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"The intellect of man [...] energizes as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. It gathers up a succession of notes into the expression of a whole, and calls it a melody; it has a keen sensibility towards angles and curves, lights and shadows, tints and contours. It distinguishes between rule and exception, between accident and design. It assigns phenomena to a general law, qualities to a subject, acts to a principle, and effects to a cause."

Here Newman is saying in a more modern way what Aristotle and Aquinas said many hundreds of years earlier. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the intellect is a power of the soul, and comprises an 'active' and 'passive' component. The distinction between the active and passive intellect is a distinction between potentiality and actuality in knowing; that human knowing passes from a state in which it does not think, to one in which it does. The passive intellect apprehends the forms of things we can understand. What "seizes" for Newman, Aquinas might call the passive intellect. But it's potential is the unity of the 'general law', and it is the active intellect which moves towards that potential. What is not clear in Aristotle (although Aquinas and undoubtedly Newman are more clear) is whether this 'active' intellect which moves potential knowledge to active knowledge is in fact God.

The question of what Newman calls 'meaning' and 'investing something with an idea' can now be considered in this process. Meaning can have components of both the passive intellect and the active intellect. The very 'seizing' of something relies on it carrying some meaning that we latch on to, and from there our active intellect drives us to realise the knowledge inherent in it. But the drive for knowledge, the process of realising it, is continually meaningful. And there lies a problem with the active/passive distinction in that it leads us to think we can have one without the other. There always appears to be a force that drives towards understanding (that is active); but with it there is that which apprehends form and recognises potential. But might it be that the active/passive distinction revolves around the principle of 'potentiality' itself, and that one way through this philosophical conundrum is to think about 'anticipation' and 'expectation'?

The recognising of potential suggests some anticipatory capacity within human perception: that what we perceive is somehow situated on a horizon of what we might expect to see. But human perception is highly complex, and whilst we can talk about 'expection' in a linear way (for example, 'expecting sales to be up next month' or 'expecting my daughter to be bored when we go on holiday'), lived experience is a continuous interaction with sensory-physical, social, biologicical and psychological perturbations. Every single tranche of experience may have its own 'anticipation' (do I anticipate the next beat of my heart or my next breath?... maybe if I'm scared...?)

That is where it may be more useful to think about a 'structuring of expectations'... where a multitude of different expectations coexist, interact and continually reorganise themselves and actions, and new perturbations occur. But what is interesting here is that we might be able to get a handle on expectations with our existing knowledge about 'information'.

It seems reasonable that expectations, even when they are subliminal, are probabilistic in some way: some things may be more expected than others; there are clearly moments when we recognise something as inevitable. Given this, a mathematics of expectation might be possible where we can:

a. analyse the structuring of expectations in a particular experience
b. simulate expectation systems given certain parameters.

I will continue this theme in a later post, but for now let us briefly consider the situation of the perception of something which we might find 'meaningful' (although prior to our understanding it). A chemical explosion of Sodium or Potassium on water is rarely not perceived as meaningful. The event is surprising and in so many ways unexpected. Water is not associated with fire (unless of put one out); neither is metallic-looking Sodium.  But when we put them together there is an explosion.

Now, in the context of the chemistry lab, this is done carefully with some planning. And there are expectations there too. The messages are "now we are going to do something special!". But there are also expectations socially, for all the other children in the class, being present at an event where 'now we are going to do something special' is occurring. Rumours will abound (other children may have seen this before). So generally there is a conflict of expectation between what is expected of the water and the metal, what is expected in the situation, what is expected socially, and so on.

Each of these layers of expectation have their own probabilistic natures. But whilst within the class there is a fairly high probability of something special happening (because the class has been prepared for it), there is a low probability when thinking about the water and the metal that it will explode. But then what happens with the actual explosion? The probability of something special in the classroom is realised, but the once incredibly low probability of an explosion with water and metal is also realised and coincides with the class expectation. It is as if there has been a 'transfer' of expectations from one dimension to another. Notwithstanding the force of the explosion, the intellectual effect is powerful. Potentiality is realised ("we can make a bomb!"), the active intellect is in full-swing.

At this point I think all I want to say is that Newman's description of the intellect as 'giving something a meaning' is a process whereby perception causes a restructuring of expectations - or a transfer of expectations, and that with this transfer, the processes of the 'active' intellect are set loose.

In the next post, I will pursue this idea as a way of understanding musical experience.

