This morning, no
streaming of past live performances of improvisational music, of what generally
falls within that horizon – aka the Zone of jamming. [cf., my paper “Learning by Jamming,” especially the introduction
for the context of preceding.] No, only
the silence and the stillness of this early February morning, so quiet, so
peaceful, broken only by the slow, rhythmic dripping of water, happening about every 20-30 seconds,
somewhere in the house, probably the faucet in the first floor bathroom, which
is around the corner from my desk in the kitchen, but it could also be from the
basement laundry sink. I’ll think/write
this morning along with the slow steady flow of each singular drop of water
descending from somewhere in my home.
Two insights revealed to
me over the past 24hrs since I was writing in Crema Café. The first:
at then end of this project it is not only the form of the Sentence that
has come to me as the preferable one for writing philosophy, but, somewhat
tangentially, so too has the movement of this project [-- I just now recalled
Ortega’s category of proyecto, from which I am deriving the
category of ‘project.’ While I feel
somewhat obligated to use the English word ‘project’ – and that’s a trip I need
to get over sooner rather than later – it doesn’t necessarily capture the
action or movement implied. Then again,
maybe it does. I suppose when you hear
someone speak of a ‘project’ it mostly denotes something someone is working on,
and which is also working on them! At
any rate, the Latin root projectio does
well to insist that we think ‘project’ as movement, and thus captures well the
sense that thinking is dynamic, and happening in the flow of becoming.--]
So, first, the insight
that, in the end, when I writing about ‘education’ this is always referring to
the learning happening by way of first philosophy. That’s it. (and I’m going to resist the
temptation to qualify this point any further by contrasting it with this that
or the other thing that I’m not
talking about). It was the exchange
with Tyson along with my recollection of having used a specific moment
Heidegger as the starting point for my philosophy of education course back in
the winter/spring semester of 2005, which I return to in a moment. I haven’t yet made it down to Hofstra for the
beginning of winter/spring semester 2015, and the beginning of the course is
very much on my mind. I’ve been teaching
this course at Hofstra for the 19 years, and it’s not an exaggeration to say
that I’m always changing the course. And
so it was that early this morning, when I was at the gym, it came to me that it
can only ever be a course on the education of philosophy. This the move I have been making for the past
5 years: the intro to philosophy of
education is really the intro to the education of philosophy. And
the one who introduces this education offered by first philosophy is the figure
I call the philosophical educator, or, in the pages of Being and Learning: the sage.
So what, if anything, new was revealed?
Perhaps nothing new at all, but only a fresh appearance of what
presented itself long ago to me: that philosophy offers a particular kind of
education, and my interest in philosophy has always been driven by the desire
to be educated by philosophy, to learn from philosophy. And that desire is expressed in the CFP I
crafted for PES Memphis, when I write about music-making philosophy as the μουσική mousike:
[at PES
Memphis we are] also reaching back to the very beginnings of philosophy, when
it was literally understood to be soul music, understood quite generally as
education. For the ancient Greeks μουσική (mousike) meant the art of the muses,
and, with respect to education, was the foundation of all practices
contributing to the proper formation of the soul. 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 we
are situating philosophy of education within the Memphis context.
1.Learning is the
poetical actuality of Being.
2. The poetical
actuality of Being is the apprehension of the thinker into becoming.
3. The disclosure of
poetical actuality happens via music-making philosophy.
4. Music-making
philosophy is the praxis and techne of spiritual work.
With these Sentences,
especially the fourth, I sense myself arriving to a proper articulation of the
project.
Now…the preceding
comment brings me to the second insight I had in the past 24 hrs. Yesterday the citation of Heidegger’s maxim
on phenomenology as “the philosophy without standpoints!” prompted me to look
for the volume Towards a Definition of
Philosophy. It’s not amongst the
books I have in my study. However, as I
was convinced by the false memory that the volume was wrapped in yellow cover
sleeve, I was drawn to one of the two that is: Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic.” Aside from the yellow cover sleeve – is the
work really that random? And is that
randomness the way spontaneity happens in when we are being educated by
philosophy? -- I was attracted by the
title, which was definitely pushing to the surface these past two days when I
was writing on originary thinking as an attempt to take up first philosophy.
