Dialectical education is an instrument of human liberation.(16) In order for it to be effective as such it must be grounded in accurate knowledge of the human condition both in ignorance and in enlightenment, and it must utilize a precise method which is adequate to the purpose.

    The method of Dialectic can best be seen in operation in the Dialogues of Plato. (17) However, fairly recent investigation into the modes of living and thinking in classical Greece have revealed that much of history's commentaries on Dialectic and other aspects of ancient culture may have been based on a misconception. Bruno Snell (18) points out that the ancients had no conception of mind or will as we have come to know these through centuries of abstracting intellect. Jacob Klein (19) has demonstrated that the whole modern, symbolic mode of conceptualization is radically different from the ancient mode. The result is that we tend to look at the Philosophy and culture of the ancient Greeks as if they perceived things in much the same way as we do, and this viewpoint leads to a gross distortion in our understanding of the Greeks and therefore also of our cultural sources.

    The same is true of our understanding of Dialectic. There has been an abstracting tendency in the whole of culture which, while it has itself been an outgrowth of ancient Philosophy and lead to many technological marvels in the modern world, has lost the immediate concerns and real human content of the original dialectical intent. This development parallels the rise of a highly abstract technological culture and the degradation of human worth and existence. Only a more complete and less abstract understanding of the sources of our traditions and their dialectical essence, can begin to again set aright the course of our cultural life.

    A beginning toward this type of understanding of Dialectic exists in the ''functional interpretation" of Plato. (20) There, Plato's Dialogues are viewed more as dramas (21) and the dialectical method of Philosophy more as a dynamic process. According to Klein:


    The terms of the dialectical philosophy are used in an active, doing sense rather than in a static sense. For instance, a key term, episteme, is taken to mean knowing rather than the more rigid and determined word ''knowledge."

    This is in keeping with the re-interpretation of ancient modes of knowing mentioned earlier. It abolishes the notion of Plato being an idealist who originated a mind/body dualism. Such categories were not even in the range of possibility for the ancient modes of awareness and thought.
   
    From this viewpoint it is possible to see that dialectical philosophy is not a theoretical construct, but a form of doing that can only really be understood in the doing of it.

"It seems that it is not enough to talk about the dramatic character of Platonic dialogues "from the outside." We have to play our role in them, too. We have to be serious about the contention that a Platonic dialogue, being indeed an "imitation of Socrates," actually continues Socrates' work. This again is by no means a novel view. There is immediate plausibility to it. And yet its consequences are hardly ever accepted. These are that we, the readers, are being implicitly questioned and examined, that we have to weigh Socrates' irony that we are compelled to admit to ourselves our ignorance, that it is up to us to get out of the impasse and to reach a conclusion, if it is reachable at all. We are one of the elements of the dialogue and perhaps the most important one." (23)

    The question about what dialectical philosophy is and what its value is, then, is a question of method rather than of theory, of action and doing rather than of merely interpretation. It is not my purpose, therefore, in this paper, to give a theoretical justification of the method I present, an explanation of its philosophical presuppositions, or an elaboration of its consequences. What I want to do is simply to operationally define a method or discipline that can be effectively used as an instrument of liberal, or liberating, education. I see this discipline as at the heart of liberal education and I believe that the tradition of critical philosophical inquiry attests to this.

    So, defining this method in usable terms is justification in itself for this investigation and should be taken as the criterion for its validity. The effects and consequences of the method will have to be seen in practice; that is the nature of any experiential inquiry, and is certainly the case for Dialectic as I am defining it here as functional, experiential learning. As a theory/praxis, the method that I am articulating derives from and is inherently directed back into human action. As theory, then, I can only hope that it may clarify something of what we are already doing in practice and bring that into fuller awareness.

    That ''doing'' is learning. My viewpoint is that true learning is dialectical, and that Dialectic is functional and experiential. I think that this viewpoint is useful for us in our practice of the learning that we are already doing; it can give clarity, precision and power to the practice by allowing us to creatively form and direct its action. This is its only real worth. If it does in fact lead us to be able to do so, this would be its only proof.


The Dialectical Liberal Arts

   The liberal arts are the specific, practical instruments of method which make the dialectical activity work. They are not subject matters or content areas of any field of learning, or even skill disciplines, as some people have suggested. They are the particular method of the ongoing process of dialectical learning, which is the direct experiential inquiry into nature and self whereby Transcendental Consciousness is allowed to come out, influence and transform the whole field of the contents of  consciousness. As such, they constitute and comprise the conventions of culture. In doing this, the liberal arts are instruments of the natural dialectic in culture and in self, mediating the tension between conventional consciousness and creative intelligence, as well as healing alienated consciousness through the return to the source of pure Consciousness and a radical, creative transformation of the very structure of experiencing and action. It is only on the basis of this return to the source (in transcendental pure Consciousness) that the liberal arts have their dialectical force and deepest meaning.

