The celebration Jaime’s 5th
birthday today was initiated late in the afternoon yesterday by the arrival of a gift from
the Spirit via the good will of Kelly’s co-worker at the University of New
England: a piano!
Today is day 353 of 2.0!
I have to document two
pieces of work I made yesterday, both related to this project, the first an
application, the other a defense.
The application of
originary thinking, in the organization of the first annual pre-conference
workshop for graduate students in philosophy of education, which will be
happening at PES Memphis. For me the
even is all about pointing to the Open, to that place where we can take up
thinking together, where we can be moved by koinonia.
I recorded a video in which I share my vision for the gathering http://youtu.be/MMKewXrcWOU.
A few years back I
recall telling one of my colleagues at PES that it seemed to me that our field
was uninterested in the work happening in the field itself, which is to say, we
were looking for inspiration elsewhere.
Now, I’m as guilty as anyone of this wandering eye syndrome, but for
reasons that are obvious: few if any of
my peers are taking up first philosophy. Yes, some dabble in Arendt, and
Heidegger, and others in ancient philosophy, but none are taken up by the force of the fundamental ontological question. Up to
now, as I wrote the other day when recalling the story of walking with Frank in
Memphis, I’ve been content to maintain a kind of laissez faire approach: so
long as I am able to do my work, I will carry on without interrupting the work of others. But last night I realized that I can only
sustain a benign indifference towards my peers’ work for only so long, and,
what’s more, this whole liberal bourgeois (here, a nod to my old nemesis Rorty)
business of working side by side –
behind our well maintained hedges – is unsustainable, and demands that we step
into that place where philosophy has always thrived: an shared agonistic place
of thinking. I say this because last
night I received a prompt from academia.edu that my colleague Tyson Lewis had
posted a recently published paper. I
decided to have a look, and, predictably, the paper rested on a straw man’s
description of ‘learning’ that had little or nothing to do with what I’ve been
working out through Being and Learning,
in the book itself and here in 2.0. It
hit me when I was reading the paper that I couldn’t simply nod and smile and
tell myself, “well, what he is referring to when he is dismissing ‘learning’
has nothing to do with my work on ‘learning.’”
Or, rather, I could and should tell myself that, and then realize, Tyson
and others who deploy the scarecrow caricature of ‘learning’ are not doing their due diligence
of, at the very least, acknowledging that there has been and currently is a
robust philosophical account of learning that has nothing to do
with the cultural and sociological and political form that it has taken. And so I dashed off an email to Tyson that I
want to share here before turning to the
writing from this day ten years ago:
Hey
Tyson, I had a quick look at this piece.
I have some fundamental questions, and looking forward to taking them up
with you in Memphis.
As a
prelude: first, my ongoing question concerning your reading of act and potency;
and, what's more, the need to move within Aristotle's metaphysics when, as
Heidegger insisted, we'd do better to return to Heraclitus; second, it
seems your whole argument pivots on a one line claim about so-called
'learning,' and that description of 'learning' is a bit of straw man.
I get that one can make the claim that a certain form of what's called
'education' or 'learning' or 'schooling' is deeply problematic because it
is overburdened with a teleological structure, but I'm not sure I'm convinced
that there aren't alternative philosophical accounts of 'learning' that
unfold within an aletheialogical
structure. My own philosophical work on learning, for example, which is
described in Being and Learning, and reiterated in this past year's
exegetical account that has been documented in
my blog, is a description of learning that has little or nothing to
do with schools and education, but does indeed have everything to do with the
philosophical time of kairos and to a lesser extent the
political time of scholē [which
you hold out as the temporality where ‘learning’ does not happen].
All this to say, I understand my own project to be taking up the one
articulated well by Heidegger in What is Called Thinking? when
he describes 'learning' as the movement toward thinking. When
Heidegger says, the teacher "must learn to let learning be learned,"
I take it he is not in any way, shape or form talking about what you are
referring to when you reject 'learning' in favor of 'tinkering' and/or 'hacking'.
