3.1.15 Originary Thinking

The category I use to describe my project is 'originary thinking'. (see below example of some writing from 2.0 on the 'originary')  I've borrowed the term 'originary' form Heidegger via my New School for Social Research grad school Prof Reiner Schürmann.  Originary is sometimes called 'original' but the two are not synonyms.   Originary expresses the force of Being's becoming, the originary force that puts and keeps us underway, existentially speaking.  Originary thinking is the manner of perceiving and responding to Being's becoming.   I call 'learning' the enactment of the perception and response to Being's becoming.  And this is why I am interested in working out the relationship between the original Attic terms that are not only foundational for philosophy, generally speaking, but are also foundational for the project of originary thinking insofar as the process of perceiving and responding to Being's becoming is one of making, cultivating, or what Hannah Arendt described as repairing and renewing our world, which includes ourselves and others.   The foundational terms I am working out are: technē, praxis, poeisis.  I have mentioned that I am also interested in recovering the worldly quality of the term epistemē, which originally meant 'know-how' in the active worldly sense that places it within the set where the aforementioned are located.

In the last quarter of 2.0   I wrote a lot about originary thinking as first philosophy, a category coined by Aristotle to described the work that understands first (universal, fundamental) principles.  For example, on 1/17/15
http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2015/01/opm-328329-january-17th-2015-meditation.html

I wrote:

"A play on Aristotle’s category expresses the point of departure as First Questions.  In other words, First Philosophy educates via First Questions.   And what is learned is originary thinking,  which has nothing to do with the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ and everything to do with the undertaking of a technē and a praxis."

Today, as I was reading a selection from Aristotle's Metaphysics (980), I came across yet another foundational term that I have not yet taken up in my project: νοῦς (intuition). Before scientific demonstration (knowing) we have νοῦς (intuition): "intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge...it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premises...and the originative source...grasps the original basic premise..."  This is then the faculty of originary thinking: intuition.

Sentences:

3.1.15.a  Nοῦς (intuition) is the faculty of originary thinking.


3.1.15.b  The faculty of νοῦς (intuition) is put into action via listening.

3.1.15.b.i.  The listening that puts the faculty of νοῦς (intuition)  into action is called compassionate listening. 

Context for listening as compassionate listening, also from 2.0 commentary 1/17/15:

"....compassionate, close listening conveys the presencing” of becoming. (BL 350)  

Teaching is an art, a performance art, and one that makes learning via evocative questioning and compassionate listening.  This is how philosophical learning happens, how we take up thinking as an educational project." 

On Originary Thinking:

OPM 218(9), September 20^th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 213-215

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/09/opm-2189-september-20th-2004-2014.html

The meditation from this day begins with a fragment from Heidegger that is probably one of the project’s top ten: ‘What we can do in our present case,’ Heidegger says, ‘or anyway can learn, is to listen closely.’  This is from the first lecture in What is Called Thinking?

The fragment reveals the listening as primary, as originary, and is meant to begin from the place where the meditation from previous day ended: with the identification of Zarathustra as the one who “gets learning underway by enjoining others in close listening.’  Heidegger tells his students, at the beginning, that they can learn to listen closely, because they are not yet thinking.  Most thought provoking is that we are not yet thinking, he tells them.  And in the absence of thinking they can learn to listen closely.  It really isn’t a option, but a necessity:  they have to learn to listen closely because they are not yet thinking.   The absence of thinking demands the learning of close thinking.  Learning to listen closely is a preparation for thinking, or so it seems.  But how can they learn to listen closely?  This is the ‘educational’ question that calls for an experiment in teaching.