Yesterday I shared this pic of one of the originary huacaslogical locations with all PES Memphis authors, respondents, and chair
Thinking/writing on the early train ride to Penn with JRAD show
from last Saturday, the one Pepe and I caught at the State Theater in
Portland. Totally exceeded my
expectations, as did the quality of the bootleg, which I downloaded
yesterday. Both the original show and
its documentation are sublime!
First things first, I
want to share some Sentences that Rocha shared with me the other day, distilled
from the ontological side of the Ontology side of the pair he is working with:
1.
Ontology
is the question of things.
2.
Desire
is some-thing.
3.
We
are some-things.
4.
The
world is a thing.
5.
We
desire to exist in the world as persons.
6.
A
person is the particular some-thing I want to be.
7.
To
be a person, I need energy; I need life.
Sharing Rocha’s
Sentences on day 365 of 2.0 is significant for any number of reasons, but the
most important one being that it confirms the movement of the Spirit via κονονια, and the gathering of the learning community. Rocha tells me that a
few years back he wrote the Sentences, but let them remain in the archives,
removing them, he did, from his dissertation that will be published this year
in revised form. I am encouraged that I
am not alone in the writing of Sentences. And, this emboldens me as I head
across the Hudson and then the East River this morning where I will meet with
my undergrads who have been charged with turning the questions they prepared
for class on Tuesday into a Thesis and
then writing five Sentences. This is
all new to them, and to me, but it is all part of enacting the project of
originary thinking, in earnest, and thus in the most dedicated way since the
project was announced ten years ago, and then again in 2011. My intention is to change the whole
structure of the course now that it is underway, so that we will toss out much
if not all of the syllabus and focus not on
‘ideas’ and thus ‘content’ of a selected number of writing, but on the
writing and thus the forms of philosophy, working under the assumption that it
is not apathetic reading alone, but mimetic copying of the master pieces,
writings of the sages, that offers us the introduction to philosophy, or
rather, that is the way first philosophy is first learned. So I will have them ‘copy’ the writings of
Heraclitus (perhaps along with John), Parmenides, Lao Tzu, Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine (perhaps), Lombard or Abelard, Aquinas, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
DuBois, Heidegger, Irigaray, Anzaldua (perhaps). That’s a plan, anyway, hatched before 7am on
this morning, as we arrive into Newark station. [This is a preliminary list.]
While I undertake this
experiment I will keep in mind the distinction that I recollected yesterday when
I retrieved some excerpts on Life, such is as the following:
“To learn is to be with Being, to emerge as a created be-ing. To
learn is to dwell as artwork, to abide existentially (in/with Life) as
creation.”(BL 328, emphasis placed on
12/28/14) Less mimetic imitation, more originary
mediation.”(12/29/14)
What the aforementioned
experiment has to keep close at hand is that in an introduction course such as
the one I am running this semester, the full force of the existential question
is not yet felt, and it can’t be, not because it is not always already present
(it is), but because they are not yet, as an emerging learning community, ready
to feel the full force of that question.
First they must become acquainted indirectly with the ways that question
has been mediated, and here I am only limiting myself to that mostly prosaic
writing that, for me, marks a significant tradition in the tradition of writing
what understand to be first philosophy.
Within the context of an introductory course one cannot presume the
students are prepared to cross the threshold and move into the Open. Indeed, one must presume the contrary, that
one must begin by welcoming them into
the threshold, and in the place in-between the ‘ordinary’ and ‘extra-ordinary’
(εκ στατικ) one prepares them
to move across that threshold. Put
differently, one must first introduce them to the proverbial School of Athens
and in that extended
moment show them the great portal through which they will, perhaps, if they
answer the call, be moved.
