I sent this letter off today.
J____,
I have been reading All things shining and thought it has much to say about your recent Ed theory piece and our previous start-up conversation on silence. It makes a rather strong point that meaning, or faith in any sort of content, derives not from agency. Rather, it comes through the ways we each are attuned to the possible. When that attunement finds too high a register in our own willfulness, we alienate ourselves from the possibility of disclosure in the world. Put another way, faith as a function of self-chosen belief is a form of false consciousness. Rather than a dwelling of existential freedom, faith becomes flight from a more radical and difficult freedom, the freedom to be what is possible. Less Fromm and more Bultmann, who wrote that "true freedom is freedom from oneself."
Cultivating silence, or what we called 'silent being,' I think, recognizes the loss that accompanies outcome-based action. Even at its most pragmatic and necessary, goal-directed living and learning risk meaningfulness in action for meaningful of action. It would be the height of irresponsibility for us moderns to construct a social institution not dedicated to effective, efficient pay-offs; we must be purposeful, directed and effervescent in pursuit. The contradiction is most apparent when teachers discuss motivating students. "Relevant" and "meaningful" get used without a deeper commitment to how things are valued. We end up working hard to convince students to either value something that will happen as a result of undergoing this things call education (or schooling or learning or, whatever) or to recognize in their school work something that they already value. Neither contend the students with what is worth valuing nor with how the emerge of value (meaningfulness) is part and parcel of a modern, occlude process of faith.
Silence, then, is less curricular than dispositional, while faith is less muscular (as Simone Weil has called faulty forms of prayer) than it is open.
Roll that around in your South Texas dirt and get back to me.
Take care,
Neil
