After a very challenging hike up and down Mt. Jackson today with my daughters (the last hurrah before they leave next week and return to collegiate life), I am at one with Thoreau and his epiphanic moment after reaching the summit of Katahdin. That is to say, I had a glimpse of that moment that he experienced upon reaching the summit of Maine’s highest mountain. There were a few sublime moments during our hike today Cooling off in the mountain spring that was cascading down boulders was one of them. And the other was the profundity of the quiet at the summit of Mt. Jackson. At the very moment when we reached the summit – clawing our way over the boulders – two medium sized black and white birds, which had a similar markings of a the blue jay, landed. They stayed for a short visit then flew away, and I haven’t yet been able to identify the species. They didn’t sing or squawk or make any sounds at all, and this drew my attention to the quiet that pervaded the mountain. The view was spectacular and we could see for what seemed to be hundreds of miles of mountains in all directions, green, green and more evergreen for as far as the eye could see. At the summit and as I cooled off in the mountain stream, I was with Thoreau. But I was also exhausted and put to the challenge by the steep rocky trail, not to mention the pace set by my daughters. And during the ascent I noted to myself how in those moments one does not experience the sublime, but, on the contrary, the raw power of the mountain. Leg muscles burning, ankle joints straining, sweat pouring from my torso; all this was its own kind of effacement with the mountain. The physicality of this side of the experience – the time of movement – leads me to recognize the different kind of disclosures are related to the body: a relatively obvious distinction is, nevertheless, revealing: what I am calling meditative thinking happens with dwelling (sitting, resting, etc.) and another kind of thinking happens when we are in the midst of arduous physical exertion. Both happen by way of attunement.
As I read the meditation from this
day ten years ago and reflect on the writing after today’s hiking, I wonder
about my use of the term ‘cultivation’, specifically as it relates to the
learning community’s movement – a movement I describe as “along the Way of
peace and freedom.” I wonder about the
claim that “the community’s ‘learning’ is the growth unfolding from the
cultivation of the open region.”(8/20/04)
I’m not sure ‘cultivation’ is how I would phrase it today, especially after spending a day in the mountain’s forest. There is no cultivation of that place. There is, rather, consolidation – a term that does well to denote both the experience of being unified with the mountain and the strength one gains from that experience. In this sense one might properly speak of the self experiencing growth and formation, of being cultivated rather than cultivating (this seems to echo Thoreau's being 'translated' by Nature). And in this sense we can perceive the experience through the language of the event of appropriation. And it is for this reason that I’m dissatisfied with the term ‘cultivation,’ which strikes me as totally out of synch with the post-humanist turn happening with these meditations.
To be fair to the writing from a
decade ago, the cultivation is not of
the open region – so not of the
mountain – but of the learning community itself. I write of the “growth of the
community…always ‘measured’ by the deepening of the roots of
mindfulness.”(8/20/04) Here then is the
metaphorical (poetic) description that is intended to emphasize the organic
cycle of learning.
Be that as it may, the experience
of the mountain today reminds me, again, that despite my best intentions the writing/thinking
slips back into a humanocentrism, and this seems to be indicated by the highly
poeticized moments. And what has been
consistently disclosed to me this summer is the need to find a way to write
philosophically out of the moments of arduous exertion, and before the sweat
has dried, and certainly before it has been washed away. This is not simply a
philosophy qua phenomenology of the body, of embodied experience, but one that
is, yes, thick and detailed descriptions of daily experiences emerging from
moments when the heart rate is elevated, the blood is flowing and the body is
in action, working. Perhaps this is how
we best experience the moving present?
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME) Great memory of hiking Mt. Jackson with Kat and Sofie on this day 10 years ago! I also remember us getting Flatbread pizza in North Conway afterwards, and feeling exhausted! I can almost compare that feeling to what I felt last night during and after playing 1-on-1 basketball with Jaime. The joy of sharing physical and spiritual exertion with my kids is special! Hiking, playing, skiing, etc., are the best moments of parenting! As for the "moving present," that phenomenological category has been important for me this summer of writing, albeit under the different name of "presencing" or what Nancy calls the "birth to presence." I don't recall using the term "becoming" and now can appreciate how that category is still too much tethered to the teleological that has been dispensed by the learning community's "performance," which occurs but does not endure.
