Now, once we said ontology of language, people began to talk about ontology, forgetting to say ontology of language. But it was useful because it kept pointing to something–that actually, in our time, we need a new ontology of bring, a new ontology of living. So, somehow the word began to demand more from us than just speaking of language.
To be precise, my dear Bill, we talk about three key elements impacting us as human beings today on this planet. Ontology is one of them. We talk about cosmology first, ontology second, and epistemology third. We challenge the three of them – the three of them from the traditions in which modernity has been established.
Cosmology, our relationship to the world and universe and cosmos, has fundamentally been held as a mechanistic phenomenon, and that defines everything. It’s a presupposition we live with, and it’s been held as a truth that the world is nothing but a human projection that is mechanistic, and that worldview has permeated everything including the ontology of ourselves and everything else.
And where it hits coaching directly is that it permeates our epistemology, our understanding of learning and knowing. And for us that has been a central focus of our work. We claim that the present epistemology will not give us the knowing that is needed to deal with the issues of our time. That, I will say, is a key claim that we work with here at Newfield.
Bill. For a moment, let’s look at these three. First, cosmology. A colleague of mine (a doctoral student) is doing his work on astrophysics and the extraordinary breakthroughs that are coming. He is going back and looking at Rudolph Otto (1950) and the notion of the numinous. In 2009, we are going to have a new telescope that will actually allow us to go back to the big bang and witness it. He is saying that, at some level, we can never be the same again. It’s a whole different conception of the universe. So, as you look at the new cosmology, is it shifting, in part, because we are forced to look at the universe in a different way?
Julio. Well, that definitely is forcing us to re-look at every thing-at spiritual claims and religious claims; it’s having us question everything. But let me go to the common sense of our times. In sixteenth-century science, Copernicus took a look and said, “Guys, this is a little bit different than what we have been saying so far.” And he defined the role of the earth, etc. The universe that he defined, actually, was our solar system. In 1905, the universe where Einstein was placing himself was our galaxy; that was it. Today, we are talking 100 years after Einstein, and saying that there are a hundred billion galaxies around, so we are talking about a little bit bigger world. But we have not changed, in our common sense, the Copernican perspective.
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