some thoughts

I stated in my paper that I am asking myself what learning is. After 12 or so years of working, now I have the status of full time student. Admittedly, the notion of learning is always dwelling in my mind. Being a student, whose main purpose is to learn, I am realizing that learning takes time. Sometimes we go one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes my heart was fulfilled with happiness that I was learning something; sometimes I got frustrated not to know what I was doing.

When we talked about a transformative learning experience at the coaching corner, I thought of it as something ‘boom’, big, inevitable, shocking things, like a beast is transformed to a prince, that kind of experience. Until very recently, I could not recall the class I had taken seven years ago. Those days my interest was “I” and “the other” not in a philosophical way, but in a practical way. One philosophy class, which I had taken at that time, had influenced me a lot on the way I think, the value I pursue. I could call it transformative experience. The class was about the meaning of “I”(or subjectivity?) in philosophy. ‘I/subjectivity’ in the Western philosophical tradition from Descartes was limited. A man looking at a mirror and constantly asking himself “who am I?.” They were never in a position where they had to think of themselves in others. (They had been always a winner in history, so they did not need to think of “the other” and “I” within “the other”. This is a western philosophical tradition, where ‘I’ had never lost its subjectivity. But according to the teacher, by yielding “I” to “you”, by losing within “you”(“the other”), “I” can expand. And “I” can be a mature, expanded and new “I”. In this sense, his concept of I-you relationship is more advanced than Buber’s). Though I feel that somehow his philosophy can be connected to ‘generative dialogue’, it’s beyond my ability to explain it.