As part of my job, I’ve been formally studying teaching and learning in the higher education context. I was delighted to stumble upon Heidegger in the education literature. He’s got this wonderful notion of teaching as this relational, intersubjective, ‘poetic’, ‘touchy-feely’ concept that very much works for me. According to him, the teacher’s job is basically to let learn; to lay bare being, to figure out what the practice of that subject looks like in the process of doing life. It’s a marvellous departure from what the typical varsity course, postgrad as well as undergraduate, looks like.
The other day, I took my postgrad students for a 90 minute tutorial. We debated, argued, agreed, imagined, and tried to figure stuff out together. The tute by no means lived up to Heidegger’s ideal, but it was an attempt to work towards something like that.
Afterwards, one of my students, a lady who I think is about my age, asked to speak to me. We sat outside our little coffee shop in the sun, had lunch together, and she proceeded to ask me about my personal work-life balance. She’s been struggling with having to balance her studies, multiple jobs, and marriage. She wanted to know how I handled all of those pressures as well as the needs of a young child.
Something really interesting happened during the course of that conversation. We stopped being tutor and student, and simply became two individuals, with particular narratives that, in a reassuring number of places, had striking parallels. Just like Heidegger suggests, the roles of teacher and student constantly changed during that half hour, and we began to scratch the surface of the interface between ‘life’ – ‘being-in-the-world’ – and the practice and tradition of our academic discipline.
All I have to do now, is figure out how to bring that conversation into the class, or how to get the rest of my students outside the confines of that class and have them sat around those concrete tables outside the canteen.
I’d like to be a part of the kind of learning experience I had at the philosophy department at Queen’s, in Belfast. I want the kind depicted in the 2008 film, The Class, based on François Bégaudeau’s semi-autobiographical novel Entre les murs, where learning French became intertwined with catching glimpses of the lived experiences of poor and migrant children living in Paris. The kind described by Heidegger as ‘poetic’ – the one antidote to the instrumental variety that sees the world as little more than a set of problems to be solved through the systematic application of ultimately consumptive processes.
I want to be like Robert Coles’ ‘other supervisor’ – the one who got him to see individuals with significant, meaningful stories, in place of just psychiatric patients to be diagnosed and, where possible, treated (The Call of Stories).
I’d like my students to learn to see Unamuno’s individuals of ‘flesh and bone’ whenever a theory, concept, formula, formulation, system, or methodology is suggested. The living, contending with life, individual who has a story.
I’ve always loved kung-fu flicks. What guy doesn’t like watching a regular looking dude unleash a flurry of amazing kicks and chops on a mob of ninjas armed to the teeth, only to escape with just a bleeding lower lip? Not to psychoanalyse myself, but maybe… Nah, let’s not go there!
Anyway, I spent the day at the State library reading about Kierkegaard’s category of repetition (as opposed to health systems or higher education research, which is what I really ought to have been doing). At the end of the day, I decided to watch what I thought would be a bog standard kung-fu film. Reign of Assassins turned out to be anything but bog standard. It has all the cool fighting stuff, but it’s also incredibly moving.
Not to force a connection, but one theme really got to me. The Kierkegaard stuff, when all is said and done, was about actually facing up to, and engaging with reality, rather than trying to find ways to escape it. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but the idea of sacrificial love that came up in the film a couple of times resonated with that idea of what constitutes real life.
In the film, on two occasions, someone sacrifices themselves for a loved one. On both occasions, a parable is alluded to. The gist is a guy tells Buddha that he’s in love with a girl. I forget why he felt the need to tell Buddha this, but Buddha responds by asking him how much he loves her. The answer is pretty profound:
I would willingly turn into a stone bridge
And endure 500 years of wind
And 500 years of sunlight
And 500 years of rain
If only she would walk over the bridge.
On the surface of it, those could be lines from a pop song. But bear in mind the fact that in this film, they were uttered by characters literally laying down their lives and dying in place of a beloved.
I suppose having spent the day working through the nature of existence and real life as presented in Niels Nymann Eriksen’s book, it was very cool to be able to dwell on the nature of love, as presented in a kung-fu flick.
