OPM 137, July 1st Meditation (not included in Being and Learning)

OPM 137, written this first day of July, did not make the final cut.   As I wrote yesterday, the organization of meditations into a ‘book’ titled Being and Learning was ambitious and somewhat arbitrary, as the writing is neither written nor organized in linear format.  Without becoming lost in delusion, I still want to note that there have been many examples of fragmentary writing collected without any defining organization.  Heraclitus fragments and Nietzsche’s posthumously published Will to Power are the two examples that immediately come to mind.  And when I consider those two I regret that I didn’t have the patience or discipline to write fragments!  For some reason I was unable to truly distance myself from the dominant narrative forms of writing, and here I am using ‘narrative’ in the sense of continuity that doesn’t necessarily denote a linear progression.  My colleague and good friend Tyson Lewis, who was featured in an video conversation (March, Albuquerque) described Being and Learning as ‘the first epic in philosophy of education.’  I thought that was a unique and interesting way of describing the writing.  But it also points to what I now see to be a problem in the writing insofar it truly aspired to be a kind of pilgrim’s tale, a chronicle of a year of daily meditations where many of the same concepts were contemplated again and again, and described again and again.  This is precisely what is identified in OPM 137 as ‘experiential philosophy’ “when ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ manifest as ‘action.’ With this move we identify wisdom as ‘enactment.’ To ‘enact’ wisdom is to ‘practice’ the truth.  Learning is thus a practice of the truth.”

Later in OPM 137 I say that this practice “is also named poiesis,” and then cite Heidegger who says, “Poetry is what really lets us dwell.  But through what do we attain a dwelling place?  Through building.  Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building.”  This all picks up on the commentary I wrote yesterday in commemorating OPM 136, when, like today, I reflected on the incomplete and unfinished project; specifically, the unachieved poiein.   Heidegger says that poetic creation is a kind of building.  And what has been emphasized in the meditations, and is reiterated in OPM 137, is that philosophy can and should be a practice that enacts this kind of poetic building through dialogic learning, which means that it always requires a congregation.   But today, as I reflect back on what was achieved and what was left unfinished, I question this assumption for two reasons. First, because the writing experiment was itself a intra-dialogic experience, a congregation of the self with itself, or what Arendt describes as the silent dialogue with myself (eme emauto).  Were the meditations Cartesian after all?  And this brings me to the second reason for questioning the assumption:  writing, for me, is and will continue to be a solitary undertaking.  The project of originary thinking is originating something (aka evoking thought) because is emerges from the authority of the author that is rooted in singularity.  Originality is the voice of natality, and the writing that expresses this is the one that is made by a single hand (metaphorically, of course, because today writing happens almost exclusively on a keyboard and is made by the coordinated movement of two hands).   So while OPM 137 culminates with a critique of the “’busy-ness’ of atomic individuals who move about dis-engaged and self-consumed on the isolated island [of] contemporary schooling…” it seems that this point fails to capture the nuance of the solitary (but not lonely) singular meditative thinker as an important interruption and contrast to the hegemonic figure of the ‘student’ in contemporary capitalist schooling.  As I write the final thought of this commentary I am reminded of an essay I wrote for the volume on Hannah Arendt (edited by Mordechai Gordon), which was a critique of cooperative learning as a practice that eclipsed thinking, the kind of meditative thinking that only happens when the singular person is granted the time and space to be alone and apart from the 'congregation'.   How strange that I would move so far from this position and yet, paradoxically,  retain it throughout the writing experiment?!?!?!