Colligere Fragmenta: What Kind of Ecclesial Mediation for Digital Discipleship?*

We always begin in medias res. In this sense, the cacophony of the Internet, far from being the exceptional nuisance of an age dominated by noise, brings us back to the ever-present difficulty of turning fragments into a recognizable picture—it brings us back in other words to the inherent difficulty of learning.

 

In this piece, I would like to begin by remembering the nature of learning as precisely a journey from fragmentation to resolution. This act of memory will afford, I hope, sufficient footing to engage in a principled reflection on the way in which the Church can be a catalyst for learning amidst the digital cacophony, folding the partiality of fragments into a journey of discipleship.

 

Colligere Fragmenta? The Scholastic Essence of Learning

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My starting point for thinking about learning is the theory of experience (“phaneroscopy”) elaborated by Charles Sanders Peirce. Why Peirce? Because, being as we are born after Descartes, it is still exceedingly difficult for us to extricate ourselves from the lingering grip of nominalist distinctions between “matter” and “concept” or between “object” and “subject” without inadvertently reproducing their implicit biases. Supposedly hardened “realists” still take pride in denying the reality of generals—considered as attributes we append “subjectively” to reality—and of putting the weight of reality only behind things that have weight. In this sense, Peirce offers an unexpected bridge to a pre-Cartesian way of thinking known as scholastic realism [1]—a connection masterfully explored by semioticians like the late John Deely and Brian Kemple. [2] Scholastic realism distinguishes without separating between mind-dependent (ens rationis) and mind-independent being (ens reale). Mind-dependent being (i.e. all manner of meaning-bearing relations) participates in the fabric of reality and makes it what it is: while it only manifests to a mind, it is not purely “subjective” in a nominalist sense. This amounts to saying that that which we experience as real is always an inextricable tapestry of mind-dependent and mind-independent being, all confused together (ens ut primum cognitum). [4] It is only by a reflexive act of cognition that this initially confused “being” gets distinguished into different categories, which are at first only virtually and implicitly—and not actually and explicitly—present. So, we always, invariably, perhaps even infuriatingly, begin in medias res. To put it otherwise: before inquiring into the four causes of an Aristotelian chair, we typically sit on it. It is in this act of “just sitting”, a state of unreflexive engagement with the world, that experience begins.

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The domain of unreflexive engagement with the world by sitting, grabbing, turning, switching, swiping, (doom)scrolling is what Peirce called “Secondness”. [5] He called it “Secondness” because, for him, it always co-exists alongside two simultaneous aspects of reality as given in experience. The first is the aspect of potential, called “Firstness”: anything we might just use unreflexively invariably harbors more than meets the eye. So, Peirce also acknowledged the reality of as-yet-unrealized potential that might dawn on us, ever so fleetingly, when we may least expect it. Let us call this the magic of small details, whereby an almost-nothing might occasionally unveil a detail that changes everything. The third aspect of reality, as apprehended in experience, Peirce literally called “Thirdness”. This is the domain of reflexively grasped order and regularity. Thirdness is the world made intelligible, its form not simply undergone but made interesting in the light of understanding. Eventually “reality” includes, for Peirce, all these aspects, which range from unrealized potential to the actuality of the world to its constitution made intelligible. Peircean realism, then, is a realism that isn’t limited to things that have weight and that provide us with friction (i.e. the world of Secondness), but includes their unexpressed potential and the tendencies they enact when that potential is at least partly expressed. Peircean realism, I argue, connects us to the realist wisdom of the Scholastics and provides us a footing on which to stand in our fast-moving times.

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These considerations ultimately build up to a theory of learning that claims to be realist, without excluding potential and regularity from the purview of the real—as if this could be nothing more than mere “subjective” projections. On this basis, then, learning could be understood as any genuine mediation of experience whereby, beginning in details that hit us, strike us, alert us, trigger us, leave us puzzled or bemused (Secondness), we manage to glimpse their potential for becoming other than they are (Firstness) through some understanding of the trajectories of growth and development they compose (Thirdness). 