As the train emerges
from the East River tunnel, its rocking and rolling reminds me that, in
essence, most if not all of what I describe in Being and Learning is an account of one [me] who was already moving
in the Open before arriving to the
‘formal’ study of philosophy in my last year of school in Summit and then up at
Rose Hill. Perhaps there are one or two
or even a trio of students in my current undergraduate seminar that are already
well along their way in the Open. But as a group, we are not yet
there. And that is the key. This past fall semester my group certainly
moved from the School through the Threshold and into the Open, and, this, in
large part, because the group was comprised of upperclass students, who also
happened to be advanced in their study of music. That, in the end, students were submitting
original performances of music as their final projects was a testament to the
movement we had made. But no group begins in the Open. Again, a tension if not outright
contradiction is happening here, because I have am consistently describing what
can only be named in Kantian language the a prior conditions for the
possibility of learning. So in what
sense is it the case that ‘no group begins
in the Open’? Of course, we are always
already in becoming, but, as I
announced in the first line of Being and
Learning, the project of teaching via originary thinking is one of taking
up the challenge (re)turning students to thinking
the moving ground they are always already on. I have described this moving ground as the Collision
Zone:
“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)
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.’
(10/12/14)
La Fenomenología
del Originario is
first and a project initiated by a
rigorous recalling of the existential condition arising from the collision
zone, and so we can call it a project of re-membering; hence a project of
gathering legein by describing via logos
(saying). (12/10/14)
The Orcha is the movement in/with becoming that should not be mistaken as a
utopian gesture. The Orcha is a movement as struggle, made
via confrontation Auseinandersetzung. [recall from 10/12/14: Auseinandersetzung, which means both ‘confrontation’, but also ‘discussion’
and ‘engagement’. Auseinandersetzung has everything
to do with originary thinking …the ‘collision zone’...] (1/18/15)
….
it is the ontological ground, described by Heidegger as always shifting – and
for this reason I described the Open (the place of thinking) as a collision zone -- that is the source of the danger. The one who enters into that place, i.e., the
learner, is subjected to the force of actualization; the power of the ceaseless
Becoming of Being. (1/4/15)
It is one this to be on
the moving ground, and another to be moved
by that moving ground. Learning, as I am
describing it, happens when we are moved
by the moving ground, and we respond to that movement, express it, imitate
it. And this morning, as I project the
movement of this project into my current semester of teaching, I am recognizing
that at the beginning with my beginning students -- [--“It is the time of returning…” ‘The
Eleven’ as performed by JRAD, 2/7/15--]
-- when our work is happening at the most fundamental level of slowly
building a learning community, which is to say, at the moment of receiving the
Spirit that is gathering us together, we are abiding in the School, preparing
ourselves to move through the threshold and into the Open…should that
happen. But, for now, we can only receive,
be gathered and prepare.
The writing on 2/12/05,
which is intensely attuned to the imminent conclusion of the experiment, begins
by acknowledging the final steps.
[--now in the studio
recording the DZ for March, started off with the JRAD from the State, and now
3.23.92 from The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan--]
Gloria! G-L-O-R-I-A!
[--I’m going to confess
that I’m feeling an unbelievable amount of energy that’s challenging my ability
to focus at the task at hand. I liken
the completion of 2.0 as the completion of a mountain hike, and I’m certain I
reached the summit in October with the commentaries that were inspired by
Heraclitus, Paul and κονονια.
And the pre-peak experience happened in July with the writing inspired
by Thoreau. That would make for a 4
month descent, which included some stops along the way, especially in December,
to marvel at the vista afforded from the heights--]
The opening line of
2/12/05 announces the penultimate meditation as organized around the
description of the “modality of the philosopher of education….as the modality
of one who has taken up an affirmative positionality, receiving and being
carried away by the excessive, the creative counter-saying that arrives as the
birth of the new…”(BL 388)
When I apply the
distilling process to this opening line
I arrive at the fragment
*the
philosopher of education has taken up an affirmative positionality…
Or
*a
philosophical educator undertakes the work of affirmation…
The crux of the matter
is the ‘affirmative,’ the positive saying Yes!
