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Educational Inequalities

While there is considerable literature on social inequality and education,

there is little recent work which explores notions of difference and diversity
in relation to “race”, class and gender. This edited text aims to bring together
researchers in the field of education located across many international con-
texts such as the UK, Australia, USA, New Zealand and Europe. Contribu-
tors investigate the ways in which dominant perspectives on “difference”,
intersectionality and institutional structures underpin and reinforce edu-
cational inequality in schools and higher education. They emphasize the
importance of international perspectives and innovative methodological
approaches to examining these areas, and seek to locate the dimensions of
difference within recent theoretical discourses, with an emphasis on “race”,
class and gender as key categories of analysis.

Kalwant Bhopal is Reader in Education and Director of Postgraduate

Research Degrees at the University of Southampton, School of Education.
She has recently edited Intersectionality and Race in Education (with John
Preston, Routledge 2012) and is currently researching aspects of rural rac-
ism in primary schools in England.

Uvanney Maylor is Professor of Education and Director of the Institute for

Research in Education at the University of Bedfordshire. She is currently
writing a text for Routledge entitled Teacher Training and the Education
of Black Children: Bringing Color into Difference.
Routledge Research in Education

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

73 Commitment, Character, and 80 The Politics of Teacher
Citizenship Professional Development
Religious Education in Liberal Policy, Research and Practice
Democracy Ian Hardy
Edited by Hanan A. Alexander
and Ayman K. Agbaria 81 Working-Class Minority
Students’ Routes to
74 Adolescent Literacies in a Higher Education
Multicultural Context Roberta Espinoza
Edited by Alister Cumming
82 Education, Indigenous
75 Participation, Facilitation, Knowledges, and
and Mediation Development in the
Children and Young People in Global South
Their Social Contexts Contesting Knowledges for a
Edited by Claudio Baraldi Sustainable Future
and Vittorio Iervese Anders Breidlid

76 The Politics of Knowledge in 83 Teacher Development in

Education
Elizabeth Rata
77 Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and
Human Development
Exploring Time, Mediation and
Collectivity in Contemporary
Schools
Michalis Kontopodis
78 Resourcing Early Learners
New Networks, New Actors
Sue Nichols, Jennifer Rowsell,
Helen Nixon and Sophia
Rainbird
79 Educating for Peace in a Time
of “Permanent War”
Are Schools Part of the Solution
or the Problem?
Edited by Paul R. Carr
and Brad J. Porfilio
Higher Education
Existing Programs, Program
Impact, and Future Trends
Edited by Eszter Simon
and Gabriela Pleschová
84 Virtual Literacies
Interactive Spaces for Children
and Young People
Edited by Guy Merchant,
Julia Gillen, Jackie Marsh
and Julia Davies
85 Geography and Social Justice
in the Classroom
Edited by Todd W. Kenreich
86 Diversity, Intercultural
Encounters, and Education
Edited by Susana Gonçalves
and Markus A. Carpenter
87 The Role of Participants in
Education Research
Ethics, Epistemologies,
and Methods
Edited by Warren Midgley,
Patrick Alan Danaher
and Margaret Baguley
88 Care in Education
Teaching with Understanding
and Compassion
Sandra Wilde
89 Family, Community, and
Higher Education
Edited by Toby S. Jenkins
90 Rethinking School Bullying
Dominance, Identity and
School Culture
Ronald B. Jacobson
91 Language, Literacy, and
Pedagogy in Postindustrial
Societies
The Case of Black Academic
Underachievement
Paul C. Mocombe
and Carol Tomlin
92 Education for Civic and
Political Participation
A Critical Approach
Edited by Reinhold Hedtke
and Tatjana Zimenkova
93 Language Teaching Through
the Ages
Garon Wheeler
94 Refugees, Immigrants, and
Education in the Global South
Lives in Motion
Edited by Lesley Bartlett
and Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher
95 The Resegregation of Schools
Education and Race in the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by Jamel K. Donnor
and Adrienne D. Dixson
96 Autobiographical Writing and
Identity in EFL Education
Shizhou Yang
97 Online Learning and
Community Cohesion
Linking Schools
Roger Austin and William Hunter
98 Language Teachers and
Teaching
Global Perspectives, Local
Initiatives
Edited by Selim Ben Said
and Lawrence Jun Zhang
99 Towards Methodologically
Inclusive Research Syntheses
Expanding Possibilities
Harsh Suri
100 Raising Literacy Achievement
in High-Poverty Schools
An Evidence-Based Approach
Eithne Kennedy
101 Learning and Collective
Creativity
Activity-Theoretical and
Sociocultural Studies
Annalisa Sannino and Viv Ellis
102 Educational Inequalities
Difference and Diversity
in Schools and Higher
Education
Edited by Kalwant Bhopal and
Uvanney Maylor
This page intentionally left blank
Educational Inequalities
Difference and Diversity in Schools and
Higher Education

Edited by Kalwant Bhopal

and Uvanney Maylor

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Educational inequalities : difference and diversity in schools and higher
education / edited by Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor.
pages cm. — (Routledge research in education ; 102)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Educational equalization—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Education,
Higher—Social aspects—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Educational
change—Cross-cultural studies. 4. Educational attainment—Cross-cultural
studies. I. Bhopal, Kalwant. II. Maylor, Uvanney.
LC213.E44 2013
379.2'6—dc23
2013012622
ISBN13: 978-0-415-53998-2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-315-88619-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

1 Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education:

An Introduction 1
KALWANT BHOPAL AND UVANNEY MAYLOR

PART I
Difference, Diversity and Inclusion

2 Pale/Ontology: The Status of Whiteness in Education 13

ZEUS LEONARDO

3 How Fair Is Britain? Addressing ‘Race’ and Education

Inequalities—Towards a Socially Just Education System in the
Twenty-First Century 31
GILL CROZIER

4 Black Academic Success: What’s Changed? 47

JASMINE RHAMIE

5 The Intersections of Ethnicity, Gender, Social Class and an

Itinerant Lifestyle: Deconstructing Teachers’ Narratives and
Thinking about the Possibilities for Transformative Action 65
ROBYN HENDERSON

PART II
Understanding Difference: Policy and Practice in Education

6 Negotiating Achievement: Students’ Gendered and Classed

Constructions of (Un)Equal Ability 87
ANNE-SOFIE NYSTRÖM
viii Contents
7 Change and Tradition: Muslim Boys Talk about Their
Post-Sixteen Aspirations 102
FARZANA SHAIN

8 Gendered Surveillance and the Social Construction of Young

Muslim Women in Schools 126
HEIDI SAFIA MIRZA AND VEENA MEETOO

9 Politics of Difference, Intersectionality, Pedagogy of Poverty

and Missed Opportunities at Play in the Classroom 146
CARL A. GRANT AND ANNEMARIE KETTERHAGEN ENGDAHL

PART III
Educational Inequalities: Identities, Inclusion and Barriers

10 ‘I Want to Hear You’: Listening to the Narratives, Practices

and Visions of a Chuj Maya Teacher in Guatemala 167
ALEXANDRA ALLWEISS

11 What Does It Mean to Be the ‘Pride of Pinesville’?:

Opportunities Facilitated and Constrained 193
AMY JOHNSON LACHUK, MARY LOUISE GOMEZ AND SHAMEKA N. POWELL

12 A Place to Hang My Hat On: University Staff Perceptions in

Multiethnic New Zealand 212
EDWINA PIO, ALI RASHEED, AGNES NAERA, KITEA TIPUNA
AND LORRAINE PARKER

13 Intersectional Pedagogy: From Movies to the Classroom 230

ELŻBIETA H. OLEKSY

14 Intersecting Identities: Young People’s Constructions of Identity

in South-East Europe 247
ALISTAIR ROSS

15 Conclusions 267
UVANNEY MAYLOR AND KALWANT BHOPAL

Contributors 275
Index 283
Figures and Tables

FIGURES

12.1 Minority staff engagement in universities. 219

TABLES

12.1 Ethnic Groups Based on NZ Census Classification

(Total Percentages) 214
12.2 Participants Interviewed 219
12.3 Percentage Distribution of Academic and Administrative
(Admin) Staff in a University 2007–2010 222
14.1 Locations of Focus Groups in Bulgaria and Romania 250
This page intentionally left blank
1 Educational Inequalities in
Schools and Higher Education
An Introduction
Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor

