As
the November 1st deadline to PES nears and the schoolwork
intensifies, these commentaries will become increasingly fragmented, and appear
more like the field notes they have be described as in my sabbatical
application. And so it should be in the
semester of learning in the koinonia
gathered by Heraclitus!
The
Souls of Black Folk has had more than
a little influence on my thinking for the past six years. I was invited to be the respondent on a panel
“DuBois and the Aesthetic of Liberation” at Teachers College in February, 2008,
and since then I’ve been working under the musicality of DuBois’ masterpiece. I’ve lost count of the drafts, presentation
papers, fragments and sections that have been written under the inspiration of
DuBois. Perhaps the most important
publication of any thinking I have done on DuBois is the call for papers for PES Memphis 2015, which is captured in the banner for the
conference “The Blues/Soul Music”. The
banner could be translated “The Sorrow Songs/Folk Music”. What’s more the axis around which PES
Memphis 2015 turns is the one that organizes the dialogue between John Jones
and his sister in “The Coming of John.”
Here is that excerpt as it is presented in the CFP for PES Memphis 2015:
The penultimate chapter of Souls
of Black Folk, is the story titled, “On the Coming of John.” At one of the most significant and moving
moments in the story, the hero, John Jones, has a poignant exchange with his
much younger sister, who has come to recognize in her melancholic older brother
a kind of wisdom that appears to have been earned through study. The following exchange occurs between them:
“Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
‘John,’ she said, ‘does
it make every one – unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?’
He paused and
smiled. ‘I am afraid it does,’ he said.
‘And, John, are you
glad you studied?’
‘Yes,’ came the answer,
slowly but positively.
She watched the
flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, ‘I wish I was unhappy,
-- and – and,’ putting both arms about his neck, ‘I think I am, a little,
John.”
Historicity: Close to Home, Far
Away, and Back Again
With this exchange we find the prompt for the theme of the 2015
Philosophy of Education Society Meeting, which is taking place in Memphis,
Tennessee: The Blues, Soul Music: Making Philosophy of Education in 2015.
Known as one of the home places for the blues, and also for soul
music, our conference will be inspired by the concrete cultural life and lived
realities of Memphis. Yet, in
articulating this theme we are not only grounding the conference in the local
historicity of Memphis, but also reaching back to the very beginnings of
philosophy, when it was literally understood to be soul music, understood quite
generally as education. For the ancient
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. 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 we are situating philosophy of education within the Memphis
context.
With
69 hours until the final bell is rung, I am a bit more than cautiously
optimistic. In fact, I am feeling what
I take to be the faith expressed in the blues, in those sorrow songs, that
DuBois hears: “Through all the sorrow songs there breathes a hope – a faith in
the ultimate justice of things.”
Faith, hope, these are new
ciphers for this writing/thinking, but not justice. Justice arrived on the scene with the Heraclitus’
war fragments, specifically, fragment 44: “We must know
that war (πόλεμος
polemos) is common to all and strife
is justice (dike eris), and that all
things come into being through strife necessarily.” The question is how to think justice and
faith together, or to think the blues as offering the song of a hope in the
ultimate justice of things? To think
this through Heraclitus is to think the songs of the learning community, their
dialogue, as making justice because their dialogue is a making, a formation
that arrives through struggle, strife, tension, agonism. Dike
eris. And the made dike is the very formation of this
congregation, which I have called a movement.
The hope that moves through this movement, through the songs, announces
the ultimate justice of things.
Again, this is not a teleology, and here we have to recall Douglass’ “no
peace without justice.” Like this peace,
faith arises with the justice made in the koinonia
of the learning community.
In
the ecstatic time of learning, as Heidegger reminds us with his reading of
Nietzsche, “Our hour is the epoch of
going-under, the time of constant questioning…” And DuBois, the exemplary
sage, pushes us along into the kairos:
“Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?” Heidegger tells us the that we are pointers,
yet signs that are not read, and with
the arrangement of Souls DuBois
insists that we read through the spirituals, and that we receive this offering
[“the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the
Negro people.”DuBois, Souls] and take it with us as we think with us as we
move into each chapter of the book.
