OPM 75 is read on the 'threshold' (the porch) of the original building at Drew University, that impressive greek-revival structure built in 1848, and purchased by Drew in 1869 for the founding of the Methodist seminary. There's a certain symmetry to reading OPM 75 on this porch on this warm spring day, because this is the meditation when I finally take up that story about Heraclitus that is at the center of the fifth chapter of Being and Learning.
The story is one that I use to return to focus on the bearing of the Sage as one who can bring the extra-ordinary into the ordinary, or disclose the uncanny in the ordinary by simply dwelling in the everyday. This is the Sage as the teacher who offers up openness in the gestures of receptivity, welcoming and hospitality, and does this without fanfare and in what appears to be the most natural and everyday way.
"The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers who wanted to come visit him. Having arrived they saw him warming himself at a stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation -- above all because he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called for them to come in, with the words, 'For here too the gods are present.'" (Aristotle, De partibus animalium, 645a)
In OPM75 I write: "The first and perhaps most important point we should gather from this story is the disruption of the ordinary within the mundane itself. We have said much about learning as getting underway when the apprentice is drawn away from the security of the domestic, the habitual habitat, but this story reminds us that the dwelling of the Sage, the open region, should not and cannot be limited to a specific 'place' if we mean by this a predetermined designated destination. This is precisely the kind of expectation held by Heraclitus' visitors...The story emphasizes the Sage's dwelling 'place' as a modality, or a specific manner of being, a 'position' occupied by the Sage."
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
3.0 - Although it wasn't planned, the original set of OPMs were organized via a kind of methodology that focused on small sections, fragments, and anecdotes from classic pieces, such as a work by Aristotle. "Classic" is a relative term, and I reserve it for the works that have been studied over the generations. And that is why I primarily engaged with ancient thinkers, with Heidegger and Arendt offering guidance as I take them up. I can't recall at the moment, but I believe it was Heidegger who pointed to the fragment from Aristotle that relays the anecdote about Heraclitus at home, welcoming the strangers to his home while warming his hands by the fire and telling them, "the gods dwell here too." I have always been of the position that less is more, assigning my students short but dense pieces to read and study. And I have often said that if they can find one illuminating line in a piece, they will have distilled a reading to an essential moment. Again, it's the search for singularity, for the single line or even word that will produce a moment of transcendence. And the story of Heraclitus is a reminder that the singular event can occur in an "ordinary" moment. This is perhaps what we might call a moment of "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical" transcendence. Plato's Allegory is all about an ascendence, a vertical ascent upward and out from the ordinary, from the everyday, from what Parmenides calls the "well beaten path." The story of Heraclitus reminds us that this encounter with the extraordinary can in fact occur on this well beaten path. The presence of the gods in the everyday, in the domestic setting. I explored this in a paper on bell hooks that I wrote for and presented at NEPES 2022. How she learned to perceive the presence of meaning at her grandmother's house, in the way things were arranged. And this seems to be the thrust of the phenomenological desire to get back to the things themselves, to the singularity of things, and thus to their significance as singular objects. Here I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's term "aura," which is explained by the Tate Museum in the following summary: in Benjamin's "1936 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' Benjamin argued that 'even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.' He referred this unique cultural context i.e. 'its presence in time and space' as its 'aura'." Benjamin remained open to the mystical, which for bell hooks is called the spiritual or even soulful, and the spiritual and mystical is also embraced by this project. In some ways it is an assignment of inherited terms to the every day, and a recognition of the iconic power of the work of art. But then the further assignment is made to the aura of the everyday object, the iconic power of the every day. This is what the story of Heraclitus conveys.
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