PANDEMONIUM AS PEDAGOGUE: MEDITATIONS ON BEING IN THE MOOD FOR SUICIDE AS BEING IN THE MOOD OF LOVE BY JOHN ALAN LANG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Pradeep Dhillon, Chair Professor James Anderson Professor Mark Dressman Professor Michael Peters, University of Waikato ABSTRACT This study proceeds according to seven meditations on being in the mood for suicide as being the mood of love. The first meditation is one of doctoral suicide as a meditation toward no doctoral future. The second meditation is one of authorial suicide within the field of philosophy of education that overcomes the fantasy of a better tomorrow toward an authorial path that leads nowhere at all. The third meditation is one of syntactical suicide as the word mapped and not mapped on to life and death. The fourth meditation is one of suicide according to the mood of method and the method of mood. The fifth meditation studies mood and method according to the mod of Anglo-Saxon literature as the interpenetration of love and care, sadness and joy, courage and violence, hospitality and murderousness. The sixth and penultimate meditation prepares endings as a study of metaphormorphosis: the transforming of being as the morphing of words. The seventh meditation means the morphing of being by way of mod as the transformation of a state of total war into one of infinite love that simply transforms itself into nothing at all. Throughout the study, pandemonium — as the clamor of voices within and all around — will service as pedagogue and educator in the sense of leading into the fundamental question of life and death. Accordingly, pandemonium leads our meditations into the dangerous maybe as direction and misdirection, spiralization and interpenetration, alternate beginnings and, finally, a dead end. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREMEDITATIONS…………………………………………………………………...…1 FIRST MEDITATION ON DOCTORAL SUICIDE…………………………………….34 SECOND MEDITATION ON AUTHORIAL SUICIDE………………………...………53 THIRD MEDITATION ON SYNTACTICAL SUICIDE………………………..………77 FOURTH MEDITATION ON MOOD METHOD.……………………………….….…121 FIFTH MEDITATION ON THE WAYS OF THE WAY……………………...….……161 SIXTH MEDITATION ON METAPHORMORPHOSIS………………………….……222 SEVENTH MEDITATION ON MORNING STAR…………………………..……...…242 FORE AND AFT ON A SHIP OF FOOLS………………………………..………….…282 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………….…..………301 iii PREMEDITATIONS My Lord Jesus Christ, Thou hast made this journey to die for me with love unutterable and I have so many times unworthily abandoned Thee. But now I love Thee with my whole heart and because I love Thee I repent sincerely for I have offended Thee. Pardon me, my God, and permit me to accompany thee on this journey. Though goest to die for love of me. I wish also, my beloved Redeemer, to die for love of Thee. My Jesus, I will live and die always united to Thee. —”Preparatory Prayer,” The Stations of the Cross According to the Method of St. Alphonsus Liguori Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? —Isaiah 40:21 1 Blessed is the man who meditates on the word both day and night, says the Book of Psalms. Blessed is the man who prepares by praying, adds St. Alphonsus Liguori. We take them to heart and begin by praying upon ourselves. We proceed by meditating on being in the mood for suicide as being in the mood of love. Our thesis is pandemonium as anti-thesis as diathesis. Pandemonium is neither educational nor philosophical nor doctoral. Pandemonium is monstrous. Pandemonium is a monster deserving of fire. We proceed in the manner and anti-manner of Descartes who offers his Meditationes de prima philosophia in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur — Meditations on first philosophy in which the existence of God and the eternal spirit are shown. Descartes meditates in order to destroy what needs destroying and to establish what needs establishing. “I needed — just once in my life — to demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations,” he explains.1 We must, however, demolish meditation as demonstration as proof positive. Our meditations will demonstrate pandemonium as anti-proof, neither arguable nor defensible. We proceed in the manner of Descartes, who writes in his Meditations on First Philosophy, “Thus my design is not here to teach the Method which everyone should follow … but only to show in what manner I have endeavored to conduct my own.” Readers are invited, he continues, simply to regard the work “as a history, or, if you prefer it, a fable in which amongst certain things which may be imitated, there are possibly others also which it would not be right to follow …”2 In this spirit, pandemonium will be absolutely fabulous in the strictest sense. We proceed in the anti-manner of education, as educational theory, since virtually all educational theory, from Plato to the present day, shares an abiding concern for a better 1 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, I, 66. 2 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, I, 5. 2 tomorrow. Educational theory models and moves us out of a darkened past and the desperate present and toward the light of a new day. Pandemonium is anti-educational anti-theory that calls tomorrow into question. To do otherwise is to answer the question of suicide even before we truly ask it. We proceed in the anti-manner of Descartes who demonstrates, in The Passions of the Soul, that passions are not, in truth, of the soul but are instead merely for or against the thinking soul. Descartes tell us that the utility of all the passions consists only in their strengthening thoughts which it is good that they should preserve and which could otherwise easily be effaced from it, and causing them to endure in the soul. So too all the evil they can cause consists either in their strengthening and preserving those thoughts more than necessary or in their strengthening and preserving others it is not good to dwell upon.3 Descartes instructs that we “separate within us the movements of blood and spirits from the thoughts to which they are usually joined.”4 Passions fortify or undermine the soul such that the soul is either master or servant to the very same. Accordingly, the task of philosophy is one of self-mastery by way of rationality in truth and being. We will, by contrast, undertake an anti- philosophy by mixing blood and spirit as a philosophy of mood. We enter into a philosophy of mood by way of mystical meditation in the anti-manner of Descartes, whose Meditations could not be further from it. By his meditations, Descartes arrives at proof positive of Man and God by rooting out “falsity and error” and by arriving and a “clear and distinct understanding” so that truth is clearly known to him. Descartes declares, “Nor have I only learned today what I should avoid in order that I may not err, but also how I should act in 3 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Article 74, 59. 4 Ibid., Article 211, 133. 3 order to arrive at a knowledge of the truth; for without doubt I shall arrive at this end if I devote my attention sufficiently to those things which I perfectly understand…” This truth in knowledge, he tells us, is “engraved deeply … so that I could never forget it.” The truth of method as the method toward truth ushers Descartes into the “greatest and principal perfection of man” as knowledge and being.5 Unlike philosophy, which aspires to rigor and veracity and consistency, mood entails vagary and intransigence. Moods are fleeting while philosophical understanding is meant to endure. When we enter a philosophy of mood as a mystical endeavor we cross into a territory that one commentator calls “delusional looniness.”6 For the philosophical mind, mystics conjure up images of primitiveness and naiveté and righteous uncriticality and charlatanism. In place of looniness, however, we undertake mystics according loomings. Recall that Moby Dick begins as a suicidal endeavor. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.7 5 Descartes, Meditations, IV, 100–101. 6 Robert Alter, “Forward,” in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, xix. 7 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, “Loomings” (I), 11. 4 From the beginning, Ishmael proceeds under the sign of “Loomings” (chapter 1). In The Sea- Mans Grammar and Dictionary (1627), Captain John Smith explains that “The looming of a ship is her prospectiue, that is, as she doth shew great or little.”8 What looms is seen and unseen and known partly by what is unknown and unknown in light of what is known. What is unknown gives fuller shape to what is known even as what is known lacks for what is not known. A ship looms. A white whale looms. Suicide looms. Suicide is here and yon though she doth show only great or a little, and never all. In this respect, we proceed in the anti-manner Durkheim, who rejects what looms precisely because it looms.