Today
immediately following a good introductory lecture on Augustine and his Confessions, my two HUHC sections
explored Augustine’s relation to Paul.
First and foremost it goes without saying that Paul’s voice is the one
that speaks to Augustine when the latter undergoes his conversion. “Pick up and read” is the instruction that
Augustine receives, one that in form is not unlike the one Socrates receives
from the muse when she tells him to “Make music!” [That Socratic
moment was taken up earlier in my philo of ed class, which meets before the HUHC
general lecture. The philo of ed group has been making a close and slow reading
of the last two chapters of DuBois’ The
Souls of Black Folk, with much attention paid to DuBois use of
spirituals\the blues\Sorrow Songs, and Wagner.
In order to get to ‘music-making philosophy’ I asked the students to
read my paper Retrieving Music’s Soulful Education, which I presented as a
keynote at the International Philosophy of Music Education meeting convened at
Teachers College on June 6, 2013. That
paper begins with an exploration of the Socrates, his muse, and the education
philosophy receives from music, and then takes up DuBois on the spirituals and
Wagner. I’m sharing this because these
mostly music education students and I have moved into uncharted territory this
semester, and the work of that learning community is about to overlap with the
work happening in my C&E sections, which will undertake a study of Rocha’s Late to Love album, the music and lyrics
Rocha wrote and performed alongside drummer Andre Scott and bassist Ken
Perkerwicz, and the meditations I wrote for the libretto that are collected
under the category of Palabras Entre Nosotros. The coming together of these courses is
unanticipated and unparalled. There is
something uniquely powerful happening this semester with the students I am
working with; an enactment and realization of so much of what I have been
writing/thinking about in this commemorative blog, and it may have everything
to do with this experiment 2.0 and the revisiting each day of the original writing that was published as Being and Learning. – I wrote that last
sentence as the train was pulling to Jamaica Station…up the escalator
and…surprise!!...the Air Train Jazz Thursday?!?! With a vibes, bass and drums
trio playing elegant music…Indeed, something powerful is happening, has caught
me, gathered me…this is no longer the work of a pseudo-Stoic…yes Stoic because
the original experiment was inspired by Arendt’s citation of Cato…the quotation
that ends The Human Condition, and
begins Life of the Mind…the project
is can no longer remain with the pretension of Stoic detachment, because what
I’m experiencing and attempting to document, describe and communicate is a kind
of full bodied carne y huesos
phenomenology…and yet ‘phenomenology’ doesn’t quite capture what is happening,
because phenomenology remains too receptive, and still too much part of the
tradition of Stoic detachment.
On
an off the past week or more I’ve been thinking/writing in the pages of this
blog about the original question, that I sometimes call the originary question,
because it is the one that initiated this project. The question is a response to that moment in
Plato (from his Republic) when
Socrates says [I’m paraphrasing] “the challenge, then, is not to put sight in
eyes that can not see; rather, it is to take those quite capable eyes and turn
them around to the proper perception of the Good.” -- From the onset of this
project, from its inception in 2003, I have quite liberally, or perhaps violently,
replaced the more powerfully ontological ‘Being’ for the normative ‘Good’,
which, anyway, implies the existential modality of the one who experiences the
perception/reception of Logos. ‘Good’ is the soul illuminated by Being qua Logos (cf. Augustine’s flooded heart, or
John Jones in the opera house) But with
the divided souls we encounter in Augustine and Jones we understand that the ‘goodness’ of the
illuminated soul has little or nothing to do with anything resembling ethics
(i.e., the liberals discourse on ‘behaving well’ or ‘acting with virtue’, which
is a corruption of Aristotle’s most Hellenistic category of arête [excellence]), and everything to do with harmony or wholeness
in the sense of the being gathered into the totality of Being…that is, an
experience with the flooding over of this totality into the human heart by way
of the sonic: the voice of Paul, the music of Wagner. – I had intended at the start of this
paragraph to say by way of going back to the original question that what
appears to be happening is something like a conversion…or at the very least a
‘rebirth’. Granted I am very much caught
today in the spirit of Augustine’s confessions, his unequalled
self-disclosure. Rocha reads Being and Learning as an Augustinian
work of self-disclosure, and I’ve never contested that reading, which, it
seems, co-exists and complements Tyson Lewis’ description of BL as ‘the first epic in philosophy of
education’. I write as one who is
experiencing the trials and tribulation of thinking the relation of Being and
learning! But today, this day, the project has taken on an entirely new
character as a work of self-disclosure…as if only now in receiving myself by
returning to the original meditations I am undergoing a transformation, and experiencing
the very originary (re)turn that initiated the project. It is a conversion to the originary, but one
that is happening experientially with my students. This is why, discursively, the project is
very far from the abstract idealism of Plato (if it were ever situated there to
begin with!), which is to say it has turned
from the horizon of teoria to the
horizon that can not be reduced to that location’s historically identified
other, pragmata. Praxis
is seems to be the word that best captures what is happening. And what has turned me is the force of koinonia. I am undergoing a conversion in the sense of a renewal of the
embodied realization of the dialogic learning community.