A friend called me an artist today. I was moved. If there is anything in my writing – any sense of beauty that bears any sort of resemblance to Gary Clark Jr’s art, or to the cinematography on display in this video, then wow! For me, this here, what is depicted in this video, this truly is art.
Two things happened to me today. First, a friend sent me this New York Times article. The second took place later in the day, in the afternoon when I was struggling to focus. I downloaded (i.e. bought) Darius Rucker’s Charleston, SC 1966. In a strange way, I think the two events are related.
The New York Times article came about when I was trying to find someone to waste time with. I needed a coffee break, and was hoping to talk one of my workmates into walking down to the canteen with me. That played out, but I happened to stumble across my friend in an industrious (today anyway) colleague’s office. We’re both ‘truth seekers’, and have broadly similar views on philosophy, religion, life, the universe and so forth. Anyway, my guy and I got talking, and the question of what constitutes one’s identity came up (really, really geeky, I know, especially given the fact that this conversation tok place in an open corridor).
Identity. He brought up Locke. I tried not to express my horror which I knew stemmed from an irrational resistance towards British thinkers. I countered with – surprise, surprise – Kierkegaard; and also confessed my affinity for Heidegger, which is a little problematic given his cosy relationship with the Nazis. We went back and forth for a little bit, then finally settled on Jerome Bruner’s paper, Life as Narrative. We decided that we both liked the idea of identity as a verb, a process of, to borrow from Kierkegaard, becoming what one is, and we went our separate ways; he to do more economic modelling around the health of the Rwandese, and me, to have a bit of an amble, pick up yet another book from the library that may be returned unread, and get that coffee.
Before getting stuck into his modelling though, my guy sent me the article on prisoners with dementia, and gave me strict instructions to watch the accompanying video. I did, and nearly cried.
Isn’t there something incredibly profound, something jarring about the relationships between the two sets of condemned men? The closest I’ve ever come to this sort of thing was in reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection, but Tolstoy, unlike Dostoevsky, seems at his core to really like happy endings, or at least resolution. The video strangely has for me a kind of Tolstoyan ‘optimism’ about it, yet ends with the sort of lack of happy ending or resolution that you’d expect from a Dostoevsky work.
What really got me was thinking of both sets of prisoners – those with dementia and the ones caring for them – in light of the idea of life as narrative. Like Resurrection, how moving an account of redemption and grace. How amazing is it that the man who literally plucks out the eyes of a woman, mutilates her, murders her, and then just carries on as usual, could then in another moment, albeit years later, wipe the soiled bottom of an elderly demented convict? What striking contrasts of utter contempt, and the most beautiful, substantive, love and nurture. Now, there’s obviously so so much more to that man, but when facing him, when trying to ‘see’ him; to ‘apprehend’; ‘fix’; get an idea of; ‘encapsulate’ him – what do you do? What do you do when you stand in front of the mirror and try to do exactly the same thing with the person facing you? How do you define/apprehend/‘see’ even you?
I have the same problem when I’m standing in front of a beautiful scene, or a lovely person, with my camera in my hand. How do I ‘capture’ what’s before me? What can I afford to ignore or sacrifice. What is the essence of the thing I want to get a hold of? And if I’m honest, not even my best photos, my best attempts, come even close to reproducing or grabbing a hold of the thing I want to grab a hold of.
I think we’re faced with the same dilemma when confronted by the prisoners in the article and video. Do we choose to see violent, barbarous men (not animals, because only men and devils are capable of that sort of evil; nature couldn’t birth that sort of thing)? Do we see redemption? Change? Rehabilitation? Affirmation of our ability to will and contort the world into rational order such that even ravenous wolves can be made to lie peaceably with lambs – or, as Nietzsche put it, that we indeed have become gods?
All of those are options. But all distort what’s really there, to varying degrees, in the same way my photos distort what I try to grasp. I like the idea that those men are narrative. That who they are is a complex process, and understanding who they are is a function of ‘reading’ that process. The closer the reading, the more ‘facts’ known, the more time spent with the individual, the more questions asked, the greater the engagement, then the greater the degree of understanding and the closer the ‘picture’ one leaves with is to what is in fact really there. And the same is true, in my opinion, of the 24 year old Canadian woman standing in front of her mirror trying to grasp who she is, her wherefore; as it is of the elderly Malawian woman who is approaching the end of her story and is trying to evaluate it.
