PPM40/Being and Learning (pp.63-64)
PPM39 concludes with the aphorism: "The essence of Learning is Freedom." (Duarte) And so PPM40 begins with: "Spontaneity, not planning (scheming), is the hallmark of the Daoist sage." (Lao Tzu). This is the 'new stone' dropped into the pond -- cf. commentary from PPM39 for context. No other borrowed fragment captures so succinctly what I am calling the Teacher who is bring others into Learning. Recall: the project was inspired by a question that emerges from Plato regarding the capacity of each and every one of us to contemplate Being. If this is the case, then the educational question arises: How does one get turned around, turned on and tuned into the contemplation of Being? And as I say in my post-reading commentary, my response is to take up the question that Heidegger relentlessly pursued: the question of Being and/or the question of the meaning of Being? I take this question 'of' Being, and/or of the 'meaning' of Being, to be 'answered' by making 'meaning,' which is another way of saying 'making' or 'forming' philosophy, understood quite generally and perhaps too generally to be any manner in which the singularity of a human being is disclosed, made manifest, offered, expressed in the making of some crafted 'thing' that carries the aura of that person's singularity. Put otherwise, it is the concrete worldly manifestation of human freedom. Manufacturing can not re-produce this, never ever.
I emphasize in my commentary that Learning is what arises first and foremost in our encounter with Being, when we recognize both the possibility and necessity of making something, of bring something into the world, and/or perhaps repairing something in the world that needs care and cultivation. Here is where teaching enters the scene.
*In the manner that I described in the post-commentary on PPM39, I drop again the aphoristic stone that is, for me, the significant line from Socrates speech in the Symposium, when he says, "I was convinced, and in that conviction I try to bring others to the same creed, and to convince them that, if we are to make this gift our own, Love will help our mortal nature more than all the world." And I say in my commentary that one could certainly do an interesting genealogy of Socrates' 'conviction,' tracing his being convicted of the crime against the State, i.e., practicing philosophy, as a 'conviction' he lived with his whole life. That is, if he was 'convinced, and in that conviction try to bring others to the same creed,' then he certainly was all the while a convict, or one who was always already guilty of the crime of philosophy insofar as it is a crime to draw others into the practice that offers artefacts of freedom.
*Finally, the other new stone that is dropped into the pond in PPM40 is from Heidegger who writes: "Man does not 'possess' freedom as property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Da-sein, possesses man -- so originally that only *it* secures for humanity that distinctive relatedness to being as a whole as such which first founds all history."
********Jumping in on 3/24/19: I am struck by a few things, or, rather by the 'thingly' description of 'Being', e.g., "in our encounter with Being". What needs to be underlined is that the daily experiment, the daily writing of the poetic phenomenological meditations, was just that: a kind of daily meditatio 'as' an expression of that encounter with Being, specifically, the poetic philosophical expression of that encounter. In this sense, 'Being' is misunderstood when identified as a 'thing,' and better understood when described, or related to, as a 'process'. My current work is emphasizing this process as an aesthetic event, or, rather focusing on the example of this process occurring as an aesthetic event, specifically, a formative aesthetic event, i.e., learning in the sense of 'Bildung' (in the most generic use of that term). The other theme that jumped out at me is the play on Socrates as a 'convict': practicing philosophy under the 'conviction' that Love is the most powerful force for human life. Coincidentally, last weekend at PES Richmond, I presented a paper on a CoRE panel that was supposed to be engaging the question, "What counts as philosophy?", and concluded the paper with the following, which sought to reiterate my commitment (conviction!) to poetic praxis, and to the persona of the threshold scholar, with allusions to PES Memphis:
PPM39 concludes with the aphorism: "The essence of Learning is Freedom." (Duarte) And so PPM40 begins with: "Spontaneity, not planning (scheming), is the hallmark of the Daoist sage." (Lao Tzu). This is the 'new stone' dropped into the pond -- cf. commentary from PPM39 for context. No other borrowed fragment captures so succinctly what I am calling the Teacher who is bring others into Learning. Recall: the project was inspired by a question that emerges from Plato regarding the capacity of each and every one of us to contemplate Being. If this is the case, then the educational question arises: How does one get turned around, turned on and tuned into the contemplation of Being? And as I say in my post-reading commentary, my response is to take up the question that Heidegger relentlessly pursued: the question of Being and/or the question of the meaning of Being? I take this question 'of' Being, and/or of the 'meaning' of Being, to be 'answered' by making 'meaning,' which is another way of saying 'making' or 'forming' philosophy, understood quite generally and perhaps too generally to be any manner in which the singularity of a human being is disclosed, made manifest, offered, expressed in the making of some crafted 'thing' that carries the aura of that person's singularity. Put otherwise, it is the concrete worldly manifestation of human freedom. Manufacturing can not re-produce this, never ever.
I emphasize in my commentary that Learning is what arises first and foremost in our encounter with Being, when we recognize both the possibility and necessity of making something, of bring something into the world, and/or perhaps repairing something in the world that needs care and cultivation. Here is where teaching enters the scene.
*In the manner that I described in the post-commentary on PPM39, I drop again the aphoristic stone that is, for me, the significant line from Socrates speech in the Symposium, when he says, "I was convinced, and in that conviction I try to bring others to the same creed, and to convince them that, if we are to make this gift our own, Love will help our mortal nature more than all the world." And I say in my commentary that one could certainly do an interesting genealogy of Socrates' 'conviction,' tracing his being convicted of the crime against the State, i.e., practicing philosophy, as a 'conviction' he lived with his whole life. That is, if he was 'convinced, and in that conviction try to bring others to the same creed,' then he certainly was all the while a convict, or one who was always already guilty of the crime of philosophy insofar as it is a crime to draw others into the practice that offers artefacts of freedom.