Finally,
to close this commentary that is more of
a meditation in the style of 1.0to a close, I want to describe the feeling of the conversion I am experiencing
as one of estrangement coupled with an uncanny conviction; I feel at one and
the same time totally secure and insecure, certain and uncertain, full of faith
and yet moments of doubt persist and interrupt.
I feel myself to be both sage and stranger, both the one who is arranging
the “venturesome singing” by performing the role of ‘first singer’ and the one
who is compassionately listening, attending and serving the singers, a “slave
to others,” as Paul puts it.
On
this day ten years ago I wrote of the “improvisational saying of the stranger
that extends…the breadth and depth of the learning community.” And I ask about the arrival of this stranger,
and return to the claim “that the originary moment of learning could be
identified in the awed silence, the speechlessness of the ones who encounter the ineffability of the
ineffable.” (BL 264)
If this speechlessness, which I often identify with the modality of
compassionate listening, is indeed the starting point then this originary
moment happens any time I experience the stammering of uncertainty. Here then I recall yesterday’s set of
questions, the ones that started the commentary/meditation and also ended it:
the question concerning the gathering force of the learning community and the
closure of the space of difference.
Today a response that pushes back against such closure; today the
re-turn of the philosophical subject….Socratic in temperament and
conviction. This muscular Socratic
persona appears too with the voice of the Augustinian self who says “I” (proto
Kierkegaardian), and yet remains ‘divided against itself’. If (“I”) speak with the voice of Augustine
when carrying out the work of Socrates, I also find myself extinguished,
diminished and overcome with the silence of the servitude of the Pauline
slave.
3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME) - The first part of "LEARN" is on reading, or what I am calling 'phenomenological reading.' The book is rooted in the claim that 'learning begins and continues with listening.' And the book's title is taken from the mantra spoken by my geometry teacher at Summit HS, "Learn to listen, listen to learn." If the book is rooted in a thesis on listening then it is emphasizing learning as a sonic event. In turn, the receptivity of learning begins and continues with the reception of meaningful sound, or, to borrow from Heidegger, from the reception of the 'said.' Phenomenological reading is the reception of whatever essentials call out from the book. And for that reason I turn to Augustine, the same moment described above, when he hears a child's voice calling out to him, Tolle lege, pick up and read. Here are some fragments from "LEARN" that resonates with the 2.0 chronicle from this day: "Tolle lege, pick up and read. This Latin phrase was made famous by St. Augustine. Augustine is one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy, and the story of his conversion to Christianity is analogous to the periagôgé that happens when a student is initially turned around and away from themselves, away from what they have taken for granted, and encounter a text that elicits entirely new feelings and thoughts. Study is underway when a student is inspired to dwell with that text. Such dwelling happens through a mindful receptivity that I describe as phenomenological reading." And: "Tolle lege, pick up and read! Augustine offers us a story of conversion, but more importantly a conversion that happens through reading. Reading is one of the answers to Plato’s challenge that insists a philosophical education can only get underway when a student is turned around to study something that is enduring with significance. Again, for Plato, every student is capable of recognizing and appreciating what is enduring, specifically the principle of beauty (kalon) that shines forth and enlightens. As Arendt reminds us, kalon is the principle of principles because it represents the harmonic organization of all things, and should be considered the principle amongst those enduring principles Plato called Ideas or Forms. “Plato, obviously, was guided by the Greek proverbial ideal, the kalon k’agathon (the beautiful and the good), and it is therefore significant that he made up his mind for the good instead of the beautiful. Seen from the point of view of the ideas themselves, which are defined as that whose appearance illuminates, the beautiful, which cannot be used but only shines forth, had much more right to become the idea of ideas.”(PP, 77)". And: "Tolle lege. Augustine was turned around by a voice that called out to him, Pick up and Read! He grabbed a copy of the Bible. As noted above, this was the second convers he experienced with books. The first happened when he picked up and read Plato. Arendt tells us that periagôgé denoted the turning around of the “soul,” and thus it is not surprising that the word “conversion” is used to describe a philosophical education as a process that begins with a student being turned away from old ways of knowing and turned toward new possibilities."
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