Education in the UK has seen significant changes in the past few years, par-
ticularly policy changes introduced by the Coalition government such as the
introduction of tuition fees and the introduction of free schools and acade-
mies, as well as the eradication of the Education Maintenance Grant (EMA).
Such significant changes have affected the poorest students the hardest. Far
from creating greater equality, such changes have perpetuated inequality
both in schools and in higher education—with greater students from poor
working-class backgrounds being further disadvantaged. Recent research
suggests, for example, that although the gap between the richest and poor-
est children has started to fall over the last decade, the gap at the General
Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) level remains large, with the
latest Department for Education (DfE) figures indicating that pupils eligible
for free school meals (FSMs) are almost half as likely to achieve five or more
A*–C grades at GCSE compared with those who were not eligible (30.9 per
cent compared with 58.5 per cent) (Carter-Wall and Whitfield 2012). Fur-
thermore, poorer children are half as likely to go on to study at university
compared with their more affluent peers. Educational attainment continues
to be strongly associated with socio-economic background (Sutton Trust
2010), despite some signs that social differences in examination results
may have started to reduce. There have been some significant changes with
the gap in attainment between ethnic groups narrowing, with some pre-
viously low-performing groups catching up with the average attainment.
Whereas a generation ago almost all the students attending university were
White British, today one in five are from Black and minority ethnic (BME)
backgrounds (EHRC How Fair Is Britain, 2010). Whereas this change is
positive, inequalities in education continue to persist. A recent report by
Alan Millburn (2012), MP (member of Parliament), explores how the most
advantaged 20 per cent of young people are still seven times more likely
than the 40 per cent most disadvantaged to attend the most selective uni-
versities, demonstrating how access to university remains inequitable. The
report argues that ‘there is a strong correlation between social class and
the likelihood of going to university generally and to the top universities
particularly. Four private schools and one college get more of their students
2 Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor
into Oxbridge than the combined efforts of 2,000 state schools and col-
leges’ (2). Furthermore, elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge
are failing to adequately represent BME students and the representation of
minority ethnic students at Russell Group universities is unbalanced (Race
into Higher Education 2010).
A report by the Sutton Trust (2010) found that just 16 per cent of pupils
who are eligible for FSMs progress to university, compared with 96 per cent
of young people who have been to independent schools. Changes in Coali-
tion government policy outlined earlier, such as the scrapping of the EMA,
has had implications for students from low-income backgrounds, affect-
ing their entrance into higher education and consequently their chances of
social mobility and future success in the labour market. Inequalities also
persist in higher education; research has shown that the majority of the UK
professoriate is White and male (Bhopal and Jackson 2013). A report by the
Equality Challenge Unit (2011) found that in 2009–2010 only 0.9 per cent
of UK staff in professorial roles were from BME backgrounds and 76.1 per
cent of professors of UK staff were White males (Equality in Higher Educa-
tion, Statistical Report 2011).
But these inequalities are not unique to the UK. Michael Apple, in his
pioneering new book, Can Education Change Society?, starkly reminds
us of the disparities and injustices that continue to exist in the US and
the significant role that education (particularly schools) play in sometimes
perpetuating these inequalities. Schools are ‘key mechanisms in determin-
ing what is socially valued as “legitimate knowledge” and what is seen as
merely “popular”. In their role in defi ning a large part of what is considered
legitimate knowledge, they also participate in the process through which
particular groups are granted status and other groups remain unrecognised
or minimised’ (Apple 2013, 21).
As scholars committed to equality and social justice, we are disappointed
about the lack of commitment and engagement given to such inequalities not
just by politicians, but also policymakers and grant-funding bodies. Con-
sequently, we are committed to examining the discourses of inequalities.
Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education brings together
researchers in the fields of education, class, gender, ‘race’ and sociology
who provide theoretical and empirical understandings of the discourses
of educational inequality. The main focus of the collection is to examine
difference and diversity, specifically gender, ‘race’ and class, and how the
intersectionalities of these differences work in relation to challenging and
also perpetuating inequalities in education.
In particular the collection seeks to locate the dimensions of differ-
ence within recent theoretical discourses with an emphasis on ‘race’, class
and gender as key categories of analysis and does so by using theoretical
approaches to examine the inequalities and diversities of educational expe-
riences. Whereas there is considerable literature on social inequality and
education, there is little recent work which explores notions of difference
 Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education 3
and diversity in relation to ‘race’, class and gender. Given the gap in the lit-
erature, it becomes all the more important to address the specificity of dif-
ference. In this collection, we bring together major research located across
the UK and diverse international contexts (such as Australia, the US, New
Zealand and Europe). Contributors explore the ways in which dominant
perspectives on ‘difference’, intersectionality and institutional structures
underpin and reinforce educational inequality. They also emphasise the
importance of international perspectives in such discussions by using inno-
vative methodological approaches to examining these areas. A collection
that integrates and interrogates the debates about difference, diversity and
inequality in education and theorising such approaches is long overdue.
Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education is based on
the premise that education and notions of inequality are controversial sub-
jects in which difficult and contested discourses are the norm. Individuals in
education experience multiple inequalities and have diverse identifications
that cannot necessarily be captured by one theoretical perspective alone
(Gillborn 2008; Ladson-Billings 2003; Reay, David and Ball 2001). The
purpose of this collection and the coherence of its arguments are dictated
by an examination of controversial grounds, both empirical and theoretical
debates, within national and international educational research contexts
foregrounding issues of gender identity, ‘race’, culture and inclusion. As
such, the aim of the collection is to do the following:

• Specifically examine areas of discrimination and disadvantage such

as gender, ‘race’ and class within education as well as debating the
difficulties of applying such concepts in relation to the experiences of
students in education.
• Analyse contesting discourses of identity in different educational cul-
tural contexts.

