An Integrative Habit of Mind: John Henry Newman on the Path to Wisdom

3—A Connected View

—— Chapter Three —— A connected View 6 “every person who is actually absorbed in any given form of experience is by the very absorption committed to the opinion that no other form is valid, that his form is the only one adequate to the comprehension of reality. Hence arise discords; for when artists and scientists, who after all do inhabit a common world of fact, meet and discuss their aims, each is apt to accuse the other of wasting his life on a world of illusions.” —robin G. collingwood, Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge “Whatever else the task of education, it should not drive the intellect and the imagination of students into channels that seem to become narrower as our century grows older; consequently, it should do everything possible to make it easier for those engaged in one discipline to understand the methods, achievements, hopes, ambitions, frustrations, the intellectual and emotional processes, of those working in other fields.” —isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas in unearthing and developing themes from select texts in the corpus of newman’s writings, i have argued thus far that the pursuit of wisdom, grounded in and shaped by the goal of cultivating an integrative habit of mind, gives greater attention to the conditions under which human cognition actually works and to the role that evaluative qualities play in regulating epistemic reflection and conduct. As a fundamental motivation 64 A N I N T E G R AT I V E H A b I T o f M I N d and activity, an integrative habit of mind does not stipulate that cognitive agents ought to thin out or bracket their thick commitments before engaging in conversation about the issues at hand. At the same time, to highlight the thick character of epistemic reflection and conduct does not mean insulating one’s claims from other perspectives. in fact, broadening one’s horizons is indispensable to the processes of acquiring greater levels of understanding and of learning to make apt judgments about the relevant issues. 1 An emphasis of this sort also involves seeing the unreflective and reflective aspects of human cognition as a matter of proper fit. consequently, providing a more adequate understanding of the tensile relationship between the thick and the thin is crucial to the pursuit of wisdom. in this chapter i hone the focus a bit and argue that an additional feature of an integrative habit of mind involves forming a connected view. More specifically, i argue that forming, sustaining, and embodying a connected view is fundamental to the pursuit of wisdom within a university context. in this regard, i link newman’s notion of a connected view in The Idea of a University and the ongoing task of formulating an adequate philosophy of education for our time. in particular, i offer some suggestions concerning the kind of teachers and researchers that my proposal of a connected view envisions within a university setting. i include my own experiences and thick commitments as a graduate professor of theology and philosophy while drawing insights from different publics (e.g., university and society) and fields of knowledge (e.g., history, philosophy of education, cognitive science, ethics, religion, and epistemology). The scope of my proposal includes teaching and research, even though i do not address in detail the question of how these activities intersect with one another in the context of a university. 2 rather, i argue that those entrusted with teaching and research responsibilities ought to pay greater attention not simply to state-of-the-art techniques and learning outcomes but, rather, to the intellectual formation of persons. 3 such an emphasis requires that we revisit our understanding of (1) the aims and scope of intellectual formation in a university environment, (2) our existing teaching and research practices, and (3) our presuppositions about what it means to realize and carry out an integrative habit of mind within our current educational setting. As a result, in this chapter i first argue that a central task of the educational process, in newmanian terms, entails acquiring a connected view. A Connected View 65 The correlative possibility between newman’s context and our own lies in his insistence on the importance of forming in learners a connected view and on the significance of pedagogical exemplars for shaping educational practices within a university context, not necessarily in his fuller vision of what a university ought to...