    It has been a common mistake, due to ignorance of transcendental Consciousness and its easy attainment in direct experiencing, that some of these arts have been seen as means to gain that experience, for instance through intellectual discrimination trying to reach the basic constituents of consciousness. It is true that the liberal arts are disciplines of awareness, but they start from awareness and move into the field of action, and are not means for attaining it. No action can attain transcendental Consciousness, only systematic non-action,  and the paradoxical non-action action of Dialectic that will be brought out in this paper as we go along. Much frustration has resulted from this ignorance, and the liberal arts have thereby been misconstrued, misused, and vitiated. In the Western tradition this stems from an abstracting theological interpretation of Being, having lost touch with the nature of Being as pure Consciousness at the very source of experiencing awareness.

    Experiential inquiry into the whole field of nature and existence, based on pure Consciousness as Being or the ground of existence, leads to spiritual enlightenment, which is the ultimate human happiness and purpose for living. The dialectical liberal arts in this context are the means to enter into this inquiry and thereby attain this enlightenment. Used in this way and for this purpose they bring about a thorough and complete transformation of individual consciousness and the cultural forms that arise out of this as the contents of consciousness. The result is personal, social and cultural liberation.

    To achieve this, the first task must be a knowing and functioning within ourselves that is adequate to the classical modes of awareness and intelligence that made a functional dialectical learning possible in the first place. This means that we must find ways of recovering modes of learning and perceiving that do not get entangled in the illusions of mind/body dualism; we must frame these understandings within a dynamic, interactional perspective that is capable of maintaining the paradoxical tension that is typical of the dialectical process, and not reduce dialectical process unity to oppositional dualisms, or to static monism; we must have a process of learning that encompasses the entire range of human action and experiencing, while remaining simple and central to the most important human concerns. The terms, the drama, and the intents of the Socratic Dialectic then become the guidelines for drawing this together into an intelligible order that can serve as the dialectical method we are looking for.

    We can begin by looking at Plato. A dramatic, functional reading of Plato shows that there are certain primary concerns of the whole endeavor of his philosophizing. These must be taken into account in any investigation of dialectical method. A few of the important concerns that are pertinent to the present inquiry are: that Dialectic is a particular type of learning process; that its main lines of inquiry are moral (i.e. related to the right use of human abilities); that it always takes place in a social, relational context; and that the terms of the inquiry always relate back to transcendental references (i.e. the ideas of the good, of truth, of beauty, etc.)

    However, this investigation cannot be limited to looking at Plato's Dialoques, even though these are the clearest and best exemplars of dialectical teaching and learning, and though we may now have perspectives from which to look at them. To merely do this would be another job of interpretation, and we are looking beyond interpretation to the essential action.

    Therefore, we will also be looking at some important learning disciplines which are founded on the ideas of "physiological experiencing," "storying," and "intellectual art." These three, broadly speaking, can be taken to constitute the liberal arts in their functional dialectical sense and use.

Functional Learning

    The most fundamental perspective that runs through all the functional learning disciplines is that the functional learning process involves the whole psycho-physical structure of the person. There is nothing that happens mentally that is not also a physical event; there is nothing that happens physically that is not a form of mental action (although, since the time of Freud we know that much of this activity is unconscious.)

    Functional learning, therefore, is a physiological learning process. [24] The living, experiencing body (soma) is the structure of our living, acting, experiencing and learning. We, as conscious, aware beings do not merely have a body; we exist and create our experience and our world as a living body process. [25] Human process is entirely at one with natural process (physis) and the laws of nature that govern this. Learning, then, like all living, is a process of physical experiencing. Moreover, functional learning is a specific kind of physical experiencing. We can see what kind of experiencing it is by looking at the way it works.

    I do not wish to argue that the physical experiential is the only dimension of Dialectic, but I do want to say that it is a fundamental dimension, in which the other dimensions are already implicit, and without which there would be no dynamic movement of learning in the functional experiential sense. The dimensions of rhetoric, argumentation, myth-making, storying; of theorizing, philosophizing, and intellectual art rest on the basic forms of the process of experiencing that are to be located specifically on the physical level. While these others are essential to that process, they do not in themselves constitute dialectical learning. It is what happens in the experiencing that makes for Dialectic, and this is best explored on the direct physiological level.

Particular characteristics of the functional learning process to be presented here are the following:

1. It is a process of changing habits of action on the functional, experiential level, i.e. on the level of self-experiencing prior to behavior or habit, that organizes the whole self for the performance of an action. This is not mere behavior change (substituting one habit or pattern for another) but a real experiential shift in the intents, directions and the organizing mental/emotional sets that precede action.

    This reorganization of experiential life can take the form of repatterning body movement, reframing the mental/emotional sets that guide action, revisioning the ideas that trigger bodily responses and /or emotional reaction patterns, redefining a situation, redirecting energies, impulses, intentions or tendencies, or re-interpreting the context of an experience to give it a different quality or emotional charge. These are all forms of restructuring experience so that a new way of responding is created rather than merely a new response, and this gives er freedom and richness of action and experiencing.

