[beginning in my Portland
house study, early, on a lax deprived Sunday!]
We are begun.
This is the fragment,
the aphorism, that appeared in yesterday’s commentary. As I make my way towards the conclusion of
2.0, I have already identified the Sentence (something in-between the Thesis
and the Aphorism) as the form that has been worked out; the style of
philosophy, if you will, that hangs in the proverbial balance between the
poetic and the prosaic, enacting the maxim: more poetry, less prose. How so? I’ll delay that question momentarily,
in order to remind myself that the fragment qua aphorism is not yet a Sentence,
which is still less than a Thesis.
Indeed, a fragment is only designed to make the most minimal and yet
profound description of what is unfolding in
media res. And this fragment ‘We are begun’ is itself a description of becoming in media res, of the discovery of
ourselves as becoming. And so it denotes the temporality of the flight of Minerva’s owl as the time of
phenomenological meditative description, which is to say to say it is not
belated, but, rather, happening in the last hour in the time of thinking.
And so it is happening,
already, and we find ourselves in the midst of this event of Being’s
becoming.
For 2.0, I find myself at
the meditation that marks the last one published in the penultimate chapter,
that leads into the final chapter of Being
and Learning, which is less a chapter (insofar as any of the ‘chapters’
constitute chapters, and this has been discussed already in these pages, so I
won’t return to that here) and more of an afterword. Before turning to the writing from 2/8/05, I
want to say something about the Sentence as a form that hangs in the balance
between the poetic and the prosaic. How so?
First it must be said
that the Sentences are a retrieval of a long since forgotten form. Reminder that enacting the retrospective
gaze of originary thinking is the retrieval of lost or forgotten forms of
writing philosophy, and this in the strict sense of that work that more or less
falls within the tradition, dare I say canon, of philosophy. I hesitate to say
canon because it strikes me that most of what constitutes the canon of western
philosophy has itself been lost or forgotten, certainly by most of the members
of the field of philosophy of education, which, perhaps, has it’s own canon
that includes some of the material that I would place within the walls of the
reading room I am envisioning at this moment.
The Four Books of Sentences (Libri
Quattuor Sententiarum) written around 1150 by Peter Lombard is the work I
have in mind when I say ‘Sentence’. It
should be noted that Lombard wrote a work of theology, and at that time,
philosophy and theology were often syncretized, albeit philosophy could be
understood to be the ‘hand maiden’ of theology. (Today, we need such hand
maidens, or, rather, we need to envision a field that, like the learning
community itself, is a syncretized field of work.) And further, it should be noted that most of
the important scholars of the medieval period (Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and
Bonaventure) wrote commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences. At any rate, Lombard’s form, the Sentence, is a
development of the work that was already happening with the exegetical gloss,
and, without treading back into waters I moved in yesterday, we might say the
Sentence is a systematized documentation of exegetical glosses. So where is the poetic in the retrieval of
what appears to be a mostly prosaic scholarly work?
For me, the poetic
appears in the very form itself insofar as there appears with the Sentence a
minimalist aesthetic that I liken to the playing of Miles Davis, the Heraclitus
of jazz. One needs to think here that
in the time of the medieval university and monastery, and especially the
latter, the work was all bounded together in the time of thinking, which for
the monastic rule Divina arises out
of and is a dedicated expression of that cycle, and is something I will need to
return to. And before the decoupling of
the work at the university, which was once organized around the liberal arts,
there was a dedicated coherence between the fields of learning, such that the
questions concerning the good, the true, and the beautiful, were taken up
across the curriculum. With the modern
research university, fragmentation occurs, and
with the rise of applied natural science via engineering the question of
the beautiful falls away. What is
‘true’ (aka, what can be applied through engineering) is what is ‘good’. Thus, the retrieval of the Sentences is akin
to the retrieval of the illuminated manuscript, where the making of the book is
understood to be art work. In sum, when
I write Sentences I perceive the poetic, and hear the music. But, again, there is a balance achieved with
the Sentence, such that the prosaic is not displaced, but balanced by the
poetic.
I also hear the poetic
in the hermeneutical character of the Sentence.
Lombard demonstrated the Sentence as a gathering of distilled glosses,
that, a gathering of previously written exegetical readings of Scripture. Besides the obvious fact that I am not
working with Scripture, I am departing from Lombard’s method by drawing from my
own exegetical and eisegetical work, which, as I noted in my reflections after
my final exchange with Tyson, are always first and foremost, an engagement with
other exegetical and eisegetical work (Arendt, Heidegger, et al) and then my
own independent readings of the primary (Heraclitus, Plato, et al). Somewhere along the way, the primary,
secondary and even tertiary writing and the reading of this material give way
to a Sentence that is a one part interpretation (poetic, music, improvisation)
and one part description (prosaic, inferential). And so the work offered here in 2.0, and
certainly moving forward for the next year or more, as I continue to work on Being and Learning and the field notes
collected this past year, is demonstrating what happens when the glosses have
been distilled. First, the gloss, which
yields the fragment, the aphorism, and then the Sentence.
