Yesterday’s
commentary reminded me of the one of the last papers I completed before
embarking on the yearlong experiment of daily writing that I am revisiting each
day a decade later. The paper, an
invited piece I wrote for a symposium From
Philosophy of Education: Curriculum Contributions for the Profession Beyond
Accountabilty (AERA, April 22, 2003), was a reflection on what I have been
identifying since then as the (unique) education offered by philosophy. There is a distinct pedagogy, curriculum,
etc., happening through philosophy, rendering philosophy of education as redundancy.
There is no philosophy of
education. Rather, there is an education
offered by philosophy, one that is as varied and heterodox as the tradition of
philosophy itself. In the paper I am
referring to I focus mostly on what, borrowing from Brecht, I describe as the
estrangement effect that is produced by the learning that happens under the
guidance of the Cartesian form of mediation, which I described in yesterday’s
commentary. The paper, “Meditation,
Estrangment, and the Disruption of Conformity – Philosophy as the Creation of
Difficulties” is organized around a close reading of Descartes’ mediations,
focusing mainly on the first meditation.
I conclude by drawing a parallel between Socrates’ modality of aporia, which he expressed in his maxim
“All that I know is that I know nothing at all”
[a fragment that would have served me well in BL meditations that take up Heidegger’s “How is it with Nothing?”],
and Descartes’ state of doubt expressed at the beginning of the second meditation:
“What then will count as true? Perhaps only this one thing: that nothing is
certain.” He says in that same moment
when he is revisiting the prior day’s mediation (the first), “Yesterday’s
meditation filled my mind with so many doubts that I can no longer forget about
them – nor yet do I see how they are to be resolved. But, as if I had suddenly fallen into a deep
whirlpool, I am so disturbed that I can neither touch my foot to the bottom,
nor swim to the top.”
The
education offered by philosophy offers the state of complete and utter doubt,
perplexity, aporia described by
Descartes, and this offering, I concluded in the 2003 paper, is one that is
‘liberating’ because “it disrupts what we might call ‘normalizing education’: a kind of education which
has become dominant within State sponsored schooling in the contemporary United
States, especially since the advent of the ‘standards/accountability movement’
which culminated in the passage of the Bush administrations education agenda
cynically entitled ‘No Child Left Behind.’ [With] this State system, we
identify a student who is understood to be teachable insofar as she remains
knowable to herself and to others….knowable and unified within this sphere is
crucial to normalizing education, particularly to the instructor who must
diagnose/assess the progress…The indisputable certainty of the
learner…[underwrites the] governable form of subjectivity….Governed from within
and without, the unified, self-certain subject remains bound within the
confines of a pregiven set of normative rules, which are scripted in a
prepackaged set of State defined Standards.”
At
the time when I wrote that paper I was under the heavy influence of
Kierkegaard, who helped me to read ‘Rene’ against ‘Descartes,’ and to find in
the first meditation radical form of thinking. For me there is something
significant in the place of departure, the originary in Descartes’ experiment, that
radical questioning which begins with the bracketing of all prior education
(recall, Descartes begins by putting aside all that he had been taught aka
Scholasticism). This first move became
the starting point of later phenomenology (hence Husserl’s Cartesian Mediations). And what is important to me is precisely the
effect of this bracketing, which is
no mere ‘setting aside’ but, rather, as something we have to work out. Bracketing is the technē of working out the internalized norms of
education. It demands from us the rigor
of radical questioning, and offers in turn the ‘highway of despair,’ a bildungsroman in the form of the
blues. And this is precisely where I
read René against Descartes by making a positive project from the very aporia the later had to work through in
order to arrive at the sanctuary of clear and distinct ideas. For me, it was enough for Descartes (who at
this early stage of his work I call ‘René’) to show us that one truth: that
nothing is certain. This, to me, is the
truth that grants learning by point to what remains, what is in excess. This one truth is precisely what Heidegger is
asking when he asks about the ‘Nothing’.
And this is precisely the truth that shifts us from the fetish of
‘knowing’ and ‘reasoning’ towards a thinking that is seeks no refuge from the
revealed fact of uncertainty, but, rather, seizes this as the most compelling
prompt to make something from nothing.
This making is not, of course, ex
nihilio, but the response to the truth that reveals that nothing is fixed, predetermined, nor fatally given in
advance. All is given, yes. But nothing is certain. And if this is a paradox then it is one of
many that generates learning as the making something of the nothing.
Now it is this matter of
making something of the nothing that
is the focus of the mediation on 11/30/04, a meditation that continues under
what I described in yesterday’s commentary as the ‘error of subjectivism.’ The error, to repeat, is made when the
learning community is described as the setting of the encounter between the
modalities of ‘friend’ and ‘artist’.
Setting aside, as I did in yesterday’s commentary, those terms, the
writing/thinking on 11/30/04 echoes the paper written nineteen months earlier
when it describes how “the musicality of the learning community…negates the
static white noise…‘negation’ here indicates the counter-normalizing
alternative offered by the gathering of the learning community that emerges
‘outside’ the ‘domestic security’…”(BL
290-291) The force of the description is
felt when one reads it alongside the 2003 paper, which announces the Cartesian
meditation to be one of the most significant weapons in the insurgency against
the State education policies. ‘War on
Terror’ is waged ‘at home’ (in ‘the neighborhood’) via the normalization (aka
domestication) of our children.
‘Security’ is a euphemism for the real war, the war on thinking. To understand the context of this commentary
one needs only to read the first pages of Arendt’s Life of the Mind, where she describes ‘thoughtlessness’.
