OPM 332(333), January 20th (2015) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 353-354

Writing/Thinking in the stream of

https://archive.org/details/gd1979-01-20.nak700.moore.miller.19413.sbeok.shnf

[repeating “Estimated Prophet.”  I'll be working in the hour or less allotted me here at the UNE library before moving on to the jetport, first part of my trip down to Hofstra.  Today will be one of those days of ‘writing’ on the move.]

I have been focusing on becoming for the past three weeks, or since the beginning of this January session of teaching two sections of a graduate seminar on what I describes as “Thinking Differently & Thinking Difference” (a philosophical approach to multicultural education).  Much of the writing from this last month of the original experiment is making a reduction to becoming; that is a reduction of the relation of Being and learning to becoming.  The flow of Being as disclosed to us appears as becoming, and learning entails stepping into the flux of this dynamic movement, re-presenting it through the artistic work I am calling (after Socrates and Nietzsche) ‘music-making’ philosophy.  And it so happens, and by no means coincidentally, that the seminar I am conducting is organized around becoming, which is to say that the educational project of thinking differently and thinking difference is the one that is taking up the praxis of becoming.   Two years ago when I designed this course I called this praxis ‘the technology of difference.’   At the time I hadn’t yet made the move that I have since made in B&L 2.0, which identifies education, teaching and learning as technē.  Technē is embedded in all descriptions of learning that highlight it as a productive activity, and so to describe multicultural education as the deployment of the technology of difference, is to describe it as the thinking that actualizes difference, or what through this 2.0 I now write as diff’rence.   How is diff’rence made?  How is diff’rence actualizes into the world?  These are the fundamental questions that are taking up by the technology of difference.   Exploring these questions in our final seminar meetings this week will reveal the necessity of moving into what Fanon calls the “zone of occult instability,” which is translated by Homi Bhabha as the Third Space.   We will also take up Anzaldua’s borderland and what she calls ‘mestiza consciousness’.    

 If learning is happening when our thinking is attuned to Being’s becoming, and when we are enacting becoming, then education is a process, and only a process philosophy can reveal its truth, its reality.   Bracketing Whitehead, I want to describe this project as a demonstration of process philosophy, with the ‘process’ always denoting a kind of dynamic tension between the prosaic and poetic, the true and the beautiful, presencing and representation.   The process is becoming, and the process philosophy is the work that thinks becoming.   And only a music-making dialogic praxis is capable of actualizing such thinking; for what other art work is revelatory?   It seems to me that sound only is capable of revealing the dynamic flow of becoming, and music is above all else capable of expressing the human flourishing that is occurring when we are enacting becoming.   If philosophy must strive for the articulation of a universal language, and it must to do this – such is the burden of philosophy, and anything else must move in the practice of theory, which does not bear the burden of expressing the universal, and is content to move in the particularities of the petit recits – then a process philosophy of education must work out a universal language that is capable of articulating the enactment of the dynamic flow of becoming.   Descriptions that show examples of such enactment are crucial, but not sufficient, and this project is attempting to work out a phenomenology of a universal occurrence.  Can phenomenology do this?  Yes, if the ‘thing itself’ is not a ‘thing’ in the reified sense of ‘things,’ but a ‘happening,’ an ‘event’, a process.  

On 1/20/05 the meditation picks up on the preceding’s day exploration of Nietzsche’ ‘empowering no,’ reiterating that the teacher’s diminishment into listening – in effect, a return to the original modality of learning – reveals the Open, and thereby indicates the path of learning.  The empowering no happens by way of “the negation unfolding with the silencing of authority, the diminishment of judgment…the ‘empowering no’ that affirms the becoming of the student as the embodiment of the Eternal Imagination…an ‘em-powerment’ that lets be the power or creative force of the student.  To ‘empower’ is to delegate, authorize and commission.  When teacher ‘empowers’ the student with her close, compassionate listening, she (re)collects the learner to the originary dispensation [ceaseless nativity], to the originality bourne upon the student by Being.”(BL 353)

What jumps out and apphrehends me from 1/20/05 is the identification of  the ‘creative force’ of learning.  This category appears for the first time on 1/20/05, but has been thought since the first moments of the project; this ‘creative force’ has been felt already with the articulation of the first question concerning the turning around of the student to the contemplation of Being.  When, in the Introduction, the project gets underway with the announcement that what will be offered is an account of teaching as the art of turning on the desire of the student to contemplate Being, the announcement is already moved by the force that calls us into learning.  The proclaimed intention of the project is make an account of the movement of the force that calls us into learning, and thus moves through the first learner (the teacher) and gathers together the learning community.  The technē of learning begins in the original reception of the call that moves us, a call that is received the creative force of Being’s becoming.  “The creative force of learning is thus transmitted over as a delegation of authority, of power.”(BL 353)

The meditation on 1/20/05 reminds us that the empowering no is the first act of the will to power happening beyond the moment of self-overcoming.  Put otherwise, it marks the end (telos) of the self, the moment of negation or the first step onto the via negativa.  Lao Tzu calls this moment ‘diminishment,’ and Heidegger ‘denunciation’.   I have emphasized an occasion of the pedagogy of gelassenheit, when letting-be of learning is underway post-effacement with Being, with the originary and the encounter with ceaseless nativity that turns the artist into artwork.  In sum, the learning process, which is organized by a still not yet named nor fully described dialectical logic,  begins or is initiated by negation. “The destruction, or negation, of the juridical empowers creation, the be-ing of human as ‘something creative’…”(BL 354)  Negation is first and foremost a movement into fecund Silence via listening; originary listening emerges from the silenced juridical voice that is at the same time expressed through that voice’s other, the voice of questioning.   The fecundity of fecund Silence is expressed through questioning, and denotes originary listening as active, and as initiating.  This is why it is properly originary: it is both at the beginning (put underway) and begins (puts underway). “…the teacher let’s be the be-ing of becoming  (re)presented by the learner’s learning….the learner abides (de)construccion [under construction, an art work in process] of/from the creative force unleashed by the with-holding silence, the diminishment of the teacher who (re)presents the ‘essence of Being’s nullity’….the teacher’s  diminishment is an un-binding of the ‘ego’ from ‘self’…by the essential swaying of freedom that moves as a ‘force’ to spare or preserve the novelty of be-ing…and brings to ‘completion’ [actualizes, realizes] the process of becoming as a (re)collection of the becoming of Being….”(BL 354)