2. It is functional. This means that the learning takes place within (not just by) doing. It also means that it deals directly with human "functions." A function is a whole pattern of action that reveals an internal feeling connection by which we orient ourselves in one way or another in the world. Every action that we perform has components of sensing, moving, feeling, thinking and self-image. A function is the coordination of all of these within the action. It is a sign of the orderly and intelligent direction of the action. Functional learning acts directly on this level.

3. It is experiential. The process itself is based on and embedded in immediate experiencing. Even in cognitive aspects of the process, the direction is toward direct experiencing.

4. It is somatic. "Somatic" comes form the Greek word soma, meaning body, but not body as object or thing but the human body as a living, feeling, aware process. In this sense, the human soma includes all aspects of what it is to be human; it is the location of all our living, doing, feeling, thinking and becoming. All our behavior is bodily action in some form. The learning process is thereby not just vaguely experiential but it is specifically somatic experiencing.

5. It is teleological. This means that it works directly and specifically with the motives, intents and deep-feeling life-purposes (telos) from which actions are directed and around which functions are organized. The learning process reaches toward this level and uses it as the seed impulse for functional and structural reorganization of experiencing.

6. It is erotic. This means that it follows the natural tendency of the primary somatic life process to be guided and motivated by the principle of love, attraction, and pleasure. Life-purposes (telos) flow from basic feeling needs and these are externalized as interest, movement toward, and pleasure through satisfaction. Using this as a principle, the learning process is pleasurable, fun and bodily (sensually) satisfying. There is a sense of
experiential opening that accompanies the learning, and this motivates the process in a spontaneous, natural way.

7. It is dialectical, meaning that it is a dynamic interactional process that honors and plays with the paradoxical tensions of seeming opposites within the complex unity of the flow of experiencing. It does not reduce experience to either a dualism of mind and body, or body and soul, or existence and Being, or whatever, or to an abstractmonism in which everything is the same. Rather, it stays with the practical drama of a complex, evolving unity of process. There is constant play and interaction between teacher and student; conscious mind and unconscious mind; creative impulse and convention; individual and society; eros and logos; symbol and experience, etc. etc.

8. It is a process of individuation, here meaning self-knowing through somatic self-experiencing for the purposes of self-direction and self-creation in action.

9. It is moral, in that it is directly concerned with the necessary components of right action, whatever that might be found to be. In this case, the morality is that of self-knowing, the coordination of being and doing, the alignment of need, purpose, intention, goal, function and action to produce somatic balance, well-being, pleasure and happiness.

10. It taps unconscious learning processes by accessing the natural organic intelligence of the whole soma on an experiencing level below the conscious thinking mind, and creates a bridge of communication between the conscious mind and the unconscious primary somatic process that governs the autonomic functions and responses of the organism. These unconscious learning processes are the basis for easy reorganization of experiential life below the level of habit patterns and emotional resistances.

     Tapping into this leads to an effortless flow of intelligent, autonomic direction of action into expression, without the interferences of self-doubt, self-criticism and judgment, or of self-consciousness generally. This allows the easy coordination of being and doing which makes for effective and fulfilling right action.

11. Learning takes place on the basis of awareness, not trying or effort. It is a process of allowing to happen (based on access to the unconscious, autonomic intelligence) rather than of making happen. The state of allowing awareness is variously described as absorptive attention, open-focus awareness, relaxed concentration, or restful alertness.

    It is the somatic state of consciousness in which the natural somatic intelligence operates spontaneously with least interference. The whole process is automatic when simply allowed to happen. In a sense it is a process that cannot be learned because it is already there and need only be accessed.

12. It is direct and simple.

13. It is specifically a learning discipline concerned with life, experience, human needs and purposes. Some of its insights and method are similar to those of certain approaches in psychotherapy only because that field has studied and worked with the living human process much more than education in general has, but this learning process is essentially different from and is not in any way a form of therapy or a healing practice.

    Neither is it psychological education or behavior therapy or bodily therapy. Its scope is much broader and at the same time simpler than any of these. Its purpose is to learn mastery in the art of living by actively experiencing your own living somatic process. In this context, mastery comes without reference to dysfunction or disease.

14. It is a dynamic ongoing process and not a technique or a set method. Its application is multidimensional and specific to each situation and to each person. All aspects and levels of the experiencing process are brought into play or considered in every act of learning, for the coordination of inner and outer action, although starting points or avenues of access may widely vary from one situation to another. It is possible to primarily emphasize body movement at one time, the mental/emotional component at another time, the cognitive at still another time, or any other element or all of them together simultaneously or in series. In any case, the learning process itself is generally the same: the reorganizing and redirecting of experiential life.

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