On 11/30/04 the learning
community is described as a training ground for resistance and for the
insurgency against the State sponsored war on thinking. The description demands the very tools of
training, and I turn to Nietzsche to show why the only way to defeat the enemy
who is intent on destroying thought is to practice mortal combat. Enter the spirit of agonism, and Heraclitus’
pronouncement that thinking is steered by conflict (polemos). In turn, if the
learning community is the gathering of friends via agapē then this love of
friend strengthens the members of the community to resist and oppose the
implied imposition of one voice over the other.
The collective work is to one of renewing isonomia, the rule of no one, and no thing. This demands a uncompromising faith in the total
reality of the present moment.
“In the strongest terms
Zarathustra draws attention to this opposition [at the heart of the learning
community] by naming the friend the ‘enemy’.
‘In a friend one should still honor the enemy. Can you go close to your friend without going
over to him? In a friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart
when you resist him.’ The [gathering] of the friend [the learning community] is
the gathering of common enemies.
Together they resist the normalizing routines of the neighborhood and
thereby recognize each other as distinct, strange, un-usual and free. Free for what? For creation.”(BL 291)
3.0 (Saturday, Basking Ridge, NJ) - Resonances of my engagement with Descartes then (above) and now, in "LEARN": "As Foucault reminds us, the history of philosophy in which Socrates was forgotten culminated with the philosopher René Descartes, who was intent on placing philosophy on the same unshakeable ground as mathematics. Descartes' project unfolds through a method of skepticism or doubt about inherited knowledge, and in this sense, he is still part of the Socratic tradition of suspending the knowledge one has unquestionably adopted. However, Descartes’ method is decidedly non-Socratic with its linearity and quest for certainty. Ironically, this meditative practice of thinking is happening in the solitude of study, but not in the existential modality of learning that a student is located during the moments of phenomenological reading and writing. As opposed to the significant object of study, Descartes was captivated by his own “mind.” In contrast to Descartes who is listening to his own voice, the student engrossed in phenomenological reading in the solitude of study remains silent. They are attuned to the text, listening to the voice of the book and receiving whatever essentials are calling out.
ReplyDeleteDescartes’ meditative thinking is what Plato described as eme emauto, a dialogue with oneself. It sounds like an oxymoron: methodically doubting one’s way to steadfast certainty. But if one’s goal is to build a solid foundation for inquiry (scientia, knowledge), and one is sincere about building something original, there is no other alternative. One must suspend one’s received ways of knowing; one has to unlearn what one has been taught. Negation is the crux of the solitude of study that is repeated da capo. But in the case of Descartes, however, that negation was a one-time event. His famous Meditations on First Philosophy, are a set of meditations that begin with a reflection on his education, the one he received from the Scholastic education that was organized around Aristotle aka The Philosopher, as he was called in the great treatises of Thomas Aquinas that were the standard curriculum of the schooling Descartes received and was intent on razing. Descartes begins his Meditations: “Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.” Descartes arrives at this solid foundation for knowledge when he realizes he can doubt everything but himself. Even if God is “a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me,” he concludes, “in that case I too undoubtedly exist…and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I nothing so long as I think I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”
3.0b - AND: "Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Foucault, Descartes' moment of illumination is an event in the history of philosophy, a singular turning point that marked an erasure of the Socratic tradition of philosophy whereby “doubt” remains a central part of a practice that is not designed to find answers, but, rather, designed to find the right questions that produce meaning rather than knowledge. The self-certainty that Descartes discovered marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of philosophy and put out of collective memory the Socratic existential dialectic that proclaimed certainty only about the ontological fact of existential uncertainty: “All I know is that I know nothing at all.” For Socrates and the existentialist and postmodern thinkers who reconnected with his spirit two millennia after his death, uncertainty is the unavoidable situation of the human condition. We are aware of our mortality, but the time between our birth and death remains an open-ended script. Tempus fugit, carpe diem: time flies, seize the day! In turn, the call of the teacher to the student, pick up and read!, is an evocative call that turns the student around and points them to the enduring fecundity of meaning offered by a work of art."
ReplyDeleteAND: "Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Foucault calls this turning point in the history of philosophy the “Cartesian Moment”. This moment is defined by the self-certainty that, for Descartes, was the unshakeable foundation for knowledge. But if we follow the Cartesian approach, learning is the ongoing acquisition of knowledge that has no bearing on the “self.” Socrates' famous confession that his philosophical practice began when he “became a question to myself,” is rendered moot by Descartes. As Foucault puts it, “the Cartesian approach, which can be read quite explicitly in the Meditations, placed self-evidence (l’évidence) at the origin, the point of departure of the philosophical approach -- self-evidence as it appears, that is to say, as it is given, as it is actually given to consciousness without any possible doubt.” Descartes, the mathematician, initiated a new agenda for philosophy: the analysis and explication of human knowledge, i.e., epistemology. It is no longer a question of if we can know, but how we know. Philosophy after Descartes aspires to be scientific, or at least a foundation of scientific inquiry, the guarantor of the scientific method that ensures that science is revealing truth. The Cartesian moment is a turning point in philosophy: it turns philosophy away from poetics and toward rationality as that which alone can respond to the existential fact of uncertainty. This is why in his “Preface to the Reader” Descartes defends himself against the objection that he his project is too narrowly focused by writing: “thus my meaning was that I am plainly aware of nothing which I know to pertain to my essence, beyond the fact that I am a thinking thing, that is, a thing having within itself the faculty of thinking. But in what ensues I will show how it follows from the fact that I know nothing else that pertains to my essence that nothing else at all really pertains to it.” But as I will describe it, this “nothing else” is the khaos (void) around and through which philosophical learning is happening. This is the chaos that Heidegger points to with the question, “How is it with the nothing?” He adds “Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects.”