that stands in contrast, not to the determinate negation, which is still making
via negative, but, rather in contrast to ressentiment, those suppressed
feelings of envy and hatred that Nietzsche documented so well. My sage, the one who answers and conveys the
call of thinking, is enlivened, and the one who says Yes! Sí se puede! Before
moving on to distill Sentences from 2/12/05 I want re-collect some moments
where the affirmative and affirmation are highlighted:
“Now I shall related the history of my Zarathustra. The
fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is
at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand
feet beyond man and time’.”(Nietzsche cited in Schürmann, and on 1/12/15 and
many times before, especially in July)
“I…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.” 1/17/15
2…the
compassionate affirmation…this ‘yes’
that confirms the natality of the student, which recognizes her originality as
a be-ing in the process of becoming, her learning as a creation, an artwork in progress, arises from and [moves in]
the space cleared by negation; the diminishment of the teacher, the destruction
that preserves freedom…(BL 352)
(1/19/15)
“Poiein, c’est faire,” poiein means to make. More poetry, less prose. Affirmation
of complexity, difference, plurality.
We celebrate, we feast, we write, we read. (from my response to Rocha’s PES 2012 paper,
cited on 1/22/15)
2.
Teaching
initiates this initiative by offering
the gesture through the sharing of the primordial intuition: the affirmation of
Life with the saying if Yes! (2/6/15)
The saying of Yes! is the enactment of the
affirmation, specifically the affirmation of Life that discloses the τεκνε and πραχις π of learning as making, or what I have described as the
working-out of the fundamental existential question. Affirmation is not ‘recognition of’ but
enactment of the possibility offered in the existential question, which is to
say, the actualization of freedom.
Hence, learning is the poetical actuality of Being.
1.
Affirmation,
the saying of Yes!, is the singing
happening with music-making philosophy; the actualization of existence (Being)
as song (becoming).
Recall: the commentary from 1/31/14 that recalls the commentary from
11/4/14, that itself recalls:
“On 10/17/14 while in Memphis I wrote on the fragment:
Rilke’s aphorism/fragment “Song is existence.”
Song is existence! The mimetic
making, a copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music
making. Music is existence, the
existence of human legein the saying
that imitates the flow
ῥεῖ (rhei) of Logos.”
2. Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being, the realization of becoming through music.
[of
course that Sentence is written as I
write this in the last DZ to be recorded during 2.0!]
Retrieved
later on the LIRR to Jamaica Station, the original articulation of the key
excerpt in the PES Memphis CFP: “In
this sense, when we retrieve ‘music’ as μουσική
(mousike), we find ourselves taking
up the education of the soul, or, perhaps, a soulful education, which better
captures the way this education unfolds.
Indeed, the prospective move toward another, futural understanding of
‘musical education’ will both retrieve the ancient intention to educate the
soul, and announce the arrival of soulful education. “
Here
are some Sentences from 2/12/05, distilled during the playing of “Estimated
Prophet” from 3/27/89, The Omni, Atlanta, GA.
[--nb: “Estimated Prophet” has
been declared the ‘theme song’ of 2.0!--]
2.12.15.a. “The affirmative positionality is…releasement, liberation…attunement to
freedom…the ek-static beyond.”
2.12.15.b. “The affirmative ‘Sí, se puede!’ calls forth
the improvisational riff of the poetic saying by (re)turning the learner to
learning; constantly en-joining…the contra-diction
into the Open.”
I
want to conclude this commentary by reflecting on the call to thinking, and the
signs that direct us, which is to say, the pointing offered by the sage, the
teacher of first philosophy who is mediating their primordial intuition into
the ‘sympathy for life itself,’ through their compassionate listening that
generates the force of questioning.
Where might we encounter such signs, both those that are offered via
visual cues as well as those that we hear and thus receive sonically, not
through the more obvious sounds of music…but, rather, through the less
obvious? How might we hear and see such
signs that are pointing us to thinking?