“Pointing toward the way of the poetic, the one who takes up the
modality of the sage, who is carried over and into the welcoming of the
ineffable…carries the cup that spill over…disrupting…This point is offered in
the disquiet questioning, the disturbing wonderment that insists on the
gathering together…Spilling over and bursting…the path of the poetic flows with
the force of the essential sway…”(10/30/04 BL
257)
3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME) There was a lot happening ten years ago this week: my father's retirement after 61 of practicing medicine, the PES Memphis deadline. I remember all too well the approaching deadline and feeling super anxious. I had made the decision, which I now realize was a mistake, not to hire a GA to help me with the process. As far as I know, all of my colleagues who have been program chairs have hired GAs to manage the submissions, to send them to the program committee, etc. I did it all on my own, and that definitely contributed to the stress levels going through the roof and, as a result, making some decisions that, well, upon hindsight, weren't examples of being guided by wisdom. It's one thing to be uninhibited in one's writing. It's an entirely different thing to be uninhibited when you are the program chair of a conference that is relatively small in terms numbers but big in terms of status. In other words, I let my philosophical project (both the style and content that was initiated with the 2004 OPMs) take over the Memphis 2015 conference, and while most found it to be a uniquely inspiring conference, I was more or less exiled from PES, and greeted with hostility when I returned in the years following. My return earlier this year was mostly under the radar, and I didn't interact much with my colleagues, aside from Frank, and the conference being in Salt Lake City, his hometown, was one of the main reasons I went to the conference. That and the invitation to participate with my colleagues on the Nancy panel. In addition to the 2 days I skied at Brighton, the Nancy panel was the big highlight, and one of the best I've been on. I've been invited to participate on a panel in the 2025 meeting, and if it gets accepted, and I'm sure it will, I won't be going to PES with the kind of anxiety I felt this past year. On the contrary, I'll feel emboldened and ready to respond to whatever negative energy comes my way!
ReplyDeleteAs for the OPM on this day, here is a fragment from "LEARN" that resonates with the 'pointing to the poetic': "The 'unfinished' character of the book allows it to be studied, picked up and read again and again. The fate of the book as open intersects with the fate of the student as a philosophical learner. The singularity and autonomy of each is dialectically related. But, again, there is an asymmetry, and philosophical study is not a dialogue between the book and the student. The voice that directed Augustine to pick up and read was also placing him in the phenomenological situation of study, inviting him to receive the enduring meaning of the book. When Heidegger describes a person as essentially a ‘pointer,’ claiming our “essential nature lies in being such a pointer,” we can understand this ‘pointer’ as what the teacher is doing when they guide the student toward the book, pointing to the chaos of the deconstructed library and instructing them to “pick up and read!” But when we recall that the book is the legacy of what Ilin calls the “first book,” we can understand Heidegger to be also describing this essential ‘pointing’ as the fate of autonomy: solitude. On the one hand, the ‘call’ of the book is a beckoning from solitude, an invitation to enjoy the provecho of reading. The book calls out to the student, ‘Más provecho saco de estar solo (I benefit the most from being alone).’ And this is a peculiar evocation because it is an invitation by the book to join it in its solitude. But this is the dialectic of study: to be ‘alone’ (estar solo) with the book."
3.0b - additional commentary re: Memphis 2015 and the fragment from today's OPM - "Spilling over and bursting…the path of the poetic flows with the force of the essential sway…”(10/30/04 BL 257) - The flow of the Mississippi, the Big River. I didn't drown, but I was certainly held under by the overflowing/flooding of essential sway of the poetic! Keeping distinct the philosophical project from the practical academic projects, such as teaching, service, etc., is necessary!
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