By combining a mix of intellectually rigorous, accessible and controversial

chapters, the collection presents a distinctive and engaging voice, one that
seeks to broaden understandings of ‘intersectionality’ beyond the simple
confi nes of the education sphere into an arena of sociological and cultural
discourse. In this way, the collection provides a challenge to current racia-
lised, gendered and classed educational discourse and promotes new ways
of thinking about educational practice.
The collection is divided into three specific parts. Part I examines dif-
ference, diversity and inclusion and consists of four chapters each of which
explores how discourses of difference are understood in different educational
contexts. Zeus Leonardo in Chapter 2 interrogates the status of whiteness
in American education by exploring two significant camps regarding the
uptake of whiteness: White reconstruction and White abolition. In the fi rst,
reconstructionists offer discourses—as forms of social practice—that trans-
form whiteness, and therefore White people, into something other than
4 Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor
an oppressive identity and ideology. Reconstruction suggests rehabilitating
whiteness by resignifying it through the creation of alternative discourses.
It projects hope onto whiteness by creating new racial subjects out of White
people, which are not ensnared by a racist logic. On the other hand, White
abolitionism is guided by Roediger’s announcement that ‘whiteness is not
only false and oppressive; it is nothing but false and oppressive’ (1994, 13).
In opposition to reconstructing whiteness, abolishing whiteness sees no
redeeming aspects of it as long as White people think they are White. This
chapter considers White reconstruction and abolition for their conceptual
and political value as it concerns not only the revolution of whiteness, but
of race theory in general, particularly in relation to educational contexts.
In Chapter 3, Gill Crozier examines the school experiences of second-
ary-aged young people in England and explores the factors that advantage
or disadvantage their academic success. The chapter presents an analysis
of existing research of educational under/achievement amongst a cross sec-
tion of BME, working-class and middle-class, girls and boys in order to
investigate the similarities and differences in their school experience. Cro-
zier argues that there is an abundance of research which shows that social
mobility between the social classes has remained stagnant for the past
twenty years and that the academic achievement of Black Caribbean and
Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage children remains obdurately lower than
the rest of the population. By employing theories of ideology, Whiteness
and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’, the chapter develops insights into why
this remains the case in the twenty-fi rst century. As part of this, Crozier
considers the role of the school in its challenge to or maintenance of exist-
ing stratification and inequalities of outcome. This is followed by Jasmine
Rhamie’s chapter, ‘Black Academic Success: What’s Changed?’ Rhamie
examines whether there have been changes of Black academic success
since the new Coalition political climate in England. The chapter begins
by reviewing the literature on the academic achievement of Black pupils,
focusing on research which identifies and promotes their academic success,
it particularly focuses on such research conducted since 2007 (Rhamie
2007). The chapter raises concerns about the education policy direction of
the present Coalition government and the implications of some of its key
decisions on equality for the inclusion of Black pupils. Rhamie provides a
picture of the current situation for Black pupils in terms of (under)achieve-
ment and explores some of the theoretical explanations for the continued
underachievement of Black pupils. The chapter concludes by emphasising
the importance of acknowledging Black academic success and considers the
implications of this for educational research and policy making.
In Chapter 5, Robyn Henderson explores intersections of ethnicity,
social class and gender based on an itinerant lifestyle identified amongst
some Australian students. She does so by deconstructing teachers’ narra-
tives in theorising transformative action. Her chapter explores how con-
siderable research has highlighted how social membership—in terms of
 Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education 5
ethnicity, social class and gender, or combinations of these factors—can
influence the successes that children achieve in school literacy learning.
Teachers often use these features as points of reference, creating narratives
about why some students in the school context succeed and others do not.
One result can be narratives of blame—stories that blame students for not
bringing appropriate understandings to school, or stories that blame par-
ents for being deficient in caring for their children and negligent in not pre-
paring them for school literacy learning. Such narratives are often based on
normative and stereotypical views of families and provide common sense
understandings that reinforce educational inequality. The chapter draws
on empirical evidence from a two-year research study that was conducted
in a school located in a north Australian rural community. It is framed
within cultural-critical understandings of literacy, alongside critical dis-
course and poststructuralist theories. The chapter investigates the intersec-
tionality of social class, ethnicity and gender in teachers’ narratives about
itinerant farmworkers’ children and their successes or otherwise in school
literacy learning. In many of the stories, deficit discourses about the chil-
dren’s ‘differences’ from their residentially stable peers represented com-
monsense knowledge that regarded children’s inappropriate behaviours,
actions and underachievement in literacy learning as predictable and ‘natu-
ral’ consequences of families’ lifestyles and perceived characteristics. The
chapter argues that these taken-for-granted assumptions about the negative
impacts of ethnicity, class, gender and an itinerant lifestyle on children’s
schooling served to narrow the pedagogical options that were available for
teachers. As a result, educational inequities seemed to be maintained and
there was little opportunity for itinerant children to move beyond under-
achievement. The chapter further considers possibilities for transformative
action, arguing that a reconceptualisation of itinerancy and the supposedly
deficient characteristics of itinerant families could disrupt deficit views and
help teachers focus on responsive, flexible and enabling pedagogies for chil-
dren who are often marginalised in school settings.
Part II focuses on ‘Understanding Difference: Policy and Practice in
Education’. It examines how the effects of educational policy and prac-
tice can work to interrogate and understand the discourses of difference
in Swedish education. Anne-Sofie Nyström in Chapter 6, ‘Negotiating
Achievement—Students’ Gendered and Classed Constructions of (Un)
Equal Ability’, explores how educational institutions are structured around
achievement and evaluating and comparing students’ achievements. The
chapter explores how stratification processes are not just about cogni-
tion but about social processes such as affect, negotiations of values and
causes of achievements. Like other Nordic countries, Sweden has long been
associated with equality—not least in education. Many statistics suggest
increased differences are primarily based on school and student categories
in terms of class and ‘race’, whereas gender stratification has focussed on
policy debates. The chapter examines privilege via analyses of peer-group
6 Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor
interactions amongst a student category that is rarely problematised: an
ethnographically informed doctoral study on young people’s identity nego-
tiations in Swedish upper secondary schools. The focus is on examining a
setting structured by high performance and dominated by White, upper-
middle-class students. Identification processes such as social categorisa-
tions based on gender, class and age and dominance relations are studied
as micro-processes and placed in the context of equality/equity and educa-
tion. The chapter outlines how young men and women in the study draw
attention to dominance relations amongst peers in the classroom; it also
demonstrates the hierarchies between schools and study programmes. The
chapter further explores how students questioned the legitimacy of such
identity claims and hierarchies, but these were often reproduced in terms of
unequal educational and social ability (resources).
Farzana Shain’s chapter, ‘Change and Tradition: Muslim Boys’ Talk
about Their Post-Sixteen Aspirations’, examines how the neo-liberal
restructuring of education has resulted in a relentless pursuit of educa-
tional success through policies such as Parental Choice, Beacon and Lead-
ing Edge schools, Gifted and Talented (Hey and Bradford, 2007) and, more
recently, Academy and Free Schools in England. As Ozga (1999) maintains,
these policies are located within a wider framework which ties education
to national competitiveness and sees achievement as the solution to social
exclusion. Rather than equalising opportunities, analyses (Reay 2008;
Tomlinson 2008) suggest that these polices have enhanced middle-class
choice and advantage while reinscribing working-class and racialised dis-
advantage. Despite such observations, policies on citizenship, for example,
place the focus on ‘helping’ individuals navigate their way through a series
of individualised ‘personalised’ choices away from the old certainties of
gender, ‘race’ and class solidarity (Avis 2006). Drawing on a wider empiri-
cal study of Muslim (predominantly working-class Pakistani and Bangla-
deshi) boys’ identities and educational experiences (Shain 2011), the chapter
argues that class, ‘race’ and gender remain salient factors which constrain
and enable educational outcomes. Following a brief overview of policy and
academic debate, the chapter focuses on the boys’ orientations to schooling
and ‘success’, their subject preferences and imagined future choices about
post-sixteen education and careers. The chapter outlines a range of factors
that shape these experiences and ‘choices’, including school processes such
as setting, peer relations, and the boys’ economic location in some of the
most deprived neighbourhoods in England.
In Chapter 8, Heidi Mirza and Veena Meetoo explore how new and vir-
ulent forms of faith-based racism in the form of Islamophobia have gripped
Western multicultural societies since the 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings by Brit-
ish-born Muslim (male) youth. In this climate, education has become a key
site in the battle against the spectre of the ‘Muslim extremist’ in our midst.
Educational programmes such as the Prevention of Violence and Extrem-
ism exemplify this hysteria with its focus on averting the next generation of
 Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education 7
potential terrorists by combating the ideology which might produce them.
However, such programmes are largely aimed at Muslim young men and
boys. Ironically, young women in patriarchal Muslim communities, often at
risk of domestic forms of violence such as forced marriage, slip through the
cracks of educational policy and school practice. In terms of safeguarding
and well-being, young Muslim women are effectively caught between the
multicultural discourses that focus on issues between communities rather
than within communities and the Islamophobia discourse that demonises
young Muslim men. Drawing on interviews with seventeen young women
in two inner-city schools, this chapter traces the narrative constructions
of young Muslim women as they negotiate gendered, ‘raced’ and classed
structures, dominance and power in the classroom and in their everyday
lives. Interviews with teachers and policymakers contextualise the young
women’s subjectivity and social relations with their perspectives on reli-
gious identity and gendered discourses of risk, safety and well-being. Using
a Black feminist framework of ‘embodied intersectionality’ (Mirza 2009),
the young women’s narratives not only demonstrate the fluidity of a collec-
tive transcendental ethnic Muslim female identity, but they also express a
strong outwardly individualistic neo-liberal career-orientated identity. In
effect they were negotiating the traditional wearing of the veil as a means
of personal transformation in socially and educationally restrictive circum-
stances. The chapter concludes that to understand young Muslim women’s
lived reality in Britain we need to theorise beyond the limitations of the
multicultural discourse which invisiblises minority ethnic women and the
Islamophobic discourse that visibilises the over determined female Muslim
body with its obsession with the ‘veil’.
In Chapter 9, Carl A. Grant and Annemarie Ketterhagen Engdahl dis-
cuss how the concepts of politics of difference, intersectionality and an
understanding of and resistance toward a pedagogy of poverty can be used
to help education researchers and teachers to see missed opportunities in
the classroom in order to create a culturally relevant instructional environ-
ment where all American students are academically engaged and have a
meaningful classroom experience that leads to a flourishing life. They con-
clude the chapter with examples of missed opportunities where teachers did
not use a lens of intersectionality or the concept of the politics of difference
in their classrooms. The examples used are contrasted with fulfi lled oppor-
tunities where these lenses and points of view are applied as a counter to
the pedagogy of poverty. This chapter is intended to deepen understanding
of both academic theory and classroom practice.
Part III of the book, ‘Educational Inequalities: Identities, Inclusion and
Barriers’, specifically examines how educational inequalities persist through
an understanding of identities and barriers to inclusion. Alexandra Allweiss,
in Chapter 10, ‘I Want to Hear You’: Listening to the Narratives, Practices
and Visions of a Chuj Maya Teacher in Guatemala’, examines the progres-
sion of educational reform. She argues how in many countries, classroom
8 Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor
teachers are on the front line of the reform effort. These education policies,
however, are generally devised, implemented and evaluated using a top-
down approach. Yet, there is much more that can be learned about the
effects of such education policies by discussing these reform efforts with
teachers. This chapter documents the experiences of one middle school
teacher, who is representative of a sample of thirty-two educators in Xan-
tin, Guatemala, participating in a larger research project designed to shape
instructional practices to be responsive to the Intercultural and Bilingual
Education (IBE) reforms in Guatemala. At the heart of the teacher’s work
is the goal of teaching students in a manner that fosters academic, social
and personal success. A narrative inquiry approach is used to frame the
chapter and investigate the intersections and influences of ‘cultural racism’,
gender inequities and place-based classism on education policy and prac-
tice through a teacher’s experience. Voices of educators working within the
framework of the national reforms provide powerful critiques and visions
for change that are not always visible through a top-down approach. The
chapter explores how narrative inquiry allows educationalists to view the
challenges and possibilities of these reforms using the experiences and
insights from one teacher.
Chapter 11, ‘What Does It Mean to Be the “Pride of Pinesville”?:
Opportunities Facilitated and Constrained’, by Amy Johnson Lachuk,
Mary Louise Gomez and Shameka N. Powell, presents the life history of
one African American woman living in a small rural community in the
southern United States. Surpassing many social, economic and contextual
barriers, she earned postsecondary degrees and returned to live and work
in her community. Using in-depth interviews, the chapter explores factors
that facilitate and/or constrain the literacy and educational experiences of
this woman. Through examining her life history, the authors present ways
that educational pursuit in rural areas is framed by intersecting dimensions
of ‘race’, class, gender and place.
In Chapter 12, Edwina Pio, Ali Rasheed, Agnes Naera, Kitea Tipuna
and Lorraine Parker use ethnicity to explore the lived-in and lived-through
academic and support staff experiences of Maori and Pasifi ka peoples in
a New Zealand university. Based on staff perceptions of their experiences
and hopes around curriculum, students, colleagues and institutional
structures, the authors present broad themes on the inscription of ethnic-
ity in the doing and being of who one is in a university. A hermeneutic
approach and semi-structured qualitative interviews are used to provide
an in-depth understanding of key issues. Using the lens of diversity man-
agement, specifically post-colonial scholarship, this chapter examines the
enduring impact of ethnicity. The fi ndings point to the coalescence of the
historical streams of migration and Indigenous peoples along with newer
nuanced ways of handling ethnicity. Creating mana—respect/honour
through ethnicity is a prevailing theme, along with the perception that
ethnicity is based on stereotypes of Indigenous people which are easily
 Educational Inequalities in Schools and Higher Education 9
accessible in an environment where there are very few minority ethnic
staff. To this end, the chapter explores how government policies seek to
positively support Maori and Pasifi ka staff in universities and develops a
model of minority ethnic staff in universities where such policies tend to
have a varying impact.
Elżbieta H. Oleksy, in Chapter 13, offers a new approach to pedagogy
whilst demonstrating how intersectionality can be experienced, thought
and learned. In the wealth of literature on intersectionality as a concept,
theory, political option and methodology, little has been published on
how intersectionality can be taught. Working with graduate students
within the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus Project in Women’s
and Gender Studies, the chapter demonstrates how such innermost intri-
cate interdependencies as ‘race’, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality
and circumstance can be explored through an audience analysis of inter-
sectional visual products.
In Chapter 14, ‘Intersecting Identities: Young People’s Constructions
of Identity in South-East Europe’, Alistair Ross examines a different
kind of intersection than that considered elsewhere in this volume: that
between potentially confl icting territorial or political identities of the
self that arise as young people in Bulgaria and Romania attempt to rec-
oncile their potential memberships of a national community, a regional
Balkan identity and a European identity. The educational implications of
this analysis relate to young people in a much wider context than these
two south-eastern European countries. At the time of writing, they are
the most recent members of the European Union, joining in 2007, but
they will have been joined by Croatia by the time this book is published
and very likely within the next four to six years by six or seven other
Balkan states. The chapter explores how some of the implications will
resonate much more widely than the Balkan peninsular: The tensions
of multiple membership of different and nesting political entities and of
being a ‘global citizen’ are becoming more common and pressing across
Europe and beyond. The chapter calls for educators to display sensitiv-
ity in understanding and reacting positively to the self-constructions of
young people as liminal beings, uncertain of how their mix of identities
socially positions them in Western Europe, if they are not to experience
inequality in educational settings.
In all these chapters, the authors have aimed to explore how educational
inequalities in schools and higher education continue to persist in differ-
ent social, economic and political climates from national and international
perspectives. If we want to work towards achieving equality in education, if
we see it as a realisable goal—and as optimists we do—we must continue to
question, interrogate and disrupt the discourses of social justice, inclusion
and (in)equality; it is only then that we, as educators committed to equal-
ity work, can achieve our aims of reaching those on the margins of society
who continue to be disadvantaged.
10 Kalwant Bhopal and Uvanney Maylor
REFERENCES

