Thinking/writing
in the stream of multiple ‘Shakedown Streets’ as a way
to work through the time of waiting here in the New Providence station for the
next eastbound train. «Tell me this town
aint got not heart...»
On this second day of the last full week of 2.0, I encounter the meditation
that constitutes the first two pages of the last chapter of Being and Learning chapter 11
«(R)eturning to the Original Question.»
[nb: I can’t help but laugh a
bit after typing ‘chapter 11’. Perhaps
one should write of the bankruptcy that re-turns one to the originary?]
Yesterday I got underway by writing on Sentences, the form I am now working
in. I wrote of Lombard’s Sentences as the primary example, and
the commentary I wrote also of the medieval monastery. Alongside the monastery is the equally
important medieval university, started in Bologna with Irenius and his learning
community who were glossing the revovered Justinian codex. When remember the university in this
context I am recalled to another exemplar of Sentence writing, Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non, which, unlike Lombard’s
work, is much closer to the Socratic parrheisia spirit that moves through my
project of originary thinking. In Sic et Non, we encounter Abelard
offering 158 Sentences in the form of questions that disclose a theological assertion and then its
determinate negation.
The
first five Sentences (questions) of Sic
et Non are the following:
1.
Most
human faith be completed by reason, or not?
2.
Does
faith deal only with unseen things, or not?
3.
Is
there any knowledge of things unseen, or not?
4.
May
one believe only in God alone, or not?
5.
Is
God a single unitary being, or not?
And
Abelard’s prologue does well to frames his work as moved that same force of
questioning that propels originary thinking as a educational project of
learning that is continuously moved and shaped by evocative questioning. Abelard, like most of his contemporaries,
retrieves Aristotle, and his prologue identifies him as “the most clear-sighted
of all the philosophers, [who] was desirous above all things else to arose the
questioning spirit…” With this Abelard
is recalling me to the two beginnings of this project: first, to the epigram (from
Heidegger) that I cited yesterday, the one atop the recovered first day of the
original project, from 2/13/04: “Every questioning
is a seeking. Every seeking takes its
direction beforehand from what is sought...As an attitude adopted by a being,
the questioner, questioning has its own character of being.” And next to the first line of Being
and Learning: “In
what follows I offer an account of teaching as the art of turning on the desire
to behold Being.”(BL 1) Here it is clear that the art of questioning
is most forcefully documented through the writing of Sentences that disclose
the questioning spirit, which is to say are moved by the questioning
spirit. Might this then be a
demonstration of the making of the art that turns on the desire to behold Being
insofar as it is a expression of that very desire to arose the questioning
spirit? Ten years later I draw the
conclusion in the midst of 362nd
consecutive day of commemorative documentary meditative writing/thinking:
1. The art of questioning is most
forcefully documented through the writing of Sentences that disclose the
questioning spirit
2. Is questioning the making of the art
that turns on the desire to behold Being?
3. Questioning is prompting of the art
work insofar as it is a expression of the desire to behold Being.
4. If questioning arises from the eros of questioning then it is an
expression of the agape experienced
with the force of koinonia that
gathers the learning community.
5. Questioning is a seeking, a movement towards
Being.
6. This movement towards Being is a
circular (re)turn via becoming.
[two hours later
just leaving the East River tunnel on the LIRR bound for Mineola… “Maybe you
had too much too fast, you just overplayed your part.”…and received text from
Kelly responding to my incessant, persistent travelling via train and the
apparent ‘ease’ with which the struggle is endured: “…everything is movement.”]
Of the 11 chapters that organize
the original meditations into Being and
Learning, some have a ‘natural’ break, and this last one is clearly
delineated atop the writing from 2/9/05: A
363 Circum-Turning: (re)turning to the Originary Question and...
From the begining of the project, the writing/thinking has been organized
around the question concerning the art of turning, which I identify as the art
of questioning that makes the (re)turn to Being. This art of questioning is the praxis of first philosophy that makes learning. And with this we understand the sense in
which Plato’s Allegory describes that emancipatory ‘force’ that compels the
cave dweller to get up and move.
1.
Learning is made via the
force of questioning.
2.
The force of questioning
(re)turns us to becoming.
On 2/9/05, with the recalling of the original challenge
from Plato to think not the capacity for thinking but rather the art (technē) of turning on the desire to
behold Being, which I have identified as recognizing the always already present
presencing of becoming.
3.
The matter at hand for the
teacher of first philosophy is the challenge of (re)turning the learner to the
thinking of their being as
being-there in the midst of becoming.
The meditation of 2/9/05, which offers a sweeping summary, contains a
moment that reveals the manner of the questioning that expresses the force of
the teaching that (re)turns the learner to becoming. From that moment, I distill the following
Sentence:
1. «The productive work of teaching...takes the risk of welcoming the
estranging contra-diction...»(BL 383)
The hermeneutical re-writing happening via the distilling of the Sentence
reassigns the place of the arrival of the force of the contra-diction. This reassignment identifies in the
teacher’s prompting the Heraclitean/Socratic spirit of counter-saying; as the expressed form of the art of
(re)turning. Recall the epigram offered
by Heidegger, now placed in the form of Sentences:
1.A. “Every questioning is a seeking.”
1.B. “Every seeking takes its direction beforehand
from what is sought.”
1.C. “As an attitude adopted by a being, the
questioner, questioning has its own character of being.”
The ‘attitude’ of the questioner is what
is enacted by the teacher, first, and,
the student, next. In this sense, every
seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. And what is ‘sought’ in learning is what is
desired: the beholding of Being.
Teaching is a pointing to the source via questioning.
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