In PPM 34 I continue the exploration of the figure of the Sage, whose name also means 'saying', Sage (Heidegger emphasized German). Arriving home to Portland today from Albuquerque today, it was (again, unheimlich/uncanny) that I wore in the opening lines of PPM34: "The Sage as the one who gathers the saying, whose wandering collects and passes on the various sayings. The Sage is a wanderer who, like Diogenes is a 'citizen' of the world. The Sage does not call place her home, nor one set of people her family, her friends, or her 'nation'. The Sage is a sojourner, one who stays for a time in a place and lives there temporarily, rests, reposes, re-poses, and moves on. The Sage's wandering is a journey. To 'journey' is to "travel from one place to another, usually taking a rather long time," but it also denotes a "passage or progress from one stage to another." The Sage, as Teacher, lets learning happen and thus 'instructs' through showing, revealing, re-posing what has been received in silence. A highlight of the post-reading commentary is the rendering of the 'persona' of the Sage as a 'form' or 'modality'. This has important implications for the question concerning the relationship between the Sage and the gathering of friends, the learning community. It seems we are mislead when we think of the Sage as a single persona, the teacher, as a fixed position in the learning community. Rather, we should think of the Sage as a modality that is fluid and moves through the gathering of friends, the dialogic learning community. This is akin to the trading of solos in jam session, which is integral to the organization of jazz performance. So we can say that the movement of the modality of the Sage through the gathering of the learning community is akin to the taking or trading solos in a jam session. That seems to be a promising resolution to the problem of the Sage, as in some ways 'above' and 'beyond' the learning community [this is something I explore through Heidegger in paper that is forthcoming in the SPSE journal [see below]. Another way of thinking of the Sage in precisely this way is to think of examples, and I offer those with John Coltrane and Jerry Garcia, two charismatic leaders whose improvisational genius were Sage-like, but also intensely community oriented and world-building.
Society for the Philosophical Study of Education
http://spsechicago.tumblr.com/post/35469730242
Society for the Philosophical Study of Education
http://spsechicago.tumblr.com/post/35469730242
3.0 - First, the reminder of the breakthrough (for me) re: the sage as the 'form' of the dialogic persona, the learners in the dialogic learning community. There is no one 'teacher' but 'teachers' and no one 'learner' but 'learners.' All who participate in the learning community are 'students,' and dialogue is there many of shared study. But dialogue mediated by shared readings, and reading in common, impromptu interpretations as well as pre-meditated ones. The learning community is also organized by the sharing of and common reading and commentary upon original writings produced by the members themselves. This is the final form of the triadic [triidialectic*] relationship (*nb: neologism)of being and learning (reading/listening> writing/speaking>dialogue) that organizes the dialectic of the philosophical education I am describing: Reading together (mindfully, carefully, critically) one another's Writing (on a question, or better, in response to a shared reading, even better if this shared reading engages with some aspect of writing, or reading, or learning, or teaching, or music, or the arts) and organizing our responses (questions, comments, criticisms, annotations) via dialogue (the dynamic polyphonic interaction of voices that moves rhythmically, and can sound harmonic but also discordant veer into cacophony). The other side of that tryad is the classic Past<>Present<>Future, with Present :: Presence :: Silence :: Gap :: Clearing :: w(Hole). Presence: Arrival<>Presence<>Withdrawal. Silence>SpeakingListeningantithesis>synthesis. And this form is yielding some good results, one of them being just tonight in response to the 2.0 and PPM 34: the (re)discovery of the Hegelian dialectic has major implications for the engagement with dyadic coincidence of opposites that is fundamental to Lao Tzu, and present in Heidegger,
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