PPM36 from March 20, ...

PPM36 is Heraclitean, and perhaps even Nietzschean, in being fragmentary.  Reading and commenting on it, I'm reminded of the sentiments I experienced during the experiment in 2004, when I often thought that I should focus on writing aphorism, fragments, sentences.   Perhaps when I conduct Being & Learning 3.0 in 2024 [knock, knock on wood] I will dilute the original meditations to one or two sentences and release another edition of the book.  One feels the breath of hope on this first day of Spring!   The content of PPM36 picks up on the Heidegger quotation that concluded yesterday's meditation, where one can hear the call to originary thinking loud and clear: "insofar as philosophy finds its way back into its inceptual way of being (in the other beginning) and the question of the truth of be-ing becomes the grounding midpoint, the abground character of philosopy reveals itself.  As such, philosophy must return to the beginning, in order to bring into the free-space of its mindfulness the cleavage and the beyond-itself, the estranging and always unfamiliar."   Before getting underway in reading PPM36, which is very much a taking up of this very dense quotation, I say, in my pre-reading commentary, how one has to read Heidegger at length and over time in order to even begin (pun intended) to have a sense of where he is pointing.  And then I recall reading Heidegger at the New School, and the experience of being among students who thought "reading Heidegger is fun!"  It is fun, but serious fun, which is one of those cliches that gets thrown around, but is nevertheless aptly applied to the study of a thinker who took thinker quite seriously but left so much 'unsaid' so as to gift others much material --  fecund and fallow ground -- to farm and/or make paths upon.   Indeed, in PPM I play with the two senses of 'abground':  'groundbreaking' & 'pathbreaking'.  For me, these are the two important sense in which philosophy is making community, and I would add, a sustainable community.  I write in PPM36, "Our Learning is said to be both 'groundbreaking' and 'pathbreaking,'  A harvest is reaped with our poetic dialogue that unfolds in the sojourn of Learning, the wandering we undertake with others in the cultivation of friendship.  We build communities and community in this wandering, and a processural 'homeland' appears in this journey."  But what of the Sage?  The Sage (philosophical educator) is the one who points to the ground that can be broken, and calls others to be groundbreakers, path makers.  Alone, the Sage can not break the ground, nor make paths, although s/he has done so many times before.  How so?  As I discuss in my post-reading commentary, the relationship here is between one (like myself) who has been teaching for many years the 'same' material.   New students arrive each year, each semester, and with their newness (natality) they make an offering, an offering to the teacher to return again to the ground and break it anew.  This is carried forth in the improvisational dialogic event.  Yet, there is no mistaking that the teacher qua Sage has over time become a true artist in the sense of achieving mastery of techniques of jamming, improvising, and encouraging others to do the same.   Thus, contrary to what I said yesterday, when I described the Sage as a modality that inhabits the member of the learning community who is soloing, today I am emphasizing, perhaps from a more Taoist perspective, a more traditional notion of Sage as one who has the 'wisdom of the ages,' i.e., an accumulated wealth of experience in the relationship between Being and learning.