The glimpse I caught of some of the men in the New York Times video was breathtaking. In and amongst the filth and violence and bars I think I saw just a little bit of the idea of Immanuel – divinity embodied in the mortal – in those men.
Which brings me to Darius Rucker. I don’t listen to very much country music. I like folk rock, but the baggage I still carry from my high school attempts to be cool are such that country is a step to far for me. And back then in school, Darius Rucker was ‘Hootie’ from ‘Hootie and the Blowfish’, a weird black dude who made music for white kids. Granted, I now think just that of people like 50cent, Kanye and so forth, but I digress.
I couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an interview in which Rucker shared part of his journey from pop into country. As he spoke, I saw a man, as Unamuno would say, a man of flesh and bone. A regular guy, like me, trying to figure stuff out. Trying to make sense of everything and figure out his purpose and ‘wherefore’. Maybe not even that, he seems to have, in one sense always known where he wanted to end up – which, oddly enough, was playing country music. It’s more like he was working it all out – not figuring it, but actually doing the work of the process of being; like someone walking through a thick rainforest with a machete does the work of clearing out the path before him. Honestly, I ‘saw’, or at least caught a glimpse of Rucker, or the Rucker narrative, and recognised myself in it – I saw my own process and my own struggle, which is radically different yet comfortingly similar. I recognised another narrative, and in that I found comfort.
As I sat in an empty room listening to ‘Free Fallin’ on John Mayer’s live album, Where the light is, my wherefore? question was partly answered.
I’ve been listening to this album since my guitar teacher suggested I buy a copy last week. It’s an amazing piece of work. The blues section is off the chart. The songs he plays with the full band are powerful. The acoustic set though, that’s haunting. It’s almost chilling. Shane, my guitar teacher, said he gets goosebumps whenever he listens to the album. It has the same effect on me – over the top as it sounds, the acoustic section ‘transports’ me to a desolate place; it forces me to look at myself. Okay, that really does sound over the top, but it’s true.
At some point while I was listening to Mayer, the solution to my wherefore? question became clearer. I think I was on the bus, on my way home, listening to the album on my phone through my noise-cancelling headphones. Closed off from the people around me, my high school physics came to mind. I remembered reading about resonance, and the example of soldiers marching in formation over a bridge. It’s all very fuzzy now, but resonance is the idea that when the particles in one object vibrate at a certain frequency (I think it’s frequency, or was that amplitude?), they can get the particles in another object to vibrate also. There’s a sweet spot where at just the right frequency, or amplitude, or whatever, things go crazy. For example, if soldiers march across a bridge in formation, the molecules and what have you in the rock that makes up that bridge can start to ‘dance’ along to the soldiers’ march, to the point where the bridge collapses.
I always understood that as those molecules being so intoxicated that they forget that they’re meant to be bound by certain forces. I think that’s why Jesus’ response has always made sense to me, when the authorities asked him to get folks to stop singing his praise during the triumphal entry. He told them that if he made the people stop, the very rocks would cry out. I read that as, ‘this is so real, at the very core of their nature, even the rocks get it, and if there were no other outward expression of what’s happening, they’d cry out because … resonance’.
Not to be blasphemous, or to grant Mayer god-like status, but him playing ‘Free Falling’ on that album resonates with something at the very core of me. Lauryn Hill signing ‘I Get Out’ has a similar effect. The same goes for nature, on a perfect day – sitting down at the beach, taking in the setting sun and the crisp sea air. All of those, I think, reflect life as it is set out to be. I think the thing with Mayer or Hill in those moments, is that you get a glimpse of a person living out their wherefore?. For that brief moment, they’re doing the thing they were created to do, and it induces a visceral response. The very core of me is moved because in that moment, I recognise the fact that I too have my own wherefore?, whether or not I’ve figured out what it is or am pursuing it. Again, that’s not to say that Mayer, Hill or nature down at the beach are perfect or ‘have arrived’. All three just so happen, at certain moments, to reflect an aspect, a facet, a portion of themselves that, perhaps briefly, is fulfilling it’s wherefore?. How then, could all of me, groping after my own wherefore? in a sometimes dark, always crowded and confused world, not be violently moved by even a partial sighting of order in another?