Of course, so much of what I have written in Being and Learning, and returned to in 2.0 has to do with
listening, with the compassionate listening that places us in the ready, so
that we are anticipating those signs.
But I am closing this by raising a question that isn’t necessarily taken
up by all that has been written about listening, preparation and
anticipation. Or, perhaps I’m wondering
about something that is less about the signs that point to thinking, as I’m
wondering about signs that remind us,
that re-collect us to thinking, that slow us down and help us to move into the τοπος (time and space,
place) of thinking? Here, I find
myself, appropriately it seems, returning to what my New School prof and MA
Thesis advisor Agnes Heller described as the philosophy of everyday life. Perhaps, this is the ‘life’ that is affirmed
in the life-affirming Yes!, this
movement into the streets. But that
returns me to Memphis, to the Pentecostal event, and to street philosophy,
which I described on several occasions as Σοκρατες
φιλοσοφια εν αγορα
(Socrates agora philosophy). This philosophy of everyday life is the work
of the ‘practical’ philosophy, the one carrying out the project of πραχις και τεκνε. In turn, from the peak
of October, I saw down to the ground, saw the expansive ground, the Open as the
street, not simply in the urban sense but in the fundamental existential place
where the human community is moving, the street as the topos of becoming. In turn,
on 10/20/14, in Memphis, I described the
“‘practical philosopher’ who experiments with poetic
projects, making and remaking, repairing and renewing the world, as Arendt puts
it. The philosopher of education is the
latter, and, for this reason, is one who takes up what Sam Rocha calls ‘folk
phenomenology’, especially when we think that project as one that re-turns to
the historico-cultural ground of el
pueblo, what I have been describing these past few days as ‘the street’.”
But here, at the
penultimate moment, perhaps the most productive of all the productive
dialectical oppositions is revealing itself: the apparent opposition between
first philosophy and practical philosophy.
[nb: first philosophy is not metaphysics, which is always caught
in the problematizing, which is to say with those ‘problems’ of philosophy that
have frozen questioning and thereby petrified thinking. With metaphysics we find ourselves caught in
the stasis (standing, stoppage) and have to break through to the ek-static time
and place of thinking. But is that topos really everyday life, the street?
It’s hard for me to deny the possibility of doing the work in the street, after all most of the writing I’ve done in 2.0 has
happened on trains, buses, planes, cafes, waiting rooms, platforms,
airports. But to do the work on the street (or on the rails) is not
the same as doing the work in the
street, and still different from taking up a work that is of the street.] So there’s
the dialectic between first and practical philosophy, one that sense is
resolved, indeed, syncretized although not necessarily synthesized by the
poetic, which compels originary thinking to be techne, an expression, a
making. And the signs that point us
toward that work are, for better or worse,
omnipresent, but the ubiquity of those signs and sounds that point us to
poetic making do not diminish the actuality of the force that is drawing us to
the working out of humanity. Indeed, to
paraphrase Anselm: the gathering Spirit
is the force that no greater can be felt.
This does not resolve the question concerning the unexpected yet obvious
signs, but at the very least returns us to the radicality of the given
(presencing in everyday life) as making an offering in the sense of pointing to
us to thinking. And this is not just a
matter of recognizing the art work in the subways, but, rather the humanity in
our fellow travellers, not to mention the unintended art work that jumps out
from the place of hiding and apprehends out attention, like this sign I encountered as I was walking through the worker's hallway that connects NJT to LIRR in Penn Station:
[The last paragraph was completed in the last stages of my return to JFK: LIRR>Air Train>now at Piquillo Restaurant. The Anselm sentence was started on the LIRR and completed here at Terminal 5, and in the interim I have to confess to feeling an uncanny sense of solidarity with the thousands who are moving through these places of transit. Perhaps this is the 'final' take away for 2.0. Perhaps it is κοινονια that is that ontological force, which no greater can be felt?]
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