Apple, Michael. 2013. Can Education Change Society? New York: Routledge.
Avis, James. 2008. ‘Class, Economism, Individualisation and Post-Compulsory
Education and Training’. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 6 (2):
37–53.
Bhopal, Kalwant. and Jackson, June (2013) The Experiences of Black and Minor-
ity Ethnic Academics: Multiple Identities and Career Progression. University of
Southampton: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research (EPSRC).
Carter-Wall, Charlotte, and Grahame Whitfield. 2012. The Role of Aspirations,
Attitudes and Behaviour in Closing the Educational Attainment Gap. York:
Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Equality Challenge Unit. 2011. The Experiences of Black and Minority Academics
in HE in England. London: Equality Challenge Unit.
Equality in Higher Education (2011) Statistical Report 2010–2011. London:
EHE.
Equality and Human Rights Commission (2010) How Fair is Britain? London:
EHRC.
Gillborn, David. 2008. Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? Lon-
don: Routledge.
Hey, Valerie, and Simon Bradford. 2007. ‘Successful Subjectivities? The Succes-
sification of Class, Ethnic and Gender Positions’. Journal of Education Policy
22 (6): 595–614.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2003. Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social
Studies: The Profession, Policies, and Curriculum. Greenwich, CT: Information
Age Publishers.
Millburn, Alan. 2012. Fair Access to Professional Careers: A Progress Report
by the Independent Reviewer on Social Mobility and Child Poverty. London:
Crown Copyright.
Mirza, Heidi Safia. 2009. ‘Plotting a History: Black and Postcolonial Feminisms in
‘New Times’. Race Ethnicity and Education 12 (1): 1–10.
Ozga, Jenny. 1999. ‘Two Nations? Education and Social Inclusion-Exclusion in
Scotland and England’. Education and Social Justice 1 (3): 44–50.
R a c e i nto Highe r E d u c atio n. 2010. L ondon: C om mu n it ie s a nd L o c a l
Government.
Reay, Diane. 2008. ‘Tony Blair, the Promotion of the “Active” Educational Citizen,
and Middle-Class Hegemony’. Oxford Review of Education 34 (6): 639–650.
Reay, Diane, Miriam David and Stephen Ball. 2001. ‘Making a Difference? Institu-
tional Habituses and Higher Education Choice’. Sociological Research Online 5
(4). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/5/4/reay.html. Accessed March 2013.
Rhamie, Jasmine. 2007. Eagles Who Soar. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.
Roediger, David. 1994. Toward the Abolition of Whiteness. New York: Verso.
Shain, Farzana. 2011. New Folk Devils: Muslim Boys and Education in England.
Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.
Sutton Trust. 2010. Education Mobility in England. London: Sutton Trust.
Tomlinson, Sally. 2008. Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Education.
Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill.
Part I

Difference, Diversity
and Inclusion
This page intentionally left blank
2 Pale/Ontology
The Status of Whiteness in
Education*
Zeus Leonardo

INTRODUCTION

Race scholarship is witnessing a shift. In the past two decades, whiteness

studies has penetrated what arguably has been the home of scholars of
colour who write for and about people of colour. Circa 1990, whiteness
studies burst onto the academic scene with three important publications,
written by White scholars about, but not exclusively for, White people. In
fact, we would not be far off to characterise whiteness studies as a White-
led race intervention. Circa 1990, Peggy McIntosh’s (1992) ‘Unpacking the
White Knapsack’, David Roediger’s (1991) Wages of Whiteness and Ruth
Frankenberg’s (1993) White Women, Race Matters arguably represent the
beginnings of a focus on whiteness and White experiences. Since then,
there has been a veritable explosion of critical work on whiteness across the
disciplines (Morrison 1993; Allen 1994, 1997; Ignatiev 1996; hooks 1997;
Winant 1997; Dyer 1997; Aanerud 1997; Lipsitz 1998; Brodkin 1999;
Warren 2000; Thompson 2001; Bush 2005; Wise 2007). In education,
the impact of whiteness studies has been no less (Sleeter 1995; McLaren
1995, 1997; Giroux 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Ellsworth 1997; McIntyre 1997;
Apple 1998; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; Howard 1999; Sheets 2000;
Allen 2002; Thompson 2003; Richardson and Villenas 2000; Leonardo
2004; Gillborn 2005; Lee 2005; DiAngelo 2006). It should be noted that
scholars of colour previously took up the issue of whiteness, but as a sec-
ondary if not tertiary concern (see Du Bois 1989), insofar as studying the
souls of White folk was an afterthought to the souls of Black folk. With
whiteness studies, whiteness and White people come to the centre in an
unprecedented and unforeseen way. This is different from the centring that
whiteness is usually afforded in Eurocentric curricula and writing. Indeed it
would be problematic to recentre whiteness as a point of reference for civili-
sation, progress and rationality in order to relegate people of colour to the
margins, once again. In whiteness studies, whiteness becomes the centre
of critique and transformation. It represents the much-neglected anxiety
around race that whiteness scholars, many of whom are White, are now
beginning to recognise.
14 Zeus Leonardo
Whiteness studies is both a conceptual engagement and a racial strat-
egy. Conceptually, it poses critical questions about the history, meaning
and ontological status of whiteness. For example, it contains an appara-
tus for the precise rendering of whiteness’s origin as a social category. In
other words, whiteness is not coterminous with the notion that some people
have lighter skin tones than others; rather whiteness, along with race, is the
structural valuation of skin colour, which invests it with meaning regarding
the overall organisation of society. In this sense, whiteness conceptually had
to be invented and then reorganised in particular historical conditions as
part of its upkeep (Leonardo 2007). Inseparable from the conceptualisation
of whiteness, whiteness studies comes with certain interventions or racial
strategies. There are two significant camps regarding the uptake of white-
ness: White reconstruction and White abolition (Chubbuck 2004). In the
fi rst, reconstructionists offer discourses—as forms of social practice—that
transform whiteness, and therefore White people, into something other than
an oppressive identity and ideology. Reconstruction suggests rehabilitating
whiteness by resignifying it through the creation of alternative discourses.
It projects hope onto whiteness by creating new racial subjects out of White
people, which are not ensnared by a racist logic. On the other hand, White
abolitionism is guided by Roediger’s (1994) announcement that ‘whiteness
is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive’ (13;
italics in original). In opposition to reconstructing whiteness, abolishing
whiteness sees no redeeming aspects of it and as long as White people think
they are White, Baldwin once opined that there is no hope for them (as
cited by Roediger 1994, 13). This chapter will consider White reconstruc-
tion and abolition for their conceptual and political value as it concerns not
only the revolution of whiteness, but of race theory in general.
Neo-abolitionists argue that whiteness is the centre of the ‘race problem’.
They go further than suggesting that racism is a ‘White problem’. Rather,
as long as whiteness exists, little racial progress will be made. In fact, lead-
ing abolitionists Ignatiev and Garvey (1996a) argue that multiculturalism
and general race theories that accept the existence of races are problematic
for their naturalisation of what are otherwise reified concepts. To Ignatiev
and Garvey, races are not real in an objective and ontological sense and
therefore Whites, for example, are not real either. They do not go as far
as suggesting that White people do not exist, which is a different point.
They exist insofar as structures recognise white bodies as ‘White people’.
But this recognition relies on the reification of a spurious category in order
simultaneously to misrecognise certain human subjects as White people.
Race treason encourages Whites to disrupt this process by pledging their
disallegiance to the ‘White club’. Race traitors are white bodies that no
longer act like and as White people. The investment in whiteness (Lipsitz
1998) is the strongest form of investment because it is the most privileged
racial identification. As long as Whites invest in whiteness, the existence of
non-White races will also continue. Hirschman (2004) has argued that as
 Pale/Ontology 15
long as race exists, so does racism and it is anachronistic to imagine one
without the other. The clarion call for abolitionists asks Whites to disiden-
tify with whiteness, leading to the eventual abolition of whiteness. I would
also add that it leads to another consequence, which is the abolition of
White people, or the withering away of a racial category and its subjects. In
other words, if whiteness disappears, so do White people. I will have more
to say about this last point later.
By contrast, White reconstructionists disagree with abolitionists in
the former’s attempt to recover whiteness. The disagreement falls within
two domains: theory and viability. Theoretically, reconstructionists do
not accept Roediger’s maxim that whiteness is only false and oppressive
because there are many examples of Whites who have fought against rac-
ism, such as the original abolitionists. Reconstructionists argue that Whites
can be remade, revisioned and resignified and are not merely hopelessly rac-
ist. Their search is for a rearticulated form of whiteness that reclaims its
identity for racial justice. They acknowledge that whiteness is a privilege,
but that Whites can use this privilege for purposes of racial justice and
therefore contribute to the remaking of whiteness that is not inherently
oppressive and false. In schools, reconstructing whiteness includes focusing
on White historical figures who have fought and still fight against racial
oppression. Reconstructionists consider this strategy as more viable than
arguing for the abolition of whiteness, which most Whites will have a dif-
ficult time accepting. The discourse of White abolition will only lead to
White defensiveness and retrenchment and does not represent much hope
for even progressive or anti-racist Whites. To the reconstructionists, aboli-
tionism is tantamount to promoting a certain self-hatred and shame among
Whites, guilting them into accepting a movement that does not recognise
their complexity. Rather, they prefer to instil critical hope in Whites.
Clearly, there has been a shift in race studies and whiteness has come
to the fore much more visibly. It is driven by a complex yet plainly stated
question: What to do with whiteness? The debate between White abolition
and reconstruction is a fertile educational ground. It represents a neglected
aspect in race studies, which is the future of a privileged people and how
they can participate in undoing these same privileges. It also poses the
question of ‘What do Whites become after undoing these said privileges?’
Do they become new subjects of whiteness or do they obliterate a racial
category beyond recognition when they commit what Ignatiev and Garvey
call ‘the unreasonable act’ of race treason? Just as we may ask what the
modern looks like after the postmodern critique (Lyotard 1984), what do
Whites look like, in the ontological sense, after the critique of whiteness
studies? This chapter hopes to generate not only insights about this process,
but a rather needed dialogue. It is less concerned with identifying who is a
reconstructionist or abolitionist of whiteness (although one can certainly
have a productive discussion that begins there), and more with assessing the
interventions that each discourse provides.
16 Zeus Leonardo