 

Colligere Fragmenta! Ecclesial Strategy for the Digital Age 

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So, let us come back to scrolling mindlessly, exposed to the cacophony of the digital speakers’ corner. Death (physical, moral, mental) by couch potato-ing is one of the unspoken moral panics of our time. How can we avoid remaining caught in the grip of eternal Secondness? Some people despair, and their despair is as strong as the rules they wish to impose. Furious diets, however, are not a substitute for moderation: they consign the table (or the Internet) to eternal damnation. Freedom is found in escape only if we resign ourselves to thinking that certain things can only, invariably, be a work of the devil. This piece, then, is a cri de coeur, urging you, the reader, not to go there—even if the temptation can become exceptionally strong.

 

What can I offer as alternative? A vision of learning achievable through personal prudence and communal discernment, grounded in the Peircean view of reality as Secondness “augmented” by Firstness and Thirdness. The first step, when meeting Secondness, is to take it only half-seriously. Do you recall the last time your doom-scrolling got you into a state of paranoia about this or that? There is always an angle from which that tragedy might melt into farce. Try and find it. This, I believe, is the strategy that was skillfully displayed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan and their infamous tetrads, which they used as satirical goggles to hold together tragedy and farce with respect to every technological extension of man. The Press? Exaggerates today and makes yesterday yesterday’s news. [6] The Pen? Increases action at a distance to the point of becoming the new sword (a “sharp pen”). [7] The credit card? Amplifies ostentatious consumption and paves the way to bankruptcy. [8] The McLuhans spared nothing from their unflinching, and humorous, gaze, so long as it possessed the ability to turn human beings into its servomechanisms. The McLuhans’ lesson to us is: do not believe in everything technology makes you do, or see, or feel. Try channeling Chesterton the contrarian if it helps. This little practice of personal prudence will help you see that a fragment is, from the right angle, just a fragment and not the whole picture. What this reflex can do is help you become receptive to Firstness. That’s already a small augmentation of experience that can release you from the grip of doomscrolling in infinite Secondness.

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However, and this is my key point, learning isn’t only a private trick but a communal discipline. We learn what we learn once we reach a point that some belief “makes sense” because it can provide structure to the experience of different people. It is through some form of communal discernment alongside others that the “realness” of order and regularity eventually becomes apparent (Thirdness). So, learning isn’t just an act focused on the object of learning, but it implies a whole discipline about learning in which we partner with others as we hold the world open for question, in order for it not to close down to a single formula. This approach is advocated specifically in relation to technology by a Dutch professor of Philosophy, Ciano Aydin, who suggests that one of the ways to form oneself in a technological world is to find ways publicly to hold the question open around what we really experience when our experience is technologically mediated. [9]

 

Aydin’s proposal is useful to remind ourselves, as Church, of what it is that Church does. Holding the world open for question and inquiry is the way in which a tradition lives. In the words of Alasdair MacIntyre: “A living tradition … is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.” [10] As a living tradition, the Church is exceptionally well-resourced for the task of being a place of formation in a technological world, because it has honed the practice to hold spaces in which present experience might be kept open for question, in order to tease out its lines of growth and development. Suffice it to think of how the Magisterium, the Church’s teaching ministry, presupposes an act of remembering the fundamentals of the faith when meeting a difficult question, in order to figure out where any room for discernment might lie. This delicate space for our brute experience (Secondness) to be made intelligible (Thirdness) by retrieving its potential for becoming other (Firstness) is closed down when our main line of defense becomes fasting and withdrawal. In contrast, belief in Tradition as a source of learning entails precisely the capacity to create buffers for discernment through which to nourish our responses (becoming responsible) instead of getting caught in tit-for-tat reactions (becoming reactionaries). Small communities, sharing groups, retreats, spiritual direction and practices of discernment, scriptural hermeneutics, councils and synods: you name it. These, I argue, are not unrelated fragments, but a reminder of the Church’s coherent capacity to hold questions open lightly, for not getting caught up in moral panics, for bearing prayerfully with doubt. Through its own tradition of teaching-discipleship, the Church might already be extraordinarily well equipped to be a place where fragments are gathered and made whole again. Re-membering, gathering up fragments so they reveal a path, seems to me a good way to go on when you get caught in medias res.