The reading of PPM27 coincides with the recording of the Dead Zone in studio north at WRHU (Radio Hofstra University). Staging this coincidence was a natural decision. Where else could I record the reading happening in the wake of yesterday's meditation that concluded with the long excerpt from Plato's Phaedo where we were formally introduced to the music-making Socrates? In turn, my pre-reading commentary discusses the recording of the Dead Zone and its relationship to the project of originary thinking. The mediation itself continues the exploration of Socrates, and the focal point is Arendt who returns me to the origin of thinking: wonder (thaumadzein). Originary thinking is initiated from this wonder, which takes us into and through what I describe the 'threshold'. Beyond the threshold we move into what Heidegger calls the 'open region' or 'the clearing' and where the pathways of thinking are wandered. And it is to that same threshold where we return, which, as Arendt emphasizes, is where we encounter the boundary of language, and, so says of philosophy: "it begins with thaumadzein and ends with speechlessness." In between this wonder and speechlessness, we raise what Kant calls 'ultimate questions,' those questions ("of God, freedom, and immortality") which remain unanswerable, yet urgent and necessary. Arendt: "In asking the ultimate, unanswerable questions, [humans] establish [ourselves] as question-asking being[s]. This is the reason science, which asks answerable questions, owes its origins to philosophy, an origin that remains its ever-present source throughout the generations. Were [humans] ever to lose [our] faculty of asking answerable questions. [We] we cease to be question-asking being[s], which would the end, not only of philosophy, but of science as well." This is a very important reminder to our friends in the hard sciences who forget not only the origin of their work, but also the enduring well-spring of it. But it is not, as I discuss in my post-reading commentary, an apologia for the necessity of philosophy in relation to science, nor the basis of a defense of philosophy of education. On the contrary, when read alongside the fragment that points us to the threshold where we begin and end our sojourns into the open region of thinking, Arendt's clarification of the order of things should be read as indicating the intrinsic 'value' of first philosophy. Put differently, originary thinking, which is initiated by ultimate questions, is first and foremost, and, dare I say final: and end in-and-for-itself. Only a degenerated understanding of first philosophy will reduce it to a handmaiden of the sciences, and apply it in the form of something like 'philosophy of education.' Philosophy offers us an education by meditating our encounter with Being's presencing/absencing.
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(Being and Learning 3.0) - There are a few coincidences and continuity as I return on this day 20/10 yrs later. First, the coincidence that on this day, 10 years later, I was again recording the Dead Zone, but not while engaging with this project. Nevertheless the coincidence is noteworthy because of that central fragment, the mantra, issued from the Muse: Socrates, make music and work at it! I hear/feel Socrates' muse calling me, enjoining me in that practice of philosophical music making, and this is one way to describe the Dead Zone. And so there is continuity in there, perhaps more so than coincidence. What does strike me as coincidental, although perhaps more a matter of continuity, is my colleague René Arcilla's invocation of Arendt on thaumadzein (wonder) in the paper he read yesterday morning in Salt Lake PES 2024. As I noted in one of the 3.0 commentaries that I wrote when I was in Salt Lake this past weekend, this project seems to be circulating in the field, not widely, but is more narrow and subtle way, amongst the few who practice existential and phenomenological philosophy at PES. In the 2.0 commentary I write: Arendt takes us "to the origin of thinking: wonder (thaumadzein). Originary thinking is initiated from this wonder, which takes us into and through what I describe the 'threshold'. Beyond the threshold we move into what Heidegger calls the 'open region' or 'the clearing' and where the pathways of thinking are wandered." Both Arendt and Heidegger remain central to my project, and as I prepare to write my book this summer and into the fall, both will figure prominently, with Arendt initiating the book as I focus on her "Crisis in Ed" essay, and Heidegger from that first lecture in "What is Called Thinking?" Looking ahead to that writing, I will have to be disciplined in my writing and produce something that can be read and studied by my undergrads, by pre-service teachers, in other words, a people's book, as it were, and quite different from the writing that characterizes "Being and Learning." Nevertheless, I will using these commentaries and the book as resources, reminding me of the central categories that will organize the new book.
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