Read in my office at Hofstra, on a very quiet Friday afternoon, PPM58 (pp. 92-93 in Being and Learning) offers further discussion of Plato's Allegory, specifically the question concerning the preparation for the calling, and this further discussion happens via Arendt, specifically the language of natality and con-servative education that appears in her essay "Crisis in Education." In my post-reading commentary I find myself making a distinction between learning and education that I'd not thought of before, and that is to say that 'education' is the particular way that learning is guided. That is, if learning is understood to be the enactment of freedom after this offering has been accepted -- an offering we encounter in the effacement with Being's presencing that 'claims' us as humans to be beings that are free -- then education is the way that learning is directed toward a moral and political outcome. That is, education, or what Arendt calls 'conservative education' has the specific goal of directing the development of our understanding of our capacity to act -- to enact our freedom -- such that when we are properly prepared to do something with our freedom to make something, to act, the product we make is one that is guided by the ethos of sustainability. This is what a 'conservational' education leads us to; what Arendt calls the work of repairing and renewing the world. I write in PPM58, which includes a citation from Arendt's essay: "Natality, the fact of freedom, the always already existing capacity for spontaneity, creativity, plurality, must be carefully preserved and prepared to make an entry into a 'pre-existing world, constructed by the living and the dead...Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.'" In this sense, 'education' is organized by and functions under the truth of concealment, which here indicates the conservation of natality and the revolutionary. It is a deliberate holding back of the impulse to simply 'act'. And it is a directing that impulse, or channelling it in such a way that it becomes ready to contribute to a project that I describe in my post-reading commentary as the project of the justice of sustainability.
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.
3.0a - I wonder what I was doing at my Hofstra office on a Friday? Maybe there was an important meeting?
ReplyDeletePPM58 continues to engage with Plato's Allegory in relation to Arendt's "Crisis" essay. Above in the 2.0 commentary I write: "In this sense, 'education' is organized by and functions under the truth of concealment, which here indicates the conservation of natality and the revolutionary. It is a deliberate holding back of the impulse to simply 'act'. And it is a directing that impulse, or channelling it in such a way that it becomes ready to contribute to a project that I describe in my post-reading commentary as the project of the justice of sustainability." Today I'm not confident I would use the phrase "truth of concealment," and would probably opt for just writing "concealment," which is one part of the dialectical dynamic of aletheia, which is the word for truth that Heidegger identifies as key to understanding Plato's Allegory. In PPM58 concealment is used as a synonym for conservation, in the manner Arendt is using it. In a previous 3.0 commentary I emphasized both the Heideggerian and Arendtian ways I understand the Allegory dialectical organization. PPM58 builds on "natality" as what Arendt suggests is the "fact of freedom." Arendt is completely non-speculative and emphatic when deploying her key terms. There is post-strucural or even modernist about her thinking. Natality, plurality, singularity...are all "facts" for Arendt. Their facticity is the almost gravitational force that moves education and learning. As noted in yesterday's 3.0 commentary, Arendt is focused on education, which, in PPM58 I link to the concealment happening in the cave. Education is the preparation for freedom, for acting in the world, and for repairing and renewing the world, which is common. As noted yesterday, because the world is common, but not the same, it can reveal our plurality, diversity and differences, so long as we don't mistake "difference" for "alterity." The relation between people in the world is commensurable because of the world. It is our common standard, that which measures us, which is another way of saying "sizes" us up. Who we are is thus not measured against one another, but in relation to the world. This is important.
3.0b - Here we might avoid the problem of the social, in Rousseau's sense, of valuing ourselves in relation to how others perceive us. Arendt overlooks this problem because she assumes that the principle of equality organizes our common connection to the world. So when she says the world brings us together and at the same time distinguishes us, that is the medium through which everyone of us can be seen and heard, and see and hear others, she is placing faith in the world's power of attraction. And this, again, seems to be one of the important implications of Plato's Alleorgy: all throughout the story there is a power of attraction, an almost gravitational or magnetic force. This magnetism holds the cave-dwellers in place, holds their gazes at the wall and shadows, releases the cave-dweller and forces him out of the cave and back into the cave after he has been magnetically drawn to the Sun, the source of authenticity and the real. Here I want to say that education, in Arendt's sense of preparing students for repair and renewal of the world, is organized around teaching the students to focus on the common object of study. This is another way of describing the challenge posed by the fundament question motivating this project: how does one turn the student around (away from themself) towards the comment object of study? (this is a remix of Plato's question) There are two challenges: first is turning them around toward the object of study, which is in part about the method or process of turning them around and directing their attention, but also of selecting an object that has magnetic force, that is compelling; second, the challenge of empowering them to trust their capacity to read and respond and share their responses with one another in a receptive, non-judgmental manner, which is to say, to enter into dialogue with one another -- dialogue, not debate or argumentation, but the constructive work of building a common understanding through the hermenuetic process that yields unique and different responses to the object of study. Although she doesn't say it, the work of repair and renewal at some point is a joint effort, something that happens with others. And that is perhaps the biggest challenge: to prepare students to work together while recognizing the diversity that each one brings to the effort. Perhaps this is where team building, using the language of sport, is worth exploring?
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