OPM 297(298), December 13th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 309-310

OPM 297(298), December 13th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 309-310

As the song says, “You know it’s gonna get stranger, so let’s get on with the show!” https://archive.org/details/gd1980-12-13.sbd.miller.91939.sbeok.flac16

I penciled a note just above the first line of the meditation from 12/13/04 that reads ‘Beyond the Family.’  I’m presuming that as I was making my way through the edits I wanted to remind myself of the learning community is an exemplar of a formation of what I calling the ‘post-traditional,’ a term I appropriated from Habermas when I was writing my doctoral dissertation.   Today on 12/13/14 the remnants of my work on Habermas are found the writing on a priori conditions for the possibility of dialogue, and imbedded in the presumption that dialogue is praxis.   But today the project is organized by the originary, which entails a dropping of the Marxist privileging of the future with the recognition that within each moment of learning we retain the retrospective along with the prospective.  And in this sense the learning community is no longer captured under the category of ‘post-traditional,’ if that is in fact what the pencil note ‘Beyond the Family’ signifies.   Nevertheless, in the same way the koinōnia of the learning community is a gathering of colegas (a college of fellows), and not one of friendship, I would describe this working group as post-familial, despite the fact that the members of the learning community may refer to one another as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.   To describe it as ‘post’ familial is to say it is ‘after’ in the sense that it is supplementing, and thereby completing or augmenting it.   And this is all presuming the pre-existence of some kind of ‘family’ unit.  [I sense myself sliding down a slippery slope with this attempt to think through a cryptic notation.  At the very least I will record the thought to return to the sagrada familia, whose initial gathering is most certainly one of the most significant examples of koinōnia that, paradoxically, reveals the nexus where the familial and post-family intersect; the birth of the child is the event that gathers together in common humility and reverance animals, kings, shepherds and angels.   I’d like to return to this moment and compare it with the Last Supper, but along the way think through the gathering of the apostles. To be continued…]

‘Beyond the Family’ is penciled atop a sentence that reads: “De-familiarization is the source of the estranging re-positioning that dis-rupts the desire for reliability, coherence and unity, and subverts the ‘order’ of the system of ‘rationality’ that prescribes and thereby seeks to ‘control’ action.”(BL 309)  There is a play here on ‘familiar’ and ‘familial,’ and what is post-familial is thus post-familiar.  Again, the push back against the Socrates from Gorgias who declares himself prepared to be at odds and discordant with everyone else so long as he remains in tune with himself.   The modality of the learner, on the contrary, is described as one inhabits the ontology of the ‘higher harmony,’ where consonance and dissonance co-exist dialectically, interdependently.   The modality of the learner is ‘identity’ of one who remains a ‘stranger to himself’ because he is always being called beyond himself.  This is the Socrates that Heidegger called the ‘purest thinking in the West’ because he withstood the draft, the force of aletheia through a thinking that was not yet thinking. “All I know is that I know nothing at all,” for Socrates was his calling card; the maxim he offered to others when he was revealing his identity to them, when he was introducing himself to them, when he was calling upon them.  This was the proclamation I hear Socrates heralding.   He is ‘pure’ in the sense of his having the strength to endure the more powerful force of perplexity, of confusion;  this is the ‘purity’ of the air on the highest peaks, the air that allows for the hearing of the higher harmony.   When Nietzsche described self-overcoming, and in that epiphanic moment he was invaded by the Eternal Recurrence of Being and Becoming, he stood at ‘six thousand feet’.   The higher we climb the purer the air, and from such altitude we can perceive the flow of things in their complex reversals, multidirectional movements.  Self-overcoming is an over-coming of the desire for a unified familiar ‘self.’  “Estrangement and the appearance of the ‘self’ as ‘stranger’ points away from the rule of logic and the privileging of ‘rationality’ as the measure of learning…” and towards the artistic “the non-rational, or ‘beyond’ the calculative, definitive and predictable.”(BL 309) On 12/13/04 the post-rational does not denote the ‘irrational,’ which is the equation that is rendered by the forgetfulness that arises with the thinking that privileges the future.  The properly retrospective recalls that once upon a time, before the advent of Modernity’s ‘reason,’ there was something denoted by understanding.  And this understanding had its limits, and was unable to fulfill the lofty and insatiable demands of human spirit.  And this spirit, moving beyond the limits of understanding and into the sphere where all art is made, recognized that when it moved beyond understanding it was making a leap, and with that taking a risk, because beyond understanding…?   There must be something ‘there’ there in that place – mysterious, a dark star.   So a maxim is required, a proclamation that announces the leap, one not unlike Socrates’ “All I know is that I know nothing”....and in that perplexity and ignorance…I practice maieutics and with others bring something diff’rent into the world.”  And once upon time that proclamation was announced credo quia absurdum est.  Belief  (faith?) arises at the threshold when we move beyond understanding, and it is not ‘irrationality’ that appears as the existential modality, but the absurd. 

