Here’s an early birthday present from
Garcia via my brother-in-law G. Messina
29 Sunset Drive is
literally just up the hill from the New Providence train station, and this
early morning the proximity is a blessing, as I’m able to get from bed to train
station in less than ten minutes. This
is just for my own documentation, but some day I will recall with deep sentimentality
my 88 year old father driving at a reckless speed down the hill. But I made the train, and now writing with
the steady flow of its movement. Aside
from the steady flow, I’m entertained by the delay on the announcement tape,
which reminds me of the tricks played by Dan Healy, sound board man extraordinaire. “The
next station, the next station…is, Maplewood, is Maplewood.” Trippy trip!
Yesterday’s commentary
described the revelation I received after reading the first two chapters
(lectures) from Heidegger’s Basic
Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic.” Two excerpts from the citations are worth
repeating, as a way to emphasize the struggle of originary thinking to move
beyond the inherited ‘quest for certainty’ (to borrow that critical phrase from
Dewey), which have frozen philosophy into “problems” that prevent us from
thinking:
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)
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.
The continuity between Being and Learning, 2.0, and PES Memphis
can be identified through these two citations.
They are all part of the project of originary thinking, all part of the
attempt to not simply implode the practices (methodological and cultural) that
have organized the “problems” of philosophy of education, but push beyond the
determinate negation and into the place of poetics, where the something ‘never
yet’ is made. What needs to be emphasized is the making, which is not just an attention
to form, but to the work as experimental, as the enactment of experiments in
thinking. Here the anachronistic sense
of making tests, of testing the alternative as the only way to perceive what
could be otherwise, to actualize the so-called ‘other’ of ourselves that one
often hears discussed but never encounters in flesh and bones (carne y huesos). One
hardly ever hears a genuine question at these gatherings of learned societies,
but often encounters statements. The
rehearsal of one’s ‘position’ or worse ‘positionality’. What of a question? What of the question of truth, arising from its root and ground? First and foremost, what needs to happen is
the hearing of that question, which, when it is raised is
registered in precisely the manner described by Heidegger when he wrote: “an
original questioning of truth becomes accessible only with difficulty, indeed
must appear strange, if not downright foolish.”(11)
How is it that this
original questioning of the truth might emerge such that it is not heard as
strange, if not downright foolish?
Throughout the pages of Being and
Learning, and again here in 2.0, I have emphasized that it can only ever be
the case that original questioning (originary thinking) is heard as strange and estranging. Originary thinking is disruptive of what the
late Ilan Gur Ze’ev described as normalizing education, and the manner of this
disruption, if it is philosophical, as opposed to political (although it may be
that too), is always heard as strange because it is estranging to those who
hear it. This estrangement is felt from
the beginning, documented famously by the account of Socrates testimony upon
hearing one of Heracltius’ fragments, claiming that he suspected the meaning
must be profound (deep, from the roots), although he confessed he understood
little of it. And again Socrates own oft
quoted maxim regarding ‘knowing nothing’ and the effect his perplexity had on
those he stung with it, as Meno describes the effect of talking with Socrates
and feeling numb from the encounter that left him in a state of utter
confusion! Originary thinking and the
questioning that reveals it via enactment (writing, speaking; meditation,
dialogue) must appear strange in a world where everything is made familiar, and
knowable by the quest for certainty.
But the matter taken up
on 2/5/05 is less concerned with estrangement and focused rather on the urgency
of raising an original questioning.