*Finally, the other new stone that is dropped into the pond in PPM40 is from Heidegger who writes: "Man does not 'possess' freedom as property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Da-sein, possesses man -- so originally that only *it* secures for humanity that distinctive relatedness to being as a whole as such which first founds all history."
********Jumping in on 3/24/19: I am struck by a few things, or, rather by the 'thingly' description of 'Being', e.g., "in our encounter with Being". What needs to be underlined is that the daily experiment, the daily writing of the poetic phenomenological meditations, was just that: a kind of daily meditatio 'as' an expression of that encounter with Being, specifically, the poetic philosophical expression of that encounter. In this sense, 'Being' is misunderstood when identified as a 'thing,' and better understood when described, or related to, as a 'process'. My current work is emphasizing this process as an aesthetic event, or, rather focusing on the example of this process occurring as an aesthetic event, specifically, a formative aesthetic event, i.e., learning in the sense of 'Bildung' (in the most generic use of that term). The other theme that jumped out at me is the play on Socrates as a 'convict': practicing philosophy under the 'conviction' that Love is the most powerful force for human life. Coincidentally, last weekend at PES Richmond, I presented a paper on a CoRE panel that was supposed to be engaging the question, "What counts as philosophy?", and concluded the paper with the following, which sought to reiterate my commitment (conviction!) to poetic praxis, and to the persona of the threshold scholar, with allusions to PES Memphis:
In poetic praxis there is a recollection that the profession of faith, the public oath or declaration, is made toward the unconditionality of the university, to the right to say everything, be it under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to present it, and to publish it. But in enacting the profession, the declaration, one is at the same time taking up the positionality of the one who is rightly accused of being transgressive, and pleading guilty of the so-called civil disobedience that is demonstrated with the experimentation. This is what the test entails, first and foremost. Of saying “Yes, I will” when Irigaray’s call for a new logic is received, and saying “Yes, I am” when the Carnapian accusation “you are a poet” is received. Here, then, another recollection, that of another significant fragment from the Medievals, Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding.” The faith in the university without condition is a faith that is seeking understanding in the form of experimental demonstration, in the realization of the profession, a keeping of the promise.
I conclude by insisting that this right, “the principal right to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and experimentation of knowledge” does not in fact exist unless it is enacted, in the Arendtian sense of performing a principal. There is no real profession of faith without the transgression, the civil disobedience, the admission of guilt of responsibility in the test that unsettles, and perhaps overturns the given discursive order of things.
3.0 - On the morning after a late winter/early spring snow storm that has us without power. (The original mediations were written with a desktop software, so connection to the www wasn't necessary. On this day 20 years later, the wireless phone provides the "hot spot" connection that enables my writing). "Freedom possesses us humans," "Socrates as convict"! I'll make a note of these two important fragments, as both resonate in the Preface and perhaps the Intro to the Routledge book. Socrates, the one convicted, the one with conviction, the one pushed along by the Muse, the Dream Figure, the calling, the flicker that evoked him to practice philosophy, to make music and work at it. Heidegger's turning the tables on the intentional subject, insisting that Da-sein expresses the being-there that entails being-possessed by Freedom. But not the freedom of the will, to make choices. Rather, in this case, the Freedom held out by possibility, by the encounter with the Nothing, what Jaime described last night as the vast emptiness of the universe. This is the proverbial situation that produces Angst, for the existential European thinker, but also inspires creativity, a response. Neither are necessary, as the encounter is always one of possibility, the possibility of possibility. There is no causality here. And this brings me to the fragment from Lao Tzu around which this project in part revolves around, or with (if the key fragments are metaphorically depicted as spokes on a wheel, which is yet another circular trope for the project). "Spontaneity, not planning (scheming), is the hallmark of the Daoist sage." (Lao Tzu). I want very much to hone in on spontaneity, and have tried before to emphasize it, especially with the writing on improvisation. My encounter with Bachelard may finally have offered me a resource that allows me to describe the encounter and the response to/with it (i.e, the writing and speaking after/about the encounter.). If spontaneity is the hallmark of the Daoist sage, then this teacher or the modality of the sage -- which is distinct from a particular person having the title or designation of 'sage' -- is occurring in the Open region where spontaneity is possible. This may sound like causality, but it's quite the opposite. It is merely the identification of a place where certain action and experience is possible. For example, if I want to surf, I need to waves, and the coastline of many oceans is optimal. The mountains would not suffice. But if I want to ski, then snow covered mountains would be optimal. Not so much the ocean. Likewise, the Open provides the situation for experiencing spontaneity, because a primary condition of the Open is openness, or the non-causal. When we experience spontaneity, we are in the Open. There is a belated quality to our recognition of being-there in the Open, and the Sage is the modality of the teacher who is attuned to Open, perhaps by experience they are able to "go there" and guide others there. That is certainly a line I explore in 'Being and Learning.' But in the more humble mood I find myself 20/10 years later, I am content to say that the Sage is the one who most anticipates being-there in the Open. Perhaps this is a version of Heidegger's "pointer," the one who points to the essential. In my class two weeks ago when we studied that moment in Heidegger, I emphasized this "pointing" as writing.
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