PPM 37 picks up the statement that concluded PPM 36: "The Sage's wandering cultivates a philosophy of the people." What might this 'philosophy of the people' mean? This is the focus of PPM37, and the post-reading commentary when I take a somewhat Hegelian position and make the distinction between the State, family, and civil society, naming the first two as spheres of inequality and legitimate enforcement/violence and the other as a sphere of equality and plurality, and, thus, where philosophy finds its proper dwelling. 'Philosophy of a people' is a bit of a ruse, and I draw the category from Heidegger, who uses it to dismiss talk of the greatness of Western philosophy. I take the category to signify two alternatives: on the one hand, a 'traditionalist' discourse that is rooted in nationalism, tribalism, or even identity politics; on the other hand a 'post-traditional' discourse rooted in a kind of cosmopolitanism and populism. The exploration of this trope reveals what I call the dangers of 'domestic philosophy.' Ironically and paradoxically, 'domesticity' is the space created under the assumption that humans require stability and security. Hence, the Department of Homeland Security is the appropriately named government agency that is responsible for the protection of rights internally and federally. As I say in my commentary, this and other state agencies actually protect the right to undertake philosophy, and, at the same time, must restrain itself from overstepping its boundary and interfering with that right. All this to say, that a 'domestic philosophy' is an oxymoron because it is built upon the logic of safety but is in fact a danger and threat to philosophy itself. In contrast I am describing a philosophy born out of wandering, a nomadic and even 'wild' discourse, or one happening in the 'wilderness.' Because it is always attuned to and taking up human freedom this philosophy does not belong to a people, nation or tribe. Indeed, it is not located in a specific place, and the time it emerges in is, in effect, the time outside of time (chronological), or what I called in a previous meditation 'ecstatic time.' But it is not a philosophy of 'homelessness' because to call it this would be to refer back to the domestic as having priority in order and value, and the philosophy of wandering to exist in fallen or lost state. Here we hear the Old Testament narrative of the origin of human and its fallen state, its being born from its emergence from the Garden of Eden. On the contrary, the philosophy of wandering is nomadic in that it has a kind of history, and moves in understood cycles, much as improvisational and even free jazz has boundaries it is working within, even if those are the minimalist ones of intentionality and the affirmation of that intentionality (i.e., the earnest attempt to make music by offering something to be heard by others, and by listening to those same others as they contribute and make their own offerings.) In turn, a 'philosophy of the people' is a way of gathering together and making something significant or meaningful between equals. This can be called the 'intentional community,' as my colleague Roxanne Desforges described what I seem to be discussing here in PPM37.
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 - The commentary fragment: "On the contrary, the philosophy of wandering is nomadic in that it has a kind of history, and moves in understood cycles, much as improvisational and even free jazz has boundaries it is working within, even if those are the minimalist ones of intentionality and the affirmation of that intentionality (i.e., the earnest attempt to make music by offering something to be heard by others, and by listening to those same others as they contribute and make their own offerings.)". In yesterday's 3.0 I mentioned reading Glissant, who inspired me to get back into that modality of audacious poetic philosophical writing. To the extent that I want to pick up the 'movement' of the learning community, and that movement as 'circular,' 'patterned,' organized 'cyclically,' or 'circularly,' I may want to take up Glissant on the itinerant. The nomadic is a metaphor that can do a lot of work, and because of that might be a bit too loaded, much like my late colleague Ilan Gur Ze'ev's description of diasporic pedagogy as gathering and moving an "orcha." To push the metaphor: it's a bit too heavily laden. There is also the problem of reduction, of reducing a practice, idea, question, etc., to a single powerful categorical metaphor. The Sage is an example. While this was the habit of the poetic/thinking/writing in 1.0, and to a certain degree 2.0, I made the turn last summer towards the description of 'cases' or 'assemblages,' which are only ever examples of instances that are not 'one' of the 'many' of the 'One.' And this is why it's so important to emphasize the multiple personas of Socrates, and, what's more, to reiterate his pathos of the new. Even up until his last days Socrates was willing and able to begin again! This is because he felt and perceived what Bachelard calls the 'flicker' of inspiration, which he says is the not the result of causality, but, like spontaneity and improvisation, which are hallmarks of the dialectic of a philosophical education, springs from the new and only flickers or resonates for what seems to be only a moment. A moment that stands out, that captivates, and endures in memory as a significant experience.
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