B&L 2.0 on the road in Chicago, day two, the reading of PPM16 that includes a cameo appearance by Sam Rocha during the commentary segment. Rocha is called on to offer some thoughts on his folk phenomenology vis-a-vis what I call the break from tradition with the Leap into the unforeseen. Most of the focus in PPM16 is on the arrival of the unforeseen in the form of the other (autre). The turning of the self is a turning from the self. Being's presencing arrives as a force that turns us away from introspection, towards perception. This is the phenomenological turn, where the 'certainty' of judgment is dropped or put aside with the 'uncertainty' of reception or what we might call 'welcoming the strange.' Emphasis is placed in the meditation of the necessity of a 'break' or Destruktion of the 'certainty' of of juridical subject, and why the encounter with the alterity of autre achieves this dismantling.
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
3.0 (20/10 yrs later) - There is something...well...a bit naive about PPM 16 in terms of the 'break with tradition.' I'm (re)reading this today in the wake of a fairly intense study of Arendt that happened at the beginning of this semester. Arendt reminds me that I was operating with a bit of amnesia (or maybe I was just being intellectually clueless!), when describing the 'break' with tradition, as if this were occurring existentially, which, in some way, yes, I want to say it is when the reception of evocative speech re-places us into the clearing of thinking. However, Arendt delivers the message of modernity, of the cultural historical break in tradition. In a Hegelian mood, then, modernity shapes post-traditional agency, so that the conditions of the possibility of the Leap are already available. But in this Hegelian mood, Being's presencing is historical and cultural, and not ontological (metaphysical). And here is where I need to step back and think a bit more carefully about the relationship between the cultural and ontological, a dialectical relationship that appears to organize education as poetic praxis (Being and learning). Final note: an interesting coincidence with the above commentary on the shft from 'introspection' to 'perception,' as this week in class I focus on Merleu-Ponty's category of 'perception.'
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