[continuing my
commentary on the LIRR; moving ahead of the latest snow storm that is coming to
Maine today through Monday. It was
either leave early, or miss yet another class on Tuesday. But now there is the possibility of joining
my Greek class tomorrow. Working along
with 12/27/82, beginning with the “Bird Song” and hearing this show with
(re)freshed ears, after last night’s Joe Russo’s Almost Dead show at the State,
which was an inspired and inspiring performance that I caught with Pepe and his
bride Cara. As Mickey Hart would say,
the music was the medicine we needed to move beyond Chicago once and for all)
The meditation from
2/8/05 reads like the beginning of the end of the process, with long sentences
that are highly compressed. This meditation is the last of the material
published in the penultimate chapter 10 “The Improvisational Art of
Teaching/Learning.” To distill Sentences from the compressed sentences from
2/8/will be a challenge. Setting the
context is helpful: this meditation is attempting to map the distinction
between the ontological and historical, and in doing so confuses, a bit, the
trajectory of the past month of commentaries, which have focused on placing the
learning happening with originary thinking as occurring via the education
happening via first philosophy. The
confuses arises with the materiality or phenomenality of the art work, and with
the emphasis placed therein. When the
emphasis is placed on the art work as process, as an enactment of becoming, the
material question is diminished, because, as the old saying goes, its about the
process and not the product, about the playing/performing. But there is this important matter of πραχις και τέχνη,
and thus the making happening with
learning that is not only mimetic (re)presentation of presencing via the sonic
flow of music-making philosophy, but the ‘recording’ or ‘documenting’ of the
live performance. There is a sense in
which the matter (no pun intended) is settled in this moment of
phenomenological writing, insofar as the recording and documenting is happening
with the meditative session as both an account and description happening within
the time and place of thinking, that is of/from the ontological, that is under
the force of an ontological writing. But
the writing on 2/8/05 pushes the issue from the onset with the introduction of
the historical: “The artwork of learning brings for the realization of the historical irruption of the same.”(BL 378)
For me the confusion
arises from the mixing of discourses, specifically, the blending of the
Hegelian and Marxist phenomenology, which is undeniably what is pushing
through, especially with the cameo appearance of Marcuse, who went unidentified
in my commentary from 2/7/15 because his category of the ‘Reality Principle’
did not figure in the distilled Sentences.
However, on 2/8/05 this category is coupled with a citation of Heidegger
and together these two help me to emphasize the phenomenality of thinking as
the actualization of becoming through thinking.
[--nb: here I must note where
the parting of the ways happens between Tyson and myself on fundamental
ontological terms, which he would concede despite his decision to ignore our categories
as inheritances that we must account for: our part happens on the matter of act
and potency. His ‘potentialism’ stands in start contrast and even dialectical
opposition to the πραχις και τέχνη of originary
thinking, which is always a matter of act, actualization, realization and the
real.--]
1.1.
Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being
1.2.
The
actuality of Being is realized poetically through learning.
1.1.
The
actuality of Being is the reality of becoming.
1.2.
The
reality of becoming actualizes Being.
1.1
Being
appears from hiding via the presencing of becoming.
1.2
The
presencing of Being occurs through learning.
‘Tell
me all that you know,
And
I’ll show you
Snow
and rain.’
[--as the NJT pulls into
Summit, where I’ll transfer for New Providence, I can’t help but be overwhelmed
by the proposal offered by the rhythm of the train: during fall sabbatical, take a long train
ride that will be long enough for a week or more of writing all day long on the
train….--]
(and now…as an enactment
of the circularity organizes originary thinking, I will distill sentences from
2/8/05 and thereby complete the first of the last full week of meditations from
the place where 2.0 set out from: 29 Sunset Drive; after walking past that spot – the cul-de-sac that
separates the Towne Deli and the New Providence train station -- only now
at this moment, has the significance
of the three names at play struck me: Summit, New Providence, Sunset, -- where some 45 years it came to me, the Eternal Recurrence in the form of
eternity/infinity)
1.1.
“The poetics of learning [is] the
creation or making of difference in
the world.” (BL 378)
1.2.
“The ‘difference’ that is made is called ‘history,’ happening with the artwork
of learning as the realization of the
originary dispensation of Being’s becoming.”(BL 378)
2.1.
The poetics of learning is disclosed through πραχις
και τέχνη
of art work.
2.2.
“This artwork signifies the movement
of learning in/with the domain of the Open.”(BL 378)
2.3. The “movement [of learning] co-responds to
the essential sway of Being’s becoming.”(BL
378-379)
[important
to note here the writing of ‘co-responding,’ which describes the dynamic
relation between Being and learning, and is a deliberative displacement of the
so-called ‘correspondence theory of truth.’ Indeed, ‘correspondence’ is
displaced further by the play on ‘co-responding’ as happening via the maieutic and hermeneutic]
1.4.1.
“Learning
co-responds to Being, remaining in/with the sway of becoming…the en-living
reception of Being that is delivered by the correspondent, the ‘one who sends
news.’”(BL 379)
1.4.2.
“As
practicioner of the art of delivery (maieutic)
the teacher is the messenger who delivers the new(s)”(BL 379)
1.4.3.
Teaching is the maieutic art of bring forth the new (natality) into the world
via hermeneutics
(evocative questioning).
1.4.4.
There
is strenuous labor involved in the bringing forth of the new.
1.4.5.
The
teacher is capable of such work because he has worked out (rehearsed) in the reflective
time of meditative thinking the phenomenological readiness for the reception of
the new; as Heidegger has put it “the fundamental phenomenological stance is
not routine – it cannot be mechanically acquired, which would make
phenomenology a farce; it is nothing readily at hand, but must be slowly and strenuously
acquired.”(BL 379)
A beautiful and most apropos belated birthday gift from Nasim Naroozi:
A beautiful and most apropos belated birthday gift from Nasim Naroozi:
No comments:
Post a Comment