These pages in the
original manuscript where are amongst the most heavily notated. On the top of p. 590, the page where the
mediations from 2/1 & 2/2/05 overlap, I wrote the note “learning as a
company; conducted by the teacher.” I sense that is the only time I used that
category, which doesn’t work well a way of describing the music-making art work
of the learning community.
In the margins on p.
590, I wrote “mystic?” next to the line that was included yesterday in Sentence
8: “the teacher resides in the dwelling
that receives what arrives from beyond…”
In yesterday’s commentary I described a distinction between
contemplation and beholding, and suggested that contemplation was unique and
rare, and akin to the mystical experience. I wanted to also make the
distinction by emphasizing that ‘beholding’ is a directed action, and in this
sense, it emerges from a pedagogical relationship, and falls within the event
of learning. Again, to use Heidegger’s
language, the teacher points and this gesture indicates the direction:
behold. When I revisit these field notes
I would want to explore this pointing further as the moment when the students
are gathering into the learning community.
This moment is significant and demands to taken up in more detail. First and foremost one has to avoid thinking
this pointing as indicating a ‘thing’ to be held, although the work does entail
‘taking up.’ And thinking through this
would allow me to pivot back toward the movement of the force of the poetic via
the poetical. If Learning is the
poetical actuality of Being, then learning is placed under the force of
becoming. Beholding offers an
alternative way to describe the subjectifying force of poetical actuality. Beholding is thus the experience of ‘being
held,’ which is close to the phenomenological category of apprehension, where
perception is described as being held or the modality of being apprehended.
[Here I am reminded of Schürmann assertion that sound and the sonic
demonstrates the phenomenological
breakdown of the subject/object dichotomy more powerfully than the visual.] Further, when the teacher points out via
evocative questioning, which is described in the first Sentence from 2/2/05:
1.
“Teaching
is the art of delivery practiced by those who constantly question…”(BL 369)
[nb: the preceding Sentence
is paired with the following quotation from Heidegger: “[those who] are
suffused with what is coming (what is futural) and sacrifice themselves to it
as a future invisible ground. They are
the inabiding ones who ceaselessly expose themselves to
questioning.”{Heidegger’s Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning)} I
want to note here the need to return to think further about what is entailed
with this ‘sacrifice,’ and to listen more closely to the messianic tone of the
preceding, resonating with categories
‘future invisible ground,’ ‘what is coming (what is futural).’ I also want to note in the preceding
citation one of the sources for my central category of ceaseless nativity. Heidegger is here indicating the temporality
of the ‘ceaseless’ that organizes a modality of action, namely, the action that
we might describe as the pathos of
questioning. More needs to be said
about the teacher’s close listening as the reception of the work of learning as
questioning.]
When the teacher is
pointing he is disclosing what he has heard, which is to say, what has
apprehended him, and in this sense he is only pointing toward what is holding
him, or what, again, in Heidegger’s lexicon, interests him. This helps me in my attempt to describe the ‘close
listening’ as the reception of questioning, which is at the same time the
mediation and return of said questioning.
IN this way the teacher is apprehended by the learner, and thus by
learning, and is pointing or gesturing from
that place of apprehension: behold, we are held together, we are a community of
learning. Here, then, is where the
teacher discloses the actualization of his capability to be taught, which is to
say, his readiness to be with others in learning. I want to describe the gesture of pointing as
indicating the call to teach, which is always the call to learn, as indicated
in Sentence 5 yesterday:
“Thus “Heidegger says, ‘the teacher must be
capable of being more teachable than the apprentices…’.”(BL 368)
It
is one thing to talk about ‘teachability’ and another to describe the moment
when this capability of being teachable is actualized. For me, the event learning is about the
movement from potency to act, and perhaps even from act to actuality. Here I am recalling Arendt’s description of
thinking as ‘sheer activity.’ In turn,
when Heidegger says the teacher must be capable, he is only indicating the
readiness for learning. But when I am
describing teaching I am indicating the actualization of the learning that the
teaching is ready and waiting for. The
teacher receives the call to learning, which she has been ready and waiting
for; all preparatory work demands readiness, which is described on 2/2/05 in
the following Sentences:
1.
“To
practice this art demands that the teacher’s basic attitude is that of
steadfast openness.”(BL 369)
2.
