The meditation from today returns to the legend of Heraclitus, as
told by Aristotle (Parts of the Animals)
and retold by Heidegger in his “Letter on Humanism,” and at the center of the
fifth chapter of Being and Learning
“The Dwelling of Heraclitus”. In the
writing from 9/27/04, the closing of the era of ‘today’ (announced in the
previous day’s meditation) with the hour of going under, the time that marks
the return of Mother Memory and "a re-turn to the past as a re-collection and re-newing of tradition." This new hour marks the appearance of anthropoetikos and the phenomenological reception of place. It is the time of taking up the huacaslogical question Donde Estamos? Place becomes 'sacred' in tis time because it carries the force of the situation that determines our thinking; 'determines' in the sense that place is the open, the open region that allows for the flow of sound and light, for the appearance of phenomenological disclosure.
The
movement into the new hour is a movement into a sacred place of the open,
‘sacred’ because it is revered for bearing the weight of the past, and because
it is identified as iconic, or infused with the force that is capable of
gathering us into meditative thinking.
In this sense it is a ground that we can say moves us more than we move
onto it. This is why the first line of
the meditation describes the “shaking of the ground, that quaking occurring
with the opening of the open region.”
Ten years later, this past April, I returned to this description in my LAPES paper when I announced my huacaslogical project: “For me, the challenge of the question, What is Latin American Philosophy of Education?, is first and foremost a challenge of making a discursive cartography, of mapping this collision zone, and, second, of moving onto and into this ground. To name the ontological ground where ladinos have been thrown as a ‘collision zone’ is to recognize the unpredictability of this ground, its seismic activity, and thus to understand it as a dynamic range of originary thinking. To borrow a term from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, this is the uma pacha (original time and place) of ladino thinking (la consciencia mestizo). We are taken up to this range via una fenomenologia originario, which also moves and guides us along its peaks and into its caves.” The originary question of Latin American philosophy of education, which I articulate as Donde Estamos? “arises with the formation of the uma pacha (original time and place), an ontological ground thrown up as a new range of thinking when the cultural tectonic plates of previously co-existing ‘old worlds’ crashed into one another. At the summits formed by this cultural collision zone appears the unresolvable, perennial existential question of the ones thrown into existence from that eruption.” In an endnote I offer context for the geological terminology I am using: “As I was writing this piece and drawing inspiration from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, specifically from their phenomenology of enqa or sami (the animating essence permeating all things) as being disclosed originally in the natural world, specifically in the mountains, I could not resist thinking in geological terms. The conceptual mezcla I make between the two allows me to describe the originary ground of ladino ontology as a mountain range created by something akin in human history to plate tectonics: a convergent plate boundary formed by cultural tectonic plates crashing into one another. This geological event is also called a collision zone, which is the term I am borrowing.”
Ten years later, this past April, I returned to this description in my LAPES paper when I announced my huacaslogical project: “For me, the challenge of the question, What is Latin American Philosophy of Education?, is first and foremost a challenge of making a discursive cartography, of mapping this collision zone, and, second, of moving onto and into this ground. To name the ontological ground where ladinos have been thrown as a ‘collision zone’ is to recognize the unpredictability of this ground, its seismic activity, and thus to understand it as a dynamic range of originary thinking. To borrow a term from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, this is the uma pacha (original time and place) of ladino thinking (la consciencia mestizo). We are taken up to this range via una fenomenologia originario, which also moves and guides us along its peaks and into its caves.” The originary question of Latin American philosophy of education, which I articulate as Donde Estamos? “arises with the formation of the uma pacha (original time and place), an ontological ground thrown up as a new range of thinking when the cultural tectonic plates of previously co-existing ‘old worlds’ crashed into one another. At the summits formed by this cultural collision zone appears the unresolvable, perennial existential question of the ones thrown into existence from that eruption.” In an endnote I offer context for the geological terminology I am using: “As I was writing this piece and drawing inspiration from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, specifically from their phenomenology of enqa or sami (the animating essence permeating all things) as being disclosed originally in the natural world, specifically in the mountains, I could not resist thinking in geological terms. The conceptual mezcla I make between the two allows me to describe the originary ground of ladino ontology as a mountain range created by something akin in human history to plate tectonics: a convergent plate boundary formed by cultural tectonic plates crashing into one another. This geological event is also called a collision zone, which is the term I am borrowing.”
In some ways I regret that I did
not perceive ten year ago the opportunity to move into a phenomenology of
place. Of course, that regret comes with
the hindsight of having now discovered place
to be the generative category for the phenomenology I am working out. Ten years ago the project was fully immersed
in a deconstruction of the degenerated Cartesian subject as the underlying
figure of the educational policy and prescribed practice I was confronting. Inasmuch as the meditations were a direct
confrontation with that figure I was compelled to show how the meditative
thinking issuing from my experiment implied a total rejection of the subject of
instrumental rationality.
On 9/27/04 (BL 221) I describe this rejection as “the resounding ‘No!’” The “sounding of this refusal…appears
deafening to the man of singular purpose…the ‘progressive man’, the cunning
one, like Odysseus…the exemplar of metis: shrewd, subtle, sly, suave, wily,
cunning.” The move to deconstruct this
figure must be made within the relational logic of Being and learning, and so
the strong subject is described as having been thrown back upon himself when
confronted with the terms of the new epoch.
It is a Hegelian move, actually, an epochal reversal that renders the
dominant form of an era inoperative on its own terms. The seismic shifting of the ground
destabilizes the will. The faculty of
thinking is untethered from the controlling will, and with this releasement
there is the return to the more originary force of thinking. “This is the throwing back of Heraclitus’
visitors upon themselves, the derailing of the one-way, fast-track strategist…”
3.0 (Friday, Portland, ME) The fragment from OPM written 20 years ago jumps out at me: "a re-turn to the past as a re-collection and re-newing of tradition." And, importantly/significantly but not coincidentally (because I am now perceiving intensely the circularity of thinking!), that fragment resonated today, in the editing of the last section of part 2 Writing from "LEARN," especially in the following fragment: "Commentary is the moment of recording of the book/text, but it is not a reproduction...Commentary is the recording and documenting of whatever essentials call out to the reader, what fill the studio of learning with meaning, what resounds with enduring significance. The commentary records fragments, the glossator annotes what what highlighted during the moment of reading. In this sense, the commentary is a recollection or memory of what called out to the reader."
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