Today
is one of those that are packed with shows, most of them from the early days
when the GD would start touring in the early part of the year and never look
back. Later, in the 80’s, they would
codify a calendar of touring that would be organized around 3 distinct seasonal
tours (spring, summer, fall) with west coast shows in February (Mardi Gras,
Chinese New Year) and December (New Years run); and Garcia would tour with JGB
intermittently throughout the year.
Today
I’ll be moving in and out of the list of shows from today, with a unique
exuberance that comes from receiving yesterday from GD inc., the announcement
that Bobby, Billy, Mickey, and Phil will be playing three shows at Chicago’s
Soldier field as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the
GD.
They
will be joined by longtime Bobby keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, friend Bruce
Hornsby, and (drum roll please)…playing lead guitar….Phish lead man Trey
Anastasio!!! I almost fell out of my seat when I read that! Actually, Kelly was the one who broke the
news to me. Anyway, given that I was
completely locked into that Phish show from last week, I am especially excited
that Trey is playing lead for these shows.
I
found a note on my desk this morning, which, I believe I made when I was at
Bates for the family weekend in October.
The note, transcribed says: “Collision Zone & The Open. Auseinandersetzung. Heraclitus frag. 53. ‘When confrontation
concerns the originary mode of unconcealment the stress falls on its role of
preserving, gathering, unifying.’
Finding this note, which resonates powerfully with the seminar from this
past Thursday and my ongoing interest in non-violent conflict, prompted me to
retrieve the commentary from 10/12/14, the day I wrote the note:
The prompt
for today is a book I pulled off the shelf in the Bates library yesterday, when
I went in for some reading time while my daughter took a siesta before Parents
Weekend dinner. I only had time to get
into the first of the two, and Lin Ma’s Heidegger
on East/West Dialogue generated lots to think about, and is easily the most
carefully composed and thoughtful book I’ve read on Heidegger I’ve encountered
outside of Schürmann’s. In the short
time I had with this book I took up the chapter that focused on Auseinandersetzung, which means both
‘confrontation’, but also ‘discussion’ and ‘engagement’. Auseinandersetzung
is crucial to my project for two reasons: because it has everything to do with originary thinking, and, in that regard,
helps me to think further the ‘collision zone’ where the work of LAPE is
arising. The forward thinking that
happens with the movement into the ‘other beginning’ is prepared by Auseinandersetzung with the ‘first
beginning’ happening with the ancients, specifically Heraclitus, who has been
the subject of my attention, among others.
Another beginning by way of a critical engagement, a confrontation with
the first beginning by what of ‘force’ [Gewalt], the force of reading, the
exegetical force that unveils what has be left ‘unsaid’ by the first
thinkers. Auseinandersetzung denotes too the exegetical ‘discussion’ with
what is remains unsaid. Close listening
enables us to hear the unsaid, and our disclosure of it is precisely what
prepares the new beginning of a ‘future thinking.’
With Auseinandersetzung we un-bind ourselves
from the fatalistic hold of a present that seeks to ‘freeze’ us. “To ‘un-bind’ is to place in the condition of
the essential swaying of freedom.”(10/11/04 BL
235) The confrontation with the
present is not a direct assault, but an insurgency: the gathering of the learning community as a
counter-cultural force. The learning
community arises within, or in, the dominant culture and surges toward the
future. The learning community is the
unconcealment of the new beginning and future thinking. [‘Insurgency’ comes to us via French and
earlier from the Latin insurgent –
‘arising’ from the verb insurgere,
from in – ‘into, toward,’ + surgere ‘to rise’]. The insurgency is the rising (surging) of ta panta (the many): “the un-binding
encompasses beings and invests them equally with distinction, thereby
recognizing the novelty of
each.”(10/12/04 BL 236)
Auseinandersetzung is amongst the top 10 categories of thinking that I will
return to during my sabbatical.
On
1/17/05 the description of the learning event speaks of facilitation rather
than confrontation. The Open remains the
place where this learning takes place.
