OPM 249(250), October 22nd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 248-249

There’s no question that the best writing/thinking happens when I find myself in the abode of writing/thinking.  That sounds like a tautology, and I suppose it is.  But I need to begin with the tautology, as I near the PES Memphis deadline, which nine days away.   Paradoxically, last week’s visit to Memphis granted me the opportunity to dwell in the abode of writing/thinking,  which I found day after day in the Café Keough.   I say, paradoxically, because it was ostensibly a reconnaissance trip that I anticipated would involve lots of meeting time.  On the contrary, the reconnaissance happened with that very same dwelling I have just mentioned.  ‘Reconnaissance’ means preliminary surveying or research, and arrives from the French reconnaître ‘recognize’.  I suppose in my case it means all of that, which I would qualify in phenomenological terms. But it also means ‘to witness’ or ‘witnessing’ as in ‘bearing witness’.   This is how I would have to qualify the reconnaissance work that happened for a philosophy conference I am chairing and have called under the banner “The Blues/Soul Music”.   Bearing witness to the reality and further possibility of Memphis as a site for making philosophy under the sign of the blues and soul music.  I recognized this when walking alongside and over the Mississippi, moving up and down Beale Street, and back and forth on Main Street, especially when I gave witness to that eternally recurring place of tragedy and redemption, the second floor balcony in front of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel.

I started with the tautology because so much of today was spent responding to PES Memphis inquiries and related organizational matter.   And I only really started thinking/writing when I turned to work on my sabbatical application.

So now, for a brief commentary, I turn to the meditation written this day ten years ago.  And I do so by way of yet another recollection from last week’s trip to Memphis.  At dinner on Thursday night Frank asked me about my use of the soul.  On his way to Memphis he’d read the paper I wrote for and read at the International Philosophy of Music Education conference, “Does Music Offer Us A Philosophical Education? Retrieving Music’s Soulful Education”, a paper that was my first attempt to think the relationship between philosophy, education, and music.   When Frank asked me point blank, What do you mean by ‘soul’?, I was completely thrown.  He didn’t give me a warning that he was going to drop such a heavy question on me.  And, what’s more, he had just read a paper that I’d written in 2013, the very same paper that blew up on me exactly one year ago at this very same table where I am sitting at the moment in the second floor of the Drew University library!!  In fact, when I told Frank about how the paper was destroyed by Megan’s heavy handed editorial treatment, he was confused.  But when I told him that I’d written a completely new paper, one that was the beginning of the work on koinonia (in proto form, of course), he was relieved.  The truth is that the paper he had read is alive and well.  Indeed, it lives on in the CFP for PES Memphis, and will be actualized in the conference itself.  

I want to return to Frank’s question, but first, I’ll share an excerpt from the introduction to the paper he was referring to:

How might we retrieve/renew a soulful education, i.e., a philosophical education of the soul through music? (EN 1) With this paper I want to explore the possibility of retrieving the connection between philosophy and music, specifically, as they work together in what the ancients called the educational formation of the soul. Here, the crux of the matter is the reception of a vocation, a calling summoned by the force of music.  In receiving this calling one finds oneself to be moved by music.   With this calling we are at one and the same time ‘caught-up,’ ‘grounded’ and ‘moved’ by the force of music.  This process of apprehension and releasement describes what I am calling the soulful education offered by music.  It is an education that addresses us at the core of our being, inspires us to dwell in that core, and thereby to engage in ‘care for self’ (epimeleia heautou, cura sui).  Music takes us to the core of our being where we learn to care for the self, others and the world.  This is the philosophical education it offers us. 

There is an old yet mostly forgotten tradition in philosophy of identifying the unique pedagogical power of music, and this paper emerges as an attempt to retrieve the thinking about the relationship between music, philosophy and education.  Music, as it has been contemplated in that tradition, arises from the primordial recognition of a cosmic harmony gathering together all beings into the dynamic, ceaseless nativity of Being.   Hearing this harmony and re-creating it through music is an example of the undertaking what Socrates called a life worth living.  In turn, this paper is interested in making a first step at renewing an ancient discourse on the way music inspires, moves and thereby educates us to care about  a living a worthy life.  

