Dharma Articles ~ Philosophical Dharma Articles ~ Philosophical
May 2006
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT MODELS
In the Introducing Buddhism course last term (Feb/Mar 2006) an interesting discussion ensued after one of the people attending asked a question about the Buddhist view of human development, compared say to conventional Western psychological models, such as, the well known one of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The discussion inspired me to write this article on the topic. Piaget's model has been around quite a while and often underpins approaches to educational curricula in the West. It basically has four stages in it:
I can remember from my own experience that the aim in many high school curricula was to bring students to the fourth stage, which I recall was usually referred to as the stage of formal, logical operations. Many reports on high school curricula used to lament the fact that many, if not most, high school students failed to attain this level. The reasons for this I discovered later in my academic career were largely due to emotional immaturity. This point I'll return to later as it does overlap with the Buddhist attitude to education.
However, I think the first point that needs to be made is that this Western model of growth, like Western culture in general, sees the pinnacle of human development overwhelmingly as full intellectual development. This is not the point of view of Buddhism. As one author puts it in the very forthright manner of Zen Buddhism (Izutsu, 1977): "The classical Western philosophy going back to Aristotle elaborates and defines this common-sense image of man as 'rational animal'. The image of Man peculiar to Zen Buddhism emerges exactly when such a common-sense image of man, be it philosophical or pre-philosophical, is smashed to pieces. The ordinary image of man on which our daily life is based, and on which our social life is carried out, does not, according to the typically Zen conception, represent the true reality of Man" (2) .
It seems to me one could usefully elaborate a threefold Buddhist model of human development that subsumes the Piagetian stages and then goes a stage further. One of the paradoxes of the human position from a Buddhist point of view is that we perceive ourselves to be a discretely existing entity independent of the natural environment and the human beings surrounding us. The seeming contradiction that defines this paradox is that we are demonstrably NOT separate from that 'surrounding' environment (the word "surrounding" already implies it is separate from us). These days in the West we don't have to prove this anymore - the 'New Sciences' of Quantum Physics and Ecology have done this for us - and most people, at least at an intellectual level, can accept that we are not really separate (it is apparent rather than real).Carrying out our lives on the basis of a MIS-perception that we are, however, is the root cause of our suffering according to Buddhism and the only way to overcome that suffering fully is to gain an experiential (that is, non-intellectual) Insight into the reality of our situation, which dawns completely with Enlightenment.
So stage 1 of the Buddhist human development model could be the same as Piaget's stage 1. In this stage the infant can not separate itself out from the environment but instead experiences it, if I recall Piaget's own words, as a "blooming, buzzing confusion". It is in Piaget's stage 2 that the infant is socialized into seeing itself as a separately existing entity which it learns to label as "I" and "me". Throughout these early stages the human infant learns to perceive the world as not only separate from him/her but also consisting of a myriad of separate 'objects', all with neat separate labels. It is fascinating to study the way this happens according to perception psychology; and language and labeling play a major role in this process of 'fragmenting' the world. By Piaget's stages 3 and 4 the human child has learnt to see itself as a completely, separately existing entity and can actually internally retreat from the world into his or her own mind and imagine and reason and remember, abstractly, with the images taken from the perceptual world at the sensorimotor stage (literally motoring around on all fours and sensing) and laid down in its memory in the developing brain.The Latin roots of the word "abstract" literally mean "taken from" and by being able to create an inner mental world of memories, thoughts and images, and experiencing this as 'internal', confirms our experience of existing separately from an 'external' environment. We are able to 'abstract' or take oursleves away from the 'external' environment.
At the stage of formal logical operations we should be able to reason about the world and in fact, when we reason about the world we are never more separate from it, because there is the 'Reasoner' and 'what it is reasoning about'. Intellectuality and reason only 'work' on the basis of this fundamental bifurcation or split. They also can only work by using concepts and thoughts and images, which enables reasoning to analyze by a process of dividing, separating and fragmenting. Now these abilities to separate out and reason are our defining characteristics as human beings, and this is where the discussion (referred to above) began, when it was posed by a member of the class that this was seen as the pinnacle of development by Western psychological models, such as, Piaget's. A common misunderstandings about Buddhism in the West is that it derides the intellect. I think this is because some of the ealiest encounters with Asian Buddhism, when it really started to come into the West in the 1960s, were with Zen Buddhism, which does strongly attack intellectuality as interfering with intuitive insight.
But in reality the intellect is seen as a valid guiding principle of the mind and essential to spiritual development. For example, how can you chose to meditate without it? How can you study and so on? From a Buddhist point of view, its use is entirely valid, as long as it is used with an awareness of its limitations - for example, it cannot be used to intuit the 'whole' or 'non-separation' because it works by separating out and fragmenting. In a sense in the East this non-intellectual mind has always been known, whereas in the West the intellect, from about the 17th century on, has been reified or elevated to the status of being the 'only' way of comprehending through the mind. Many in the West, in my experience, cannot conceive of the mind without thought and yet in Buddhism out of eight levels of meditative absorption (known as jhanas in Pali or dhyana in Sanskrit) only the first has thought present in it.
