The reading of PPM39 is, for the first time, a reading from the published meditations aka the book Being and Learning, pp. 61-63. It was inevitable that pages from the original manuscript would be missing. That is to say, as much as I tried to insure that I had copies of the originals that would be enough to take me through the two weeks I would away from my office at Hofstra, it happened that the two pages that I was supposed to read were missing. So, as a result I was forced to read from the book, which, actually, I quite enjoyed and now feel a certain desire to read from the book and not from the originally written meditations. We'll see. I have to confess that even my closest colleagues, folks like Sam Rocha who have written reviews of Being and Learning and have talked at length with me about it, find it challenging, and virtually impossible to teach. I get that, and one of the reasons for the experiment 2.0 is to offer some kind of foothold for engaging the material. So, perhaps, I'll make a shift and read directly from the book.
As for the content of PPM39, which corresponds to chapter 3 The Way of Lao Tzu, I move from the previous day's engagement with Arendt on thinking to Heidegger, returning to two quotations that I have used earlier. This is one of the techniques: introduce a significant quotation in a way that is unlike the dropping of a stone into a pond, and then following the outward movement of the rings generated when the stone hits the water. Consider that for a moment? The number of rings; one seemingly following the other; moving at the same speed outward in 360 different directions, more of less, but you get the point. This is how might illustrate Being's presencing and the fecundity of possibility it offers us. But this is also a way to illustrate how I 'trace' or 'follow' a significant quotation for pages and pages, and then suddenly, when the water of the pond has returned to stillness, I drop the same quotation back into the conversation -- back into the discursive pond. An example of this is the quotation from Heidegger that is dropped back in at PPM39: "Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings...Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom." 'Original revelation' and 'ground' are key here for obvious reasons: at this point 'ground' has taken on multiple denotations, the most important being the Way and the Where the learning community is wandering as it moves along on it peripatetic sojourn. It is also the 'ground' that is broken when the 'gap' between past and future opens up and we move into when we occupy through thinking the threshold, the ecstatic topos where Being discloses presencing. Heidegger calls this 'disclosedness' and says our encounter with it is 'ek-sistent engagement.' Further, as I cite in PPM39, he says, Ek-sistence is "rooted in truth as freedom." So the focus has shifted from the gathering of the learning community, making philosophy with friends or through friendship, to the experience of freedom in this gathering. In turn, I conclude PPM39 with the dropping of yet another aphoristic stone, this one being of my own making: "The essence of Learning is Freedom."
******I'm jumping in on 3/23/2019, mountainside at the Jordan Bowl, SR, where the wind continues to howl! Coincidence: decided yesterday at Crema Cafe, Portland, to teach Lao Tzu this week in FDED 242. Thought about using the chap from B&L. didn't recall that Lao Tzu was the guide at this point in the sojourn. Current study: focus on listening, formative power of music; presented paper on Nancy at PES Richmond a week ago. 'Discovered' Shustermann's somaesthetic project, although my Hofstra colleague in dance department had introduced me to it just prior to break, and is loaning me some books on the topic; looking to interconnect the radio work (Dead Zone, Musings, Black Diamond Discography) with the listening studies project, the common thread being my ongoing interest in Bildung (aka formative education), which received no explicit recognition in B&L?!?!?!********
As for the content of PPM39, which corresponds to chapter 3 The Way of Lao Tzu, I move from the previous day's engagement with Arendt on thinking to Heidegger, returning to two quotations that I have used earlier. This is one of the techniques: introduce a significant quotation in a way that is unlike the dropping of a stone into a pond, and then following the outward movement of the rings generated when the stone hits the water. Consider that for a moment? The number of rings; one seemingly following the other; moving at the same speed outward in 360 different directions, more of less, but you get the point. This is how might illustrate Being's presencing and the fecundity of possibility it offers us. But this is also a way to illustrate how I 'trace' or 'follow' a significant quotation for pages and pages, and then suddenly, when the water of the pond has returned to stillness, I drop the same quotation back into the conversation -- back into the discursive pond. An example of this is the quotation from Heidegger that is dropped back in at PPM39: "Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings...Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom." 'Original revelation' and 'ground' are key here for obvious reasons: at this point 'ground' has taken on multiple denotations, the most important being the Way and the Where the learning community is wandering as it moves along on it peripatetic sojourn. It is also the 'ground' that is broken when the 'gap' between past and future opens up and we move into when we occupy through thinking the threshold, the ecstatic topos where Being discloses presencing. Heidegger calls this 'disclosedness' and says our encounter with it is 'ek-sistent engagement.' Further, as I cite in PPM39, he says, Ek-sistence is "rooted in truth as freedom." So the focus has shifted from the gathering of the learning community, making philosophy with friends or through friendship, to the experience of freedom in this gathering. In turn, I conclude PPM39 with the dropping of yet another aphoristic stone, this one being of my own making: "The essence of Learning is Freedom."