Recall the 5th Sentence distilled from 2/4/05 regarding the
teacher as the messenger
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)
The message delivered is
the news of the new, a delivery made by the gesture of pointing to natality,
affirming singularity. It is a
deliverying of the new into the world, hence it is the Socratic art of philosophical
dialogue that is described as midwifery (maieutic). The gesture is also an example of what
Foucault calls the rebound effect of questioning: the teacher’s gesture towards the new happens
by way of evocative questioning that rebounds back to him and thereby enables
him to learn. An original questioning is
a questioning that gestures towards the arrival of the new, that points towards
ceaseless nativity. What is ‘urgent’
about this news delivered in the gesture? Is the event so fleeting that, like
the proverbial speeding train, we are compelled to compelled to jump on
board? But isn’t the train catching us
rather than we it? In this sense the
urgency of the call is ‘urgent’ I the sense of being most compelling. And this reminds me of my student Deanna’s
rendering of the flow of thinking that she placed alongside words from
Bach’s St. John Passion:
I took a piece from Bach's St. John Passion taken from the Gospel of
John:
Befördre den Lauf
Selbst an mir zu
ziehen,
Und höre nicht
auf,
zu schieben,
zu bitten.
Bring me on my way
And do not cease
to pull,
to push,
to urge me on.
“Bring me on my way, and
do not cease to pull, to push, to urge me on.”
I’m reminded here of Marley’s Zion
Train. The proverbial whistle is
blowing, and that steam train is roaring down the track. The call of the screaming whistle is urgent,
and the ur-gency is felt: it is as coming from the ‘primal ground’ (Urgrund). Contact!
Contact! as Thoreau described
feeling the call arriving from ground. This ur-gency
is an expression of what at the end of 2/5/05 is described as “the
phenomenological attitude of the primordial
intuition, the attunement that remains in close proximity with the
be-coming of Being, near the originary presencing of Being.”(BL 375)
What is delivered by the teacher is a questioning that does not so much
reveal a truth but shares an intuition.
This sharing of an intuition of the originary is precisely what is
happening when the teacher is drawing the student into first philosophy via
questioning. When we trace back to the 18th century we discover that
‘intuit’ denoted ‘instruction, teaching,’ and this usage arrived from the Latin
intuit, which denoted
contemplation. The sharing of the
intuition is thus the teaching that happens from
contemplation, which, in this case, is not the rare experience that is likened
to the mystical, but the experience grounded in the Yes!, the life-affirming gesture that welcomes the ceaseless
nativity arriving in the natality and singularity of each student. This is why Heidegger, who is cited at the
conclusion of 2/5/05 describes the primordial intuition as revealing the
principle of principles, or what I want to call the originary as disclosed in
originary thinking:
“the ‘principles of principles pertaining to the
phenomenological attitude: everything given in primordial intuition is to be
accepted just as it gives itself. No
theory as such can change anything here, for the principle of principles is
itself no longer theoretical; it expresses the fundamental life-stance of
phenomenology: the sympathy of experience with life! This is the basic
intention. It has nothing to do with
irrationalism or the philosophy of feeling.
Rather, this fundamental stance is itself clear, like life itself at it
basic level.’”(Heidegger “The Ideal of Philosophy and the Problem of
Worldview,” cited BL 376)
On
2/5/05 the meditation begins by describing the message as delivered by the
‘conduct’ of the welcoming reception, the close listening that is offered in
evocative questioning, with original questioning. In this sense the teacher is conducting
himself as a conductor on the proverbial Zion Train. The moving train denotes the flow of
thinking as the ceaseless nativity of Being, and this suggest the train is
moving in circles, yes? Returning again and again and again. But this is precisely how things operate in
the ‘ordinary world’. It only appears
as if the train is on a linear track, but, in fact, it is on a circular
path. In this sense the event of
learning is episodic.
To
describe an event as episodic is only to say what it is. An event is an episode. This much is evident. And what this indicates is that the teacher
insofar as they are calling the student into (or onto) the event of learning
are always already in the flow of thinking, yielding the following Sentence
with regard to the order of things in the matter of teaching:
1.
Meditation precedes dialogue.
This sentence troubles
the temporality of the phenomenological description as happening during the
flight of Minerva’s Owl, at dusk, after
the event as a recollection of its happening.
