PPM65 is the penultimate meditation on Plato's allegory of the cave, and represents pp. 101-103 in Being and Learning. As I say in the post-reading commentary, the work of re-imagining and re-telling the allegory is almost complete, as I have now pursued the question concerning the preparation for leaning through the dwelling in the cave, suggesting that the cave represents schooling (education), and that the truth of concealment that organizes the cave has the force of 'holding back' and thus preserving freedom, or what Arendt calls 'natality.' In my commentary I refer to a paper I published in TCR on Arendt (available via https://hofstra.academia.edu/EduardoDuarte) where I describe the ideal school as a conservatory. I make this reference to clarify that the necessity of being held back or having ones freedom 'chained' has to be re-imagined in a non-oppressive way, or the whole claim of preparation is nullified. Re-imagining and thus re-telling the allegory is what chapter 4 is about, and it is thus an example of the projects poetic and phenomenological quality: the allegory appeared to me as a story about the possibility of education as the preparation for the actualization of freedom, and thus as a way of making a positive vision of schooling, which continues to be one of the most important challenges for philosophers of education, not to mention teachers and parents. For without a positive vision, we will have no hope, and no expectations, and will fall into cynicism and compromise, and, ultimately, despair and demoralization. So re-imagining the school as the dwelling place of freedom is the move I make at the penultimate moment of my exploration of Plato's allegory, and I do so with some help of Heidegger and his musings on the etymology of the German words that denote dwelling. So, in PPM65, I cite him to underline my vision that schooling is the place where freedom is dwelling: "We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers. But in what does the essence of dwelling consists? Let us listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the world bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye; and fry, means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free actually means to spare. The sparing itself consists snot only in the fact what we don not harm the one who we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence...The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing."
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 - After reading the 2.0 commentary I'm feeling a bit snarky given what had been written 10 years ago in the wake of the commentary from only a few days earlier, where I wrote something about then to be "turned around" and thus "turned away" from the (Western) philosophical education I had received in order to turn towards a discourse that was more authentically my own. I have made that attempt, and even published a piece on it, my essay for the first issue of Lapiz (the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society journal), a paper I presented to a gathering of Latinx analytic philosophers at Rutgers (the conference where I was met with blank stares after reading my paper, and later was told by a earnest colleague: "you are a poet!" To this day I'm not sure if that was meant as a compliment, but he was a genial fellow, and so I took it in the spirit of collegiality.). What causes me to feel snarky is the way I appropriate Heidegger's etymological analysis of dwelling. On the one hand, I still appreciate and appropriate that methodology, especially in my teaching. As I said the other day at the beginning of class, like it or not, the Attic Greeks are with us. This is certainly the case in philosophy, in the language and ideas that motivate and organize our thinking. And it's also true for me that Heidegger is a central figure in my project, for better or worse, and I would say for the better. Writing that sentence helps to assuage the snarky feeling, by reminding me that, for better or worse, Heidegger is an important thinker I encountered along the way, mostly in graduate school and beyond, who, for whatever reason, spoke to me. His opening lecture from "What is Called Thinking?" was the first text I taught way back in 1993 at Loyola Marymount, and one that I have taught almost every semester for the past 31 years. Morever, it seems to me that one of the important ideas that Plato is communicating with the Allegory, and a point that is central to a philosophical education, and was central to my dissertation and continues to be in my project, is the experience of "self-overcoming," or what lately I have been describing as "re-placement." Now, for some, this replacement would entail a recovery of relationship to a cultural background, a replacing of the self from an inauthentic ground (cave) to a location that is more authentically their own. And to use some Heideggerian language, we are always struggling to work out the situation, ground, etc., that we have been "thrown onto." This is part of the human condition, and captured in all the classic itinerant stories, including those that tell of the spiritual journey. The story of Siddhartha Gautama's awakening is the first one that comes to mind, a story that could be told through the Allegory. In my own journey, I have been struggling against reductionism, against reducing a person to a historical "persona" that is only just a sociological "identity" that always fails to capture the nuance of their life experience. What is more interesting are the general and perhaps universal characteristics that human share, the human condition, which protect the nuance. We are indeed all beginners and capable of beginning, again and again, and this cycle of initiating something new is what learning, understood existentially, is all about.
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