The movement beyond understanding is described in emancipatory terms as “unboundedness…the un-binding of the ownmost potentiality in the creative production and performance.”(BL 309)  Learning is now described as artwork because this thinking is “un-bound from the principle of non-contradiction,” the very logic that underwrites the desire expressed by the figure of  ‘Socrates’ in the Gorgias.  The ‘other’ Socrates that I have portrayed is un-bound from that desire; he enacts “the paradoxical ‘principle of anarchy’.” Here I turn to Schürmann’s “articulation of the ‘anarchy principle’ as indicating a ‘location’ where the fundamental rule of metaphysics has lost its hold.  ‘Is not the backbone of metaphysics…the rule always to seek a first from which the world becomes intelligible and materable, the rule of scire per cauas, of establishing ‘principles’ for thinking and doing?  ‘Anarchy,’ on the other hand, designates the withering away of such a rule, the relaxing of its hold’.”(BL 309)  Of course, there is confusion here when I write of a ‘principle of anarchy,’ because anarchy designates what is non governed by principle, a thinking and doing that is not held by governing logic.  So there is confusion as I revisit this meditation ten years later.   And the confusion is felt intensely when I revisit the writing from 12/13/04 and read the invocation of ‘anarchy’ in the wake of what I wrote in yesterday’s commentary:  Meditative thinking flows with the common (ho koinos), which for Heraclitus is logos.  John 1:1: En archē ēn ho Logos.  The common is the beginning, the originary.  A phenomenology of meditative thinking offers descriptions that move with the flow.   And because this flow is dialectical (contradictory, full of reversals, multidirectional, reverberating) it demands a phenomenology that is some parts prosaic, and more parts poetic.

The need to retain ‘principle’ within these descriptions has already been worked out (cf. OPM 272(273), November 15^th), so I won’t rehearse that here.  But in the same way that I have replaced ‘friend’ with ‘fellow’ and ‘plurality’ with ‘diff’rence’ I am challenged at this moment by the term ‘anarchy.’  And I’m wondering if the ‘absurd’ captures what Schürmann describes as the “withering away of a rule” that establishes principles for thinking and doing?  If the principle is what inspires (breathes life into us), then isn’t learning as a doing (technē) inspired by and enacting a thinking that is organized by the contra-dictory, the dialectical, which is not seeking ‘closure’ or ‘resolution’ but is only ever committed to ‘suspending’ the work – taking a break?   The withering of the rule would today entail the disruption of the govern-mental hold on education.   And this is precisely what philosophy in education is always prepared to undertake.  It is the raison d’etre of philosophy in education under the banner of credo quia absurdum est.   Philosophy in education represents the presence of the absurd.  “Thus, to be located within the learning community is to circulate within the realm where the ‘governing principle’ is the ‘non-rule’ of the dynamic process, spontaneously and improvisationally unfolding as the chaotic complexity of plurality that can never be ‘totalized’ within a rationalized system.”(BL 309)  

En archē ēn ho Logos.  An archē ēn ho dialogos.