Read from the iconic space of Irvine Auditorium located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, PPM50 is an exploration of the third moment in Plato's Allegory, the penultimate section, when the liberated cave-dweller experiences the culminating revelation of Being's presencing, and then, in the wake of that revelation experiences an intense longing to return to his companions, what I have called his demos. The occasion for my being in Irvine Auditorium is the 2014 Indigenous Education Pre-Conference: Comparative Indigeneities in Research, Theory and Schooling, organized by my good friend and colleague, Troy Richardson, faculty member at Cornell University, and a member of the Orr's Island Collective. In turn, much of my post-reading commentary is meditated by the presentations I have heard at today's conference, and, at times, I find myself struggling to articulate my sense of symmetry between the writing happening in Being and Learning, and the projects unfolding with the group of scholars meeting at the conference. I have felt an intense sense of connection and disconnection, the combined force of both has inspired me to envision a sequel to Being and Learning, which would be Being and (re)Learning, which, on the face of it, is an audacious proposal, but, is actually much more attainable than it may appear, especially if one were to thinking the sequel would have to be another year of daily poetic meditations. On the contrary, the sequel would go to the heart of the matter, which I have articulated and been discussing in my commentaries, as the work of originary thinking, and would be a genealogy of originary thinking aka a philosophy cartography of the traditions of fundamental ontology. I have done some of that work in the present Being and Learning, but beyond the ancient thinkers of Greece, India, and China, there are the traditions of the "Americas," and it seems to me that this Being and (re)Learning would link my project with the nascent Latin American Philosophy of Education Society and Troy Comparative Indigeneities project, but, perhaps more importantly for me as a philosopher, ground my thinking, my ontological education, in the traditions within the hemisphere where I was born, raised and spent the majority of life.
In terms of the highlights, here is an excerpt from PPM50: "the moment of his vision is a bag of mixed emotions. He recognizes the vision for what it is: an extraordinary revelation of beauty, the beauty of the world shining forth and capturing him. He has been released into the open region and again finds himself a captive. But now he is held captive by the sublime, the overwhelming beauty of the world's harmony. He is held in wonder by this harmony. His captivity has been re-newed, as he stands in awe of this beauty that shines forth. But this moment of awe and wonder is interrupted by the memory of his fellow prisoners, those whom he has left behind and who still dwell in the darkness and remain bound at the neck and feet....It is at this moment, where he has arrived at a calm repose, where he has been gathered into the harmony of the world's relations, that he re-members his friends."
P.S. in my setting of the scene I mention that politicians Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton have spoken in this space, but I failed to mention that Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and Baba Oluntungi have played their music in this space. I was reminded of this because somewhere, in some space within this building -- presumably a practice studio -- I can hear the faint sounds of a piano being played in the style of Theolonius Monk.
In terms of the highlights, here is an excerpt from PPM50: "the moment of his vision is a bag of mixed emotions. He recognizes the vision for what it is: an extraordinary revelation of beauty, the beauty of the world shining forth and capturing him. He has been released into the open region and again finds himself a captive. But now he is held captive by the sublime, the overwhelming beauty of the world's harmony. He is held in wonder by this harmony. His captivity has been re-newed, as he stands in awe of this beauty that shines forth. But this moment of awe and wonder is interrupted by the memory of his fellow prisoners, those whom he has left behind and who still dwell in the darkness and remain bound at the neck and feet....It is at this moment, where he has arrived at a calm repose, where he has been gathered into the harmony of the world's relations, that he re-members his friends."
P.S. in my setting of the scene I mention that politicians Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton have spoken in this space, but I failed to mention that Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and Baba Oluntungi have played their music in this space. I was reminded of this because somewhere, in some space within this building -- presumably a practice studio -- I can hear the faint sounds of a piano being played in the style of Theolonius Monk.
3.0 - one of the true joys I experience in this project is watching the 2.0 videos that take me back to wherever I happened to be when I was revisiting the original meditations. I remembered going to UPenn for Troy's Indigenous Education conference, but couldn't remember the year.
ReplyDeleteWhat jumps out from PPM49 is the fragment cited above, specifically, this moment: "the moment of his vision is a bag of mixed emotions..." The play on captive/captivation is one that I often deployed. Being held captive by the experience, being held captive by the work of art, etc. Captivation: "to attract and hold the interest and attention of". This is what the phenomenological modality prepares for, and, I suppose, one could argue that the phenomenological modality is only truly inhabited when one experiences captivation. The emphasis is always on that which captivates, that which attracts and hold our interest and attention. This is why Heidegger describes learning to thinking as learning to respond to what is essential, to what is calling us. This is what Evocative saying/questioning is all about: captivation the attention of the student. "He has been released into the open region and again finds himself a captive. But now he is held captive by the sublime, the overwhelming beauty of the world's harmony. He is held in wonder by this harmony. His captivity has been re-newed." This fragment from Plato's Allegory underlines the point I was making in yesterday's 3.0 commentary: the inevitable boundaries of the learning experience. Because Liberation is unbounded we can not fully experience it. Nor can we remain/dwell within the Open Region beyond the event that releases us into that location. We remain bounded by the dialectic of freedom, the appearance and disappearance of the perception of possibility, the tension between hope and fate.
The fragment also includes the following: "He recognizes the vision for what it is: an extraordinary revelation of beauty, the beauty of the world shining forth and capturing him." This description remains close to Plato, but almost too faithful. Here Irigaray's critique resonates: Western philosophy is founded on "looking at" to the detriment (silence towards) "listening-to." Despite his commitment to an aural art form, i.e., the philosophical dialogue, Plato remained captive to the visual, to vision as the touchstone for knowledge. And this despite his non-ironic critique of reading and the written word, which appears in his Phaedrus. At the end of that dialogue, the spoken word is held out as the best and only way to practice philosophy, especially when we are describing philosophy as an educational practice.