Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how (...) their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)

Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese educational “wind” (...) texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)