In fact, those cultural practices may be relying on what Heidegger is
referring to? All that to say, that I'm not convinced that the category
of 'learning' has been dismissed on philosophical grounds, but, rather,
on cultural and sociological ones.
That's
all meant as a prelude to what I hope will be a spirited conversation, or two,
in Memphis.
Best,
Eduardo
Appropriately,
in the wake of the preceding apologia of a philosophical account of learning,
which is to say, an account of the learning happening via philosophy, is the
opening line from the meditation on 1/31/05: “All learning is a realization of
the be-ing of human that is taken up by the fundamental question, ‘Freed for what?”(BL 366)
Let
me restate that in the form of a Sentence, and pair it with it’s pair, which
follows:
1.
“All
learning is a realization of the be-ing of human that is taken up by the
fundamental question, ‘Freed for
what?”(BL 366)
2.
“This
question is primordial because it
resides as an originating question, a question that abides at the starting
point or initial moment.”(BL 366)
First
let me get out of the way the possible misunderstanding of the universal
qualifier ‘all’. Indeed, here is where
the line of demarcation reveals itself, the one that forces us to distinguish
between the fields of cultural and sociological studies and the work
undertaking by first philosophy. Most of
what is happening in ‘philosophy of education’ is occurring in the former. Some of the work in ‘ethics’ gestures towards
the latter. The perennial problem is the
following: the inevitable starting point
for the work is the cultural/sociological/political appearance of ‘education’
within historical time. So long as the
work of philosophy of education is occurring in ‘ordinary’ or ‘historical’
time, that is, so long as our thinking
is happening in that time, the work is not philosophy, but sociology, political
and cultural theory. Everything turns
on the place where we take up the
work: the temporality of thinking that is disclosed in a particular topos.
In turn, when I make claims about “all learning” I am making that claim
from within that topos of thinking, from within
the horizon of first philosophy, insofar as I understand Heidegger as issuing a
pedagogical prompt as opposed to making an ontological claim when he says,
“most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking.” Indeed, this assertion, repeated like a
mantra in the first lecture in What is
Called Thinking? is one that ought to deploy as my go-to when making
pointing to the aforementioned line of demarcation. Heidegger issues that proclamation in a
seminar room, on day one of a seminar on the question concerning the ‘call’ and
the ‘calling’ of thinking. “Most
thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking,” is the prompt to himself
and the students that insofar as their work (in the university) is enframed by
the sciences, they are not moving in the topos
of thinking. I want to make the same
claim today, but in a slightly different context, which is to say, that the
field I am contesting is enframed by a different kind of ‘science’, and, in
fact, is enframed by the strange syncretic collision of two highly contrasting
logics: policy oriented analysis and
cultural/political oriented theory.
“Most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking.”
The
move toward art and to learning as the work of art is the way to break from
what I am generally calling the ‘sociological frame.’ Here I am borrowing from Foucault, who
insisted that there are always breaks, fissures, openings to be found, and the
work demands that we not only find those, but, perhaps, make those breaks and then move through them. This is precisely why in the CFP I crafted
for PES Memphis I cited Foucault:
“There
is no sovereign philosophy, it’s true, but a philosophy or rather a philosophy
in activity. The movement by which, not
without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks
other rules – that is philosophy. The
displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of
received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do
something else, to become other than what one is – that too is philosophy.”
The
preceding is helpful, specifically, in my ongoing struggle to describe learning
as action (praxis, techne). The
category of “philosophy in activity” is useful when advancing the claim that
learning is the mimetic mediation of becoming. Philosophy in activity denotes learning as the poetical actuality of
Being. Philosophy in activity denotes the appearance of becoming via learning, which is precisely what is happening when
the learning is understood as the work of art, as art work, and, moreover, as
that event when, as Nietzsche put it, the artist becomes the work of art. This is the link between the originary and
the original, between ‘beginning because we are beginners,’ between making
[‘creating’] art because we are created and under
Creation: (de)construccion. Attunement,
enactment, actualization: poetical
realization.