If educational engagements are not meaningful -  for both teachers and learners - then nothing in education really works: meaningless education is an oxymoron. Unfortunately, it is an oxymoron which we somehow succeeded in realising! Meaningfulness can be a precursor to deeper levels of understanding. Things mean something to us before we begin to understand them (think about falling in love). Indeed, it is in finding something meaningful that is often the spur to being driven to a deeper understanding (in the case of love, that can take a lifetime!). So the distinction between meaning and understanding is important to be clear about. The process that leads to understanding we call learning.

In current educational discourse, these terms get conflated. This is partly to do with the fact that in the learning process, information is sought or delivered (by learners or by teachers). Informally, we talk about the meaning of information being explained (by teachers) so that it might be understood (by learners). The problem here is that information is mistaken for meaning: we say, "the meaning is in the content." But only information is in the content. And there is a high probability of the information being meaningless to learners - particularly in the beginning.

Creating something meaningful through the presentation of information is a function of teaching. But for teachers to do this, there are pre-requisites:

• the information must be meaningful to the teacher (amongst the many idiotic curriculum requirements in schools, this is often a challenge!)
• teachers' enthusiasm for the meaning of the content is meaningful to the learners
• Individual learner enthusiasm is available to other learners (facilitated through activity)
• that the learners' concerns, their perspectives on life and their development are meaningful to the teacher

These are not trivial points, although they would appear to be obvious. But so many examples of educational practice fall foul of these issues. If curricula are dictated by government (or even institutions), there is a risk of meaninglessness in the teacher concerning the content. If students are disinterested in the teacher, nothing will happen. If the teacher is disinterested in their learners at the expense of the content, nothing will happen (for example, castigating them for 'lack of intelligence').

All these problems will result in control problems in the classroom. In university, this usually manifests in a lack of attendance. In school, where attendance is compulsory, disruptive behaviour is the only route available to learners. Both are expressions of the meaninglessness of the situation learners (and often, teachers) find themselves in.

But behind this are some fundamental questions:

1. Should we achieve meaningful engagement through allowing learners to identify what is meaningful to them? (which would produce some sort of inquiry-based learning)
2. Should we achieve meaningful engagement through allowing teachers to teach what is meaningful to them?
3. Should we achieve meaningful engagement through focusing on effective classroom management?
4. Should we achieve meaningful learning through abolishing the classroom altogether?

A friend commented on a desire to twirl on a swivel chair to the music of Bach. "But Mozart is not the same for twirling!". Having noticed my daughter also having a propensity for twirling on swivel chairs (although not requiring the aid of music), I thought this was an interesting statement.

I think there's something in it. After all, 'spinning' in Bach and Baroque music generally is well-known to musicologists: 'Fortspinnung' is a feature of many arias in Bach cantatas (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortspinnung). Motifs are repeated at different levels of the scale creating a continual driving musical energy (actually, the driving force is usually the rhythm) that unfolds over time in an apparently relentless pursuit of the final cadence.

Having said that, not all Bach is like this.. I'd like to know about the 'twirling' properties of the final "At the Sepulchre" chorus in the St John Passion (Taverner Players – St John Passion BWV 245, Part Two: No.39 Rhut wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine) (this still has some aspects of 'fortspinnung', but a very different mood), or the slow movement of the first violin concerto (Joji Hattori;Scottish Chamber Orchestra – Violin Concerto in A minor BWV 1041: Andante). But Mozart is clearly different in sensibility, and this may explain its difference in 'twirling' property, which in itself may seen to be a manifestation of that driving rhythmic force.

That's interesting, but not what I want to think about here. Because what matters in this case is the difference in the physical (and presumably emotional) responses to the music. What are the differences in us as we hear the music? And what about the difference in our physical responses to it?

'Twirling' is a sympathetic physical response - like dancing. Yeats knew about this and asked the obvious question:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I wonder if an answer to this lies in the essence of 'sympathy' and the coordination between music and movement. What seems to occur is a 'coupling' - a self-regulating relationship between music in the environment and the biological system of a human being with a particular disposition and freedom to respond. What occurs physically is psychologically meaningful: in coupling the twirling and the music there is a harmony between psychological expectations of the music and expectations of physical sensations which feeds back to the continuing production of those physical sensations (so twirling continues) as the music continues to produce the conditions that feed it. And 'fortspinnung' may produce these conditions most effectively.

Mozart's music, in having 'low entropy' moments punctuated with 'surprise increases' in disorder (which are then controlled) clearly does not lend itself to a continuous physical movement like 'twirling'. It requires something more nuanced, sensual and responsive where phrasing is mirrored by waves of emotional and physical response which are more like caresses than continuous motion. Hard to do that with a swivel chair! But if one were to move to Mozart in sympathy, the same issues of expectation of the music and expectation of the physical sensation apply. The meaningfulness of a movement to music lies in the alignment of expectations both of physical feedback and musical events.

