The portrait of the Indigenous Philosopher, as depicted by Guaman Poma (1550-1616):
I'm prompted to begin today's post with a citation from the first of my summer reading books, Rodolfo
Kusch's Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America, specifically that moment when he makes an intervention in the taken-for-granted authority of Heidegger's Dasein by distinguishing Guaman Poma's utcatha, which Kusch qualifies with the Spanish word for being (ser) in the sense of estar. Here we encounter my own interest in the fundamental ontological and existential question: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?), which takes us into a thinking about place, a thinking that reveals the self as located. To speak of the self as located is to identify our situation, which is to say, our existence to be one of moving in spheres, places, domains, etc. What is important for Kusch is not so much my question, which takes us into a thinking about these specific locations (hence I call this work of learning about the places I am: cartographical); rather, Kusch is interested in our arrival into our worlds. When we take up the arrival into we can think the contrast between the German Heidegger and the Quechua Guaman Poma. With Heidegger, the da (there) of our sein (being) is the result of our having been thrown into the circumstance. Our arrival is a fall: we have fallen into our location. Kusch: "Heidegger's problematic is centered on an awareness of a diminished being, a thrown being." In contrast, Guaman Pomo's utcatha is the wider public, plaza where we are disclosed: exhibited. It is the place where we show the fruits of our labor, our harvest, our crafts, and place them alongside others. It is a communal gathering space, for sure, but one that is actually a place to enact this ritual of self-disclosure. The entire event of gathering and disclosure is operating at secondary level, because the space is ontologically primary. In other words, the utcatha is the primary there where we are, always opening for and calling us to gather. We are neither thrown nor fall into the utcatha. On the contrary, we are gathered there with others, brought together. However, our arrival into this space of gathering happens by way of our mimetically performing this same process of gathering: cultivating, harvesting, forming. The essential difference between the two ways of arriving, between being gathered and being thrown, is the difference between the narrative of origins (ancestry, homeland) and exile (alienation, banishment).
But all of this returns us to the question that I believe is the most significant: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?) Indeed, where have we arrived? We are we academic philosophers of the 21st century, specifically, so-called, philosophers of education?
The fragment I have distilled from the writing I did ten years ago this date corresponds well with the reading of Kusch I have made today. OPM 142 begins with a quotation from Lao Tzu that sounds as if it may have been spoken by the indigenous philosopher 'astrologer-poet' of Guaman Poma: "the sage puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved." The fragment is organized around the relation between the self, community and the 'primordial simplicity'.
The self is gathered, and the self gathers. The self is gathered by the community, and the self gathers community. Both self and community are gathered together by a shared past that they must commemorate through celebration, feast, and song. A person is a member of the community by virtue of his contribution. First and foremost he contributes himself. This is called self-disclosure and represents the offering he makes to others of himself. A simple example of this is when an individual spontaneously joins a duo of players and forms a trio that becomes even more dynamic when a fourth member joins them. What is important in this example is the third member joining the duo by way of offering himself as an additional participant, and the fourth member joining by way of invitation. In both cases the community is enlarged and made more robust. Is there intentionality? Yes and no. Yes, with the offerings (participation, invitation). No, because there is no need to speak of, name, or describe the event itself. This is the error of metaphysics that can not simply allow for things to be, but must narrate and chronicle. The true genius of the sage: he remains silent in the gathering of himself and the community.
I'm prompted to begin today's post with a citation from the first of my summer reading books, Rodolfo
Kusch's Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America, specifically that moment when he makes an intervention in the taken-for-granted authority of Heidegger's Dasein by distinguishing Guaman Poma's utcatha, which Kusch qualifies with the Spanish word for being (ser) in the sense of estar. Here we encounter my own interest in the fundamental ontological and existential question: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?), which takes us into a thinking about place, a thinking that reveals the self as located. To speak of the self as located is to identify our situation, which is to say, our existence to be one of moving in spheres, places, domains, etc. What is important for Kusch is not so much my question, which takes us into a thinking about these specific locations (hence I call this work of learning about the places I am: cartographical); rather, Kusch is interested in our arrival into our worlds. When we take up the arrival into we can think the contrast between the German Heidegger and the Quechua Guaman Poma. With Heidegger, the da (there) of our sein (being) is the result of our having been thrown into the circumstance. Our arrival is a fall: we have fallen into our location. Kusch: "Heidegger's problematic is centered on an awareness of a diminished being, a thrown being." In contrast, Guaman Pomo's utcatha is the wider public, plaza where we are disclosed: exhibited. It is the place where we show the fruits of our labor, our harvest, our crafts, and place them alongside others. It is a communal gathering space, for sure, but one that is actually a place to enact this ritual of self-disclosure. The entire event of gathering and disclosure is operating at secondary level, because the space is ontologically primary. In other words, the utcatha is the primary there where we are, always opening for and calling us to gather. We are neither thrown nor fall into the utcatha. On the contrary, we are gathered there with others, brought together. However, our arrival into this space of gathering happens by way of our mimetically performing this same process of gathering: cultivating, harvesting, forming. The essential difference between the two ways of arriving, between being gathered and being thrown, is the difference between the narrative of origins (ancestry, homeland) and exile (alienation, banishment).
