Tuesday, October 14, 2014

OPM 242(43), October 14th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 239-240

 “In preparing for the lecture I discovered that koinon (common) also appears as koinonia: the experience of community, communion, joint participation, sharing and intimacy.   The sage is the one who gathers through his evocative speaking, gathers the learning community into communion.  The learning event of this gathering is one of close listening.”OPM 227(28), September 29th

“Cultivation of the open ground via learning is another way of describing the making of learning as the making of culture.  Poiein is making, forming, and building of the community (koinonia).   Now, as a mimetic re-presentation of the organic totality,  the formation of the learning community is human working out of gathering (legein) of Logos via human dia-logos.” OPM 235(36), October 7th

“…the meditative thinking that arises from abiding in media res gathers one into primordial koinonia…” OPM 240(41), October 12th

“From his mountain cave Zarathustra descends ‘overflowing with wisdom’, ready to gather a community (koinonia), ready to enter into a fellowship.”  OPM 239(40), October 11th

“The discovery of koinonia seems to represent an important turning point for me this semester.  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, the studio of learning.”  OPM 241(42), October 13th  

“..the question taken up in the course of study on the learning community is “What is the distinct koinonia of [X] learning community?” OPM 241(42), October 13th

These fragments from my commentaries related to koinonia  begin the writing/thinking today.  Indeed, before I revisit the meditation from this day ten years ago, I want to make note today (a day after announcing the focus of my forthcoming sabbatical) of what I had not even considered when I came to recognize, through Heraclitus, the gathering of thinking, or what is common (koinon) to all:  the communal/gathering spirit (koinonia) of the learning community.  Again, I ‘discovered’ κοινωνία (koinonia) by chance a few weeks ago in the 11th hour of my lecture prep when doing some etymological research on Heraclitus' Κοινόν (common) from fragment 91The etymological work lead me to a concordance resource, where I ‘discovered’ that κοινωνία appears throughout the Bible, specifically in the Gospels and Acts, describing the gathering of the community of the faithful, and the presencing of the Holy Spirit in all living beings.  I thought this was interesting, and had planned during my lecture to present this post-Heraclitean history of koinonia.  I did mention it in passing during the lecture, and also in my section discussions, but didn’t do much more with that post-history.   All that to say that today, after announcing my sabbatical focus, I did a quick search of koinonia just to see what titles would come up in the marketplace of books.  I was surprised and even startled to see that almost all of the titles were coming from the religious studies crowd, and were written for the general audience.   Did I miss or mis-understand something?  Does koinonia only have meaning within the bible studies discourse?  Perhaps.  But that makes my use of it counter-cultural in ways that I had not imagined.   However, when I turned from the marketplace to the library catalog I discovered a title by Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, which includes a chapter on koinonia, and also on poiesis, polis, psyche, and logos!   Needless, to say, I downloaded the available pdf of the book, and requested a copy via interlibrary loan.  Castoriadis is himself a ‘figure of thinking’ for me, and a mysterious and dare I say exotic one.  He was the first of the fashionable names being thrown around at the New School when I attended my first grad course with Agnes Heller in the summer of 1988, weeks after I had completed my philosophy degree at Fordham.  I can’t recall if we read anything by Castoriadis, but I do recall one student who spoke often of him, and with such great interest that I felt compelled to take him up.   I did, but without connecting, as I had, at the time, nothing in common with Castoriadis.  But, today, I discovered the common (koinon) I have with him.
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In yesterday’s commentary I wrote of the mimetic event happening in the learning community: “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.”  [Mimesis is fundamental to my understanding of learning as poiein (making), and much commentary has been written that includes mimesis.  Gathering all the fragments may or may not reveal some coherence of meaning.  That remains to be seen when this project is completed in precisely four months.]  The highlighted ‘re-membering’ denotes ‘formation’ as well as ‘gathering together’ of each in their singularity, and the whole as a community of learning.  Each part as a being and all together as a whole are re-membered.   Memory as receptive gathering is a way to think the interplay of human logos as legein.  This play happens as dialogue (dia logos). 
Thinking in terms of Auseinandersetzung (confrontation, engagement, discussion), the re-membering that gathers dialogue is understood to involve ‘risk taking’: “learners are those who abide within the poetic dwelling and risk the hospitality that welcomes the encounter with its root…Being’s investiture.”(10/14/04 BL 239)   The ‘risk’ is not so much in the welcoming of the other, which is, anyway, much too passive a way to describe what is happening here with the mimetic gathering into being.  Rather, the risk is felt and experienced in the disclosure, the unconcealment, the coming into being.  This is the event of learning as abiding in the flux: “no one is capable of remaining as they once were…Perspectives altered, paradigms shifted, the revolutionary force of the novel, natality, overwhelms and inundates.”(10/14/04 BL 239)  The temporality of the learning event reveals the mimetic work as a constant unveiling of the community and those who compose it.  No one remains <the same> as they once were <had been>.  The advent of the adventure is precarious.  The coming forth of being involves risk.  Why?  Is it the chaos felt in the uncertainty? “The un-bounded take the risk and venture into the unknown.” (10/14/04 BL 239)