WHITE BY ANOTHER NAME: WHITE

RECONSTRUCTIONISM IN EDUCATION

Before we begin, one caveat must be entered. By focusing on whiteness,

Apple (1998) warns that scholars of whiteness studies may unwittingly
recentre whiteness, insufficiently knocking it off its orbit. He writes:

We must be on our guard to ensure that a focus on whiteness doesn’t

become one more excuse to recenter dominant voices and to ignore the
voices and testimony of those groups of people whose dreams, hopes,
lives, and very bodies are shattered by current relations of exploitation
and domination. (1998, xi)

Much useful work has been spent on decentring whiteness from its privi-
leged son-of-God status. When the sun of whiteness has been centred the
planets of colour have suffered. However, the centring of whiteness has also
been an example of a certain inverted understanding, a geocentric theory
that mistakes the real dynamics of social life and development. Not only
does whiteness encourage us to be ‘flat earthers’ (Friedman’s phrase), but it
constructs a Ptolemaic universe that misunderstands a world it has created
after its own image (Mills 1997). As a privileged marker, whiteness assumed
that the lives of people of colour depended on White progress and enlight-
enment, whereas a heliocentric critical theory puts whiteness in its rightful
place in racial cosmology, as largely dependent and parasitic on the labour
and identity of people of colour. By recentring whiteness here, we counteract
what may be dubbed the superstitious beliefs in the rightness of whiteness
and institute a more scientific explanation of how the social universe actu-
ally functions. In other words, if critical studies of race recentre whiteness,
it does not do so in order to valorise or pedestalise it. Quite the opposite. A
critical study of whiteness puts the social heavens back in order.
The rearticulation of whiteness is part of an overall emancipatory proj-
ect that implicates a host of institutions from economic to educational.
Discursive interventions in education to transform whiteness attempt to
explain the whiteness of pedagogy as they encourage a pedagogy of white-
ness. That is, shifting the white racial project from one of dominance to
one of justice requires a pedagogical process of unlearning the codes of
what it currently means to be White and rescuing its redeeming aspects.
Giroux (1997b) writes, ‘“Whiteness” . . . becomes less a matter of creating
a new form of identity politics than an attempt to rearticulate “whiteness”
as part of a broader project of cultural, social, and political citizenship’
(295). In rescuing whiteness, critical educators insert hope in White people
as hermeneutic subjects who may interpret social life in liberating ways and
not as hopelessly stuck in the molasses of racism. It recognises the mul-
tiple moments of White history as an attempt to complexify racial options
for Whites (indeed speak to its existing complexity). In the dialectics of
 Pale/Ontology 17
whiteness, Whites search for positive articulations in history as well as fac-
ing up to the contradictions of what it means to be anti-racist in a racist
society. Seen this way, the current formulations of whiteness are racist, but
whiteness itself is not inherently racist. Being White is not the problem;
being a White racist is.
Dislodged from the hopelessness and helplessness of having to consider
oneself as simply privileged (therefore racist), White students’ humanity is
affi rmed as the ability to choose justice over domination. Here, abolition-
ists may agree that whiteness is a choice, at least with respect to the kind of
White person one chooses to uphold. This new racial project asks:

How students might critically mediate the complex relations between

‘whiteness’ and racism, not by having them repudiate their ‘white-
ness,’ but by grappling with its legacy and its potential to be reartic-
ulated in oppositional and transformative terms . . . ways to move
beyond the view of ‘whiteness’ as simply a troupe of domination.
(Giroux 1997b, 296)

Questioning the essentialism of identity politics, Giroux projects a third

space for Whites, which neither valorises their ‘accomplishments’ nor over-
states their complicity in relations of domination (see also Giroux 1997a,
1997c). Their history is not determined by the originary sin of racism but
rather a complex web of contradictions that make up what it means to be
White in any given context. As such, educators recognise the anti-racist
moments within White hegemony as well as the racist traps of White calls
for racial justice. The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century pro-
vides a glimpse into this dualism if we consider the fact that John Brown
and his comrades fought to dismantle slavery while their White privilege
made their instalment in leadership positions possible over those of Black
abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass. A reading of the abolitionists as
exceptions to the White rule (so common in history books and lessons)
misses the way that White privilege works to favour even White abolition-
ists; equally, educators note how, by fighting against the institution of slav-
ery, abolitionists were remaking what it meant to be White. It testifies to
the fact that ‘some of the time, in some respects even when not in all,
whites empathize and identify with nonwhites, abhor how white supremacy
has distorted their social interactions, and are willing to make significant
sacrifices toward the eradication of white privilege’ (Alcoff 1998; italics
in original). In short, they were able to ‘rearticulate whiteness in oppo-
sitional terms’ (Giroux 1997b, 310). To the extent that the abolitionists
were racially privileged and that they used these said privileges to edge out
Black abolitionists in discursive and institutional positions of leadership,
they were anti-racist racists. They were located in the cauldron of whiteness
without being entrapped in its determinisms insofar as they were anti-racist
without being anti-White.
18 Zeus Leonardo
Within this perspective, social domination is not the sole property of
Whites as there have been many examples of non-White forms of domina-
tion. As Gary Howard (1999) might put it, whiteness is not the problem,
but rather certain interpretations of what it means to be White lead to
forms of domination. The theory of social dominance is too deterministic
because it fails to recognise the multiple positions that Whites take up in
the race struggle. There are different ways to be White: from fundamen-
talist, to integrationist, to transformationist. Or as Ellsworth (1997) once
put it, ‘It is more than one thing and never the same thing twice’ (266).
Just as Christianity is not the source of a religious problem, but interpreta-
tions that encourage subjugation of non-Christian peoples, the ultimate
meaning of whiteness is up for reinterpretation under concrete conditions
of struggle as educators ‘disrupt the sanctification of whiteness’ (McIntyre
1997, 149). Rather than rejecting whiteness, Howard suggests ‘breaking’
out of whiteness, ‘emerging’ from it to become something else. This process
should not be underestimated. Just as Lenin once remarked that whereas
the proletariat must merely be educated and the bourgeoisie must be revolu-
tionised (see Althusser 1976), so must Whites be transformed or experience
a transformative education. In other words, although the social experiences
of both the working-class and people of colour provide the basis for under-
standing the nature of their oppression, we cannot say the same for the
bourgeoisie and Whites who must be ‘reborn’ like the phoenix (Allen 2005;
Freire 1993).
Because whiteness is a social construction, a range of possibilities is
opened up for White agency. Although durable, racial identity is also fluid
and flexible. It fractures into different racial projects, some of which do not
merely reproduce and reiterate White power. That said, reconstructionists
suggest that struggling with whiteness is well within a racial project, not
an attempt to get outside it (see also Omi and Winant 1994). In this sense,
racial ideology has no outside. As Kincheloe and Steinberg (1998, 8) note,
‘As with any racial category, whiteness is a social construction in that it can
be invented, lived, analyzed, modified, and discarded’, which echoes Omi
and Winant’s contention that racial projects can be created, modified and
even destroyed. For the moment, Ignatiev and Garvey (1996a) agree when
they declare that ‘what was once historically constructed can be undone’
(35). More of an ideological choice than a biological destiny, whiteness is
part of a hermeneutics of the self. Although not entirely up to the individual
to transform, whiteness represents a constellation of differences articulated
to appear as a ‘lump-sum’ category (Pollock 2004), when in fact ‘there are
many ways to be White’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998, 8). Of course there
are masculine and feminine ways to be White, poor and rich ways to be
White, straight and gay ways, liberal and radical ways as well, which speak
to ‘the diverse, contingent racial positions that white people assume’ (Gir-
oux 1997b, 309). In this sense, resignifying whiteness leads us to the ‘mul-
tiple meanings of whiteness’ (McIntyre 1997, 4) that, rather than viewing it
Another random document with
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 100. For a discussion of the same point in dealing with energy,
see Professor Schuster, British Association Report, 1892, p. 631.
101. W. M‘Dougall in Mind for July 1902, p. 350.
102. See the admirable remarks of Bosanquet in Companion to
Plato’s Republic, pp. 275, 276.
103. On the category of Ground and Consequent and the principle
of Sufficient Reason, consult Bosanquet, Logic, bk. i. chap. 6, and
bk. ii. chap. 7.
104. It is no answer to this suggestion to urge that the present,
being real, cannot be conditioned by the future, which is unreal.
Such a rejoinder commits the metaphysical petitio principii of taking
for granted that only the present is real. It is obvious that one might
say with equal cogency that the past, being over and gone, is now
unreal and therefore cannot influence the real present.
105. For a fuller explanation of what is meant by continuity, consult
Dedekind, Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, specially §§ 3-5, or
Lamb’s Infinitesimal Calculus, chap. 1. Readers who have been
accustomed to the treatment of continuity by the older philosophical
writers should specially remark (1) that continuity is properly a
characteristic of series, and (2) that though continuity implies
indefinite divisibility, the reverse is not, as was sometimes assumed
by earlier writers, true. The series of rational numbers is a familiar
illustration of endless divisibility without continuity.
106. There would arise further difficulties as to whether the
magnitude of this lapse is a function of A, or whether it is the same in
all cases of causal sequence. But until some one can be found to
defend such a general theory of causal sequence it is premature to
discuss difficulties of detail.
107. For the English reader the best sources of information as to
the “descriptive” theory of science are probably volume i. of
Professor Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism; and Mach, the
Science of Mechanics (Eng. trans.). Students who read Gennan may
advantageously add Avenarius, Philosophie als Denken der Welt
gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses. Professor J. A.
Stewart is surely mistaken (Mind, July 1902) in treating the doctrine
as a discovery of “idealist” metaphysicians. Whatever may be
thought of some of the uses to which “idealists” put the theory, they
cannot claim the credit of its invention.
108. Cf. Mach, op. cit., p. 483 ff.; Pearson, Grammar of Science,
chap. 4.
109. E.g., eclipses can be calculated equally well for the future or
the past.
110. Infra, Bk. III. chap. 4. It will be enough to refer in passing to
the curious blunder which is committed when the principle of
Causality is confounded with the doctrines of the Conservation of
Mass and Energy. That the principle of Causality has nothing to do
with these special physical theories is manifest from the
considerations: (1) That it is at least not self-evident that all causal
relation is physical. Philosophers have indeed denied that one
mental state directly causes another, but no one has based his
denial on the assertion that there can be no causality without mass
and energy. (2) The principle of Causality, as we have seen, is a
postulate. If we are ever to intervene successfully in the course of
events, it must be possible with at least approximate accuracy to
regard events as determined by their antecedents. The doctrines of
conservation of mass and energy are, on the contrary, empirical
generalisations from the observed behaviour of material systems.
Neither science nor practical life in the least requires them as an
indispensable condition of success. In practical life they are never
appealed to, and the ablest exponents of science are most ready to
admit that we have no proof of their validity except so far as it can be
established by actual observation. In short, they are largely a
posteriori, while the principle of Causality is, as already explained, a
priori. See infra, Bk. III. chap. 6, § 6.
111. Neither can have a first term, because each has two opposite
senses, positive and negative in the one case, before and after in the
other.
112. I suppose I need not remind my reader that when a number is
spoken of as the actual sum of an infinite series (as when 2 is called
the sum of the series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... to infinity), the word
sum is used in a derivative and improper sense for the limiting value
assumed by the sum of n terms as n increases indefinitely. See
Lamb, Infinitesimal Calculus, p. 11.
 113. For the various views here summarised, see as original
sources, Geulincx, Metaphysica Vera, Pars Prima, 5-8;
Malebranche, Entretiens sur la Metaphysique et sur la Religion, 7th
dialogue; Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, pp. 147, 148; Principles of
Human Knowledge, §§ 25-33, 51-53, 57, 150; Second Dialogue
between Hylas and Philonous.
114. Geulincx expresses the principle in the following formula (op.
cit., pt. 1, 5): quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis.
115. Not that existence can intelligibly be treated as a property; on
this point Kant’s famous criticism of the “ontological proof” seems
conclusive. But from the point of view of Leibnitz it must be imagined
as an additional predicate, somehow added by the creative act of
God to those already contained in the concept of the world as
“possible.”
116. For Leibnitz’s doctrine consult further, The Monadology etc.,
of Leibniz, edit. by R. Latta, Introduction, pts. 2 and 3, and
translations of Monadology, New System of the Communication of
Substances, with the First and Third Explanations of the New
System. Also see the elaborate criticisms of B. Russell, The
Philosophy of Leibniz, chap. 4 and following chapters.
 BOOK III