I’ve done some work with
this volume, but have mostly focused the fifth chapter, ‘The Need and the
Necessity of the First Beginning and the Need and the Necessity of an Other Way
to Question and to Begin.’ It’s obvious
why I would be drawn to that chapter.
So last night I went back to the first two chapters -- and it must be made clear that most of the
‘books’ we read by Heidegger are edited lectures, most of them from his
seminars. This one is from the 1937-1938
course at the University of Freiburg – Chapter 1: ‘Preliminary Interpretation
of the Essence of Philosophy,’ and Chapter 2: ‘The Question of Truth as a Basic
Question.’ [-- noteworthy is the use of
‘interpretation’ and not ‘description,’ which is key for understanding the move
Heidegger makes at the start; in short, it calls our attention to the place of
the poetic in the phenomenological, and, for me, shows the necessity of
undertaking poetic phenomenology, which I described yesterday in the following
way:
syncretic methodology that combines exegesis,
eisegesis, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, which keeps us close to the
originary. My own methodology is an
attempt to work out this syncretic methodology, by, on the one hand,
recognizing the authority of the past as handed down to us in writing that must
be read and read and wrestled with, and, on the other hand, moving through that
authority to what is still more originary, and what confronts and compels first
philosophy: Being. The project of originary
thinking is my attempt to take up that two-sided approach, attempting as it
does to retrieve and recover the forms of writing that are bequeathed from the
past, but also to wrestle with the categories that have been handed down to us,
not to mention with the readings of those categories that have arrived with the
original categories. --]
And
so the second revelation is precisely this reminded regarding the necessity to
retrieve the poetic, which is not just a matter of keep hermeneutical
interpretation together with phenomenological description. Rather, it about the requirements demanding
by first philosophy that arrive from the pre-Platonic thinkers, specifically,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and, for me, also Lao Tzu. All of it turns on the form of the writing,
and retention of the poetic, which is to say, art. If the writing is art work then we have
acknowledged the ‘problem’ of ‘logic’ that has held back thinking since Plato,
although, in fairness to Plato, whose Allegory of the Cave is an important part
of the ‘core curriculum’ of my philosophy course, it’s not clear that he
doesn’t understand his dialogues as part of the tradition of the dramatic
arts. Indeed, one could take a page out
of Hegel and thereby understand Plato’s work as the highest form of tragedy. I myself would not go so far, influenced as I
am by Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the point
here is that with Heraclitus, whom I remain convinced wrote aphorisms, and Parmenides, whom we know wrote something that reads like an micro-epic, we have philosophy
that has not yet sharply distinguished between ‘truth’ and ‘beauty,’ such that
the aesthetic beauty of form is as integral a part as the content of the assertion. This is logos
before it has been reduced to ‘logic’ or ‘reason,’ or ‘logic’ and ‘reason’
before they have been divorced from ‘art’ and ‘beauty’. Poetic phenomenology is the way to recover
that original way of making philosophy, and Heidegger reminded me of this,
especially in the second chapter (lecture) and the following:
“Problems” – the word in quotation marks serves
to name questions that are no longer truly asked. They have been frozen as questions, and it is
only a matter of finding the answer or, rather, modifying answers already
found, collating previous opinions and reconciling them. Such “problems” are therefore particularly
prone to conceal genuine questions and to dismiss out of hand, as too strange,
certain questions that have never yet been raised, indeed to misinterpret
completely the essence of questioning.(8)
[--
when typing out this excerpt I was reminded of the prospective anticipatory moment of originary thinking, which I
often describe as the encounter with ‘excess’, and that is always indicated by
the fundament question, Freedom for what? Natality, or the presencing of ceaseless
nativity in the existential horizon of human be-ing, is actualized by way of
the ‘not yet’ but anticipated future that is arriving via becoming. “Certain
questions that have never yet been raised…”
‘Never yet’ is a fascinating way of retaining the non-teleological temporality
of becoming. --]
We shall select a “problem of logic” behind
which lies hidden a still unasked “basic question of philosophy.”(9)
These remarks at least suggest that the “problem
of truth” stands within a long tradition which has increasingly removed the question of truth from its root and
ground and indeed that the question of truth has never yet been raised
originally. Insofar as modern and
contemporary thought moves wholly within the perspectives of this tradition, an
original questioning of truth becomes accessible only with difficulty, indeed
must appear strange, if not downright foolish.(11)
[--when
typing out the last line of the second excerpt, I recognized how well Heidegger
has described the feeling that I often experience, but that never overwhelms
nor dissuades me – neither during the first experiment ten years ago, nor
during 2.0 this past year.--]
As
I noted yesterday, these pages in the original manuscript, which I am working
with, is heavily annotated. The
mediation from 2/4/05 begins on p. 595, which, I wrote in yesterday’s
commentary, includes the note at the top of the page: “teaching as dance,” that
stands a sign indicating the first line from 2/4/05: “the teacher…the one who participates in the
movement of the learning community….”(BL
372) While this strikes me today as
a relatively weak description, I read it in relation to the note on dance, and
in that way understand ‘participation’ as indicating the teacher as learner, as
the one who conveys the flow of thinking by way of evocative questioning. Dance is thus the art form that is not only
an expression of what I have been calling rhythmic thinking, but also an
analogue for the movement of questioning that enacts the philosophy without
standpoints.
