OPM 238(39), October 10th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 233-234

Echoes.  The past few days I have been taking up the meditations focus on the hearing the voices of the future, the seventh generation.  It is a case of close listening, and a point of overlap between a conservative education that conserves the open region, not per se, but, rather, the entry or threshold that takes us into that place where the learning community (koinonia) is gathered.   Echoes from the future.

But there are also echoes from the past.  And these are echoes that truly signify Heraclitus hidden harmony, something almost silently working out behind our backs, something like Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’.  From time to time, when I am working on this commemorative blog I encounter these echoes.  Today is one of those days!   I suppose I started hearing them yesterday during my colleague Michelle Moses’ presentation at Teachers College, which happened immediately after the Lapiz launch.  Michelle presented on her work democracy and education that is built upon the foundation of the old deliberative democracy theory.  I say ‘the old’ because I was really into that stuff twenty years ago when I was writing my dissertation, writing a kind of genealogy of dialogic philosophy that ended up being a work of normative and practical philosophy.   At the heart of my dissertation was Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which makes up most of the foundational material poured into the foundation of deliberative democratic theory.  I brought up Habermas during the Q&A session because it wasn’t clear to me why Michelle was using the language of ethics (‘moral disagreement’) to talk about democracy, political discourse, and the question of justice.  For me, Habermas showed how communicative action (dialogue) was already gathered by a set of normative principles (equality, openness, understanding, etc.) from which we reduced or distilled normative principles for working out questions of justice in a democratic society.   It could even be understood that justice was precisely what we are making (in the praxis sense of making human history) when we are gathered into the public sphere and engage in dialogue.  The word ‘deliberation’ is, as I noted during Michelle’s session, is liberalism’s denotation, and strikes me as a degenerated denotation of dialogue.  ‘Deliberation’ is what is ordered and civil and legalistic and following a set of rules.  ‘Dialogue’ is dynamic, vital, improvisational and directed by spontaneity.  It is what Arendt calls ‘action’ and is much more robust than ‘conversation’ because there is something truly at stake.  ‘Conversation’ is the stuff of gentile gatherings, salons.  ‘Dialogue’ is the Socratic in-your-face street philosophy of the agora.  It can be volatile, because, in fact, it is the logical in the sense of speech gathering of logos  that is always precariously close to spilling over into physical confrontation.  Hence, why liberals want controlled and civil deliberation, which ends up repressing energies that require the pathos of dialogue.  Repressed dialogue produces disingenuous communication, which is one step closer to bad faith instrumental reasoning.  

I rehearsed most of the preceding in my first HUHC section, when, during our discussion of Plato’s Symposium, a student asked about the authority granted to Socrates.  ‘Why was he considered the philosophical authority?’  A brilliant question, to which I offered a response I have been working out this semester: because the tradition of philosophy has handed him down to us as an authority. Socrates exemplifies the transformative power of dialogue, and represents the one who can orchestrate that power, who knows how to organize and make something from the gathering force of Logos when it moves through human logos.   He exceeds Heraclitus, in fact, which we can fault for allowing his passion for Nature fuel his misanthropy.   Of course, we can also turn it the other way, as Burnet does in his introduction to his edition of Heraclitus’ fragments, and insist that Heraclitus proximity to Nature (phusis) granted him the closer proximity to the originary unfolding of Logos.  And if not for Heraclitus, no Socrates.  But here and now, today, I write of democracy and the question of justice, problems face the polis and resolved in its public place by the public (hoi polloi, res publica).  And so dialogue is quintessential.  And the authority of Socrates arises from his taking responsibility for the public place and those who move in it.   And so his authority resides in his being the originary dialogic philosopher, the first to practice what we would call dialogic democracy. 

I rehearsed all of this in the morning, and then brought it with me (not knowing I was going to use it) to Michelle’s presentation.  And then I found myself talking about it again today when I was debriefing with Sam Rocha about the Lapiz  launch.  At one point during the launch the ever present ‘study’ discourse came up.   I listened politely, but then had to offer what has become a standard critique of mine with regard to the study discourse, specifically as it is expressed by Tyson Lewis (close friend and colleague who is a leading voice in this area).   Yesterday’s event was celebrating the completion and first publication of the new journal Lapiz, the journal of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (LAPES)[cf. yesterday’s blog post to read the comments I shared at the launch].    We were celebration something new that had been made, something that had never before been put together, and the material existence of a collection of essays that were taking up what is for intents and purposes an entirely new field of study.   The focus of the celebration was, for me, this ‘thing’ that had been made: Lapiz No. 1.  Revolutionary read, and printed on revolutionary paper, with a 60’s aesthetic (according to Ana Cecelia Diego, editor).   There was care put into the making of this object, this work.  Lapiz is the actualization of possibility, the realization of potentiality.   In the sense, it is not the ‘result’ of study, because, pace Tyson, study does not produce anything.   Lapiz is the result of work, and it is a work; it is praxis (both in Paulo Freire sense of ‘reflection and action upon the world to transform it,’ and Arendt’s sense of vita active: action both in the sense of performance and fabrication – the life of action where humans display something original, and work of bring something into the world that has never been brought before (in the sense of gathering ‘old’ materials in ‘new’ ways).  When I debriefed Sam on my critique of ‘study’ vis-à-vis Lapiz No. 1, I mentioned, again, the Habermasian communicative v. instrumental rationality distinction, suggesting that it appears to me that our colleagues who are emphasizing so much the ‘impotentiality’ of study are doing so because they are, in their desire to critique ‘neoliberalism’, collapsing the communicative/instrumental rationality distinction, so that any form of action oriented toward an end is a version of the parasitical and corrupt instrumental reason.   I see this is a dangerous and disingenuous philosophical error, and will insist on calling attention to it.

Echoes.  Yes, the preceding account of the past 24 hours of philosophy was meant to indicate how this day ten years ago I was meditating with the very same philosophical language, mounting a critique of those who would deny any speaking that “appears ‘disruptive’ to those who seek to maintain the ‘good order’ of the status quo, and thereby strive to maintain a cycle of predictable repetition.”(10/10/04 BL 233-234)  The context for the writing ten years ago was the emerging ‘accountability’ movement, but ten years later, today, the critique applies internally to ostensible ‘critical’ philosophy of education that is, in fact, precariously close to deploying the very same reactionary logic they are apparently opposing.   Study’s ‘impotentiality’ degenerates into a impotent cynicism because it holds back (in the Stoic sense of apatheia) from entering into the volatile and dynamic gathering force that propels action and bring a work into being. With this we encounter what Nietzsche called the ‘bad faith’ of those who don masks, or what I call the “masquerade [that] is the denial of the un-binding…enacted with the evocative invocation,” (10/10/04 BL 234) the originary invitation issued by Logos and mediated (channeled and then orchestrated) by the sage.   ‘Impotentiality’ as a category for critical analysis works in the insidious manner of the logic it seeks to dismantle: the laissez faire. “This denial operates with the same parasitical  logic…that is able to attain ‘success’ through a manipulation of the more fundamental and primordial rationality of communication…”(10/10/04 BL 234)   This is the distorted other of dwelling in media res via the phenomenological attitude, the letting-be of gelassenheit precisely because the meditative thinking that arises from abiding in media res gathers one into primordial koinonia. The empowerment that brings foward art, ethics, and politics follows from this dwelling: it is thus a dwelling with potency  in the sense of poder (power) that ultimately spills over into action (actuality).  Zarathustra – the figure that organizes these meditations, an the 9^th chapter where they are gathered – first dwells on the mountain and then descends ‘overflowing with wisdom’ and ready to make speeches aka ready to gather the community.