COSMOLOGY—THE INTERPRETATION
OF NATURE
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY
§ 1. Distinction between the experimental sciences and a Philosophy of Nature
and Mind. The former concerned with the description, the latter with the
interpretation, of facts. § 2. Cosmology is the critical examination of the
special characteristics of the physical order. Its main problems are: (1) the
problem of the nature of Material Existence; (2) problem of the justification of
the concept of the Mechanical Uniformity of Nature; (3) problems of Space
and Time; (4) problem of the Significance of Evolution; (5) problem of the
Place of descriptive Physical Science in the System of Human Knowledge.

§ 1. In our two remaining Books we shall have to deal with the

more elementary of the problems created by the apparent existence
of two orders of Reality, a physical and a psychical, which again at
least seem to stand in reciprocal interaction. In the present Book we
shall discuss some of the leading characteristics which everyday
thought and scientific thought respectively assign to the physical
order, and shall ask how these characteristics compare with those
we have seen ground to ascribe to Reality, i.e. we shall attempt to
form a theory of the place of physical existence in the whole system
of Reality. In the Fourth Book we shall discuss in the same way
some of the leading characteristics of the psychical order as
currently conceived, and the nature of its connection with the
physical order. Our treatment of these topics will necessarily be
imperfect and elementary for more reasons than one: not only are
the facts of which some account must be taken so numerous and
complicated that they would require for their mastery something like
an encyclopædic acquaintance with the whole range of the
experimental sciences, physical and psychological, but their
adequate interpretation, especially on the cosmological side, would
demand a familiarity with the ultimate foundations of mathematical
theory which is rarely possessed either by the experimentalist or by
the metaphysician. The utmost we can hope to accomplish in this
part of our work is to establish one or two broad results as regards
general principles: any suggestions we may make as to the details of
interpretation must be avowedly tentative.
We must be careful to distinguish the task of a Philosophy of
Nature and a Philosophy of Mind from those of the experimental
sciences which deal directly with the fact of the physical and
psychical orders. The fundamental business of the latter is, as we
have already seen, the discovery of descriptive formulæ by the aid of
which the various processes which make up the physical and
psychical orders may be depicted and calculated. The fewer and
simpler these formulæ, the more they economise the labour of
calculation, the more completely do the experimental sciences
perform the work for which we look to them. And so long as our
formulæ adequately accomplish this work of calculation, it is
indifferent for the experimental sciences whether the language in
which they are couched represents a “reality” or not. The “atoms,”
“forces,” and “ethers” of our physical, the “sensations” of our
psychological formulæ, might be as purely symbolic creations of our
own imagination as the “imaginary quantities” of mathematics,
without their unreality in any way interfering with their scientific
usefulness. In the words of an eminent physicist, “the atomic theory
plays a part in physics similar to that of certain auxiliary concepts in
mathematics, ... although we represent vibrations by the harmonic
formula, the phenomena of cooling by exponentials, falls by squares
of times, etc., no one will fancy that vibrations in themselves have
anything to do with the circular functions, or the motion of falling
bodies with squares” (Mach, Science of Mechanics, p. 492). When it
is asserted that the usefulness of a scientific hypothesis, such as,
e.g., the atomic theory or the hypothesis of the existence of an
etherial undulating medium, of itself proves the real existence of
things corresponding to the concepts employed by the hypothesis,
the same fallacy is committed as when it is contended that if an
algebraical calculus is generally capable of geometrical
interpretation, every step in its operations must be interpretable.
 The work of the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind only begins
where that of the experimental sciences leaves off. Its data are not
particular facts, as directly amassed by experiment and observation,
but the hypotheses used by experimental science for the co-
ordination and description of those facts. And it examines these
hypotheses, not with the object of modifying their structure so as to
include new facts, or to include the old facts in a simpler form, but
purely for the purpose of estimating their value as an account of
ultimately real existence. Whether the hypotheses are adequate as
implements for the calculation of natural processes is a question
which Philosophy, when it understands its place, leaves entirely to
the special sciences; whether they can claim to be more than useful
formulæ for calculation, i.e. whether they give us knowledge of
ultimate Reality, is a problem which can only be dealt with by the
science which systematically analyses the meaning of reality, i.e. by
Metaphysics. We may perhaps follow the usage of some recent
writers in marking this difference of object by a difference in
terminology, and say that the goal of experimental science is the
Description of facts, the goal of Metaphysics their Interpretation. The
difference of aim is, however, not ultimate. Description of facts, when
once we cease to be content with such description as will subserve
the purpose of calculation and call for description of the fact as it
really is, of itself becomes metaphysical interpretation.
The chief danger against which we must guard in this part of our
metaphysical studies is that of expecting too much from our science.
We could never, of course, hope for such a complete interpretation
of facts as might be possible to omniscience. At most we can only
expect to see in a general way how the physical and again how the
psychical order must be thought of if our view as to the ultimate
structure of Reality is sound. For an exact understanding of the way
in which the details of physical and psychical existence are woven
into the all-embracing pattern of the real, we must not look. And the
value of even a general interpretation will of course depend largely
upon our familiarity with the actual use the various sciences make of
their hypotheses. With the best goodwill in the world we cannot hope
to avoid all misapprehensions in dealing with the concepts of
sciences with which we have no practical familiarity.
 Though this general caution is at least equally applicable to the
amateur excursions of the student whose mental training has been
confined to some special group of experimental sciences into the
field of metaphysical criticism, it would be a good rule for practice if
every student of Metaphysics would consider it part of his duty to
make himself something more than an amateur in at least one
branch of empirical science; probably Psychology, from its historical
connection with philosophical studies, presents unique advantages
for this purpose. And conversely, no specialist in experimental
science should venture on ultimate metaphysical construction
without at least a respectable acquaintance with the principles of
Logic, an acquaintance hardly to be gained by the perusal of
Jevons’s Elementary Lessons with a supplement of Mill.
§ 2. Cosmology, then, means the critical examination of the
assumptions involved in the recognition of the physical as a distinct
order of existence, and of the most general hypotheses employed by
popular thought and scientific reflection respectively for the
description of specially physical existence. It is clear that this very
recognition of a distinction between the physical and other
conceivable forms of existence implies a degree of reflective
analysis more advanced than that embodied in the naïve pre-
scientific view with which we started in our last two chapters. In the
simple conception of the world of existence as consisting of the
changing states of a plurality of interacting things, there was not as
yet any ground for a distinction between the psychical and the purely
physical. That there really exists a widespread type of thought for
which this distinction has never arisen, is put beyond doubt by the
study of the psychology of the child and the savage. Both, as we
know, draw no hard-and-fast line between the animated and the
inanimate, and the savage, in his attempts to account for the
phenomena of life, does so habitually by supposing the physical
organism to be tenanted by one or more lesser organisms of the
same order of existence. The “soul” he ascribes to things is simply a
smaller and consequently less readily perceptible body within the
body.
For civilised men this conception of all existence as being of the
same order, an order which we might describe from our own more
developed standpoint as at once animated and physical, has
become so remote and inadequate, that we find it hard to realise
how it can ever have been universally accepted as self-evident truth.
Physical science, and under its guidance the current thought of
civilised men, has come to draw a marked distinction between the
great majority of sensible things, which it regards as purely physical,
and a minority which exhibit the presence of “consciousness.” Thus
has arisen a theory of the division of existence into two great orders,
the physical and the psychical, which so dominates our ordinary
thought about the world, that all the efforts of philosophers, both
spiritualist and materialist, to reduce the two orders once more to
one seem powerless to make any impression on the great majority of
minds.
When we ask what are the distinguishing marks of the physical
order as currently conceived, the precise answer we obtain will
depend on the degree of scientific attainments possessed by the
person to whom our question is addressed. But in the main both
current science and everyday thought, so far as it has reflected on
the problem, would probably agree as to the following points. (a)
Physical existence is purely material or non-mental, or again is
unconscious. The exact significance of these predicates is probably
rarely clear even to those who make the freest use of them. On the
face of it, such epithets convey only the information that existence of
the physical kind differs in some important respect from existence of
a mental kind; the nature of the difference they leave obscure.
Reflection, however, may throw some light on the matter.
The distinction between persons and animals on the one side and
mere things on the other seems to rest in the last resort on an
important practical consideration. Among the things which, according
to the naïve Realism of the pre-scientific theory, form my
environment, there are some which regularly behave in much the
same general way in response to very different types of behaviour
on my own part. There are others again which behave differently
towards me according to the differences in my behaviour towards
them. In other words, some things exhibit special individual
purposes, dependent in various ways on the nature of my own
individual purposes, others do not. Hence for practice it becomes
very important to know what things can be counted on always to
exhibit the same general type of behaviour, and what cannot, but
require individual study before I can tell how they will respond to
different purposive behaviour of my own. It is on this practical
difference that the distinction of mental and conscious from purely
physical and unconscious existence seems to be based. We shall
probably not be far wrong in interpreting the unconsciousness of
purely material existence to mean that it exhibits no traces of
purposive individuality, or at least none that we can recognise as
such. More briefly, the physical order consists of the things which do
not manifest recognisable individuality.
(b) Closely connected with this peculiarity is a second. The
physical order is made up of events which conform rigidly to certain
universal Laws. This is an obvious consequence of its lack of
purposive individuality. The elements of which it is composed, being
devoid of all purposive character of their own, always behave in the
same surroundings in the same regular uniform way. Hence we can
formulate precise general Laws of their behaviour. Originally, no
doubt, this uniformity of the physical order is thought of as a point of
contrast with the irregular behaviour of purposive beings, who
respond differently to the same external surroundings according as
their own internal purposes vary. With the growth of Psychology as
an experimental science of mental processes there inevitably arises
the tendency to extend this concept of uniform conformity with
general Law to the processes of the psychical order, and we are then
confronted by the famous problem how to reconcile scientific law
with human “freedom.” The same antithesis between the apparently
regular and purposeless behaviour of the elements of the physical
order and the apparently irregular and purposive behaviour of the
members of the psychical order is also expressed by saying that the
sequence of events in the physical order is mechanically determined
by the principle of Causality, whereas that of the psychical order is
teleological, i.e. determined by reference to end or purpose.
(c) Every element of the physical order fills a position in space and
in time. Hence any metaphysical problems about the nature of space
and time are bound to affect our view of the nature of the physical
order. Here, again, there is a point of at least possible contrast
between the physical and the psychical. As the accumulation of
experience makes it increasingly clearer that the bodies of my fellow-
men and my own body, in so far as it is an object perceived like
others by the organs of the special senses, exhibit in many respects
the same conformity to certain general laws, and are composed of
the same constituent parts as the rest of the sensible world, such
animated bodies of purposive agents have to be included along with
the rest of sensible existence in the physical order. The individual’s
purposive individuality has now to be thought of as residing in a
distinct factor in his composition of a kind foreign to the physical
order, and therefore imperceptible by the senses, i.e. as a mind or
soul or stream of consciousness in the current psychological sense.
Such a mind or soul or stream of consciousness is then usually
regarded as not filling a series of positions in space, and sometimes
as not filling a series of positions in time.
(d) The physical order, as thus finally constituted by the
introduction of the concept of an imperceptible soul or mind, now
comprises all sensible existence[117] as an aggregate of events in
time and space, linked together by the principle of Causality, and
exhibiting conformity with general law. To this conception recent
science has made an important addition in the notion of a continuous
evolution or development as manifesting itself throughout the series.
So that we may ultimately define the physical order as a body of
events occupying position in time and space, conforming to general
laws with rigid and undeviating uniformity, and exhibiting continuous
evolution.[118]
From these general characteristics of the physical order, as
conceived by current science and current popular thought, arise the
fundamental problems of Cosmology. We have to discuss—(1) the
real nature of material existence, i.e. the ultimate significance of the
distinction between the two orders, and the possibility of reducing
them to one; (2) the justification for the distinction between
mechanical and teleological processes, and for the conception of the
physical order as rigidly conformable to uniform law; (3) the leading
difficulties of the conceptions of time and space, and their bearing on
the degree of reality to be ascribed to the physical order; (4) the
philosophical implications of the application of the notion of evolution
or development to the events of the physical order; (5) finally, we
ought perhaps to deal very briefly and in a very elementary fashion
with the problem of the real position of descriptive physical science
as a whole in its relation to the rest of human knowledge.