Here,
then, the Sentences distilled from 1/31/05:
1.
“All
learning is a realization of the be-ing of human that is taken up by the
fundamental question, ‘Freed for
what?”(BL 366)
2.
“This
question is primordial because it
resides as an originating question, a question that abides at the starting
point or initial moment.”(BL 366)
3.
“Action…embodied
in the work of art, is initiated by the invocation that (re)collects the
originary dispensation…originating in the becoming of Being.”(BL 366)
4.
“The
be-ing of human as free…is actualized (unveiled) through learning and embodied
in the learner.”(BL 366)
5.
“Teaching
conveys the primordiality of each being, the be-ing with the becoming of Being,
and lets learning happen in the practice that…brings forth…the realization…of
human existence.”(BL 366)
6.
“Teaching
is the art of arts, the art of bringing
forward what is brought forth in
the process of bringing-forth, the
production that makes way for the performan, the receptivity that welcomes the
new and affirms the be-ing of human as ceaseless nativity, as ‘existing at or
from the beginning.’”(BL 366)
7.
“To
exist ‘at or from the beginning’ is to reside with becoming, of/from creation,
(de)construccion.”(BL
366-367)
8.
“The
art [work] of teaching creates the conditions for the realization of learning
by embodying the question that draws into the nearness of Being’s becoming, to
the threshold between concealment and unconcealment.”(BL 367)
The
8th Sentence must be understood within the larger context where the
above citation of Foucault resides along with the citation the past two days
from meditations from 2012: the writing/thinking on the threshold scholar. Here is a
video I produced on the threshold scholar: http://youtu.be/gnvXF0OXIZk
And
here are a trio of Theses on the threshold scholar, and some expository writing
that explicates them:
THESIS 4.?.12 The ‘in between’ of the
threshold scholar is the distinct hour of consciousness when s/he dwells with/in the studio where gathers
herself….
THESIS 4.8.12 The studio of the threshold scholar is the third space, the location
of culture.
THESIS 4.11.12 The enunciation
of the first, originary question is the intervention of the Third Space into
the university commons. The threshold
scholar arrives from his studio bearing the first question, and with it
announces, or makes known (annuntiare)
the presence of the Third Space. In
turn, the enunciation of the originary question of perplexity is the eternal
returning of the gift of learning, the present breaking the teleological,
instrumental process of knowledge consumption.
Exposition of THESIS 4.11.12: The enunciation
of the first, originary question is the intervention of the Third Space into
the university commons. The threshold
scholar arrives from his studio bearing the first question, and with it
announces, or makes known (annuntiare)
the presence of the Third Space. In
turn, the enunciation of the originary question of perplexity is the eternal
returning of the gift of learning, the present breaking the teleological,
instrumental process of knowledge consumption.
This has been
taken up in Being and Learning, but
another approach is necessary, now that I am working out this ‘studio’ or
‘cell’ idea. Returning to Socrates
‘making music’ is important for exploring and introducing the time of study as
the preparatory work of the threshold scholar, and here I can return and
examine Arendt on Cato, and the importance of time spent with oneself in study. Here then will be the opportunity to
understand the working out of the poetics that will be announced. But this raises many questions, and a tension
can immediately be seen with Fanon’s/ Bhabha’s
social project, where the singularity of the threshold scholar, the
enunciator, is called into question.
That is, what is the status of ‘singularity’ with respect to the
threshold scholar’s relationship to the community, ‘the people’? I want to retain and insist on the threshold
scholar being a kind of ‘teacher’ in the sense of being a messenger: enunciation = e + nunti(us) = messenger, one, perhaps, in the mold of a
Zarathrustra. I’m taken by the linking
between enunciation (to utter or
pronounce – words, etc. – in an articulate and particular manner; to state or
declare definitely as a theory; to announce or proclaim)…and…annunciation (to announce; annuntiare: to make known)
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