Someone sent me an off-list response to my Freire post, offering that "I
think that "ser " used by Paulo Freire refers to the essence of each
individual. " In my response, I say that I agree with ser as the essnece,
but I'm thinking Freire is trying to say our essence is our doing, not
something that we are [as with the verbal copula]. This is consistent with
Sartre, of course, but I think Freire is trying to express this in a more
radical sense, by using "ser" (at least sometimes) in a way that it should
not be translated as the noun "L'etre."
I think "ser" is not always "O ser" (= L 'etre) in Freire, as when he writes
in the footnote "Em torno do que e de como estão sendo." (p. 1, chapter 1,
Pedagogia do Oprimido)
The English, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is: < preoccupation with what
and how they are "being." >
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Larry Purss
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 8:56 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [xmca] adverbial qualified movement, action, being
The discussion of vivencia has me pondering
The turn to discussing "vital experience" or being as qualified being [not
qualia] seems to be an opening with potential and possibility.
Andy,
you ask if it is what we "make" of an experience that is determinative if it
is "vital". I would suggest that the term how we "participate" rather than
"make" is central to exploring "vital experience". Making is one particular
approach to engaging vital experience. This is a vital experience that
transforms the individual person's orientation within the world. This is an
agentive response that has the quality of being a "personal" decision. I
would like to suggest this is one particular way to intergrate "vital
experience in our proceeding along pathways. I would even suggest this may
be the particular way forward that is biased as an approach within modernity
as an ethical way of life.
>From this perspective "vital experience" can be personally "undergone"
and
through struggle and courageously exploring of personal inscapes the person
can change direction and "make" something different of their lives [develop]
However, alternatively, the person could possibly be "met" [alterity] and in
this "I-YOU" meeting "vital experience" is transformed and new pathways
open. I wonder if this alternative way of engaging "vital experience" is
through "witnessing" [as I explored recently] This is another way of
engaging "vital experience" that does not emphasize the personal courageous
aspect of transformation [as making] but rather points to "being met" within
the "vital experience".
I've contrasted and made distinct two possible openings of development
[transformation or in*formation] One emphasing a journey through inscapes,
the other through intersubjective "holding environments". In actuality there
may be multiple flow-forms and interweavings of these multiple strands of
"vital experience" What I'm pointing to is our socio-cultural biases in
modernity to validate the "inscapes" as legitimate [good] pathways of
transformation while invalidating the inter-subjective witnessing pathways
to transformation. [as dependency and defended against] In other words we
don't really "trust" the other will actually respond to the calling of "vial
experience".
Andy, I grant that after being "met" [which I believe may be developmental
in its own movement] there follow other phases or levels of transformation
that bring us back to "spaces of reason" "propositional language games"
"agentive stances of *making* ones way in the world", etc.
This becomes a cultural-historical narrative of projects and objects and
activity. I also grant "meeting" as I'm discussing it is "normative" and an
ethical stance towards alterity [including one's own alterity]. However as
a particular form of participation it may have as much validity and
legitimacy as the moe courageous form of turning towards inscapes for
transormation.
Larry
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