But finally there is the question as to why we are drawn to different kinds of music at different times and in psychological states. I suspect this has something to do with what we feel we need to do to our bodies at a particular moment in time in response to broader self-regulation within ourselves in response to our environment. In chaotic and stressful times, when there is high entropy in our own minds, a low-entropy physical sensation like swivelling on a chair may provide a necessary corrective (how might that work?). But with space to think and reflect, maybe a need for a more sinuous movement takes hold... (not that my improvisation below falls into either category!)

The current economic difficulty started with a crisis in banking and is ending with a crisis in public services as nations grapple with the fallout out of their intervention with the banking crisis. The public services in the form of health, education, welfare, law enforcement, street lighting, public housing, planning, waste management, transport, utilities management and broadcasting are relatively recent in historical terms, and many of them have undergone radical reform, deregulation and privatisation which has blurred the boundary between public and private industry. But despite this, there remain clear distinctions between public service and private industry in terms of accountability (shareholders or voters?), motivation (profit or social good?) and coordination (corporate strategy or community strategy?).

Politicians of the left and right argue about the benefits of central planning vs the free market (and how that dynamic has been changed by the crisis!), but clearly there are benefits and disadvantages on both sides of the equation. Often it depends on who you would prefer to hold you to ransom: banking giants or union barons? (not that there are any of the latter left). Either way, being held to ransom isn't nice, but it now appears that the problem lies with over-powerful global corporations, not just in banking (for which, for the majority of the population equals housing), but IT, telecommunications, utilities management, insurance and media.

The latest candidate for deregulation and possible privatisation (if not of existing institutions, then encouragement of new private ventures) is higher education. But education is a strange one because its benefits are less tangible than keeping warm, seeing where you are going at night or being able to turn on the tap. Yet, we regard it as a civil right.

As has been the pattern with other deregulations and privatisations, a pattern of institutional takeovers and the emergence of global brands in education is probable within the next 10 years or so. This is why I believe 2012 is such an important year in the history of education (and probably not just in the UK). But on the back of that, the strength of global corporations, and their ability to hold individuals to ransom (like the banks, the utility companies, the insurance companies) will only increase and invade the realm of certified academic achievement and individual merit.

I have argued previously that this corporatisation of education, and the exploitation of individual anxiety about future career prospects may be economically necessary in the current climate. Global education organisations will, after all, create employment (although with vastly inferior terms and conditions to the present!). But necessary or not, it is also potentially horrible. It's emergence we can do little about. But its reality should at the very least challenge us to think very deeply about what we really want education to do beyond the shallow aims of the new global education industry who will only really care about their shareholders.

But more than that, I believe the education problem is the opportunity to think more broadly about what 'public service' really means.

Here I can only offer some early thoughts (I may change my mind on this). But I would echo Geoff Mulgan here:

and say that capitalism has been very good at some things (compare Western Europe and the US with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s), and very bad at other things. Why?

I think the people who benefited most from capitalism were people who wanted to become very rich. If you didn't want to become rich then often 'quieter' jobs related to government were the route that you took. Teachers, nurses, social workers, community group leaders and many others fall into this category. The reward for these people (at least the reward that they hoped for) was to do something meaningful in society which benefited others. Often this work involved 'care' in some form or another. It is interesting that it is precisely these people who have borne the brunt of government cuts in the last year or so, and even before that, for many years, workers in public services felt under-valued, always the object of politicians' ire as they sought to show their metal in trying to deliver 'public services' which would (in the end) result in votes.

It would be useful to know what proportion of the population want to become rich. My guess is that it isn't the majority. Most people know that wealth brings misery with its power. But capitalism, the system for rewarding material innovation and exploitation, is the only show in town. And it creates its pathologies which impact on those other fundamental aspects of human experience which directly involve care and communities. Amongst those pathologies is the deep-seated alienation experienced by those who are simply not wired-up for capitalist gain. Even the kick-back from the alienation in the form of crazy ill-thought-through radical pseudo-Marxist revolutionary dreams feeds the dynamic of capitalism (Marx wouldn't have approved of any of that!).

I have argued before that I think the driver behind this mono-culture of capitalist innovation is the atomisation of the individual, and that technology has played an important role in this. The net profits of the giant tech companies who sold us Walkmans, iPods, Personal computers, laptops all the way through to Facebook and Twitter have all depended on complicity in the atomisation process. Nobody has created technology for communities. Only technology for individual users... and worse... the virtualisation of 'communities' which aren't communities! ....

