OPM126 June 19th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 8, pp.207-209

OPM 126 is the penultimate meditation of those that were gathered and published in Being and Learning as chapter 8, ‘Meditative Thinking.’   (I put the matter in this way because creating chapters from this material was by all accounts a relatively  ‘arbitrary’ editorial process, and I struggled with that decision.  In March, 2005, just weeks after completing the experiment, I recall speaking with colleagues at the Philosophy of Education meeting about the editorial process.  Unfortunately I didn’t receive much feedback, because most of the folks I spoke with didn’t no what to make of the work – I had brought one of the binders with me…I suppose as ‘evidence’ of the experiment, but also because I was already busy with copy-editing, hoping, in vain, that I could find an interested publisher.   The one and only comment I recall quite vividly is the one I received from Audrey Thompson, one of my favorite people at PES.  After I explained to her my ‘dilemma’ aka in what form to publish the writing, I wondered if perhaps I should distill the meditations down to the one or two lines in each one that were truly  originary.   I liked the approach to the Wittgenstein used – although, with hindsight, I should have used the latter Nietzsche as my exemplar.  At any rate, Audrey rolled her eyes at me when I made the comparison with Ludwig W., and, being the somewhat impressionable person that I am, I dropped the idea right there in the hallway of the San Francisco.   [I just now found a link to Audrey’s photo journal of the 2005 PES meeting, which includes a photo of me, ten years ago, weeks after completing the experiment.   I miss that hat I was wearing!  http://www.pauahtun.org/Audrey/SF.PES.2005.html)

As for OPM 126 representing the penultimate meditation, I anticipate writing something tomorrow about the funky break that occurs with OPM 127 at the end of the chapter 8.  I’ve already experienced that kind of change from chapter 3 ‘The Way of Lao Tzu’ to chapter 4 ‘Plato’s Allegory of the Cave’ via the word passage.   (cf. post from March 25^th) 

Prompts for today are the following:  the locution without why,’ and two quotations from Arendt that bookend OPM 126.

            Last night when I was recording my reading of OPM 125 I noticed the phrase ‘without why’ jumping off the pages:  “this cultivation [of the open region] is the communicative that proceeds ‘without why.’  To ‘proceed without why’ is to let go of the desire of definitive, to renounce the claim of the calculative…the Sage…guides others along the path of silence, the wandering ‘without why’….thereby enjoings when in a dialogic community where each can be seen and see, hear and heard.  This is the polyphonic gathering that chants without why. To arrange and direct the chanting ‘without why’ is to let learning be learned… -- the being-together in peace and freedom – unfolds ‘without why’…far from the linear road of  the propositional that rushes us towards what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’…Specifically, we seek to understand why the teaching that lets learning be learned and thereby cultivates mindfulness…directs an aporetic dialogue that proceeds without.” 

All that sets up the very dialectical OPM 126, which propels the contrast between the way of ‘meditative thinking’ versus the way of ‘calculative rationality.’  This contrast is borrowed from Heidegger, but is also one that has lots of Frankfurt School influence as well, specifically the ‘communicative’ v. ‘instrumental’.  OPM 126 qualifies the ‘without why’ by re-turning to Arendt, who offered me a quotation that helped to define “the disruptive and estranging character of medititative thinking when she said: ‘Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to an end.’”  I seize on this ‘production of nothing,’ first and foremost,  as the essential contrast to the logic hyper-productivity that reigns in formal education aka schooling, and beyond, in the dominant economic system.  (The ‘production of nothing’ also brings me back all the way to the very beginning  of the experiment, with the question, ‘How is with the Nothing?’  But that is a subtle index  that only one who is really focused will ‘hear’)  

With meditative thinking ‘Proceeding without why’ is linked to ‘producing nothing.’  Both signify the peculiar and particular time and place of meditative thinking, which happens in what Arendt calls the nunc stans (the standing now), which I locate as both the threshold  and the open, depending on the context.  It can also be denoted as the ‘studio’  of thinking/learning.  The larger arc is drawn in OPM 126 by returning to the oft quoted statement by Heidegger:  “the teacher ‘often produces the impression that we really learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning,’ we now automatically understand merely the procurement of useful information.’”  Here then we see why the teaching and learning that follows the path of meditative thinking ‘proceeds without why’ and ‘produces nothing’.   This perception is not simply from the perspective of the hegemonic ‘calculative’ reasoning, and its obsession with measuring outcomes.  Rather, with meditative thinking arises the awareness/consciousness that ‘nothing’ is produced – no thing made – with this learning.  It is a happening, an event, and, as Arendt puts in the quotation that bookends 126: “It is obvious that this kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends.  Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that friends have in common.  By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them.”