OPM 241(42), October 13th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 237-238

Yesterday’s commentary ended with the assertion: the adventure of learning is the advent of the learning community. 

Today I was wondering about the sabbatical application I have to submit in ten days…ten very short days.   My challenge is that I tend to work on very large canvases (question areas) that are filled with lots of details that aren’t always unified.  This blog is the best example, so too Being and Learning and the meditations being revisited here in this blog.   But if I were forced to narrow down, yes, narrow down a project that I would like to focus on exclusively when I am not teaching next Fall or Spring (I haven’t made that decision yet), I imagine it would be the learning community.  The learning community seems to be the philosophical category and phenomenological reality that brings together the paper I completed a year ago “Learning by Jamming”   [that I requires one more set of corrections before being published], the LAPES project (more or less), Being and Learning, and most of what has been the focus of my attention leading up to and coming out of the Heraclitus lecture.  The discovery of koinonia seems to represent an important turning point for me this semester with respect to the ongoing work on the learning community.  And the lecture itself, with its emphasis on the ‘educational’ question…definitely a turning point with respect to identifying myself as a philosopher of education.   So there it is!   Koinonia: the Learning Community in the Studio of Education.   And, for the first time, I’m going to apply for a teaching sabbatical aka I’m going to organize a new course, which I will run, first, as an HUHC seminar in Spring or Fall 2016, use as the basis of my Intro to Philosophy of Ed courses, and, perhaps, teach it at TC sometime in the 2016-17 academic year.   First things first, the writing of the proposal.  Then the semester planning the course, which could include preliminary supplementary ‘notes’.  Finally, the teaching of the course and the expansion of the supplementary notes into something that would be a small book, which would, in turn, become a ‘textbook’ for the coursework moving forward…

For now, today, I re-call a moment from yesterday’s commentary that, it seems, underlined the necessity of organizing the work going further around the work of the learning community, koinonia:

“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.”  

The meditation from this day ten years ago (BL 237-238) begins with the poetic fragment that appears in Heidegger’s “Conversation Along A Country Path.” [If the question taken up in the course of study on the learning community is “What is the distinct koinonia of [X] learning community?” then variable [X] in the question would be examples from philosophical (literary?) texts such as Heidegger’s “Conversation Along A Country Path.”  [‘literary?’ denotes the question concerning the selection of texts.  For example, when asking the koinonia question of Heidegger one could use an imagined learning community, such as the one gathered together in the conversation, or one could use the historical learning community, such as the students he was teaching and addressing in “What is Called Thinking?” or the Heraclitus seminar, or even the Four Seminars from 1966.  I suppose the matter will be resolved by the content of what is said in the selected pieces, although I can see already that I am engaged in those key decisions that will determine the direction of the work.] 

The poetic fragment is ‘In-dwelling’, and begins: “In-dwelling, never one truth alone.”  It is poetic but utterly practical, that is, pointing to the practice of meditative thinking and the posture of phenomenological reception.   “To receive intact, the coming forth of truth’s nature, in return for boundless steadfastness.”  The practice of ‘boundless steadfastness’ is the practice of close listening; reception happening with the letting-be of things ‘coming forth’.  And, suddenly, the return of the “thinking heart”, which was the focus of this blog’s attention in July [cf. OPM 154, July 18^th, ‘heart to heart conversation’], with the turning from the mind to the heart.  To receive the coming forth “Imbed the thinking heart in the humble patience of unique high-minded and noble memories.” The ‘thinking heart’!!! 

The meditation (BL 238) picks up the previous day’s  “investiture” of “each being’ with Being’s vestige.”(BL 236)  And, ultimately, it will be upon ‘thinking heart’ that we locate the vestige.  On 10/13/04 the investiture is the “endowment of the novel”.   But ‘endowment’ immediately gives way to language of the ‘vestige’.  The investiture is the “stamp” of presencing.  But “stamping [is] not simply a ‘mark’ or even ‘copy’ of an originary pattern.  When we say ‘stamp’ we are denoting the ‘deep impression’ made, especially upon memory.” (BL 238)   And “the investiture is ‘in-dwelling’ of beings within Being.”  Today, ten years later, I would phrase it in the opposite way: the investiture is the ‘in-dwelling’ of Being within beings.   And the memory of this in-dwelling is the gathering force that releases each being into its singular presencing.  The reception of this releasement happens with phemenological meditative thinking.  In turn, “as we have indicated, the learning community is that dialogic precinct where we are pointed back to the investiture of our existential birthright.  In learning we re-collect that ‘stamp’.  Learning, as re-collection, is the affirming of Being’s truth as a sparing of freedom.” (BL 238)

Here, the need to re-call the commentary from just two days ago, so that we remember what is meant by the link between ‘sparing’ and ‘freedom’ and the dwelling of the learning community in koinonia, specifically, the fellowship of peace: “The koinonia of the learning community is a fellowship of peace and freedom, the two qualities issued by the same precinct.  ‘Here we recall further the link between peace and freedom identified by Heidegger in his unpacking of the German word for peace, ‘Friede,’ which ‘means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded.  To be free really means to spare.’(10/11/04 BL 233) 

The investiture is the mark of the originary ‘sparing’.  Ontologically, it is the sparing, the releasement into singularity, the freeing into a specific gathered modality of being designating a ‘who’ (a person) and not simply a ‘what’ (a human being).  The learning community is the re-collection of that gathering modality: the memory happening by way of reception (close listening, attentive perception) of the natality (the new arrival, advent) of each person. Here we encounter Arendt’s ‘conservation of the revolutionary’.  We re-member one an-other…this is the work of the learning community, and this is why it is a mimetic undertaking: we copy the original investiture, we imitate the sparing, by conserving (the person) the new in each and everyone of us.  We receive the presencing of the present, the offering of the advent:  “Learning is thus the affirmation of this arrival, of this investiture, the re-collection and response to this originary ‘investment’. Learning’s welcoming is the re-collection of this creative event in-dwelling within the hearts of all. The ‘stamp’ impressed deeply on the memory of each being is re-called in the improvisational saying ventured by the learner who leaps into Being’s precinct.” (BL 238)