Originary thinking in terms of
identifying learning as originating is announced in the
fragment: "more poetry, less prose...", which is a play on
Lyotard's “Poiein, c’est faire,” poiein means to make. The move to techne was initated
on OPM 270(271), November 12th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being
and Learning, pp. 270-271, and then was worked out further
when I recalled the necessary coupling of techne with praxis,
which is to say the need to qualify praxis with techne. And
today I am interested in a further qualification of word that does not
once appear in Being and Learning, nor in 2.0: Phronesis.
Phronesis (φρὀνησισ), is Attic
Greek word for a type of wisdom -- thus,
falling within the set of categories that are held together by thinking, which
I identifying with poetic [the most general way of using the
term that identifies learning as crafting, creative making, production as
opposed to consumption of knowledge]. Other words: praxis,
techne, sophia, nous, episteme, mousike. This is the initial way that
I would organize a fundamental set of philosophical terms.
It was on Monday, when
preparing for my Attic Greek class, that
I ‘read’ for the first time in the ‘original’ Heraclitus fragment “Thinking is common to all,”
and discovered (or encountered) for the first time that the word he uses in
that fragment is phronesis (φρὀνησισ). Thus
the need to further qualify praxis, which is
to say, to work out further learning as originating, as poetic, and thus to
work ‘more poetry, less prose’ [Poiein, c’est faire] by returning to
Aristotle on phronesis (φρὀνησισ),
which is precisely what I intend to do next week with my Intro to Philo Ed
class.
So in terms of 2.0, the place
to begin further work on poiein as techne and praxis are the commentaries that take up
Heraclitus’ fragment: “Thinking is common to all.” And that work was initiated
with OPM 266(267),
November 8th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 266-267
The past month’s
thinking/writing under the influence of Heraclitus and the koinon initially lead me to emphasize the
learning community as the gathering of the many (ta panta). But the discovery of koinonia was a major turning, so much that two
days ago when I was writing my commentary I described it as taking me all the
way back to the originary question of the turn – the educational turning on of thinking. With the discovery of koinonia, however, this return to the
originary question has felt like a conversion in the sense of the Latin conversion, convers to be ‘turned around’. That is, with koinonia I have been turned around to the
originary educational question of turning on thinking and have re-turned to the
learning community with an entirely new understanding of the force of this
gathering as a spiritual power that is uniquely capable of effacing us with
ourselves and, together with others, overcoming ourselves (both in the sense of
experience a vertical transcendence above ourselves -- what DuBois allows us to call the
Wagnerian altitude and Nietzsche six thousand feet about the self -- and the horizontal
transcendence toward the past and future, and the other. With the horizontal transcendence we
re-turn and reconnect with history, but also leap into an unknown future with
faith, hope in the possibility of justice and freedom).
The conversion to the originary question of education
re-turns me to the learning community as a totalizing experience. Totalizing in the sense that when
Heraclitus says “Thinking is common to all,” the ho koinos (the common) is what gathers
everything. There is nothing
outside what is gathered by Logos, which is
to say nothing exists outside of this gathering [this is not the moment to take
up the question of the xenos in Plato’s Sophist who overturns ‘father
Parmenides’ logic by compelling us to think the existence of nothing]. Here the concern is the totalizing
force of Logos as what gathers, and what is
thought when the originary question of education is taken up. A concern because of the
intersubjectivity it presumes is one that demolishes the liberal democratic
modality of subjectivity. A
concern because the fellowship of koinonia demands a diminishment of this subject
into “the co-construction of a common world.”(BL 266) Subjectivity is replaced by
inter-subjectivity, individuality by friendship. Citing Arendt, again, on Socrates I
emphasize why the koinos is the world built by dialogue, a
dialogue that is inconclusive, open-ended, and, because it is the work of poiesis it makes a work of art that is
mearningful in-and-for-itself. Arendt:
“It is obvious that this kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in
order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by
friends. Friendship to a
large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that
friends have in common. By
talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them.”(cited
11/8/04 BL 266)