I think we need to understand the relationship between public services and real communities. We need to re-balance the relationship between communities and global services. And we need new technologies to help us which will cut against the atomisation process.

Those technologies, the practices around them and the theories that underpin them are all the products of social innovation. But social innovation is not like the material innovation of Apple or Microsoft. Those who engage in social innovation are not out to get rich. They want to do something meaningful.

The problems of education are an ideal breeding ground for this kind of work, because education is fundamentally about community. Classrooms are communities. Successful innovations in classrooms should translate to the outside world. Technologies of the classroom are the technologies of social innovation.

But most fundamentally, the public services need to be recast. In a world dominated by global corporations, the role of government should be to strengthen communities which have suffered in the alienating march of capitalism and the atomisation of the individual. The best way government can do this is to supplement the rewards of capitalism (which are governed by the market) with new mechanisms for rewarding social innovation. Those must be mechanisms which measure success by looking at the deep impact on the lives of others. Of course, there lies a whole new set of problems: how do you measure deep impact? How do you make a decision as to what sort of innovation to support? Will the voters see the link between supporting innovation and voting for a government?

But these questions are the nub of the issue. One final thought...a crisis in public services is better than a crisis in world peace - but their inter-connection is rather more substantive that governments might imagine.

The Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan is the most remarkable music. For those first audiences, it must have felt as if music, which had always hinted at orgasm but never fully revealed it, finally revealed what had been veiled for so long. Perhaps the more explicit verbal expression of the subject through Freud was inevitable afterwards.

But it is the nature of the climax itself in Tristan which is interesting me - particularly how it might be interpreted biologically. In my musical studies, I often encountered an anti-essentialist tendency in musical analysis which saw music as a culturally conditioned phenomenon where the mannerisms of high romanticism (for example) were regarded as normative, not ontological. I have always felt ill-at-ease with this position. Sonata form may have been codified and taught in the conservatoires, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something essential about it.

But musical essentialism is a slippery slope. It either leads to a kind of physicalism which privileged physics and denies the power of the human mind and society, or it falls prey to mentalism, which over-emphasises the causality of individual psychological mechanisms in musical affect and appreciation at the expense of obvious physical qualities or indeed, palpable shared experience.

The problem stems from different models of the human being. The psychological model produces a somewhat isolated organism, rather like a computer, obeying the rules of the programming prescribed in their mind, and picking up signals from other individuals programmed on a similar basis (although having specific differences in personality, etc). The 'physical' model on the other hand tends to be a puppet of their environment, with mental mechanisms always subject to the rule of physical nature (harmonic series, etc).

I prefer to think about the 'convivial model': The Convivial human always lives with others in the world. Partly, my reason for thinking this is that the pure psychological model or the pure physical model isn't (actually) thinkable: we do not know a world of no other people. The social world pre-exists us. Consequently, we do not know of a world without our own and other peoples' bodies, or without our own or other peoples' communications. And this leads to the strange paradox of the convivial model - that it is impossible to say where the individual ends and the world begins. Indeed, the very concept of boundaries is tied up in the human-world relationship: to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, the world, its boundaries and distinctions, is as much of my flesh as my little finger.

How does this help in thinking about musical essentialism, or the musical climax? What I believe we can do is to talk in a common-sense way about experience. The remarkable thing of Tristan is that the experience is immediately recognised: we all know about the climax; we know what it means, because it is such a fundamental part of experience. What it means is letting go at the point at which nothing can be held on to any longer.

I think that raises a number of questions:

• What is in nature that we seek to 'hold on' to things in the first place?
• What is in nature that we eventually have to let things go?
• What is in nature that drives us through holding on and letting go?
• What are the different forms of 'letting go'?
• What are we holding on to in music that we then let go?

I think this question can be addressed through thinking about the continually shifting relation between ourselves and the world... or rather the shifting organisational relationship within the self-world system. I think this relationship might be expressed as a mechanism of 'attachment'.

I think that identity and meaning are the things which we seek to hold on to.

I think that identity and meaning is established through managing relationships with the world... through managing attachments.

I think that our relationships with the world, and ultimately our identities and effort to establish meaning, are ultimately unstable.

I think that the climax occurs when we can no longer manage our attachments.

I think that at the point at which attachment can no longer be maintained, the only thing the individual system can do to preserve itself is to divest attachments, to give up trying to manage what it can't manage - and this is usually done with some explosive force.

This is when the climax occurs.

But there is one question which remains, and which I will have to deal with in a future post. Because given this struggle, Camus is right when he says at the beginning of the Myth of Sisyphus that:

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"