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Summary of Resulting Thoughts
Through four years of scrambling ideas and scribbling thoughts and hoping that chaos would assemble itself into good form, a sense of coherence emerged in my thinking. Although my senior project is the most formal product of my major, there are several other related ideas that I would like to comment on.
Web-like thinking:
Throughout my website, I have attempted to illustrate and provide theoretical support for a web-like representation of thought (see Worksweb or Classweb). My motivation for this is found in a common question I am asked about my major: If rationality itself is contingent on our society's discourses (as is argued by Foucault in The Discourse on Language or in Habermas' argument for "communicative rationality"), do other models of rationality exist? This question is sometimes intended as a critique, in much the same way it is posed to radical feminists, because it is extremely hard to conceive of systems of rationality other than our own. Nonetheless, I wanted to offer my own attempt at describing an alternative. Web-like thinking and representation are not radically different from linear rationality, especially considering they contain linear text within elements of the web, though the emphasis on connections and the possibility self-guided selection of content do present substantial modifications.
Shadowing critique of linear rationality:
The previous comment hints at a deeper criticism of linear rationality. Through studying the postmodern epistemology implicit to discourse analysis, I became curious about some of my assumptions about rationality, particularly the linearity of rationality. The emphasis on linear reason is an inherited characteristic from our nearly exclusive use of the text as our choice method of academic exchange. Other methods exist (besides web-like representation), such as the narrative or other artistic representations. There are many benefits to linear reading, such as clarity or brevity, but I cannot ignore my personal experience of the pedagogical, creative, and theoretical benefits to web-based thinking that have been common throughout my independent major.
Postmodern-progressive, personal consolation:
There was a stage I reached in my education where I knew without doubt that what I think would dramatically affect my personal happiness. Along with many other people, the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, marked the beginning of this stage. Ishmael presents a series of alternative visions of the world, myths, that criticize our most deeply held societal beliefs, particularly humankind's dominance over the natural world. While the alternative visions themselves are not ideal solutions, Quinn successfully illustrates the contingent nature of our own society's myths or "truths," engendering a sense of postmodernism within the reader.
Unfortunately, this postmodernism leads many to absolute relativism, which is a troublesome view for anyone who wants to change the world. If you cannot base your beliefs on some “truth,” it is nearly impossible to hold beliefs firm enough to allow for activism within a social movement like environmentalism. I have observed that progressive students of this sort often find that relativism leaves them without motivation for changing the world.
The results of my major led me towards a “truth” upon which I could base my desire to be involved in political action and civic involvement. I found that truth constructed from the ideal speech situation could act as truth in itself. It is worth quoting a passage from the epistemology section of my senior project:
“Ecosystems exist as constructions of our environmental discourse. Vis-à-vis Habermas’ theory, we can say that to the extent our discourse resembles the ideal speech situation, we can meaningfully speak of ecosystems as a “true” conception of the environment. We can say that ecosystems are a right conception to the extent that communicatively rational speakers agree they are a useful category for making sense of the environment. If environmental scientists present new information that leads our discourse to a different conception of the environment, then our truth about ecosystems has changed.”
Though wordy, this passage treats the “truth” of ecosystems in a way that could be used for many different ideas and constructions. For me, this type of truth has become a solid base of motivation, one that corrects the incomplete postmodernism I inherited from Ishmael.
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