But all of this returns us to the question that I believe is the most significant: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?) Indeed, where have we arrived? We are we academic philosophers of the 21st century, specifically, so-called, philosophers of education?
The fragment I have distilled from the writing I did ten years ago this date corresponds well with the reading of Kusch I have made today. OPM 142 begins with a quotation from Lao Tzu that sounds as if it may have been spoken by the indigenous philosopher 'astrologer-poet' of Guaman Poma: "the sage puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved." The fragment is organized around the relation between the self, community and the 'primordial simplicity'.
The self is gathered, and the self gathers. The self is gathered by the community, and the self gathers community. Both self and community are gathered together by a shared past that they must commemorate through celebration, feast, and song. A person is a member of the community by virtue of his contribution. First and foremost he contributes himself. This is called self-disclosure and represents the offering he makes to others of himself. A simple example of this is when an individual spontaneously joins a duo of players and forms a trio that becomes even more dynamic when a fourth member joins them. What is important in this example is the third member joining the duo by way of offering himself as an additional participant, and the fourth member joining by way of invitation. In both cases the community is enlarged and made more robust. Is there intentionality? Yes and no. Yes, with the offerings (participation, invitation). No, because there is no need to speak of, name, or describe the event itself. This is the error of metaphysics that can not simply allow for things to be, but must narrate and chronicle. The true genius of the sage: he remains silent in the gathering of himself and the community.
3.0 - (Saturday, Forage Cafe, Portland, ME) - My summer reading includes re-reading Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." The novel starts off too quickly, too condensed, but that starting point might be considered en media res, although it's not clear, initially, if we are in dropping into the middle of the epic existential journey of Dick Diver or Rosemary the actress. The condensed beginning may also be an aesthetic strategy...the nested ball of neurotic energy that needs to be carefully unwound. Whatever the case, after the initial settling in -- and for me this was necessary after having just finished two pulp fictions by Grisham including his latest, the third in a series -- Fitzgerald writing, which is nothing short of musical, took me away. This morning it produced an epiphany, one that was in fact therapeutic, a clearing of dark clouds that have been gathering over me for some time. Fitzgerald stages his investigation into human psychology against the backdrop of Post WW1 France, where well healed American are living a kind of flaneur lifestyle. Like his masterpiece, "Gatsby," "Tender is the Night," explores class consciousness in its purest sense, mostly through the self-consciousness of Dick Diver, who is a medical doctor and well off financially, but on unspecific sabbatical from his practice. The epiphany occurred with the scene when Dick is having a drink with one of Rosemary's suitors from the States, a Yalie from the South. The revelation that Rosemary is not so innocent as she appeared, and in fact was performing a role that he was too naive to realize, put Dick into a manic impulse, and as Fitzgerald describes it, for the first time he was stepping beyond the boundaries where he lived and thrived in every sense. Relating this all to the above and to OPM 142, Dick crossed the boundary, the threshold, and in the Open where everything seems possible (is the Open an anarchic region?), he unravels. The Sage is described as the one who always retains his composure. He has it together, and bringing things together is the goal of his teaching. His is a formative education, an education that forms, gathers the student and gathers the learning community. But it seems that before one can be gathered and formed one needs to be unwound. And here I am thinking of the artist Jeremy Frey, who I wrote about two weeks ago after we visited the exhibit of his work at the PMA. The identity of the student as a private persona but not yet a public one, needs to be cut down, removed from its natural habitat, taken to the studio, unravelled and then reformed into truly authentic autonomous person. The question that I'm trying to work out is how that autonomy is formed. It would seem an oxymoron to say that the autonomous student is formed by the teacher. How does autonomy come about? How is it learned? There must be a spark, something that drives the will to be free and to express ones freedom. This is what the evocative call appears to be doing.
ReplyDelete