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.  

2.25.15 Phronesis: The 'Other' Category

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

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/11/opm-266267-november-8th-2004-2014.html

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)  

2.21.15 on the One and the Many

I try to start each morning with some Attic exercises.   This morning when I concluded my exercises I dared to pick up T.M. Robinson's critical edition of Heraclitus' fragments, which obviously includes the fragments in the 'original' Attic Greek form.  'Original' is a relative term in this context because what we today identify as 'ancient Greek' is something that was codified by the medieval Erasmus.  Moreover, with Heraclitus we have the additional challenge of only knowing his writings through the writings of others who came later, most importantly Aristotle, but also Plato, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes et al.  

I wanted to test my current knowledge of Attic so I had a go at a few fragments, fumbling may way through a few until I arrived at fragment 10, which is taken from Aristotle's De Mundo 5.396b20

Robinson's translation:  "Things grasped together: things whole, things not whole; <some-thing> being brought together,  <something> being separated; <something> consonant, <something> dissonant.  Out of all things <comes?> one thing, and out of one thing all things."

ἐκ πἀντω ἐν και ἐξ ἐωος πἀντα   

The fragment turns the relationship between ἐν and πἀντα, the one and the many, which is how we have inherited the 'problem'.    

ἐκ πἀντω can be read as 'out of the many' or 'from the many', but πἀντω (the many, or things) is in the dative case, which means that implies 'to' or 'for'.   But  ἐκ is the preposition for the genitive case: 'out of, from'.   I'm sure my elementary understanding of Attic has is causing me to miss the target, but that is balanced by the three decades of reading philosophy, much of it Attic.  What's more, this is Heraclitus we are reading!   So it's very possible that he is combining to grammatical cases, and, indeed, has to do that in order to convey the dynamic [dialectical] force the discloses the relationship between Being and Becoming: pulling apart/coming together, consonance/dissonance; things grasped together/let-be in difference: 

What follows is that we have to think the dative ('to' or 'toward') with the genitive 'out of, from':  ἐν (whole, one) is 'out of the many' or 'from the many'  ἐκ πἀντω;  ἐκ πἀντω is 'to' or 'for' ἐν.   And this reveals the following Sentence:

1. Thinking, occurring in media res: grasping together, letting-be apart. 

This is a preliminary gathering of excerpts from the 2.0 commentaries that take up τα παντα.  Not surprising, two of those happen in the peak month of October, and on consecutive days:

OPM 239(40), October 11^th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 235-236

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/10/opm-23940-october-11th-2004-2014.html

OPM 240(41), October 12^th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 236-237

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/10/opm-24041-october-12th-2004-2014.html