PPM63 continues the exploration of Plato's Allegory as offering us a way of understanding what I'm calling the 'truth of concealment' -- one side of the twofold play of our encounter with Being -- specifically, how and why 'schooling' is governed by the truth of concealment, and, as such is the preparatory event for learning. In PPM63 I write: "The cave, as the instructional event of schooling, represents what we initially identified as the saying of the 'Nothing,' which releases us to the freedom of discovery. If Learning is the discovery that comes with the adventure of inquiry, the seeking that is propelled by steadfast openness, then this 'openness' is prepared and conserved by the concealment that is insisted upon the child. To insist upon concealment is to enable the child to be free from the alterity of the other, the unstable ground of the clearing...The truth of concealment is the negative liberty imposed upon the child in the sheltering security of the domestic habitat. She is free form the responsibility ot the world, to others, from responsibility itself....Within the context of our exploration of Being and Learning, this is important, because it identifies how the truth of concealment represents the hiding of Learning within schooling, and shows why education, as the preparation of Learning, preserves or conserves natality, the fact of freedom. Freedom does not appear ex nihilo, but is always already present, in potency, retained as the 'not yet' possibility that requires only the proper conditions an relations to emerge. Thus, when Heidegger suggests that 'real freedom' only appears in the third part of the story, we must be careful to understand this to imply that freedom is now in the process of being actualized [at that point]. Freedom is not a phenomenon that is created, nor imposed, but liberated. And paideia, the process accomplishing the turning around of the whole person, initiates this liberation that is made possible by the proper preparation. The truth of concealment is thus identified in the conservation of freedom."(Being and Learning, pp. 99-100)
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 - On this day, 20/10 years later, on the NJT, after some prep work for class which, today, will take up Plato's Allegory. Usually we read the Allegory in the beginning of the semester. But I decided, for some reason, to study it in the third and final part of this semester. And this semester has felt unusually challenging, and there are many reasons for that, but they can all more or less be collected under the following: the pressure of the pragmatic has put enormous stress on the speculative, the theoretical. This is the first semester I can recall where a non-productive self-consciousness is felt, where I am feeling some distance, what might be described as alienation, from my usual approach. In some ways I have experienced a negative periagogē, a turning away from speculation, from wonder. After 28 years of teaching in a college of education, I am again encountering the alienation that swept over me during my first weeks of teaching at Hofstra. Neither then nor now has this alienation caused anything close to an existential crisis. It does not cause me to question what I am doing, but where I am doing it and with whom. Perhaps the cave-dweller who was freed experienced something similar. But we don't know. Plato says almost nothing about the cave-dweller's "self awareness," which is probably because the "self" wasn't a concern for him, and certainly wasn't a philosophical concern in the way we take it for granted today. More importantly, Plato's concern is how the individual fits "properly" into the whole, cosmically and politically. Freedom then is experienced as the relief from the personal existential domain of "choice." It is a "negative liberty" a freedom from the confusion of "choice" and "decision". Positively this is the power of the team, the band, the congregation, the feeling of being a significant part of something significant, a community of learning in the case of my project, and more generally, the community of Being. PPM63 focuses on the dialectic between schooling and the "real" world after school, experienced on a daily basis and chronologically when one is not longer attending an institution of learning. But if we follow Arendt's line on education, schooling is only in part organized by the truth of concealment, the preservation of natality. It is also a preparation in repairing and renewing the common world by experiencing community, being-together. Here what is significant is the community emerging from the common. The Allegory conveys the challenge of understanding community as the collective experience of something in common without a common understanding. This is why Arendt emphasizes the common as yielding plurality as opposed to commonality. The common brings us together and at the same time allows us to distinguish ourselves, and be distinguished. It allows for the possibility of a constructive dialogue, a dialectic of agreement/disagreement without the telos of consensus, which may be significant for the political but not for the educational. That is important! The educational learning community allows one to experience the collective effort but never at the expense of autonomy, where responsibility returns, but not as a matter of choice in the everyday lived sense. It is rather a matter of being responsible for making an interpretation, for one's relationship to the object of study. So what then of the dialectic of the dialogic encounter? The dynamic constructive tension can only ever emerge if students have skin in the game. And that is what responsibility for one's thinking, for one's take on the object of study, is all about. And this is perhaps what Irigaray means when she says that we must allow others to question us, but we must remain steadfast on our path of inquiry. Again, there is not telos of consensus and agreement. Here is where my students get confounded and resist the process: if there is no fixed end, how can this be important? Because process is more significant than product.
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