Now,
in terms of what I’ve just written (above) on the prospective anticipatory moment of originary thinking, the
meditation on 2/4/05, which gets underway by recalling the writing from
8/10/04, describes how anticipation is not passive but an act of preparation,
specifically, a readiness that occurs via close listening. Thus, preparation via close listening
enacts the anticipatory moment that defines teaching as first
learning, or the learning that lets learning be learned. By way of context, Heidegger’s important statement
is again cited on 2/4/05: “The stress
here is on the ‘activity’ of close listening and the compassionate enduring of
the improvisational artwork of the learner, the ongoing activity of the
letting-be of learning, of letting learning be learned. When Heidegger says that the teacher is ahead
of the students because ‘he has still more to learn than they – he has to learn
to let them learn,” he is referring to the guiding movement of teaching that…is
learning to listen closely.”(BL 372)
But this learning to listen
closely, the preparatory work of the teacher – preparing or making the way
[setting the groove, breaking the ground] – is a learning by way of prompting
thinking. Again this is not a passive
‘waiting’ but an active prompting: learning to let them learn happens by way of
listening, but this begs the question, Listening to what? I want to insist via Socrates, who
demonstrates the dialogic expression of thinking that is complemented by the
meditative (shown by Heraclitus), that the art of bringing the new into the
world aka the art of teaching happens by way of evocative questioning. The teacher is learning to let the students
learn when he is listening to their learning.
Learning
to let learn happens by way of the work that is initiated by what Heidegger
calls “an original questioning.” This
original question reveals or brings forth the original, which is to say, the
thinking that arises from singularity as an expression of natality, which is
the appearance of the poetical actuality of becoming, the presencing of the
ceaseless nativity of Being.
1.
“when
we say ‘has learned close listening’…we…refer to teaching as the ongoing
reception of the ceaseless nativity.”(BL
372)
2.
Beyond
the specificity of the particular, singular student, the teacher receives the
“evocative vocare (the calling) of
the ex-cessive nature of Being…(re)presented in the be-ing of human, freedom.”(BL 373)
3.
“The
teacher, performing the role of messenger thus (re)presents…the primordial
Hermes, bring forth the ‘message of destiny’…the ‘not yet’ completed be-ing of
freedom.”(BL 373)
4.
“When
Heidegger says, ‘hermeneuein is that
exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message,’ he refers
to the receptivity that ‘sets forth’ or clears the way for the appearance of
the new, the ceaseless nativity of learning…by affirming the originality or
primordiality of the learner, her be-ing (de)construccion, of/from creation, and ‘near’
the beginning.”(BL 373)
5.
“The
teacher conveys and delivers…through the art of delivery (maieutic) that we can now describe as the phenomenological movement
of hermeneutics, that ‘setting forth’ of the be-ing of freedom with the
receptivity that clears the way for the improvisational performance of the
poetic.”(BL 373)
Might
there be then a kind of rehearsing or practicing of the dialogic praxis, such that the anticipatory
preparation of teaching has its own anticipatory preparation? And might the rehearsing of the
improvisational performance happen by way of meditative thinking and poetic
phenomenological writing?
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