“What might
philosophy as ‘soul music’ μουσική (mousike) sound like
today?”
“If education remains
paideia, what are the ways we are
‘turned around’ and/or ‘turned on’ by philosophy?”
The preceding are two
of the last questions I pose at the end of the Call to PES Memphis Soul
Music/The Blues http://www.philosophyofeducation.org/2014/2015-call-papers
Those last questions
re-call the question imbedded in the first line of Being and Learning:
“In what follows I
offer an account of teaching as the art of turning on the desire to behold
Being.”(BL 1)
What is the question embedded in the first
sentence? It is nothing more or less
than “What might philosophy as ‘soul music’ μουσική (mousike)
sound like today?”
Indeed, before even
the question concerning ‘the account’ (What kind of phenomenology are you
undertaking?), and before even the question of desire, the one concerning
‘beholding’ and, last but certainly not least, even before the question of
Being, emerges the question of teaching as the art of turning. Can this ‘turning’ be separated from the
‘on’? Isn’t the original title of the
paper presented in Oxford in April, 2004, “Tune in, Turn on, Let Learning
Happen”? If the ‘Tune in’ is a euphemism
for ‘attunement’ and ‘Let Learning Happen’ is a stand in for the pedagogy of gelassenheit, then certainly the ‘Turn’
doesn’t make sense without the ‘on’. Perhaps.
After all, the penultimate question of the Call to Memphis asks, “If
education remains paideia, what are
the ways we are ‘turned around’ and/or ‘turned on’ by philosophy?” But paideia
and periagoge
are distinct. Paideia is education in the sense of ‘upbringing’ and is probably
what the Germans have come to call Bildung. Periagoge
is what is happening in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and constitutes the
turning of the soul, a spiritual movement, a ascent and descent. In this sense we can use periagoge to describe a ‘Turn’ that is
not unlike the conversion that I described exactly two month ago, on November 6th:
– 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.
The final question of
the Call to Memphis is thus already imbedded in the question that is imbedded
in the opening line of Being and Learning:
“to quote Cornel West, ‘Are you ready for that turning of the soul,
that transformation?’”
And it is imbedded in
the sense of following from original question concerning the ‘Turn’ aka “What
is meant when we say ‘Turn’?” Response: describe periagoge. Once described,
the question raised by Cornel West arises.
Next: What is ‘the art of
turning’ that propels periagoge? Response: describe the sound of philosophy when undertaken as ‘soul music’ μουσική (mousike)?
All of that is in the
original question imbedded in the first line: “In what follows I offer an account of
teaching as the art of turning on the desire to behold Being.”(BL 1)
And that brings me to
the writing from 1/6/05, the meditation that continues the debate with Plato,
the one that ‘defends’ the poetic dimension of philosophy. This morning’s commentary writing inspires
me to return to the Preface of Being and
Learning, and to recall the poetics of ‘father’ Parmenides. After citing Karl Jaspers [“Parmenides was
the great point of departure”] and then bell hooks [“Language is also a place
of struggle…One is always at risk. One
needs a community of resistance.”] I
begin with a mimetic (re)presentation of Parmenides lyrical philosophical form:
BEGINNING
It, begins with
Parmenides’ Poem.
It beings with
Parmenides ‘Way of Truth’
I’m reminder of
Parmenides because his description of the encounter with the originary, with
Being, was famously rendered in a lyrical form, although I suppose one could
argue that the poem has ‘epic’ qualities to it; after all it is a journey of a
young soul beyond the gates of night and day that culminates in the encounter
with the Goddess (Thea). He has travelled
the way of truth, and she then discloses to him the path he has been taken, and
what is then implied by that journey.
Her discloses offers to him both the existential possibility (the choice) of the way of truth (where ‘to
think’ and ‘to be’ are the same) but
also the art of accounting for the ongoing journey he will take, should he take
it. This art is not epic nor lyrical
poetic, but philosophical poetry; the very poetic philosophy that Parmenides is
demonstrating. And, for me, Parmenides
is demonstrating what I am calling the huacaslogical: the description of the thinking happening in
sacred place (holy time and space). To
reiterare, I described the huacaslogical
in my contribution to Lapiz volume
one:
What we
discover through the reduction I am proposing is a phenomenology of originary
thinking arising from the originating huacaslogical question: ¿Dónde Estamos?
(Where are we?). [‘Huacaslogical’ is
a neologism that combines the Incan word huacas
(sacred place) with the Greek word logos
(philosophical account, wisdom)]endnote*
endnote*: ‘Huacaslogical’
is a neologism I have constructed for this project. The category combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek
word logos (philosophical account,
wisdom). I want to acknowledge and thank
my colleague Tyson Lewis for a lively discussion that helped me find a way to
phrase the cartographical turn I am making.
When I offered him an overview of this project, emphasizing how it is
making a sharp departure from Heidegger’s project, Tyson recognized that the
shift is one from Heidegger’s and existential question of Being, i.e., Who are
we?, to my project’s question: Where are we?
Ten years later I call on
Parmenides to assist in my debate with Plato.
“As we have seen Plato reject the modality of the poet of the situation
of one who has taken leave of his reason….What we have called the rapture of the learning
abode....‘un-settled’ state of the poetic soul….is rejected by Plato as the
error of the ‘unkeen eye’…”(BL
337) The question is whether or not
Parmenides is an ally, a member of what bell hooks calls “the community of
resistance”? I have no doubts about
Heraclitus, and, of course, I have put much faith in Socrates, the exemplar of
a philosophy of refusal and resistance that enacts
and thereby actualizes the power of
the dialectic. I wonder about
Parmenides to the point of having my doubts; doubts that are prompted by
Heidegger, who cites in his epigram to Being
and Time the famous Xenos from
Plato’s Sophist, the one who Derrida
refers to in his lecture “Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/From the
Foreigner.” My doubts are expressed in
the same Preface to Being and Learning
I cited above:
As stranger, he begins, again,
the conversation, by being
the question, by
questioning
Parmenides
telling
the tale
of the first teaching
of the Way of Truth
i.e., overturning, deconstructing
the logos of Parmenides.
Who is this stranger that
overturns the logos of
Parmenides? Socrates? But which ‘Socrates’? The ‘Socrates to come’ that Nietzsche
prophetically announced in Birth of
Tragedy? The ‘music-making Socrates’! Yes!
Indeed, the xenos (the stranger and the newcomer) is a future figure, a figure
to come, an existential modality to be made in the making, formed in learning, “which
we identify as an en-actment of freedom, and the embodiment of spontaneity of
improvisation saying that is the releasement of the poetic (re)presentation of
Being’s dynamic unfolding. But here is
where we have gone astray, according to Plato.
Our aesthetic [artistic] pedagogy of poetic dialogue that unfolds as a
relational encounter with Being, and thus from a reception of Being as a
dialectical of dynamic dispersal that is open-ended and ‘remains’ incomplete,
resides within an abode of falsehood, [in] the delusions of Dionysian ex-cess…”(BL 338)
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