The mediation describes learning as getting underway through the teacher, who is the
‘threshold scholar’ insofar as the learning community moves into the Open
through teacher. The teacher “dwells in
the ‘embodying attunement’ that ‘lays open’…the teacher’s conduct releases the
student…by turning the student toward the Open…toward the originality invested
upon the be-ing of human…toward the emptiness that resides in/with the Open.”(BL 349-350)
The
place of learning, the Open, is an existential topos. It is the place of fecund Silence, the silence of the
place where I am dwelling in at this moment, no music streaming, just the silence of
this especially cold morning in Portland.
Like this morning, where everything seems frozen, stilled by the cold,
the Open is a place where chronological time slows to the point of almost
stopping. Perhaps this is why thinking
is often described as stillness?
Silence and stillness seem to be a pair, a couple, existing together.
The
teacher enacts the silence and stillness of the Open. She conveys the open. This is the heart of the pedagogy of gelassenheit, of the letting-be of
learning. But the silence of the teacher
is fecund, and the fecundity of the silence is conveyed by an invocation, a
calling (vocare) made in via
questioning, “with the evocative invocation of the questions that draw into and
toward the emptiness that resides in/with the Open. The welcoming embrace of the teacher’s
silence, her steadfast openness and reading to en-act compassionate, close
listening conveys the presencing” of becoming. (BL 350)
Teaching
is an art, a performance art, and one that makes learning via evocative
questioning and compassionate listening.
This is how philosophical
learning happens, how we take up thinking
as an educational project. Of course,
there are a multitude of forms of learning.
That fact is acknowledged. My
project (as announced in p. 1 of Being
and Learning) is limited to “an account of teaching as the art of turning on
the desire to behold Being.”(BL
1) This is what I call the education of
philosophy, which is described by a phenomenology that arises as a form of
philosophy of education. In sum, there
are many forms of learning; the education offered by philosophy is but one of
these. Further, there are many ways
philosophy educates; and this has been disclosed in the complex history of
philosophy. Within that history is a
tradition that stretches back to antiquity, the crossroads where East and West
meet. There we encounter Heraclitus, and
the beginning of a tradition that engages in what Aristotle would three
generations later categorize as first philosophy. With Heraclitus we encounter the beginning
of working out of a phenomenology that describes the learning happening via the
reception of Logos, an education via
meditative thinking, via contemplation of Being that gathers one into
becoming. There are many forms of
learning; and there are many ways philosophy educates. The account offered here is a description of
one that is happening when we attempt to listen to Logos, which is to say, an original phenomenology: an account of the presencing of Logos.
The
preceding was prompted by the writing from 1/17/05, which returns to the
project's point of departure. A play on
Aristotle’s category expresses the point of departure as First Questions. In other words, First Philosophy educates via
First Questions. And what is learned is
originary thinking, which has nothing to
do with the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ and everything to do with the
undertaking of a technē
and a praxis.
This
technē and
a praxis is mimetic: it is the
artwork that (re)presents Logos. What is re-presentation? The re-turn of presencing via human hands and
voices (breathing).
First
Philosophy educates through the teacher who calls “with the First Questions
that assign the student the fundamental question of be-ing.” (BL 350)
The education offered by First Philosophy is the one that assigns
existential learning. It may be the most
fundamental form of education, but it remains one of many. Most fundamental because it is the most
inclusive. Hence the one who teaches
First Philosophy moves in the Open, or what is most inclusive. To move in the Open is to enact what is most
inclusive. Anazaldua (who we will be
taking up in the upcoming third and final week of the intensive January
graduate seminar) describes this inclusivity as a radical toleration. I concur, but would use the category of
affirmation, which I take to be what is radical about gelassenheit. It is not
simply a letting-be in a passive manner, but an affirmation and an authoritative
directing. “The inclusivity of the teacher draws the student towards the
originary question of Being, what Heidegger calls the ‘grounding question.’ Her encompassing openness turns the student
toward the attunement to Being….To encompass
is to ‘envelop, enwrap, to bring within’ but also to ‘bring to completion,
fruition, or perfection, to accomplish.’”(BL
350)
See http://duartebeinglearningsentences.blogspot.com/ post 3.1.15 Originary Thinking:
ReplyDeleteFeaturing the Sentence:
3.1.15.a Nοῦς (intuition) is the faculty of originary thinking.