To the Music Itself! Folk Phenomenology and the Return to Original Melody

Education, as Hannah Arendt showed us, exists in a pre-political sphere, and this means it is properly understood as existing against the state. How do we arrive at this ‘proper’ understanding of education, to this utopian intuition, which is to say, How are we moved into and then occupy the utopos of Education? This talk takes up these questions by returning to the category of music-making philosophy. The category of music-making philosophy arrives to us from the prophetic writing of Nietzsche, who prognosticated the renewal of a chorus based poetic praxis, or what we would today describe as the dialogic learning community. Like the chorus of Greek tragedy, the dialogic learning community occupies a time and space outside of the chronological events unfolding in the statecontrolled political realm; it arises in the utopos of Education. Music-making philosophy via poetic praxis is thus a collective working out of a counter-culture through a mimetic representation of music’s non-intentional and radically independent ontology. It is the dialectical negation of the instrumental rationality of data driven ‘schooling’. The return to Nietzsche’s category enables this paper to accomplish two aims: first, to take up what Theodor Adorno identifies as “the right of music – all music – to exist,” and, second, to present the method, folk phenomenology, that discloses this “right of music – all music -- to exist”; folk phenomenology mediates an effacement with what Nietzsche called “the original melody.” Thus, the thesis to be taken up in this talk is the following: the disclosure via folk phenomenology of music’s right to exist is prior to any music-making philosophy. Before we enter Education, then, we must first return to the music itself!

Biography: Eduardo Duarte is Professor of Philosophy of Education and a recurring Lecturer in the Honors College at Hofstra University. He earned his doctorate and masters in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and his baccalaureate in philosophy from Fordham University. Duarte is the author of Being and Learning (Sense Publishers: 2012), and has published articles in Studies in Philosophy and Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Educational Theory, and the Journal of Philosophy of Education. He is an active member of the Philosophy of Education Society. Under the pseudonym Professor Iguana, Duarte is host and producer of Dead Zone, 88.7FM WRHU. ORG, a program documenting the improvisational jam music of the Grateful Dead and related musical configurations.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Educational Studies and Green College

All talks are free and open to the public. Visitors are welcome to stay for dinner after the lecture. Go to our website to make a dinner reservation: www.greencollege.ubc.ca/join_us_for_dinner/index.php