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 26

(pp. 496-497, 1st ed.); H. Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysic, pp. 77-79;
J. S. Mackenzie, Outlines of Metaphysics, bk. iii. chap. 2; J. Ward,
Naturalism and Agnosticism. lect. 1.

117. I.e. existence of the same kind as that perceived by the

senses, whether actually so perceived or not. In this sense the solid
impenetrable extended atoms of Newton or Locke are “sensible”
existence, inasmuch as their properties are the same in kind as
certain perceptible properties of larger masses, though they are not
themselves actually perceptible.
118. Of course the evolution must be mere subjective appearance
if, as is sometimes assumed, the processes of the physical order are
one and all purely mechanical. But this only shows that the current
concept of the physical order is not free from inconsistencies.
 CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF MATTER

§ 1. The physical order, because dependent for its perceived qualities on the
sense-organs of the percipient, must be the appearance of a more ultimate
reality which is non-physical. § 2. Berkeley’s criticism is fatal to the
identification of this reality with “material substance.” The logical consequence
of Berkeley’s doctrine that the esse of sensible things is percipi would be the
subjectivist view that the physical order is only a complex of presentations. §
3. But this is clearly not the case with that part of the physical order which
consists of the bodies of my fellow-men. These have an existence, as centres
of feeling, over and above their existence as presentations to my senses. § 4.
As the bodies of my fellows are connected in one system with the rest of the
physical order, that order as a whole must have the same kind of reality which
belongs to them. It must be the presentation to our sense of a system or
complex of systems of experiencing subjects; the apparent absence of life
and purpose from inorganic nature must be due to our inability to enter into a
direct communion of interest with its members. § 5. Some consequences of
this view.

