Beginner's Mind: Opening the Open in the Classroom

As a teacher of writing, literature, and cultural theory, I have long been intrigued by what I will tentatively call the "opening of the open" in the practice of classroom pedagogy. This opening cannot be separated from an encounter with nothingness, the final groundlessness of all work in what we can still call the humanities.

There are a number of passageways that we could take toward this nothingness: entire theological traditions, east and west, that practice a via negativa; the Hegelian "work of the negative" that drives the dialectic of history; the castrating cut of psychoanalysis; the nothingness of the existentialists and the related nihil of nihilism; the constitutive gap between signifier and signified that enables the linguistic generation of meaning. There is also the enigmatic poetics that Rainer Maria Rilke (1982: 191) thinks when he writes in the Eighth Elegy:

Never, not for a single day, do we have
before us that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No: that pure
unseparated element which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows.

In this space devoted to thinking about teaching, however, these other paths will be reserved for another time, with the recognition that they are always just off the stage.

I would like to play with the notion of teaching nothing and its relationship to the opening. The major division of the nothing (speaking loosely, as if we could divide it) is between what deletes absolutely--value, meaning, hope, life--and what, surprising us with the unexpected, opens possibilities. The latter provides the condition of possibility for the emergence of a cutting edge or a breaking wave in our classrooms and in the communal exchange that co-constructs learning.

All of this should cause at least a laugh or two, if nothing more. There have been, after all, illustrious teachers who have claimed not to teach--or, to rephrase it, nonteachers who nonetheless have managed, rather mysteriously, to teach. Socrates, the very type of the teacher in the West, famously said that "I have never set up as any man's teacher, but if anyone, young or old, is eager to hear me conversing and carrying out my private mission, I never grudge him the opportunity" (Plato 1993: A 33a). There is for Socrates a deep link between not-teaching, the rhetorical arts that form the dialectic, an intellectual-spiritual eagerness, and the philosophical vocation granted him by Apollo. Socrates, as we know, never claims to know the truth, but only to dynamically open a space that, like the ascent from the cave or up the ladder of Eros, leads toward the horizon of the appearance of truth. His efforts (Plato's writings) are always in motion, and such mobility of intellect and passion among teacher, student, and subject matter characterizes our teaching when it clips along like a sailboat on a windy day.

More recently, even after two millennia of learning and of producing knowledge, Martin Heidegger (1968: 15) can say that

teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than--learning. His [or her] conduct, therefore, often produces the impressions that we properly learn nothing from him [or her], if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. (my emphasis)

Learning is not simply obtaining new information--which both computers and amoebas can do quite well--but the very human activity of learning to learn. That entails paying attention, listening with the entirety of ourselves (a task always unfinished), and a responsive thinking that is, already, an ethics. As soon as we listen, we begin to say yes to the other.

Finally, Jacques Derrida (1985: 41)--that trickster, that most assiduous of readers--has said that "I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece...