OPM 265(266), November 7th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 265-266

With this paper I am moving precariously close to the thema probandum, and not because I have an argument determined beforehand and in writing this paper I am merely working from an outline, or a set of notes, and thereby not actually proceeding via phenomenology.   Of course, were I to do so I would only be endangering the duty to myself insofar as I would be risking the integrity of the philosophical project and its phenomenological methodology that I have set for myself.   To you, my audience (my reader, or those listening to me read this paper), however, this danger matters not at all.  Indeed, from your perspective the matter has already been settled insofar as I am at this point offering you a completed draft, a composed piece.   Well, I’m presuming this to be the case, because at this point I have only completed an introduction/overview that is only a promise; again first and foremost to myself.   (It’s an odd thing to be writing a paper of philosophy that one hopes to read at a conference.  But I digress.  Or do I?)

Excerpt from Introduction to the paper I shared with my Philo of Ed class for next week’s seminar: Feeling the Funk:  Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a Music-Making Philosophy GV-7. Society for the Philosophical Study of Education; Friday Evening, 2/28/14: 7:00–10:00 p.m. The 111^th meeting of the American Philosophical Association Central Division Chicago, Palmer House Hilton Hotel

I would like to plead innocent and blame last night’s commentary writing on what my Paris Farmers Union calendar is calling the Full Beaver Moon, and that’s not necessarily a far-fetched excuse for the writing that commentary writing that happened yesterday, first, on the campus to train bus, then on the LIRR, continued on the Air Train, and was completed while I was eating dinner at my usual spot in JB Terminal 5 at JFK, where I always order the paella, and catch-up with Ken the waiter/bar tender.   By the time I was done with the commentary I felt a certain sense of unease, even though the food was excellent, as always.   Again, I’d like to blame it on the full moon, or the strange mix of exhaustion and stimulation that arrives around the 16^th hour of a 19 hour day.   But those are excuses, perhaps legitimate, to explain, and even defend, the somewhat discombobulated quality of the thinking/writing that went down.   Once I found myself in the modality of Kerouacian free jazz beat writing – something I did a bit of in July in the wake of reading Big Sur --  I just went for it.  That’s how it has to go down, as I’ve been telling students and colleagues alike, using Heraclitus’ war fragments as my example.  Once you are there in the situation and modality you can’t run and hide or freak out.  You just have to write in the voice that speaking at that moment, and yesterday it was a most informal expression of the Augustinian self-disclosure; informal, mostly, because I didn’t and couldn’t do any of the heavy lifting that he does, especially in the last four books (10-13), when he ‘gets over himself’ or ‘gets through himself’ and moves into the Godhead.    What I did try to do in the commentary was account for the return of singularity, the first person, the persona first, that voice that I usually attribute with Kierkegaard – who taught me about becoming an author, and being an apostle. But in this past week of teaching and learning with my students and colleagues I realize how much of this is also coming from Augustine, and also Paul, whose epistles are these wonderful philosophical treatises on the conversion, community and congregation; written by powerful self that is at the same time a diminished self, a self that has been overcome.   The return of the first person in my thinking/writing stand in stark contrast to the original meditations and Being and Learning.   The meditations and Being and Learning is written in the third person, and I’m tempted to say ‘problematically written in the third person’, but I’ll resist that kind of critique; there was, is, and will remain in the future to write in the third person, which is the traditional voice of philosophy, more or less.  I say ‘more or less’ because all of the noteworthy thinkers/writers were noteworthy precisely because they expressed a powerfully distinctive voice.  [More accurate is the description of the writing in Being and Learning would identify it as vacillating between the third person and the first person plural, but never in the first person singular.]  But today the first person is the compelling voice, in part, because it answers the question concerning the overwhelming force of the learning community, the difference eclipsing power of koinonia.  The important counter-example, which I have explored in these pages (cf. OPM 245 & 246) is the event of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit disrupts what can be identified as the parochial and private and ‘exclusive’ gathering of the apostles and disperses them into the streets of Jerusalem with the disparate strange voices that are not their own.   But in that moment we don’t witness the re-turn of the first person, but the momentary disaggregation of the congregation; the return of plurality, which is not the same as singularity.  Plurality is made up of singularity, as Arendt tells us.  And this means singularity is always prior and originary vis-à-vis plurality, but not necessarily vis-à-vis the learning community.  And this is precisely the matter I have been thinking/writing about for the past few days: in what sense is singularity present or appearing in the learning community?  This is a question raised by Paul, for sure.  But  when we make the Augustinian and Kierkegaardian turn, the question vanishes, especially with the latter who is deeply suspicious of community and congregation.   The Augustine of the Confessions seems to think that question is outside of his concerns; he brackets it because he is working within the interior landscape via memory.  He too is confronting the problem of singularity, of course, and the problem is the very ontological status of the singular self.  On the one hand the self is divided against itself (will v. thinking, or mind v. heart, reason v. faith, etc.), and in being divided the self is not fully with God, although the Holy Spirit is always with him and in him.    As Arendt insisted, singularity is always a matter of harmony, a harmony of the self.  And she cites Socrates from Plato’s Gorgias to make this point: “better that I be in discordance with everyone, so long as I am in harmony with myself.”  For Socrates, of course, we do need others to help us achieve that harmony.  And this has always been the crux of my move to the dialogic learning community.  For Augustine, however, we have to work it out on our own…with the help of God, of course, but mostly through thinking/writing, prayer and contemplation…on our own.    Singularity appears in the work we do…on our own.

The question of singularity can also be phrased as the question of subjectivity, and when its phrased in this way I am able to more easily demonstrate why the question is a difficult one for me, and why Augustine poses me with an enormous challenge.  The first line of the meditation from this day ten years ago shows the nature of the challenge: “Freedom, then, is realized in the face-to-face inter-action of inter-subjectivity.”(11/7/04  BL   )  [Encounter the word ‘freedom’ reminds me that I had intended to make a connection between Augustine’s first person confessional writing and writing of Frederick Douglass in his work My Bondage and My Freedom, which was waiting for me on my desk when I returned home last night.  I had ordered the book last week after discovering that Douglass had visited Maine and spoken at what is now Bates College.  Now, after a week of studying Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and its complex slave discourse, I’m receiving Douglass’ writing within a much larger hermeneutic horizon!]  With the opening line of the meditation from this day it is clear that I am deeply ambivalent about our capacity to resolve the question of subjectivity and even to think through the question of the divided self on our own.   And it is not just a matter of ‘making progress,’ but of the quality and power of the experience of working it out on our own.   What is the quality and force of the learning happening on our own?  If we are talking through the concept of ‘freedom’ it strikes me as an example of ‘negative liberty,’ that ‘freedom from’ others that is held up by liberals and libertarians.  For a congregationist like myself, that is a weak form of freedom.  What’s more, I make the claim that the inter-action of inter-subjectivity is the existential manifestation of the ontological “‘free flowing’ movement of the essential sway. The learning community is enjoined…[by] the most subtle rhythm…”(11/07/04 BL 265)  

The question of singularity and/or subjectivity is jettisoned at the onset, as soon as the learner emerges from the preparatory modality of the novitiate/apprentice.   The movement across the threshold and into the Open is marked by a self-overcoming that is an overcoming of the self as a singularity subject.  Inter-subjectivity arises from the modality of the diminished act of subjectivity, the servitude toward the other that happens by way of listening.  “We call such standing with the movement of the essential sway ‘compassionate listening’, for this modality of the ones who remain steadfast in this standing [moving with the subtle rhythm]  is the comportment of the ones who have taken up the learning of close listening.  Such learning marks the attunement to the other, the attentiveness that occurs with the diminishment of ‘self.’”(11/7/04 BL 265)