§ 1. In the preceding chapter we have very briefly indicated the

nature of the steps by which reflective thought comes to distinguish
sharply between a physical and a psychical order of existence. The
physical order, when the concept has been brought into its complete
shape by the inclusion of my own body and all its parts, is thought of
as a system comprising all the bodies in the universe, that is, all the
existences which are of the same kind as those which I directly
perceive by means of the special senses.[119] Now, with regard to the
whole physical order thus conceived two things seem fairly obvious
upon the least reflection, that it does not depend for its existence
upon the fact of my actually perceiving it, and that it does depend
upon my perception for all the qualities and relations which I find in it.
Its that appears independent of the percipient, but its what, on the
other hand, essentially dependent on and relative to the structure of
the perceiving organ. As we have already seen, the familiar
experience of the variations in perception which accompany
differences in the permanent structure or temporary functioning of
the organs of sense led, very early in the history of Philosophy, to the
recognition of this relativity, so far as the so-called “secondary”
qualities, i.e. those which can only be perceived by one special
sense-organ, are concerned. We have also seen sufficiently (in Bk.
II. chap. 4) that the same consideration holds equally good of those
“primary” qualities which are perceptible by more senses than one,
and have probably for that reason been so often supposed to be
unaffected by this relativity to a perceiving organ.
Without wasting the reader’s time by unnecessary repetition of our
former reasoning, it may be worth while to point out here how this
thorough-going relativity of the qualities of the physical order to a
percipient organ leads directly to the indefinite regress, the
apparently invariable consequence of all contradictions in
Metaphysics, when we try to take those qualities as independently
real. I perceive the properties of physical existence by special sense-
organs, and the properties as perceived are conditioned by the
structure of those organs. But each sense-organ is itself a member
of the physical order, and as such is perceived by and dependent for
its perceived qualities upon another organ. This second sense-organ
in its turn is also a member of the physical order, and is perceived by
a third, or by the first organ again. And there is no end to this mutual
dependence. The physical order, as a whole, must be a “state” of my
nervous system, which is itself a part of that order. We shall see
more fully in our final Book, when we come to discuss the problem of
Mind and Body, that this contradiction is an inevitable result of the
inconsistency involved in the inclusion of my own body in the
physical order, an inconsistency which is, in its turn, a necessary
consequence of the hard-and-fast separation of the two orders of
existence.[120]
Considerations of this kind have led to the general recognition that
the physical order must be regarded as phenomenal, as the
manifestation to sense-perception of a reality which is in its own
nature inaccessible to sense-perception, and therefore, in the
strictest sense of the words, not physical. When we ask, however,
how this non-physical reality of which the physical order is the
phenomenal manifestation to our senses, is to be thought of, we find
ourselves at once plunged into the same difficulties which we have
already met, in a more general form, in discussing the concept of
Substance. Popular thought, and science so far as it is content to
accept the notions of popular thought without criticism, have
commonly fallen back on the idea of the non-phenomenal ground of
the physical order as an unperceived “substratum.” To this
substratum it has given the name of matter, and has thus interpreted
the physical order as the effect produced by the causal action of an
unperceived matter upon our sense-organs, or rather, to speak with
more precision, upon their unknown material substratum. Frequently,
as might have been expected, the attempt has been made to identify
this substratum with those of the known qualities of the physical
order which appear least liable to modification with the varying states
of the percipient organs, and lend themselves most readily to
measurement and calculation, the so-called “primary” qualities of
mechanical science. This is the standpoint adopted by Newton and,
in the main, by Locke, and largely through the influence of their work
still remains the most familiar to the ordinary English mind. But the
inconsistencies we have already found inherent in such a conception
of Substance as is here presupposed, so inevitably make
themselves felt upon any serious examination, that the doctrine
regularly appears in the history of thought as a mere temporary
halting-place in the advance to the more radical notion of matter as
the entirely unknown non-phenomenal substratum of the sensible
properties of bodies.
§ 2. This latter notion is again manifestly open to all the objections
previously brought against the more general concept of substance
as an unknown substratum or support of properties. It is from these
objections that Berkeley’s famous criticism of the concept of matter,
the most original attempt at a constructive theory of the real nature of
the physical order in the history of English Philosophy, starts.
Berkeley first takes the identification of material substance with the
primary qualities of body, which Locke had made current in English
speculation, and shows, by insisting upon the relativity of perceived
quality to percipient organ, that it is untenable. Having thus driven his
opponent to surrender this identification, and to define matter as the
unknown substratum of the physical order, he proceeds to argue that
this notion of an unknown substratum is both useless and
unintelligible. It is useless, because our knowledge of the actual
properties and processes of the physical order can neither be
extended nor made clearer by the addition of an unknowable; it is
unintelligible, because we can give no account to ourselves of the
nature of the “support” supposed to be bestowed by the substratum
or the properties.
Material substance being thus dismissed as an unmeaning fiction,
what is left as the reality of the physical order? According to
Berkeley, nothing but the actual presentations, or “ideas,” in which
the percipient subject is aware of the properties of bodies. A body is
simply such a complex of presentations to a percipient; except as so
presented it has no existence. As Berkeley is fond of putting it, the
esse of the material thing is simply percipi, the fact of its being
presented. But just when we expect Berkeley to accept the complete
subjectivist contention that bodies are simply “states of the
percipients’ consciousness” and nothing more, he remembers that
he has to account both for the fact that we cannot perceive what we
please and where we please, but that our perceptions form an order
largely independent of our own choice, and for the deep-seated
conviction of the common-sense mind that things do not cease to
exist when my perception of them is interrupted. To reconcile his
theory with these apparently conflicting facts, he has recourse, as is
the custom of philosophers and others in a difficulty, to divine
assistance. The continued existence of the physical world in the
intervals of perception, and its systematic character and partial
independence of our volition, he explains by the hypotheses that
God produces perceptions in us in a fixed order, and that God
continues to be aware of the system of presentations which I call the
physical world, when my perception of it is suspended. The same
explanation would, of course, have to be invoked to account for the
existence of physical realities which no human subject perceives.[121]
It is fairly obvious that the two halves of Berkeley’s theory will not
fit together into a coherent whole. If the whole esse of physical things
is merely percipi, there can be no reason why I should suppose them
to exist at all except in so far as and so long as they are presented to
my perception. The whole hypothesis of an omnipresent divine
perception which remains aware of the contents that have vanished
from my own perception, thus becomes purely gratuitous. It also
labours under the disadvantage of being, on Berkeley’s theory,
internally inconsistent. For if it is necessary to invoke the agency of
God to account for the occurrence of presentations to my
experience, it is not clear why we have not to suppose a second
deity who causes the series of presentations in the experience of
God, and so on indefinitely. On the other hand, if God’s experience
may be taken as uncaused, it is not clear why my own experience
might not have been taken so in the first instance, and the
introduction of God into the theory avoided. Thus the logical outcome
of the doctrine that the esse of physical things is merely percipi,
would have been either Solipsism, the doctrine according to which I
have no certain knowledge of any existence except my own,
everything else being a mere state or modification of myself; or the
Humian scepticism, which resolves my own existence, as well as
that of the external world, into a mere sequence of fleeting mental
processes. Conversely, if I have adequate reason to believe that any
member of the physical order whatever is more than a presentation,
and has an existence in some sense independent of my perception, I
have no right to declare of any member of that order, unless for
special reasons, that its being consists merely in being perceived.
§ 3. Why, then, did Berkeley, as a matter of fact, accept neither the
solipsist nor the sceptical conclusion? Why does he, after all, credit
the members of the physical order with an existence independent of
the fact of my perceiving them, and thus introduce a patent
contradiction into his system? It is not hard to see the reasons by
which he must have been influenced. The whole physical order
cannot be dismissed as a mere subjective illusion, because there are
some members of it which undoubtedly have an existence
independent of the fact of being perceived by my sense-organs.
Such members are my own body and the bodies of my fellow-men.
Both my own body and those of my fellow-men, as they are
perceived by the various special senses, belong to the physical
order, and share its qualities. But over and above its existence as a
member of the perceived physical order, my own body has further
another quite different kind of existence. It is, in so far as I perceive
its parts, as I do other bodily existence, by the sensations of the
various special sense-organs, a complex of presentations, like
everything else in the physical world. But my body is not merely an
object presented to me by the organs of the special senses; it is also
something which I feel as a whole in common or organic sensation,
and in the changing organic thrills of my various emotional moods.
This unique feeling of my body as a whole accompanies every
moment of my conscious life and gives each its peculiar tone, and
there seems to be no doubt that it forms the foundation of the sense
of personal identity. If we recollect the essentially teleological
character of feeling, we shall be inclined to say that my body as thus
apprehended is nothing other than myself as a striving purposive
individual, and that my experience of it is the same thing as the
experience of my purposive attitudes towards my environment. It is,
in fact, this experience of my body as apprehended by immediate
feeling, that Psychology describes as the “subject” of the various
“mental states” of which it formulates the laws. For Metaphysics, it
does not seem too much to say, this double existence of my own
body, as a presented object about which I have knowledge in the
same way as about everything else, and as an immediately felt unity,
affords the key to the whole problem of the “independent” existence
of a reality beyond my own presentations. To see how this comes
about, we must first consider the influence it has on our conception
of one very special part of the physical order, the bodies of our
fellows.
The bodies of our fellow-men are, of course, from one point of
view complexes of presentations which we receive through our
sense-organs; so far their esse, as Berkeley would have said, is
percipi. But all practical communion with my fellows through the
various institutions of society is based upon the conviction that, over
and above their existence as presentation-complexes, or contents of
my perceptive states, the bodies of my fellows have the same kind of
existence as directly apprehended in immediate feeling which I
ascribe to my own. In other words, all practical life is a mere illusion,
unless my fellow-men are, like myself, centres of purposive
experience. By the existence independent of my own perception
which I ascribe to them, I mean precisely existence as feeling
purposive beings. Hence, unless all social life is an illusion, there is
at least one part of the physical order, external to myself, of which
the esse is not mere percipi, but percipere, or rather sentire. If my
fellow-men are more than complexes of presentations or “ideas in
my head,” then the subjectivist reduction of all reality to states of my
“consciousness” breaks down, at least for this part of the physical
order. Hence the acceptance or rejection of the subjectivist theory
will ultimately depend on the nature of the evidence for the
independent existence of human feelings and purposes beyond my
own.
On what grounds, then, do we attribute such “independent”
existence as experiencing subjects to our fellows? According to the
current subjectivist explanation, we have here a conclusion based on
the argument from the analogy between the structure of my own
body, as presented in sense-perception, and those of others. I infer
that other men have a mental life like my own, because of the visible
resemblances between their physical structure and my own, and this
inference receives additional support from every fresh increase in
our anatomical and physiological knowledge of the human frame.
But, being an argument from analogy, it can never amount to a true
scientific induction, and the existence of human experience, not my
own, must always remain for the subjectivist a probability and can
never become a certainty.
I am convinced that this popular and superficially plausible view is
radically false, and that its logical consequence, the belief that the
real existence of our fellows is less certain than our own, is a grave
philosophical error. That the argument from analogy is no sufficient
basis for the belief in human experience beyond my own, can easily
be seen from the following considerations:—(1) As ordinarily stated,
the data of the supposed inference do not actually exist. For what I
perceive is not, as the subjectivist assumes, three terms—my own
mental life, my own anatomical structure, and the anatomy of my
neighbour, but two, my own mental life and my neighbour’s anatomy.
If I cannot be sure of the reality of my neighbour’s experience until I
have compared the anatomy and physiology of his organism with
that of my own, I shall have to remain in doubt at least until science
can devise a mechanism by which I can see my own nervous
system. At present one of the terms on which the analogical
argument is said to be based, namely, my own internal physical
structure, has to be mostly taken on trust. It would be little less than
the truth to invert the subjectivist’s position, and say that, until
science can devise means for seeing our own brains, we infer the
resemblance of our own anatomy to our neighbour’s from the
previously known resemblance of his inner experience and ours.
(2) And even supposing this difficulty already surmounted, as it
conceivably will be in the future, there is a still more serious flaw in
the presumed analogical inference. If I once have good ground for
the conviction that similarity of inner experience is attended by
similarity of physical structure, then of course I can in any special
case treat the degree of structural resemblance between one
organism and another as a sufficient reason for inferring a like
degree of resemblance between the corresponding inner
experiences. But upon what grounds is the general principle itself
based? Obviously, if my own inner experience is the only one known
to me originally, I have absolutely no means of judging whether the
external resemblances between my own organism and yours afford
reason for crediting you with an inner experience like my own or not.
If the inference by analogy is to have any force whatever in a
particular case, I must already know independently that likeness of
outward form and likeness of inner experience at least in some
cases go together. The plausibility of the usual subjectivist account
of the way in which we come to ascribe real existence to our fellows,
is simply due to its tacitly ignoring this vital point.
How, then, do we actually learn the existence of feeling purposive
experience outside our own? The answer is obvious. We learn it by
the very same process by which we come to the clear
consciousness of ourselves. It is a pure blunder in the subjectivist
psychology to assume that somehow the fact of my own existence
as a centre of experience is a primitive revelation. It is by the
process of putting our purposes into act that we come to be aware of
them as our purposes, as the meaning of our lives, the secrets of
what we want of the world. And, from the very fact of our existence in
a society, every step in the execution of a purpose or the satisfaction
of a want involves the adjustment of our own purposive acts to those