So Buddhism considers there to be another higher stage than Piaget's stage 4, also accessible to human beings, according to Govinda (1969), known as " ... bodhi or illumination ... and is based on meditation (bhavana), the intuitive state of consciousness (jhana), which means 'the identity of the mind knowing witht he object known' (appana bhavan) (3)." A Buddhist model of human development therefore could be:
1. Subjective immersion - the infant can't separate itself from the environment (e.g., the mother) - Piaget's stage 1.
2. Experience of separation and selfhood - beginning in Piaget's stage 2, although there are still plenty experiences of spontaneous immersion (dhyanas?), culminating in experiencing oneself as completely separated out, an intellectual being, by stage 4, and hardly capable anymore of immersion.
3. Intuitive experience of Unity through dhyanas - gaining of Insight so that the ability to 'separate out' and 'experience unity' can coexist.
The Buddha Dharma and other Eastern 'ways' thus resolve the paradox of our experience of 'seeming-to-be-separate' correctly by referring to it as a delusion or illusion (albeit a useful one if used within its limitations), and by going into higher, intuitive states of consciousness through meditation to gain insight into the reality of our non-separation. Whereas in the West, till fairly recently, the Modern worldview that developed from Rennaissance times on, and reached its zenith in the so called 'Age of Reason', did not resolve our paradoxical position correctly. Instead it endorsed the deluded view as the correct one - that we are separate from our environment and furthermore, superior to it, and that it is our (God-given) right to exploit it for our own ends. The result has been the destruction of the environment over the last few centuries on a scale never experienced before in human history, and the backfiring on us as a result, which, of course, only proves we are not separate from it in the first place. This worldview also supported the idea that the intellect was supreme and the 'only' way of gaining valid knowledge. As a result the nature of intuition in gaining knowledge has been denigrated, and is spoken of these days in rather 'wooly' terms, such as, a 'gut reaction' or something women are supposed to have more of than men (4).
So becoming an intellectual being, a 'rational animal', is not the end of the story regarding human development from a Buddhist perspective. There is nothing 'wrong' with being able to experience ourselves as a separate self, and to be rational; in fact as mentioned above, 'self'-growth is not possible without it. However problems start, from a Buddhist point of view, when we objectify that self and really believe that it exists as a permanent, self-subsistent, separate object. At the highest stage of the Buddhist development model the 'Enlightened' being experiences the same empirical world of separate objects as you and me; accept such a person does not see them exactly as you and me, because their seeming separation has been informed with a 'realisation' of their non-separation. In such a being duality and non-duality coexist and the paradoxes of our experience of the world have been correctly and successfully resolved.This is a higher stage than the intellectual/empirical one. According to Izutsu such a person " ... is not an ordinary 'man' as we represent him at the level of common-sense thinking, for he is a Man who has come back to this world of phenomena from the dimension of absolute Reality. His is a two-dimensional personality. He, as a most concrete individual, living among the concretely existing things, does embody something supra-individual. He is an individual who is supra-individual - two persons fused into a perfect unity of one single person." (5)
One cost of overly emphasising intellectual development in our Western culture, including our approach to high school education, is that we become cut off from, or alienated from, our emotions - we are emotionally immature. It is only now, thanks in part to the contemporary writer on this subject, Daniel Goleman (who happens to be Buddhist) and his best-selling book (and now concept) entitled "Emotional Intelligence", that this defect in our approach to education is being addressed. Buddhism has always emphasised the balance of emotion and reason in our lives. It seems, as stated at the beginning of this article that, rather ironically, one reason our high school students don't fully successfully realise Piaget's 4th stage is because they're emotionally immature. It seems intellectual intelligence needs to be supported by emotional intelligence! For example, we learn more about something if we are emotionally engaged or enthusiastic about it or simply respect it. The dangers of fanatacism and fundamentalism are that they are based on 'blind belief' - a highly irrational but powerfully emotional state. From a Buddhist point of view it is entirely possible to have strong emotions, like confidence, that is supported by rational analysis and empirical testing. Surely that's what a good education is all about - developing a critical awareness of the cultural conditioning that creates our 'taken-for-granted' beliefs, views,opininons, values and attitudes, accompanied by attendant emotions such as humility, tolerance, generosity and compassion.
Notes and References
1. Source: www.funderstanding.com/piaget.cfm
2. Izutsu, 1977, Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism,Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, p. 4
3. Govinda, Lama Anagarika, 1969, The Psychologicak Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy, p. 41
4. Despite the fact that we still have very clear definitions in our English languge dictionaries of intuition being, for example, "direct knowledge gained, unmediated by the intellect", which implies to me that we must have understood what intuition is at some point in our cultural history more clearly than we do now.
5. Izutsu, ibid., p.7.
