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Friday, November 11, 2011
 
Iain Thomson on thinking the pedagogical truth event after Heidegger.
While many late-moderns continue to believe (with Nietzsche) that all meaning comes from us (as the result of our various “value positings”), Heidegger is committed to the more phenomenologically accurate view that, at least with respect to that which most matters to us—the paradigm case being love—what we most care about is in fact not entirely up to us, not simply within our power to control, and this is a crucial part of what makes it so important. Indeed, the primary phenomenological lesson Heidegger drew from art is that when things are approached with openness and respect, they push back against us, making subtle but undeniable claims on us, and we need to learn to acknowledge and respond creatively to these claims if we do not want to deny the source of genuine meaning in the world. For, only meanings which are at least partly independent of us and so not entirely within our control—not simply up to us to bestow and rescind at will—can provide us with the kind of touchstones around which we can build meaningful lives and loves. Heidegger drew this lesson from poetry, but it is profoundly applicable to education, where it helps us understand what I have called the pedagogical truth event.

Heidegger calls such an enduringly meaningful encounter an “event of enowning” (Ereignis). In such momentous events, we find ourselves coming into our own (as world-disclosers) precisely by creatively enabling things to come into their own, just as Michelangelo came into his own as a sculptor by creatively responding to the veins and fissures in that particular piece of marble so as to bring forth his “David”; or as a woodworker comes into her own as a woodworker by responding creatively to the subtle weight, color, and grain of an individual piece of wood in order to make something out of it (or to leave it be); or as, in the pedagogical truth event, a teacher comes into his or her own as a teacher by learning to recognize and cultivate the particular talents and capacities of each individual student, thereby enabling these students to come into their own. In all such cases, a poetic openness to what pushes back against our pre-existing plans and designs helps disclose a texture of inherent meanings, affordances, significations, and solicitations, a texture Heidegger teaches us to discover “all around us”—not only in nature, our workshops, and classrooms but even in our lives as a whole.7 For, we truly learn to “make something” out of our lives not when we try to impose an artificial shape on them but, rather, when we learn to discern and develop creatively that which “pushes back” in all the ways mentioned here, and many more.
 
Comments:
No source is cited.

This looks to be a helpful interpretation of Ereignis, insofar as it offers a series of examples of possibilities for the experience of Ereignis.

It cheers me to see knowledgeable folks struggling to apply MH's conceptualizations to everyday events. I don't know if this attempt might mean something to other folks not yet acquainted with MH. Yet it is very promising.
 
Linked to source. Thanks.
 
Love and Death-- yall. Doesn't get mo' authentic than that.

Then, Dostoyevsky has as much to offer on that as french/german existentialists (including Nietzsche, for whom "love" was some slave-whores in a italian bordello)
 
Dostoyevsky didn't fit it into the ontological scheme of things. Each of us has a different contribution.
 
The rare great writer...overflows the philosophical categorization, if you will (including "ontology")--sort of like History itself ..out-runs the metaphyicians' attempts to describe it (Hegel was sort of aware of that, in some sense).
 
The lack of continuity in time is also expressed in words and phrases such as "the suddenness of a new epoch," "the leap," "the flashing up (Aufblitzen, Erblitzen) of being," "uniqueness" (no moment like any other, the moments are not homogeneous), "the push (Stoss) of being," and even in earlier expressions from Being and Time such as "project" (Entwurf) and "thrownness" (Geworfenheit)." --Stambaugh, "Finitude" Pp 138-39

Can you fell the push of be-yng?
 
If beyng pushes, what pulls? Nothingness?

Breaking from his usual only-Germans-and-Greeks-matter bigotry, MH is reputed to have read Dostoevsky.
 
The essays hints at one of the dangers of...continental theorizing (or shall we say..bad hegelianism--tho' applicable to MH aswellIMO)--the conceptualizing gets so broad and inspecific..and may become meaningless.. just saying"being" itself..may not mean much to some. One reason..Marx(whether one..agrees or not) differs greatly from Hegelian tradition....the French revolution for Marx has definite ..factions, and specific economic and historical relations--it's about humans and class struggle. For Hegel .it was a battle of Spirit more or less (tho' Hegel rather more...specific--"no ideas except in things"--than most PoMos.).
 
"If beyng pushes, what pulls?"

Very astute IMHO. Stambaugh repeats several times that the cognates for the "Center" of the Fourfold, "the chasm cannot be neatly ordered and classified in categories or even structures." They are unsubstantial.

So maybe the "feel" of the push/pull has to be sense as indicated by Husserl's (and MH's) "Sinn." Who says we do not need a sixth sense!
 
"For Hegel. it [the French Revolution] was a battle of Spirit more or less."

Hegel has a specific essay about the Terror that my Hegel prof assigned for class reading. It never was brought up again. I recall reading it through at least twice and coming away shaking my head; I had no idea what he was getting at.
 
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