ENDNOTE NUMBER 1: To speak of retrieving and renewing an ancient philosophical discourse is to issue the call made by the project I call originary thinking.   The project, which was initiated in the writing of Being and Learning (Duarte, 2012), is an attempt to break out of the constricted, formulaic and prescribed norms of academic philosophy, or what Hannah Arendt (1978) derisively categorized as the contrivances of‘ professional thinkers.’ The originary break from the present is an interruption of a ‘professional philosophy’ that predominates in the field of philosophy of education. The break is an attempt to clear the way for a possible future in this field, and to do so by recovering lost or forgotten forms of making philosophy: aphorism, meditations, confessionals, sentences, epistles, disputations, commentary, etc. These are the ‘two fronts’ (prospective, retrospective) indicated by Reiner Schurmann (1990).  Together with the present that is broken, the originary thinking project unfolds through a trinitarian temporal movement (ontological temporality): suspending the present, leaping toward a possible future, re- turning to the ancient past.  The deployment of the originary project in this paper is a retrieval of of the original denotation of the art which we have inherited as ‘music’.  For the ancient pagan Greeks μουσική (mousike) meant the art of the muses, and, with respect to education, was the foundation of all practices contributing to the proper formation of the soul.  Francis Tovey’s succinct description reminds us that when Plato and Aristotle were distinguishing the two major fields of education (music, gymnastic), music, in the sense that we normally refer to it today,  was only part of the more general ‘musical education.’  “Thus the singing and setting of lyric poetry formed but a small, if a central part of a ‘musical’ education which ranged from reading and writing to the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, besides all the arts of literature.  The philosophers valued music, both the ancient general sense and in our restricted sense, chiefly as an educational element in the formation of character.” Tovey (1959), p. 101.  In this sense, when we retrieve ‘music’ as μουσική (mousike),  we find ourselves taking up the education of the soul, or, perhaps, a soulful education, which better captures the way this education unfolds.  Indeed, the prospective move toward another, futural, understanding of ‘musical education’ will both retrieve the ancient intention to educate the soul, and announce the arrival of soulful education.  

I included the important EN 1 (Endnote Number 1) because it not only gives important context but shows the connection between this, that, and the other thing [this: 2.0, Being and Learing, that: the project of originary thinking, the other thing: music-making philosophy, the blues, soul: PES Memphis].  Indeed, anyone who might be reading this blog might be interested to compare the last two lines of EN 1 with the CFP for PES Memphis

So, back to Frank’s question.   After recovering from what I like to a hard body and/or stick check in lacrosse (something I experience every early Sunday morning at the Riverside Athletic Center in Portland), I gathered myself and responded: Excess.  When I use the term ‘soul’ it denotes what is always in excess, specifically, the excess of time [the future, the forgotten past] and space [those ‘vacant’ rooms, fecund fallow places], meaning.   The ontology of excess.  What exceeds us, what remains in potential, the ‘not yet’.  [Here I am immediately restrained, momentarily, by the conversation I had earlier today with Sam Rocha re: his grad seminar’s engagement with Guttierez.  Becoming poor, that is to say, returning to the advent, the spiritual ontology of natality, the child. Becoming poor understood through the ontology of natality allows us to understand the denotation of the soul as ‘excess’, and allows us to ward off the reduction to material excess,  and to avoid having the project derailed by the logic of Capitalism] 

The soul: excess.  “The building of poetic dwelling begins anew with the reception of the excess that spills over in the dialogic encounter. ‘Bless the cup that wants to overflow!,’ say Zarathustra as he prepares his going-under.”(10/22/04 BL   )  This is how the meditation from this day begins.  Excess is conjoined with overflow and overflowing and both are kept within the cup, yes that cup…the originary koinon that gathers the, again and again, the koinonia.   That cup appears again and again in the form of whatever koinon is held in common, which we might even very generally describe as ‘curriculum’, especially because of this word’s roots in turning, racing, running, moving!  The koinon is both what is shared and what moves the learning community,  and also what the learning community moves on.   This is why in the previous day’s commentary I describe the song/saying something as what moves the learning community. 

Likewise, in the large and powerful wake created by the reading of Acts 2:1 & 6, I want to recall the movement of the strange songs of Pentecost that moved the Apostles from the Cenacle (Upper Room) on Mount Zion into the streets of Jerusalem.   I want to recall this while streaming “Viola Lee Blues” from the GD’s  performance on Haight Street in San Francisco March 3, 1968 

[It’s become a usual habit of mine lately to withdraw from the noise around me – on trains, in airports, even in libraries – and listen to very early GD and the signature extended jams of those heady days].   It’s a stretch, for sure, a risk-taking leap I’m taking when I listen to this music, performed on a flatbread truck above thousands of people jammed onto the boulevard, and identify in it the recurrence of that movement from the Cenacle and into the streets of Jerusalem.  I’ll take the Kierkegaardian leap! “The offering of the overflowing cup is the dis-orderly conduct of the improvisational performance that spills over and into the order of the habitual habit…spills over into the domestic security, producing the counter-resonance of the dissonant.  This spilling over is the breaking through, the destruktion, that signals the opening of that gap…”(10/22/04  BL 248 ) 

Learning by jamming!  That aphorism that organized the paper that emerged from the destructed soul paper, seems almost trite in that in comparison with the audacious writing from this day ten years ago.  Trite, ‘lacking in originality’?  Only if it is read outside of context.  The aphorism is like that small yet overpowering sip of wine made from grapes that have grown and been harvested from an nearly primordial vine, grown up in a vineyard that has emerged from the primal ground.  One sip from that cup…takes in all the grapes, the ancient vine and timeless ground.  THAT is the excess!

To speak of soul is also to speak of the blues, the mess, the disorder, the disruption, the counter-cultural: “Improvisation, the arrival of the in-effable, the not yet spoken, the excess spilling over.  This spilling over dis-rupts the tidiness of the orderly…The site of learning is thus a dis-orderly sphere that is, nevertheless, unified by the common purpose of the project, the building that arises in the mutual edification.”(10/22/04 BL 249)