In what sense ‘unknown’?  To think this ‘unknown’ is to think the temporality of learning, which is to think the happening unconcealment as always granted by the place opened by the withdrawal of Being.  The unknown is revealed in the mystery of the withdrawal, the gap opened up between things, and a gap that appears in the cracks within the erstwhile solid whole of identity.  ‘We’ become many in the course of learning.  Thus, the risk of learning happens with the un-binding of the self, which has been discussed since the beginning of these meditation.   But here, for the first time, there is an abiding in that place (time and space) in-between ‘self’ and ‘self’.   There is a radical experience happening here with the releasement into the absent, as we are “drawn into the withdrawal of Being’s essential sway…seized by the draft…of freedom…this ek-static event.” (10/14/04 BL 239)

3 comments:

  1. 3.0 (Monday, Portland, ME) - Awesome day. Completed 5 pages of typed edits, which, from a quantitative measure appears paltry. But from a qualitative/existential perspective was a fun grind. Writing a book like "LEARN" is challenging. It's dense and there are a minimum of poetic flourishes of the sort that populate the OPMs and the 2.0. I'll share a fragment that shows continuity with the above. But, first, the citation of two fragments from above that resonate with "LEARN": 1) We receive the presencing of the present, the offering of the advent, 2) Thus, the risk of learning happens with the un-binding of the self, which has been discussed since the beginning of these meditation. But here, for the first time, there is an abiding in that place (time and space) in-between ‘self’ and ‘self’. There is a radical experience happening here with the releasement into the absent, as we are “drawn into the withdrawal of Being’s essential sway…seized by the draft…of freedom…this ek-static event.” (10/14/04 BL 239)

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  2. The force of the principle of insufficiency has moved the student from the onset of her philosophical study. The initial periagôgé can be described as the teacher’s conveying of the principle, the invitation to a kind of learning that is inspired by incompleteness, an invitation to take up the open-endedness of philosophical thinking. But if this principle has been present from the onset, what is distinct about the transitional moment that brings about an awareness that something is missing, and, further, compels the decision to join with others? Blanchot suggests the following: “The awareness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted.” (UC, 5) He then cites Bataille: “What I am thinking I have not thought all alone.”(UC, 6)

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  3. 3.0c [another fragment from "LEARN" part 3 discussion]: The provecho is the collection of highlights from the text, those fragments that together form what Nietzsche calls the revered objects. The sharing of the provecho does not elicit a contest, debate, nor a war of words. Nothing is being asserted, there is no thesis, proposition or argument. Rather, the highlighted fragment is akin to the proverbial opinion that each and every student is “entitled” to express. Only, the stakes are even lower than that because the highlights are not quite the student’s own. Rather, they are whatever has appeared as essential to them. The “something” that appeared as essential is always the partiality of the phenomenological reception. This reception, as Arendt reminds us, is “what dokei moi, that is, what appears to me.”(PP, 80) Importantly for Arendt what dokei moi, what appears to me as essential because it captivates me and grabs my attention as significant, is a particular aspect of the world, which is to say, a specific and concrete part of that which is always already shared by everyone. The world is what is koinon or common to all. With repair and renewal the world endures. The world, which is the product of human hands, is what draws us together and at the same time distinguishes us. We are differentiated by our positionality, and the plurality that persists is grounded in the diverse and singular ways the world opens up and reveals significance to us. Within the educational situation the focus is placed upon the work of art, the text, which Arendt describes as the most pure and clear way that “the sheer durability of the world of things appear…It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the work of art…something immortal achieved by human hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and be heard, to speak and to be read.”(HC, 168) The Socratic teacher, who is letting learning happen, has the responsibility to not only listen as the students present their dokei moi, but also to lead the response by asking questions that will remind the student that the highlight that “appears-to-me” is a part of the world that is always already shared. The discussion that unfolds is thus not a mere sharing of highlights but a building of community whose foundation is the common world.

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