OPM 248(249), October 21st (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 247-

“We have no alternative but invent another logic.” So says Luce Irigaray in her essay “Listening, Thinking, Teaching,” one that I have been teaching every semester for the past seven years.   This essay, along with Heidegger’s first lecture from What is Called Thinking?, is the centerpiece of my intro to philosophy of education course.   The fragment cited above is coupled with others like it, and together they make up the axis around which our course of study moves.  Fragments like: “most thought provoking is that we are not thinking,” and “let learning be learned.”   I’m teaching Irigaray today, and in preparing for the discussion, I was struck, again, by this assertion she makes about inventing another logic, one that will replace the old dominant ‘Western’ logic, which, as I have described elsewhere in response to Irigaray’s challenges, is a logic that can be traced by to Parmenides’ equating of thinking and being in such a way that there is one and only one authentic form of thinking, taken up on ‘the way of truth.’   To think otherwise, as the xenos (stranger) in Plato’s Sophist shows us, is to overturn Parmenides logic and to think ‘non-being’.  A thinking that achieves this overturning of the being<>thinking equation will, I contend, undertake the building of another logic and thus represents precisely what Irigaray calls “a crucial step for reaching another logic and entering multiculturalism.”   And what this overturning and turning over achieves is precisely the commencement through the threshold from the preparatory education rendered by apathetic reading.   When this commencement occurs the student qua learner is reading to experience the horizontal transcendence that takes them from the intradialogical to the interdialogic; from self to other.  This is Nietzschean self-overcoming that positions us in the phenomenological place of receptivity where we are ready to receive the disclosure of the singularity and distinctness of the newcomer, the otherness of el otro (the other).  For Irigaray, the new logic is the foundation for a new ethics: “the respect for the otherness of the other.”  She adds: “to recognize and to respect the other as other can correspond to both a transcendence at work in the construction of a future on our scale and the transcendence which lies in someone or something which remains irreducible to us without being, for all that, beyond our reach…”

(re)Reading Irigaray this morning (on the NJT and LIRR en route to Hofstra) I’ve been thinking about the alterity of el otro and the ‘new’ that the other bears and offers to the learning community.  And I’ve been thinking this through the fragments I articulated yesterday and the reductions that have been distilled from them: Singing stands for what is ‘new’, and the song for what is studied.  When we sing we are saying something: “what is sung is not spoken” or “what is sung has not yet been said.” And in thinking Irigaray through these fragments I wonder about the gathering force of koinonia that organizes and moves the dialogic learning community.  And I wonder if this community takes precedence over the singularity of the individuals, and in what sense the one (unum) is made from the many (pluribus, ta panta) such that the overturning of Parmenides is more of a dialectical confrontation that produces a new logic of thinking and being?  And by production I don’t mean a new or higher synthesis, but a confrontation that makes (‘performs’) the new logic.  But I wonder if this new logic, in the way I am building it through koinonia,  the irreducible alterity of the other remains?  Irigaray’s is, ultimately, an ethical project that reminds me of the Levinasian dyadic, which is not entirely dial-logic (≠ gathering of the many by Logos), not a politics that would accommodate a situation where a many are dynamically gathered together. Singularity gives way to plurality in the dialogic political situation I am envisioning the learning community to be.  And it would have to give way if we are truly interested in making a logic that transcends the atomistic self and its will to power via the demand of recognition.  The political collectivity displaces the ethical dyad.  And, so,  in thinking about the so-called ‘irreducibility’ of the alterity of the other I wrote a note: ‘the learning community is not a place of otherness – difference and alterity are not the same.’   Difference is the dynamic interaction of the many (ta panta).  The persistence of alterity happens with the contradiction arising between the learning community, as a counter-cultural gathering, and the larger dominant cultural norms that remain the presumed hegemonic ‘one’ (the State) that the community’s existence is indirectly confronting.

The questions I am asking in response to Irigaray’s call for a new logic,  and the subsequent assertion (or conjecture) that the learning community is not a space of alterity, are both the result thinking koinonia.  And this thinking has lead me, today, to envision this as by design having a limited reach, which is to say, a scope that is philosophically quite local.  I often use the category ‘counter-cultural’ to denote what today I would describe, in the non-perjorative sense, as the parochial boundaries of the learning community.   The limited boundary I am going for here is both a phenomenological description of the local location of the learning community – its happening on the ground in specific localities [studios] – and a philosophical strategy that captures the pragmatic thinking at work in the description.  In the end, this thinking/writing emerges from my own experiences and experiments in dialogic teaching and learning. And while it may resonate with other philosophers of education it is not is not designed to have universal applicability in the way that, it seems to me, Irigaray’s writing presumes.   

The meditation written this day ten years ago reminds me that The Orpheum theater where Wide Spread Panic was playing this past weekend in Memphis is named for the god Orpheus, who makes a sudden cameo appearance as I try to extend myself further on the thinking inspired by Rilke’s fragment “Music is existence.”  Orpheus is a figure who, like Zarathustra, ‘goes under’.  Orpheus’ descent to Hades, who holds his beloved Eurydice, happens via music.  Heidegger insists that “for the god Orpheus, who lives infinitely in the Open, song is an easy matter, but not for man.”(cited on 10/21/04 BL 247)  But this is not at all the case that the god lives ‘infinitely in the Open,’ and his descent to retrieve his beloved is a precisely one that takes him from the Open and into the primal ground.  His is a tragic tale, one that insures that all music he will make when he ascends back to the ground will qualify as the blues.  “…his movement was tragic....Orpheus…returns to the Earth, to the ‘Open,’ alone…poet and musician, in search of welcoming out-stretched arms, wandering and nomadic…”(10/21/04 BL 247)

The legend of Orpheus reminds us that when we think “music is existence” we enter a place where we experience our fate to live with the tragic dimension of the human condition: the incompleteness of our relation to the present moment.  We can not sustain our presence; the present moment withdraws.   We learn from the legend because even the god struggles in his attempt to achieve reconciliation; he is unable to retrieve his beloved.   If song is not easy for the god it is because, like us, he moves in and out of the Open, which withdraws from him in the same manner it withdraws from us.  This is koinon (common) we share with him.  Song is never easy, neither for god nor human, and it is difficult on both sides, but especially for the one who is making music, for the one who is singing, who are saying something new.