Resonance.
I suppose it’s not the answer to the question of wherefore?. Maybe it’s just a clue that points towards what George Price has called Kierkegaard’s existential imperative: the fact that we all have a purpose, an end towards which we are placed on the earth, and the point of it all is to live that out. To seek it, to search and think and strive and feel for it, and hopefully in the process, to have more and more aspects of our self aligned to what they were made to be.
…the movement which defines the Being of Dasein is the movement of “care”. But the movement of care, he [Heidegger] says … involves a fundamental drift (Zug), a tendency to fall in among things and to fall outside the proper concerns of Dasein’s own Being, to take the “easy way” out … Dasein is always “falling” where “fall” has the strictly ontological sense of a degeneration in virtue of which Dasein becomes more and more removed from its own primordial Being. We tend to drift farther and farther away from ourselves ontologically, even though ontically we are this very being … Fallness is a Zug, a pull away from the centre of Dasein towards dispersal and dissipation.
- J. D. Caputo (1987) Radical Hermeneutics, Indiana University Press, p. 62.
I started working on an academic paper the other day. I started working on it not because I felt I had some unique contribution to make to that bit of the world, but because that’s the sort of thing you do if you want to get ahead in academia. You write papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals, get a PhD, apply for grants (hopefully with some measure of success), and so forth. The actual content of your work is neither here nor there if we’re going to be completely honest. If you like, you can dedicate your professional life to the investigation of the effects of chemical imbalances in the neural tissue of the house fly; the association between the number of hours spent listening to ‘80s music in-utero and personality disorders in adolescence; cost-benefit analyses on starting a colony on the moon; or whatever else you can justify with a straight face. It helps if you can somehow link your work to the prospects of the very existence of humanity going forward, but ultimately, it just needs to be solid – in the sense that you stick to all the relevant conventions and gain the approval of your peers, who, mind you, are engaged in a similar enterprise. It’s pretty much a self-sustaining economy.
Back to my paper. Is the topic an interesting one? I think so. Is that why I’m writing it? Nope. Is anybody going to be substantively better off for my having written it? Will I? I’m not sure. I think that’s why I’ve hit up against writer’s block. I can’t answer the most basic question regarding either the paper or even my professional pursuits to my own satisfaction: wherefore … to what end?
If I can’t answer that satisfactorily, if there isn’t really a point, then why do this? Why do anything at all if it’s all ultimately futile?
Two figures come to mind. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes (it’s in the Old Testament, the first half of the Bible), and Nietzsche. The author of Ecclesiastes, also known as ‘the Preacher’, tried out everything – experience, travel, building stuff, women, etc – and he decided that it was all futility; that in the end, the same fate awaits us all, the wise and the foolish. There’s no real point to it all, as I read him, only, there is God and we have an obligation to serve Him and live in a manner that’s mindful of His presence. My understanding of Nietzsche thus far (there’s a serious relationship developing between us) is that there is no point to it all, but you should try to bend your environment to your will anyway.
My problem with Nietzsche is that I don’t see the point. If it’s all ultimately meaningless, or if it all boils down to the strength of one’s will without further purpose, why should I bother getting out of bed tomorrow morning, let alone executing some 5 year plan for what I want my life to look like?
If we go with the Preacher, then you’ve got to ask yourself, in what way does another academic paper glorify God; or another five units of product X sold this week for that matter; or very many of the things you all will be doing next week?
Maybe I’m just over thinking this. The Preacher does say ‘whatever work you find to do with your hands, do with all your might for there is no work in the grave where you are going’. Maybe the answer to my wherefore question concerning the ultimately irrelevant paper I’m working on is simply, ‘to work’.
I’ve been reading a lot about Kierkegaard lately, and even a little bit by him. I’ve fallen in love with his notion of personhood as a verb; an act of becoming. Perhaps the importance of my paper has to do with my becoming who I am? Maybe In the words of George Price defending Kierkegaard’s conception of personhood:
‘It can be argued with some justice that he reduced human reality (the individual) as well as external reality (God) to an infinite number of relationships, and made the relationship in all its contingency the only permanent possibility … But his reply to this would be equally just: I do not dissolve man; he is dissolved already. What else is man but a possibility that seldom becomes an actuality? And what is reality for most men but the remotest of all possibilities? And, until men become real, both they and their God suffer the same shadowy status. If personal reality and divine reality are both contingent, it is only because every man must find reality for himself – or forfeit it eternally’. – George Price (1963) The Narrow Pass: A Study of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Man, McGraw-Hill, New York. p. 66.
