Kaustuv Roy

Among the “Presocratics”: Heraclitus

With an astonishing economy of language, surrounded by a palpable silence, Heraclitus surgically cuts through the miasma of thought, guiding thinking past the quagmire of its own making. The vast empire of thought is brushed aside by a few sharp insights running like scalpel through tissue. It brings us to the point in our journey where we are enabled to make a few deductions that follow in the ensuing chapter. Pitting the intentionality of thought against an imperturbable Innocence Heraclitus brings thinking to its knees. Portraying Nature as “playing dice,” Heraclitus makes nonsense of the idea of cultural progress. Observing that thought looks everywhere but into itself, Heraclitus opens the main ontological window away from cultural constructs and devious arguments. Demanding that we remain prepared and open to the unexpected, Heraclitus shows us the creative abyss that awaits the seeker of essence. And finally, denying that human nature can, by itself, ever apprehend truth, Heraclitus makes the all-important gesture toward a divine nature that encompasses all. Thus thinking is forced to contemplate necessity.

Ideology and Curriculum: The “Lacunar” Dialectic

Where there is a goal and a method, there must be a corresponding formal sub-stratum or elements of a normative structural template that is identified as ideology. Curriculum has both goal and method, and hence ostensibly it must be ideological. And since ideologies are contested and the dominant forms are the product of social or epistemological power, we cannot escape the question of ideology in any serious discussion of curriculum. Historically the word ideology has acquired many associations and its usage has undergone many changes. In raising the issue of ideology in the context of curriculum, two questions are uppermost: To what extent does curriculum merely recuperate its own ideological presumptions in the name of education? And, Is it thinkable to go beyond ideology in the practice of curriculum? The inquiry suggests that an ideology-free moment can arise through a conscious clash of paradigms.

Reason and Curriculum: On Rethinking the Logistikon

To rethink curriculum we must be prepared to investigate those very apparatuses on which curriculum implicitly and explicitly rests, chief among whom is the epistemic stance we call “reason.” For it is precisely in such investigations that the ontological character of knowledge is revealed, taking us closer to the structures that underwrite the modern curriculum. It is suggested that the deconstruction and resultant self-consciousness of reason can contribute meaningfully to the pedagogic situation. In other words, ratio is, or could be, more than a mode of conveyance, arrangement of thought, or logical apparatus; under sustained interrogation, it reveals the metaphysical “spin” and the consequent “gyroscopic” stability that underwrite its self-presence. To the extent that each subject of reason becomes cognizant of this ontological underpinning, reason becomes a living process and not something supplied from the outside as fixed epistemic procedure. The present chapter looks into the enigma of reason with reference to the works of Kant, Husserl, Freud, and others, coming upon interesting dissonances and aporias that are at odds with the public face of reason. This alerts us to the reconstructive possibilities of reason within the curriculum.

Introduction: Toward Philosophical Bilingualism

This chapter addresses the question: Does the possibility of philosophical freedom, that is, attaining existential renewal by means of serious engagement in philosophy, still exist? Or has philosophy long been reduced to just another formal academic pursuit, recapitulating tired debates and worn-out positions in novel ways? Is there left to us a doing of philosophy, or rather, can philosophy do something with us? Some like Theodor Adorno seemed to be skeptical of the possibility. In the introduction to Negative Dialectics, Adorno wrote: “Philosophy remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.” In other words, humanity failed to attain to philosophy at the very moment when it was ripe for existential and phenomenological realization. So now it merely lives on as a formal discourse, alive only because it did not come to fruit? However, assuming that Adorno was speaking from the standpoint of redemption, can the moment of realization of freedom be truly lost? For, must not freedom be implicitly understood to be a blossoming that is free of the category of time as repetition and procession of historical content? If the latter is the case then philosophy can still do much with us by giving us a new vantage point from where we can look beyond the historical content of thought.

Heidegger and the Pathless Land

Thinking, because we are born into it, does not appear as anything out of the ordinary, that is, till we become conscious of it. When we pay attention to it, the possibility and phenomenon of thought appears stranger and stranger. That which is most familiar now looks inexplicable. And when we directly begin to contemplate this strange thing called thinking, by means of which each one unreflectively achieves their daily ends, a new dimension opens up before us which has no proper language in thought. In meditating on thinking, we can only be underway, as Heidegger puts it, and not arrive at quick or facile conclusions. Thought has inquired into phenomena, but has rarely inquired into itself. There is no ready path of inquiry to be followed but that of careful questioning and observing. To turn and face the origin (essence or matrix) of thinking, we have to first understand and become aware of the nature of the inner verbal and representational traffic thus slowing it down. Besides, since much of this inner traffic is verbal, we have to pay special attention to language and the nature of representation.

