OPM 93 has two citations from Heidegger that offer important context, and help to propel further thinking on the limits of language and the boundary between intentional speech, and the excessive meaning that is always already present in that intended speech. Of the two citations, the following is the more illuminating of the two: we have 'hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though fails to heed this silence.' My reading of this is: "We only fail to heed this silence if we fail to heed the appeal of language, fail to receive the invocative beckoning to cultivate community and dwell in fellowship, in the ek-sistent stand of freedom in relation to others, released from the judgmental posture that places us against others." I add further that "To heed this silence is to take up the tough work of hearing, the painstaking listening. This work unfolds, proceeds, and is directed by the silence of the primal call, the appeal of language which invites us to conserve the way for the appearance of the ineffable."
There is an interesting logic at work here, which is using language as a sign that points beyond itself, that discloses what I have been calling the offering of Being: our potentiality, our freedom. This is why Heidegger says that to hear the mystery and primal call of language is to heed its silence. The 'silence' is not simply the absence or withdrawal of language, but what language can not say through language. The 'silence of language' is the language's other way of saying, another way of speaking that does not use ordinary language, nor words in the ordinary way. What does language say with its silence? Many things are pointed to, but one thing I am emphasizing is the formation of community, the cultivation of friendship, which may be what Diotima taught Socrates when she instructed him in the power of love. In the love that we experience with friends in the community with make with them, another kind of saying is heard. It is a saying that is spoken through the sharing of emotions, and one that opens up the space for intuitive ways of knowing. In sum, the love we share with friends directs our thinking/learning to be first and foremost receptive, and this is why in OPM 93 I say claim that it is through hearing and listening that we build the dwelling we call community.
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 - The central concern of OPM 93 is an example of circulation that it not redundancy. I have been interested in the limits of language and ineffability for some time, and it's a theme I return to again and again. At one point it was the main focus on my doc dissertation, the one I was writing under Reiner Schürmann that had to be abandoned once he passed. Not surprisingly the fragment that inspires the writing from this day 20 years ago is from Heidegger: "But [language's] primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though fails to heed this silence." Heidegger is working with an interesting distinction here: the hearing and heeding of the primal call, what I describe as the evocative saying but what might be even more originary than that -- indeed, the primal call may describe the original originary originating from Being's excess -- places one in the modality of silence. Heidegger suggests that the silence is itself evocative and that we must pay attention to and notice it. A phenomenology of silence is not listening per se, but an attention to silence, to what I describe as the gap, the void, the (w)hole, the abyss. While silence organizes the place of listening, listening is always turned away from silence.
ReplyDeleteHeeding the silence that is evoked in hearing and heeding the primal call entails remaining with the experience of ineffability. If the encounter with the work of art is captivating, then the silence occurring in the aesthetic experience is what we must attend to on its own. The experience is itself ineffable: inexpressible, indescribable, beyond words, beyond description. Hence we are faced with a meaningful silence, or a silence that is full of meaning. It is a specific kind of silence. Heidegger describes the "primal call" as falling silent. And this seems to me to indicate that the primal call is not "linguistic" in the manner we are accustomed to, so it is pre-linguistic. I've described the aesthetic experience as "pre-cognitive." The primal call arrives in the aesthetic experience. It is a emotional, embodied and spiritual experience, some might even say mystical in character. Happening as a spontaneous moment of illumination, it strikes us like a lightning bolt and we are momentarily overwhelmed. This is what the replacement of the ego is indicating, the moment of transformation, the turning around that happens when we are carried over into the aesthetic experience -- the periagogē that follows from the diagogē. The primal call falls silent because it cannot be conveyed, but only felt. As listeners caught in the circulation of music we vibrate or resonate with the sound of music, but cannot convey the music ourselves. We heed the silence of the primal call.