That’s pretty frightening: ‘…find reality … or forfeit it eternally’? It’s frightening because so many of the other illusory possibilities are infinitely easier to operate within and deal with than reality. Even if it’s ultimately futile, the rules of the academia game are pretty explicit and straight forward. So are the rules to whoredom, pan-Africanist militancy, corporatism, and even the observance and practice of religious culture. Stendhal makes this point beautifully in The Red and the Black, where he has a married woman and young man decide to engage in an affair because that seemed like the logical thing to do based on the Parisian novels they were reading. Nothing has changed. Switch on your TV, or go to the movies, and you’ll be shown exactly how to go about whoredom, political militancy and so forth. There are lots of straight forward idiot guides out there dedicated to your chosen means of getting around actuality.
Looking reality in square in the face, confronting it repeatedly, confronting one’s own shortcomings, fears and demons, acknowledging reality and then stepping inside of it, that’s some scary stuff. It’s outright terrifying. Look at Job’s reaction when confronted with reality:
‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes’.
Maybe the Preacher is right. Maybe what I do doesn’t really matter. Maybe writing this paper somehow affords me both the opportunity to confront reality, or to hide from it. I don’t know…
A good friend asked why I wasn’t writing about the events unfolding in Syria. Here is part of my response:
Honestly, in the words of Catherine Tait, “I ain’t bovvered.” It sounds harsh, but I’m starting to think that ‘world affairs’ are really the modern West’s version of an outing at the Colosseum. Think about it, how many people do you think really care about individuals in harm’s way in Syria? Honestly, I don’t. Maybe I’m just that selfish and callous, but I can’t put myself in their shoes. You and a small minority, yes, but for most folks, this is just an intriguing show made all the more exciting because it seems more and more likely that Obama and Clinton are going to go all ‘Shock and Awe’ on Assad (like Bush did with Hussein, only with liberals cheering this time). And in case we miss any of the live action, 24 hour TV will be there showing us the highlights from multiple angles – with the obvious exception of anything that could add nuance, complexity or an in-depth understanding of the background to an otherwise bog-standard, black-and-white, simplistic, Hollywood-esque production.
That the Western media has decided to go with the ‘Free Syria Army’ label for the other side in this civil war, a label brimming over with normative implications, is taken for granted. China and Russia are cast in their traditional roles of the ‘baddies’. The US, the ultimate ‘goodie’. And when the goodie smashes the baddies, the credits will roll, our attention will move to the next show, and Syrians will have to live with consequences and pick up the pieces, like Iraqis, Libyans, Egyptians and others are trying to do.
Meanwhile, how many children have died of malnutrition today in sub-Sahara Africa? How many children have gone to bed hungry in the US? What abut the ordinary peasant farmer in Malawi who has to choose between marrying his 14 year old daughter off or watching his children have to forgo an education, pathetic as it may be?
World events, at least as defined and described by the global media and our ‘global leaders’ – politicians, civil society groups, Sean Penn and George Clooney (though I really like George) – it’s all … In the words of Dead Prez, ‘Turn off the radio, turn off that bull****’ (Dead Prez are where I very rarely go when I need background music for my indignation and (hopefully) righteous anger).
I brought up the ‘starving little black babies’, not because I want CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera to give them as much prominence as they do escalating conflict in the Middle-East. That would probably only make things worse. No, I brought them up to show that it’s not abhorrence at misery and the desire to bring justice to an all too often unjust world that gets us fixated on places like Syria and inspires chants of ‘Do Something America!’; ‘Never Again!’; ‘Not another Rwanda!’ and so forth. No, it’s glamourous, exciting, animated, ‘televisionised’ suffering that gets us going, and it gets us going in the same way and via the same physiologic mechanisms as a Brazil – Germany World Cup soccer final gets us going; or the season finale of a show like The Wire; or folks getting eaten up by lions in the Colosseum once upon a time.