Colonial Modernity and Curriculum: The Other World

There is plenty of critical discussion about the curriculum as a colonial residuum in erstwhile colonized countries. The post-colonial discourse ranges from treating post-coloniality as an identifiable condition to rejecting the term itself as problematic. Beyond these sophisticated debates about what exactly constitutes post-coloniality, there is relatively little that is available to visualize possible starting points or points of recovery for a truly non-colonial perspective in education and curriculum. To compound the problem, often what is available comes from canonical sources of the older societies rather than folk perspectives, which already makes them problematic in the eyes of some (for aren’t canons themselves left-overs of earlier colonization of thought?). Despite these difficulties, the present chapter attempts to identify certain universals that run through the mythological narratives and cosmological descriptions of pre-colonial societies that once guided their cultural ship in terms of laying out the universe of meaning and conceptual schemas within it.

Corpus and Curriculum: Finding Our Rhythm

The present chapter attempts to redraw curriculum boundaries by challenging the conventional hierarchy between the mind and the body. “Discarnation” meaning the systematic suppression and disavowal of the living body as a source of orienting, knowing, and relating to the world, a typically modern attitude, is rejected as a viable existential or educational outlook. Body and mind are deconstructed on the plane of Rhythm, a timeless movement which is shown to be the ontological matrix for both body and mind. An attempt is made to shed the knowledge fixation through the grasp of the rhythmic. Part of Tagore’s Chandalika, a dance-drama is presented here as a pedagogic effort to reengage the world of the senses and their training toward a re-awakening of the sensibilities. In this reengagement, the body teaches us attention, responsibility, and competence, all of which add up to a supreme form of caritas that can help us bridge the body-mind hiatus.

Beyond the Inner Daguerreotype

The ontological character of its own movement remains obscure to thought, a condition that needs to be remedied in any serious attempt to think. From multiple angles we have looked at the pre-occupations of thought as it refuses to think, that is, refuses to think what most needs to be thought about, which is its own condition of possibility. Given this backdrop, we obtain some deductions in the form of a propositional arrangement, a deliberately chosen format, that allows us to survey what thinking can disclose to itself about itself. The inner daguerreotype is suggestive of the uncritical self-image of thought that is built up through memory accretions. So long as thought remains invested in the daguerreotype (its inner picture of itself), it remains divided against itself, incapable of truly thinking—the self-image is a schism in thought maintained through and by division. By means of the propositions in this chapter the attempt is to deconstruct the image and go beyond the daguerreotype so that new light is thrown on the operation of thought. We begin with simple observations drawing our means from Heidegger, Schelling, Goethe, and Heraclitus.

Aesthetics and Curriculum: Developing Negative Capability

The aesthetic sensibility uncovers an irreducible quality that cannot be grasped through intention, reason, or propositional knowledge. And yet this quality, without which existence remains vitally incomplete, unfree, is the essential other side of the modernist drive toward certainty. This quality may be apprehended through the development of something Keats called “negative capability,” or the capacity to remain in uncertainty. Given the modernist obsession with positivistic knowledge, the present chapter illustrates the relevance of negative capability by recourse to three practices, namely, truth-capability, simplicity-capability, and sense-capability. Sensory and corporeal mobilization is essential to balance the over-reliance on the intellect. The heart must balance the mind otherwise there is great distortion of the truth of living. And this truth of living is no other than the simplicities of nature. Radical aesthetics turns out to be an ontological alignment with the macrocosm and the rigors of nature, demanding from us therefore a directness of living.

Schelling’s Great Leap

Schelling’s “great leap” begins by cutting adrift of two of the foundational concepts of modern metaphysics—Descartes’ I think—I am, and Kant’s thing-in-itself. The former establishes the pre-critical ‘I’ as the sovereign experiencer and consequently anoints the duality of the experiencer and experience, and the latter introduces the second key binary of modern thinking: that of the “thing-in-itself” versus “appearance.” Schelling negates both and reaches beyond to look for a way of establishing the source of our reality in “unities” rather than in binaries. Going beyond Descartes and Kant, Schelling offers two perspectives: one from the phenomena upwards to the Absolute, and the other, from the Absolute down to the particulars. Together these two perspectives show conventional thinking to be foundering in misapprehensions regarding the world of finite particulars as well as its own nature. This includes the haloed world of empirical science. Nietzsche’s intuition with respect to the “Eternal Return” is much better understood when we apply Schelling’s construction of the phenomena/essence relation. Eternal Return is not to be thought of in terms of a perpetual return to accidental aggregates or external conditions, that is, in terms of recuperating contingent social formations or personal circumstances indefinitely (the latter is both improbable and a misapprehension). Rather it is to be thought of in terms of things forever returning to their essence as an underlying principle of ontological necessity.