OPM 250(251), October 23rd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 249-

On the late train to the airport to catch the last flight of the day back to Portland.   There are so many prompts ready-to-hand for my commentary writing that I feel somewhat overwhelmed.  So I’ll try for brevity by way of making a few observations, and then some exegesis on the meditation that happened this day ten years ago.

If I had the time and energy I would make a full blown critic of the bizarre performance/lecture that was made today in HUHC C&E.  In all the years I’ve been participating in this team taught course I’ve never experienced anything that produced the level of agitation and exasperation that was pervading the Monroe lecture hall today.  There was something wholly off in my colleague's attempt to perform Lucretius.  And it wasn’t that he lacked acting skill, which he certainly does.  Rather, it was that he couldn’t sustain his character, and, again, this had nothing to do with his lack of acting skills.  On the contrary, he didn’t know his character well enough to sustain the performance.   And it was painfully and frustratingly obvious to the just majority of our student and faculty audience.   But what really pushed it over the top was his inability to recognize that his performance was bombing!   The felt agitation increased with each moment that the performance unfolded precisely because his lack of awareness manifested in and was most likely caused by his arrogance.  It was bizarre and bit shameful, actually.  The one and only idea that resonated for me was the Epicurean conception of happiness advanced by pseudo-‘Lucretius’, which was reduced to the maxim: “nothing in excess, everything in moderation.”  The pseudo-‘Lucretian agonisticism’ (a reading I don’t endorse) made complete sense to me, given my description of the ‘soul’, as I shared in yesterday’s commentary,  arrives by way of an ontology of ‘excess’.

The other prompt I want to comment on takes me into my exegesis.  And that is the sabbatical application, which I completed this afternoon.  I announced last week that my upcoming leave will take up and focus on koinonia.  When envisioning the proposal last week I did not anticipated writing a narrative that would frame the past eighteen years of my work at Hofstra as Arendtian studies.  But when I took up the section of the application that asked for a history of the past sabbaticals I’ve taken and the work produced therein, I realized that the work all revolved around and was inspired by Arendt.    Heidegger, her teacher and one time lover, may be the one I most frequently emulate, when I’m not confronting him.  But Arendt is the one who has been my Virgil, my guide; the one who took me to the originary,  to the kairological, into a political beyond identity politics; to that apolitical dwelling of the thinker, and back again the political realm of freedom.   Here is an important excerpt from the just completed sabbatical application:

"For me the most important moment of dialogue happens when we perceive an opening or break in time (kairos).  A dialogic jam session gets underway when we move into this kairological break and seize the educational opportunity of thinking differently and enacting freedom.  When this happens learning is the felt experience of making community, the felt experience of the gathering force of koinonia:  “Understood as occurring in the time of radical possibility, thinking happens in the temporality of kairos, when the linear flow of time, kronos, is interrupted by an opening that allows for something wholly different to emerge.”(Duarte, 2009)   Moving forward, my exploration of dialogic jamming as the making of community resonates with the scholarship that has slowly but steadily moved along under the influence of Arendt’s depiction of the human capacity to initiate or originate.  Indeed, my project of originary thinking (Duarte, 2012a, 2012c) continues to draw inspiration from the Arendt’s Augustinian inflected aphorism:  “Because he is a beginning man can begin, to be human and to be free are one and the same.”(Arendt, 1993 167)   Under the influence of Arendt I am now describing the cultivation of our capacity to begin and to be free as the congregational learning experience of koinonia happening through dialogic jamming."(sabbatical fall 2015 application)

Apparently I shouldn’t be surprised that the meditation from this day begins with Arendt, and a citation from her essay “What is Freedom?” when she describes the ‘political’.   I import her description and appoint it “a defining quality of the dialogic event of learning.”  To understand what is meant here by quality requires a recollection of the cartographical and the phenomenology of place.  The ‘political’ is the place where learning as a dialogic event unfolds.   In this sense, the political is what she calls the ‘theater of freedom,’ and there is no better description for the learning that is claimed to be happening via improvisation. Sustaining the political, as the place of learning, is the primary responsibility of educator, which is to say, her authority resides in her taking responsibility for maintaining the political, “to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom and virtuosity can appear.  This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.”(Arendt cited on 10/23/04)

There is a small category mistake that happens with the writing on 10/23/04, as the learning community is erroneously equated with the political, when it should be identified as what happens in the political: the enactment of freedom.  It’s an easy error to make, because the community can be understood to be the political in the sense that it is the very place where freedom and virtuosity can appear.  Nevertheless, its a mistake.  And what’s more, a careful reading of Arendt, which I offer in my essay "Educational Thinking, and the Conservation of the Revolutionary," (Teachers College Record, Volume 112 Number 2, 2010, pp. 488-508.), would see the another error in the move to place education within the political.

Here, then, an important clarification is demanded; one that was made in the first weeks of the current semester of teaching in my undergraduate philosophy of education course:  when Arendt speaks of education she has in mind schooling (K-12).  And she hints at the distinction between ‘education’ and ‘learning’ at the end of her “Crisis” essay.   For me, however, education is never just schooling, and, on the contrary, when I describe education I am always beginning with my experiences in higher education, specifically, undergraduate liberal arts.   This is precisely where learning is taking place, but certainly not only there.  What’s important for me is the threshold that is crossed in higher education, specifically, the relative independence of the students, who are, more often than not, living on campus.   The challenge is then one of drawing relevant analogies, such as the ones I made yesterday with the GD’s performance on Haight Street, and the Apostles in the streets of Jerusalem, and even before that in the Cenacle.   The project of understanding the link between learning, freedom and the political is one that requires cataloging analogous examples of koinonia.

The category error leads to further error, which is the way things go!  Once the learning community is (mis)identified as the political I then describe its movement as disruptive, which is to say, an act of defiance.  The learning community unfolds as a dissident collective.  Excess is identified as dissent: “poetic dialogue has a spilling over effect that extends the learning community into the domains of ‘non-learning’…Extension is the passing-over of learning as an encroachment into the sphere dominated by calculative, instrumental and strategic ‘reasoning.’”(10/23/04, BL   )  ‘Encroach’ may appear an odd choice to describe a dissident and counter-cultural collectivity.   But it does well in the case of describing the disruptive movement of a place, “the movement of the learning community”  that appears “as intruder”.  “To encroach is to ‘go beyond what is right or natural or desirable’ and thereby to intrude.”(10/23/04  BL    ) 

Spatially, as the political, the learning community ‘expands’ and takes on the force of an insurgency that has the aim of becoming a full-blown revolutionary movement toward planetary peace.   Such is the necessary implications of a catholic spiritual revolution: one that is universal, diverse, diversified, all-encompassing and all-embracing.  Such is the reach of an ontology of receptivity that manifests in close and compassionate listening, and the phenomenology position that anticipates and is ready to welcome the arrival of the singer, the virtuoso performer of freedom. “The ‘arrival’ of the newcomer now appears as the gathering of the strange… a nomadic pilgrimage which has as its ‘destination’…the ‘strange’, the ‘not yet’ encountered.  The ad-venturing of the learning community is now seen as the globalized expansion…[to] ‘establish and keep in existence’ that space where freedom appears…the movement of the learning community is properly an intrusion of a peace that secures and spares the abiding of plurality, the flourishing of ‘ten-thousand’ things.”(10/23/04  BL   )