But, again, we need to think in terms of a circular movement, which is
to say, understand the circularity of the process: meditation, dialogue,
meditation, dialogue, mediation…
I’ve just had my first
face-to-face meeting with my undergrad philosophy seminar, and I couldn’t help
but share with them my impression that our seminar room, Hagedorn 180, with
it’s single long table, felt like a train car, albeit a small one, so something
akin to a subway car. These trains of
thought today are full of trains; indeed, so far all of the writing has been
happening on trains. [nb: I'm on the LIRR en route to JFK, in the first part of my return trip to Portland]
The seminar was an
immediate application and testing of what I have been writing/thinking the
past two days. The Sentence we
generated today is the following:
1.
Learning
is remembering and applying memory to the future.
I didn’t have the
opportunity to raise a question about the meaning of ‘application’. I would want to replace ‘applying memory’ with
‘(re)collecting,’ which sustains the force of memory, and of the
self-overcoming it compels. We were able to think through the ‘problem’ of veritas, its grip on education via the
testing regime, as well as its inevitable presence in our work. Veritas
as ‘correctness’ is unavoidable, although it doesn’t have to be exclusive. When we deploy veritas in the work, we are
working against the teological force that makes its appearance when veritas unfolds as a gravitational force
pulling toward the telos of verification. Deploying veritas, on the contrary, enables us to work dialogically and
phenomenologically via the written and spoken word. To work under the force of writing is to be
subject to the deployment of veritas. Working against this force is to work via the
force of poeisis, to be moved by the
art work that arises in the distance between now and then, here and there, the
gap between past and future, the space between the members of the learning
community. If, as my student Cristina
wrote via citation, “philosophy is the art of questioning,” then this art is
only ever made in the place where we find we are beyond ‘our’ ‘self’. And it is from that place that the teacher delivers the message and gestures
towards thinking:
1.
“The
‘urgent’ message is delivered when the learner is turned around and enjoined…with
freedom, beckoned into the gap that is preserved by the emptiness that
(re)presents the Open…”(BL 374)
[--sour grapes, indeed!
I’m now at the noisy JB Term 5 and popped on the show from this date in ’89,
which is returning to me as perhaps that last great year. NO WAY will Chicago come close to this sound! https://archive.org/details/gd1989-02
05.sbd.walker.scotton.miller.108689.flac16]
For the first time the
syncretic methodology reveals the hermeneutical, which is a natural outcome of
all talk of hermenuein and maieutics. Close listening is thus “the phenomenological
interpretation…[insuring] the coming forth of distinctiveness…”(BL
) Phenomenology here as listening
is poetic in offering interpretation.
Can evocative questioning happen via description? The experiment with a
hermeneutical-phenomenological pedagogy unfolds from a skepticism regarding a
listening that ‘only’ offers a description (as if description is only ever
working under the force of veritas,
which it is not).
1.
Questioning
delivers natality into the place of learning.
2.
“The
constancy of questioning (re)presents the constant arrival of the new, the
ceaseless [nativity] that [delivered over in] learning…”(BL 374)
3.
Questioning
is “the poetic receptivity…that expresses the steadfast attunement to the
imminent arrival of the new, the artwork of listening/down-beating/grooving…”(BL 374)
4.
Questioning
is as “poetic receptivity, or the interpretative delivering of the coming forth
that receives the novel as the ex-cessive spilling over, is the
‘phenomenological attitude’…affirms…the be-ing of becoming as the be-ing of
freedom.”(BL 375)
In seminar today as we
worked through the category of original time, the temporality of thinking when
first philosophy offers its education, I raised the question concerning
proximity in response to student Yonette’s introduction of opinion (doxa) as what is offered instead of
assertions. We maintain distance from
our opinions and it is in the gap created by this distance that learning via
dialogue emerges. This prompted the
question concerning the necessary proximity, specifically, the distance
between time of originary thinking and ordinary time. Put differently, where is the space or
distance when we have moved into the time of thinking? Recall here Nietzsche’s description of the
Eternal Recurrence (yet another depiction of circularity): the closest
approximation between Being and Becoming.
What is happening here is a tension between categories that persist: on
the one hand, the collapse of any gap with the temporality of thinking
occurring with the opening of a space for the movement of thinking. Time and space remain distinct in the place
of thinking.
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