“She
must, first and foremost, (re)present the openness of the Open, and remain in
the modality of receptivity.”(BL 369)
3.
“The
be-ing [modality] of the teacher (re)presents…emptiness, the mysterious ground
that preserves possibility and is ready to receive anything and everything that
will appear with creative production.”(BL
369)
Sentence
3 indicates the teacher’s capacity for teachable as grounded in a modality that
not unlike the mestizo consciousness
described by Anzaldua, which I discussed in the commentary from 1/21/15:
“…Anzaldua’s description of mestizo
consciousness as the thinking capable of ‘developing a tolerance for
contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity….She learns to juggle cultures.
She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode –
nothing is thrust out, the good the bad the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing
abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns ambivalence
into something else.’ The positive negation occurring with
the dialectic of denouncement and disclosure happens in the act of teaching
that can sustain contradictions, and turn
ambivalence into something else.
This act of turning ambivalence into ‘something else’ is precisely what
is happening with the praxis and technē of phenomenological learning,
process education. But none of this gets underway if the teacher has not
wholeheartedly committed himself to the project of originary thinking, to first
philosophy, if he has not be taken by the leap of faith, where the empowering No! reveals the empowering Yes!: Sí se puede!”
Turning
the page, to p. 591, and I encounter four notable notations on the margins of
the page, which offer us examples of Fragments, as distinct from Sentences:
“Teacher
as the Preserve.”
“Latin
– Educere (‘lead out’ from –
variation of ex ‘out’ + ‘ducere’ to lead)”
“Educere – bring out or develop
(something latent or potential)”
*these note were made in the margins alongside
the important Sentences that describes the phenomenological quality of the art work
of learning:
1.
“Production
happens on both sides of this dialogic event, so that we describe the happening
[event] of learning as poetic, the
‘process of bringing forth.’”(BL 370)
2.
“And thus the performance of learning is
poetic in that it is brought forth in the non-causal, co-arising of these
moments.”(BL 370)
Here
is it important to note the breaking of the teleological happens because
learning moves within the temporality of the kairological where the logic of causality remains, if at all, in a
diminished and weakened state. Here is
yet another example of the collapse of the subject/object dichotomy that
happens under the force of becoming, the actualization of Being via the
poetical that appears via the poetic:
the artist becoming the work of art.
Learning happens within a temporality, which Nietzsche described as the
Eternal Recurrence – closest approximation of Being and Becoming – where cause
and effect co-arise. One needs to think
here perhaps of the immediacy of the playing and hearing of music; hence the
live performance of music is the strongest analogy for the dialogic learning
happening with the education (the bringing forth) occurring with music-making
philosophy; that is, the bringing forth happening with education occurring
through the force of first philosophy.
Spontaneity,
which for Arendt is the crux of thinking and acting, and improvisation must be
thought through a non-causal logic. The
question of learning, “Freedom for what?”
has no meaning if the question is unable to presume the reality of spontaneity
and the improvisational it begets. This is crucial. Indeed, the whole project of originary
thinking, and all of Being and Learning,
presumes the not yet worked out ‘new logic’ (to borrow Irigaray’s
category). At the very least, on
2/2/05, I indicate the retrospective move that is demanded by the working out
of this new logic. Again, it is a case
of Heidegger’s “running ahead to the past,” where the past are the ancient
thinkers aka first philosophers, specifically (for me), Heraclitus and Lao
Tzu. On the new logic that allows us to
think the spontaneity and improvisation happening with the art work of
learning:
1.
“The
releasement of the new as the production of nativity is not ‘caused’ but
endured as the condition of Being’s twofold sway…described as the Mysterious
Agreement: the Tao (Way) of Being.”(BL 370)
2.
“This
Mysterious Agreement is…the condition of the be-ing of human as poetic, as the be-ing of bringing forth
the new, as originator, as creative.”(BL
370)
3.
To
move into the horizon of learning is thus take up the modality of “a primordial being, existing as the beginning,
as ‘one’ participating in the heterogeneous continuum, the manifold (the ‘many’).”(BL 370)
4.
“This
primordiality is the be-ing of freedom that is borne upon the being whose
be-ing is becoming, whose existence is marked by originality, uniqueness and
particularity.”(BL 370)
5.
The
primordial “is the poetic ‘nature’ of human existence.”(BL 370)
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