Learning is the ecstatic experience of freedom. This is what is revealed in PPM35. At least, that is where the post-reading commentary arrives. I circle back, first, in the pre-reading commentary to the quotation from Heidegger that follows my claim that "The bearing of the Sage is what Heidegger calls 'Eksistence.'" I read the quotation from Heidegger "'Eksistence,' in fundamental contrast to every existentia and 'existence,' is ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being. It is the guardianship, that is, the care for Being...." Eksistence is the best we can do, perhaps, if we are restless and feel the compulsion to make a word to describe the most fundamental ontological experience, the effacement with Being's presencing, which makes the offering of possibility, of freedom. As I emphasize in PPM35, and have many times already in the meditations, this effacement occurs in the threshold where we encounter the limits of language, because with Eksistence we experience the ineffable. And it has to be this way if we are going to talk of Being and learning. It's actually quite simple, or so it seems to me. Learning is that moment when as Heidegger has emphasized, the ego cogito, the self, the person is transcended -- into the ground, is how Heidegger puts it, to make clear he isn't going for the vertical transcendence; but maybe it could be what Irigaray calls horizontal transcendence, which happens with listening, and a radical opening towards the other; so perhaps over the ground? The moment of learning happens of self-overcome, to use Nietzsche's language, who, in Birth of Tragedy, calls this the annihilation of the subject and the birth of the artist as artwork. THIS is learning in relation to Being; the fundamental ontology of the human condition The ground we go into is also a return to the beginning, our beginning and in that experience we come into what Arendt calls our 'natality,' the human condition of making, initiating, freedom. I write: "To be human is to be a beginner, an initiator, a maker, builder...The is the image (imago) we cast. When it has been written that humans are 'created' as 'images of God' what is meant mostly by this is that as 'created' beings we are 'creative' beings." And thus here, for the first time, I am drawing on the same Augustinian language and spiritual sentiments that Arendt is drawing from.
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 - To begin, pun intended, with the fragment I quote from PPM35, written this day 20 years ago: "To be human is to be a beginner, an initiator, a maker, builder...The is the image (imago) we cast. When it has been written that humans are 'created' as 'images of God' what is meant mostly by this is that as 'created' beings we are 'creative' beings."' And then the commentary from 10 years ago today: "And thus here, for the first time, I am drawing on the same Augustinian language and spiritual sentiments that Arendt is drawing from." To continue a theme of 3.0, which is linking the 'Being and Learning' to 'The Dialectic of a Philosophical Education,' this Arendtian/Augustinian theme of "beginning" and "being a beginner" will be the focus of the Routledge book's Introduction. I don't know that I will go so far as to rehearse the statement of the human as created in the image of God, but if I were to make that move, it would be in relation to Bachelard's "poetic image." Yet I doubt I will go as deep ontologically with the Routledge book, which is designed to describe the dialectic of a philosophic education, most engaging with the triads that organize the dialectic, but without the move to the ontological status of the categories in those triads. So, for example, the major theme of PPM35 is Heidegger's "Eksistence," which I note above implies 'self-overcoming' with the proximity to Being. Beyond all things, including the self. But while the 'self' experiences transcendence in the dialectic, this transcendence is always towards an other (person, work of art, reading, etc.), and is also receptive, but not a total evacuation as occurs in the modality of Eksistence. Also, the dialectic does not mediate a transcendence beyond language, and only a limited encounter with the ineffable through the aesthetic experience, and perhaps in the modality of silence. But even with that modality, the listener is receiving and perceiving voices of speakers and writers (insofar as reading is a sonic event). The dialectic has the learner and the learning community rooted in culture, history, and relating to the world.
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