpose. As objective phenomena, capacities for selfmaintaining must emerge from some constitutive indeterminacy of the universe, and all of life’s vast and complicated purposive efforts emerge from innumerable, recursive, and specific activities of self-maintenance that have been taking place over eons through the lives of living forms.

Self-organize

Self-organizing takes place in the process of emergence. Self-organization properly takes place with living forms, for they have a self capable of organizing. But the term often loosely indicates a mechanical transition in the organization of matter and energy taking place in a phase change determined by external causes. Self-organization often refers to the over-all outcome of an emergent process—the self-organization of a flock in flight. Phase change often refers to the specific transformations undergone as some emergent state self-organizes. Thus, an emergent whole self-organizes as its components each go through a change of phase.

Sequence, Sequential

Kant's second analogy was the principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality. In a temporal sequence, a necessary connection between one state and another must be in the form of a causal action in which what comes before determines what follows after. An observer can give a true account of a temporal sequence only ex post facto. With respect to any future state, an observer can only give a probability based on predictions involving a starkly limited number of potential causes.

Simultenaity, simultaneous

Coming soon.

Students, Study

Students are persons actively engaged in the many forms of study in their lived experience. We call them "students" because they study, not because they are "learners." Students are persons; learners are abstractions which mysteriously respond positively to all that teachers try to impart. Study, in its most general sense, comprises the diverse efforts by students to control the educative interactions taking place in their lives. Through these interactions, the student forms her basic capabilities and capacities that facilitate self-maintenance and self-organizing. The many verbs denoting the forms of interaction that take place as a person engages her cultural circumstances indicate the educative capabilities emerging through study. The word-cloud on page 149 depicts a selection of verbs indicating what persons do as studying takes place in their lives. Here it appears as a partial listing of capacities that emerge in the course of study:

acquire, admire, affirm, analyze, answer, appropriate, argue, aspire, assert, associate, assume, calibrate, catalog, challenge, choose, classify, collaborate, comment, compare, complicate, compose, compute, concentrate, confirm, conform, conjecture, consider, consult, contend, contest, contrast, converse, cooperate, copy, correct, create, criticize, daydream, debate, decide, deduce, deliberate, desire, detect, disagree, discourage, discuss, dispute, doodle, doubt, draw, empathize, emulate, enjoy, err, estimate, evaluate, examine, exemplify, experiment, explore, fantasize, feel, finesse, forget, formulate, guess, hint, honor, hope, hypothesize, ignore, illustrate, imagine, imitate, impersonate, improvise, infer, inquire, inspect, interact, invent, inventory, investigate, joke, judge, laugh, learn, list, listen, look, make believe, manage, map, measure, meditate, memorize, mime, monitor, muddle, muse, negate, notice, observe, oppose, order, organize, paint, perceive, perform, picture, plan, play, predict, pretend, prioritize, probe, prove, question, quote, rail, react, read, reason, recite, recognize, record, reflect, refute, regulate, reject, remember, respond, review, scrutinize, search, seek, select, simulate, sing, solve, sort, speak, speculate, study, subordinate, suggest, suppose, sympathize, synthesize, taste, test, theorize, think, tinker, touch, travel, try, tune out, understand, use, value, waver, weigh, wonder, worry, write, and so on.

To keep in touch with the real activity of study, we should daily compose sentences using each of these verbs in the active voice, with "the student" as subject. Double credit for each verb added to the list! Nota Bene In some educational research, the rhetoric of which sometimes affects the text, "students," often in the plural, denotes abstract members of a class, selected characteristics of which are counted and classified, and then subjected to mathematical analyses that reveal the proximate causes making some members of the class effective learners and others hopeless dolts. Generally, we should avoid such usage.

Taking place

Philosophizing would be clearer were thinkers to pay more attention to the meaning of verbs. They are the tools of thought defined by action. Specific verbs fit well with each of Kant's three analogies of experience. The verb "to be" has a special relation to Kant's first analogy of experience, the principle of the persistence of substance, something Parmenides long ago observed. "To become," along with verbs such as "to result from" or "to be caused by," work well with the second analogy on the principle of causality, the prepositional component indicating the relation of causality. The verb construction, "to take place," describes especially well matters considered with the third analogy, the principle of reciprocity. Something emerges, it takes place, it happens, meaning that it manifests its unique temporal and spatial presence in all that co-exists. "To happen" has the element of unexpected emergence embedded in it, for it is derived from the old English word, hap, meaning chance, fortune, or luck—a use still alive in "happy," "happiness," and on the other side of the ledger, in "mishap." Throughout the text, the future authors describe states or conditions as taking place in order to indicate that readers should think about how such a state is emerging from reciprocal interactions between a self, aspiring to achieve control of some sort, and the self's circumstances.

Teachers, Teaching

The person who serves the office of teacher, who is often reduced to an abstraction.In conventional speech, an abstract teacher delivers instruction, imparting specific skills, values, and knowledge, to collections of abstract students—learners, who are ideally receptive unless limited by one or more well-documented psychological, ethnic, economic, and social impairment. The results of work by these abstract teachers are judged good, bad, or indifferent, according to how well some set of indicators reveal whether their abstract students can subsequently manifest traces of the material in which they have been instructed. Any similarity between these abstract teachers and flesh and blood teachers, whose lived experience comprises the whole of their lives, 24/7, 365 days, year in and year out, is purely coincidental. Real teachers, in and out of schools, are ubiquitous in the realm of human interaction. The actual accomplishment of real teachers is not to cause learning; it is to model human capacities for self-maintenance in ways that students can emulate, adapt, or reject. Together, all of us, through the sum of our reciprocal interactions, exemplify the full range of what can take place should our control of emergent capacities be excellent or inept—excellent or inept, not merely in the subjective view of the real teacher, but in the view of those who absorb what the teachers exemplify through interactions with them, experienced as emblematic of human possibilities, good, bad, or indifferent. Everyone on many occasions serves as a real teacher and some persons make it their life calling.

Umwelt

Umwelt, or life-world, has been an important concept in twentieth-century thought. Its usage in Enough resists the tendency to think of an Umwelt as the environment peculiar to a particular being. It is more than an environment abstracted away from a living form. It is existential unity of the living being and the world the being interacts with in its living. Vital (as distinct from the mechanical) "Vital" is an adjective qualifying whatever pertains to the initiation and control of activity by living forms, as distinct from what the external operation of material causes initiates and determines. The familiar contrast between the natural sciences and the human sciences, with the former relying on causal explanation and the latter on cycles of interpretation, is closely related to the distinction advanced here between the mechanical and the vital. In both cases, the contrast illuminates the difference between the causal determination of factual states and the meaningful interpretation of significant happenings. The distinction drawn by the polarity of the mechanical and the vital may be less problematic than that between the natural and the human, however.

1. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1964, 1994) passim, esp. pp. 7-21.
2. José Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy? (Mildred Adams, trans., New York: W. W. Norton, 1960) p. 223. Retrieved from "https://mystudiolo.org/w/index.php?title=My_lingo&oldid=142"

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