Back home in blustery Portland
after a week of teaching at Hofstra. Last night’s
seminar was really good. I hit the
ground running with an intense opening presentation in response to a question
concerning the relationship between Arendt’s ‘fact of plurality’ and my
distinction between ‘thinking differently’ and ‘thinking difference’. The move happens through the reduction of
singularity; singularity, both the facticity of being historically moving
individual bodies and the ontology of our being existentially unique and yet
compelled to achieve or make ourselves.
Learning emerges with the twin modalities of thinking our facticity
(thinking differently) and our ontological situation (thinking
difference). These two are twins but
relate dialectically, the one unfolding in chronological time, the other
happening in kairological time. When
they intersect the temporality of learning appears. I want to call this time of learning originary temporality in order to denote
the initial/initiative character of the time that organizes the place of the
learning.
Here I need to recall, again, Schürmann
when he writes: “With
the originary concept of ontology and the ontological concept of the originary
we leave the phenomenology of reversals…Rather, presencing itself is to be
understood as originary…as pure coming-about.”(140) And then 1/7/15: “Presencing
understood (thought) as orignary, as
pure coming-about, demands a thinking of becoming,
that is, of actualization, realization.”
And then the commentary from yesterday that describes learning as “an attempt to think the originary concept of
ontology, the originary as presencing
as ‘pure coming-about’ as becoming. To think
becoming is to work through the attunement of Being via learning; to enact becoming. The technē
of thinking is learning; happening both through phenomenological description – the work of meditative
thinking (poiesis) – and through
dialogue – the work of koinōnia
(praxis).”(1/8/15)
Moving into the writing from 1/9/05, but, first, a comment
in response to the conclusion of yesterday’s commentary, which cited my Lapiz announcement of the huacaslogical methodology. In the cited endnote I write: “‘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)….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?” It wasn’t until this blustery morning that I
recognized the paucity of my description of logos. ‘philosophical account,
wisdom’…really?!? I confess that the
arrival of huacaslogical -- a category that came to me at some time in
between PES New Mexico and the Late to
Love sessions in Ohio. But well
before the prep work on my Heraclitus lecture got underway. In turn I’ll give myself a pass on the logos side of huacaslogical, which emerged at a moment when the focus was almost
entirely on the place of learning, and the thinking of that place as ‘sacred’
or ‘holy’. What has not yet been
described is sanctification of the learning place. How does it come to be ‘sacred’? This question was only alluded to and
indirectly undertaken in the months of July and August via Thoreau, and then,
Heraclitus (in a preliminary way). Then
in October and November the indirect path was more intensely taken via the
category of koinōnia, which is to say, the post factum description of the place as
sanctified because it is the place where the learning community is gathered and
propelled by the force of koinōnia.
In other words, we come to recognize we have inhabited a sacred place when
we recognize (belatedly) that Spirit has moved in us, with us and through us.
[it is important here to recall that the movement of learning happens
by way of a gathering into becoming: the presencing of Spirit. Here then the huacaslogical is an
attempt to describe the occurrence or happening of the event of learning; a
description of the thinking of the originary concept of ontology; a description
of the presencing the originary, the
‘pure coming-about’ of learning in-with-through becoming.
This is why in my Lapiz paper I use the geological term
‘collision zone’ as a category to describe the phenomenology that arising in a
place of persistent becoming:
“that is,
arises from the gap that is opened in human history at the moment of cultural
collision, and represents the fissure that marks the fault line of the broken
hegemonies left in ruins on either side of the disjuncture. This moment of collision is the accident of
history producing the ontology of the original as the condition of perplexity
and uncertainty, an an-anarchic modality.”(Duarte, Lapiz 1)
“this
collision zone, and, second, of moving onto and into this ground. To name the ontological ground where ladinos
have been thrown as a ‘collision zone’ is to recognize the unpredictability of
this ground, its seismic activity, and thus to understand it as a dynamic range
of originary thinking. To borrow a term
from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, this is the uma pacha (original time and place)” (Duarte, Lapiz 1)
“something
akin in human history to plate tectonics: a convergent plate boundary formed by
cultural tectonic plates crashing into one another. This geological event is also called a
collision zone, which is the term I am borrowing.” Duarte, Lapiz 1)
The huacaslogical description discloses in
the manner of the Hegelian phenomenologist who goes to work at dusk, that is to
say, when the day is coming to an end, so not necessarily belatedly or too
late, but just in time. That is to
say, the unique temporality of learning extends,
and the huacaslogical description is
occurring meditatively within the place of the learning event. The description is a thinking of the sacred
place that has been sanctified through the gathering. It is a thinking within that sanctified place.
Again, this is why it is not a theology
(a thinking about God). In sum, the logos in huacaslogical is a ‘philosophical account, wisdom’ in the sense of
an attempt to capture the gathering spirit the learning event; that is, to
capture being caught, seized and propelled;
the account is not organized towards veritas
but towards sapientia.
Sapientia is a term that works well to describe the figure of the
sage, who makes a return in the meditations happening in the first week of
January, 2005. “The sage points to the
encounter with Being’s unfolding by indicating the presencing of
plurality, The sage’s pointing happens
with the questioning saying that irrupts the familiar. The sages’ questioning bears the strange, and
s/he arrives as the stranger who offers the irrupting tidings that indicate the
imminent but uncertain arrival of the ‘not yet.’” (BL 340)
Sage was
appropriated from Lao Tzu, and it is for sure a helpful anachronism in a time
when the authority of the teacher is misplaced, and here I am reminded of Heidegger’s
comment in the first lecture of What is
Called Thinking?, when he bemoans the fact that the once exalted position
of the teacher has degenerated to a position that no one wants to take. And who would blame anyone today if they were
to resist the call of teaching in this time of instruction? But learning remains what it has always been,
and the call to teach is perhaps stronger today than it has ever been precisely
because the circumstances are so grim.
The call is an urgent one.
Indeed, as Arendt would say, we live in a crisis of education. And so we
are called into a place that is organized around anachronisms like ‘sage’. And we are called into a place of writing
that discloses anachronistic sound descriptions, like so much of the syntax in
the pages of Being and Learning. Originary thinking is anachronistic, indeed
it is. And perhaps this is yet another way of describing the temporality of
learning and the phenomenology that describes it: Anakhronismos, from ana- ‘backward’
and khronos ‘time’.
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