OPM125 June 18th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 8, pp.206-207

FINALLY taking advantage of summer in Portland and rode my bike down to my favorite coffee house Crema.   When I first moved to Portland two years ago I was a regular before realizing I wasn't able to do anything that required a high level of focus.  That realization coincided with my discovering the 7th floor of the USM Portland Glickman library, where there is a fine reading room that is most conducive to writing.   But these June days are the days of dialing it down, so Crema beckoned and here I am.  That's the context.

There are actually three prompts that get this commentary underway.  The first is the 'I/Thou' category that was introduced a few weeks ago, but has been appearing daily for the past week or so.   It really jumped out at me yesterday when I was recording my reading of the meditation, although it came to mind yesterday when I was writing my commentary and contrasting subjectivity and intersubjectivity, a distinction that is bit more complicated that it may appear, especially in view of Arendt’s concepts of singularity and plurality.   Arendt’s is not a relation of intersubjectivity in the sense that I first developed it (in my doctoral dissertation) via Habermas, Dewey and Freire.   The intersubjective modality marks a kind of horizontal transcendence into a ‘third’ existentiale (location of human being).   For Arendt, the ‘third’ is constituted by a public realm that constitutes a space for freedom where all ‘can be seen and see, hear and be heard.’  It is quasi-Heideggerian in the sense of its post-human character.  The intersubjective is wholly human, and it is what arises through dialogue.    Martin Buber was a very important source for my post-dissertation thinking and teaching on intersubjectivity.   And it wasn’t simply his ‘I/Thou’ category.  While his central category was influential, it was the form of his writing that inspired me during the writing of the meditations.  Buber wrote fragments, and offered a unique blend of religious existentialism. 

The second prompt is ‘silence’.  OPM 125 picks up where OPM 124 concludes:  “The path of silence is the pathos of compassion.” (124)  “Learning unfolds along the path of silence, the purposeful wandering we call poetic dialogue.”   The path of silence, the gap, the open, etc., are all locations that offer the conditions for the possibility of dialogue.   And insofar as they make this offering they also promise to form us in particular ways.  While the Sage is the figure of the persona who is capable of guiding others into and through this location,  the location always remains originary.   Here, again, is the priority of location that demands a philosophical cartography.  I feel the need to repeat this point because it is understanding that has only become clear to me in the past year.  Repetition is a reminder.

The third and final prompt is the appearance of Karl Popper in OPM 125.  The positivist Popper appears in the wake of one of the few qualifications of that most central category: the ineffable.  The qualification: “the ineffable, the unnamable and unspeakable beyond ‘fact/fiction.’”   The appearance of Popper: “To be gathered beyond ‘fact/fiction’ is to be unified by a communicative performance…that produces meaning rather than asserting ‘bold conjectures and grand refutations, ‘ as Karl Popper might say.  This so-called ‘logic of scientific discovery’ should not be excluded from the learning community a priori, and, on the contrary, we must understand this particular way of approaching ‘science’ has the potential to be a specific moment or even occasion of poetic dwelling.”  This has to be one of the most hospitable moments of this writing experiment, but not at all surprising because of my prior ‘relationship’ with Popper, who I was compelled to read carefully in preparation for the oral examination part of my doctoral exams.  I read Popper alongside Thomas Kuhn, and didn’t identify the former as a ‘positivist’ until this was pointed out to me years later.  Indeed, when I read Popper I did so with the memory of a Fordham friend who had studied him and found him exciting.   I was also taken by his critique of grand theories that said too much, and therefore disclosed too little.  And also took inspiration from the first part of his ‘bold conjectures and grand refutations’ formula.   Of course, if the two parts of the formula are two sides of the same coin then the bold conjecture is itself a grand refutation and vice versa.    I’d like to believe the experiment was a grand refutation of the norms and expectations of academic philosophy (what Arendt derided as the work of ‘professional thinkers’).   And I’d like to think that the writing that was ultimately published as Being and Learning under the banner of originary thinking is a bold conjecture of what one can write.