ReplyDeleteHere's what I wrote this morning:
3.0b - Discussion emerges from a sharing of the highlights that have captured the attention and imagination of the students during study. First and foremost the highlights are what is disclosed. Sharing is a disclosure, the appearance of significance, the circulation of meaning. It is only in relation to these highlights that the discussion unfolds and the persona is revealed. The discussion is moved by the shared resonance and repercussion of the book/text.
ReplyDeleteSharing is the manner of commonality, and “doing nothing” is the cipher for discussion as a collective performance as opposed to a contest (agōn) or battle of words. If Socrates turned to dialogue as a way of negating agonism, the practice he introduced was based on philía, the love shared by friends. This is the same philía that is at the root of philosophy (love of wisdom). Discussion is a philosophical dialogue, the collective performance that enacts freedom/beginning. The significance of the performance, what makes the discussion meaningful, which is to say, what produced the shared repercussion of the significance offered by the book/text, emerges from philía.
3.0c - An agonistic exchange is combative, and within the educational context of schooling the performative demonstration and display of plurality is reduced to a predetermined outcome: an achievement enjoyed by one or a select few that have mastered the discourse of debate and can thereby rise above the rest. Their “achievement” is only an imitation of the authoritative know-it-all “master” instructor. What they have demonstrated is “mastery” itself, the capacity to exercise the individual power to control and dominate. But, as Arendt reminds us, this outcome is merely “one form of achievement among others. It is then indeed no less a means to an end than making is a means to produce an object. This happens whenever human togetherness is lost, that is, when people are for or against other people.”(HC, 180) When the classroom becomes an agonistic contest, a war of words, the dialectical opposite of philía is present: phobia. The war of words is grounded upon and reinforces schooling’s most compelling force: truth as correctness (veritas). The fear (phobia) of being “wrong” produces an anxiety that either motivates combat or demoralizes and silences. The first moment of “victory” happens in the silence of those students who are overwhelmed by the fear of mistake, error, or the debilitating judgment from their peers and/or teacher. Then the “real” contest begins, and the students motivated to dominate the conversation turn the classroom into an arena of debate, with the teacher acting as judge. Debate is not discussion, and what is produced is meaningless sophistry, a competition between misleading or fallacious arguments. The fallacy resides in the assumption that a definitive “truth” can be extracted from the book/text. Debate is not discussion, and the “power” felt by the combatants is the will to power that produces the impression that something significant has unfolded the war of worlds, the feeling of “victory” over one’s peers, and, more importantly, over the book/text, which is reduced to a prey that has been tracked and hunted. But what has produced the trophy that commemorates the enemy’s defeat is meaningless and devoid of the resonance and repercussion that is collectively felt and shared in the philía that performs discussion. As Arendt reminds us, in the agonistic debate “speech becomes indeed ‘mere talk,’ simply one more means toward an end…here words reveal nothing…and this achievement…cannot disclose the ‘who,’ the unique and distinct identity of the agent.”(HC, 180) Within schooling discussion is defeated by debate. And what is lost during debate is, first, the significance of the fragments offered by the text. The relational autonomy experienced in study is negated by desire for mastery. The “friendship” experienced between the reader and the author is forgotten. Next, the possibility of hearing the singularity of each student voice is foreclosed. Like the indistinguishable standing of the soldier aligned in rank and order, the idle chatter of debate reveals nothing original. Learning is lost when debate takes over, and in those situations speech (the discussion of the fragments) “would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token it would lose its subject, as it were…performing robots”(HC, 180) would replace the flesh and bones, the hearts and souls of the students. In this case, schooling has achieved the perhaps unintended outcome of producing “artificial intelligence,” the meaningless collection of moribund facts, the imitation of the instructor’s power of presenting points of information. As Irigaray puts it, “If the question were only one of communicating knowledge, a machine could substitute for the teacher. But a machine cannot be the substitute for a certain way of being.”(LTT, 234) There is no discussion without the presence of significance, no voice that can be heard exploring the varieties of meaning offered by the book/text. Discussion without “a ‘who’ attached to it, is meaningless.”(HC, 180-181)
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