Maybe it’s just a manifestation of my selfishness, but I really think looking aside – not adding to the ratings or in any other way contributing to the economy that thrives off Syrians killing Syrians and wrecking their country – is the most ethical thing I can do. And honestly, when all is said and done, I have no understanding of what is happening there or why. Rather than be a pirate or cockroach, I choose to turn aside and walk on.
I just hope that doesn’t make me the priest or Levite who walked past the half-dead man on the road to Jericho in the parable of the good Samaritan.
Years ago, I went through a John Maxwell phase. I wanted to become an effective leader, be the best me I could be, rise to the top, and so forth. It was all meant for the greater glory of God, of course; to better serve Him and His flock and my fellow countrymen – or at least, that’s what I told myself.
I’ve since come to distrust the idea that God wants the rest of the world looking the way an American motivational speaker imagines it. I now associate that drive towards ‘self help’ much more with Nietzsche’s post-God world than with God, who I imagine has no need for a superman.
I digress. In one of his books or audio lectures, Maxwell tells the story of a basketball player who would stay behind after every team practice, and take an additional 500 shots. Shock horror, this player was later renowned for his shooting record.
I’m not sure what it is I want to communicate, but it recently occured to me that being able to communicate well in writing is something that’s important to me. I want to be able to get an idea that’s in my head to evoke visceral responses in other people because they’ve read something I wrote. I want to be able to not only move folks by the force of the words I write, I want to also plant ideas in their minds. To what end? I’m not sure. Maybe some of it is just vanity. Maybe deep down inside, a part of me wants to be Nietzsche’s superman. Or maybe it’s just an intrinsic aspect of my ‘wherefore’ – why I exist.
In any case, I’ve decided that I’d better do my own post-training shot regime. To that end, nothing else makes more sense than blogging regularly. So I’m back. Again.
I had a small debate about this issue with a left-leaning friend.
Just about all of the things that got most of us to think the Bush Jnr. administration was run by monsters, the Obama administration has intensified. And yet, while there was all manner of protest against Bush and Co., President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and people like my friend are convinced that regardless of appearances, Obama is doing the right thing by the world.
That’s what I can’t get my mind around. Bush does one thing, and he’s evil. Obama does the exact same thing – he takes it up a notch even – and because the man has an amazing ability to leave us with warm and fuzzy feelings; because he’s incredibly proficient in the language of human rights advocates and post-Enlightenment optimists; because he isn’t Bush, isn’t white, and doesn’t come from a political dynasty; because he conforms to the average middle-class Westerner’s idea of what the leader of the ideal state ought to look like; because of these things, the man and his administration are beyond reproach.
At this juncture, I feel like Aaron McGruder’s Martin Luther King. I quit. I quit politics. In the book of Samuel, the Israelites ask God to give them a king because everyone else has one. This was a people who was being led by the Divine, but that wasn’t enough. Given the option between Perfect governance, and some feel-good, tall, handsome leader who met the requirements of the contemporary trends, they went with the trendy. Human nature hasn’t changed. Folks will generally pick their idea of what looks and sounds good over what is good, especially if what is good isn’t sufficiently well clad.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to canonise G.W. or whitewash the past. I’m just saying that as Alisdair MacIntyre pointed out (in either After Virtue or Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, I forget which), in a liberal society, what ultimately counts is the ability to persuade, rather than a coherent argument. In foreign policy terms, Bush was at the very least the lesser evil, when stacked up against Obama. But because he struggled to put two sentences together without coining some new ‘Bushism’, that’s not how ‘history’, or the Nobel Committee, views the matter.
So I quit. Because all of this is just too depressing and frustrating.
I’ll turn my attention instead to other things – literature, the individuals I come across in daily life, fiction, something, anything, just not politics.
I grew up in Zimbabwe, spent several years in Ireland, and now live in Australia with my wife and our son. Besides writing about issues related to social justice, I have a keen interest in academic research. I am particularly interested in the study of modernity; the formation of identity; how different ‘traditions’ (in Alasdair MacIntyre’s sense of the word) relate to each other; culture as a locus of political resistance; and the genesis of the postcolonial African state... (Read more)