******I'm jumping in on 3/23/2019, mountainside at the Jordan Bowl, SR, where the wind continues to howl! Coincidence: decided yesterday at Crema Cafe, Portland, to teach Lao Tzu this week in FDED 242. Thought about using the chap from B&L. didn't recall that Lao Tzu was the guide at this point in the sojourn. Current study: focus on listening, formative power of music; presented paper on Nancy at PES Richmond a week ago. 'Discovered' Shustermann's somaesthetic project, although my Hofstra colleague in dance department had introduced me to it just prior to break, and is loaning me some books on the topic; looking to interconnect the radio work (Dead Zone, Musings, Black Diamond Discography) with the listening studies project, the common thread being my ongoing interest in Bildung (aka formative education), which received no explicit recognition in B&L?!?!?!********
3.0 - 10 years later, another day of snow here in Maine. The Jordan Bowl at SR, specifically the glades in Blind Ambition must be a place of joy this day! Yesterday's 2.0 commentary inspired me to grab the 3 ring notebooks from the bookshelf and revisit the original meditations, and also located them in 'Being and Learning.' As noted above, today's original meditation appears as pp. 61-63 in the book. But on this day 20 years ago I have the originals to work with. Aside from a few minor edits, the original and the published material are mostly the same. First things that jumps out to me is the memory of the big challenge of organizing this material into a book. I couldn't quite bring myself to cut out material, and because of the flow of the writing/thinking, I didn't know where to begin with editing it down. Part of me thought then, and more so today as I prepare to write a much shorter book, that 'Being and Learning' would have been served well if it had appeared in half the length, and perhaps even in the aphoristic style of say Nietzsche's posthumously published 'Will to Power.' But I'm not Nietzsche, and at the time of it's preparation for publication, was still very much alive and working with 'Being and Learning.' Length aside, the other issue, and what was much more daunting, was the thematic organization of the meditations, which is to say, creating 'chapters' or 'parts'...discrete sections from writing that emerged from a spiraling of ideas. How does one organize circular writing/thinking into the classic linear 'left to right' organization of a book? Look up at the stars at night, and you might recognize patterns, some constellations. The key is the relationship between the stars and planets, the apparent harmony within the apparent chaos. Finding that relationship in my writing was a huge challenge. And so when I (re)read the original meditation from today, which is mostly an engagement with Heidegger, including the citation of two really important fragments, I'm a bit uneasy to read that material within a chapter, #3, title 'The Way of Lao Tzu.' But that feeling of anxiety is related back to the very modality that the project is confronting: what I describe as "the certainty of subjectivity," and "the static domesticity of our solitary egoistic habitat." In other words, that comfort zone we have all mostly been socialized into that demands that our writing/thinking is 'clear' and 'concise' and 'organized' and thus communicating a singular coherent Idea. That's the legacy of Plato, for sure, and one that is almost impossible to fully expire (release, exhale...the reverse of inspire). So in the end I decided to remain faithful to the original project and publish it all! And I'm glad I did, and grateful that the publishers at Sense put it out there!
ReplyDelete3.0b - As for those two important Heidegger fragments: first, "only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings...Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom." Always circling back to the question that probably initiated the project, the initial evocative question, Heidegger's "How is it with the Nothing?" Today, still, I am captivated by the Nothing: the abyss, the (w)hole, negative space, silence. The empty clearing, the opening, where the learning community moves and abides, the dwelling of Learning. As the original meditation indicates, the encounter with this ground, or the movement onto this ground, this opening and clearing, is the necessary (yes, necessary) movement onto/into the location that offers the condition for the possibility of listening, receiving, reading, and thus encountering the unexpected. We are 'released' from our ego when we are moved onto/into the open clearing, and, as I wrote in the original meditation, "In this releasement we are held out before possibility, or the condition of our being spontaneous, improvisational, novel." (B&L, p. 62). The other important fragment from Heidegger cited on this day 20 years ago: "In Da-seing the essential ground, long ungrounded, on the basis of which [humans are] able to ek-sist, is preserved for [them]. Here 'existence' does not mean existentia in the sense of occurring or being at hand. Nor on the other hand does it mean, in an 'existentiell' fashion, [a person's] moral endeavor on behalf of [their] 'self,' based on [their] psychophysical constitution. Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.." This is Heidegger's description of the modality of Da-sein as the essential phenomenological disposition, which, for me, is the distinct modality of Learning, and probably the first modality, or original modality, what Heidegger might describe as the primordial. Primary and primordial insofar as it is 'before' or 'beyond' the historical character we habitually perform. Da-sein is the modality of the beginner, because it is located at the beginning, before we have 'named' things as 'this' or 'that.' This modality as phenomenological enables an encounter with 'things' in their 'original' and 'primordial' condition, circumstance, sound and shape. To the extent that we can be drawn into this modality, this location, we are capable of learning. And here is perhaps the inspiration for what later emerges as one of the central categories of the projet: ceaseless nativity.
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