OPM 94 is the weekly Sunday early evening reading that coincides with the broadcast of my radio show, The Dead Zone, which airs on Sundays 6-8pm EST on wrhu.org Tonight's show is part 2 of the annual Barton Hall (Cornell U) May 8, 1977 show. So I play a bit of the The Dead Zone, and then get into the reading, with the music lowered but still playing. "St. Stephen will remain..." into "you know our love will now fade away..." are to perfectly appropriate lyrics for a meditation that introduces for the first time the complementary to freedom, which has been thus far the most important ideal: peace. From this point onward freedom and peace will be two sides of the same coin, or the fundamental realized ideals of the learning community, which has displaced and replaced the singular, solitary Cartesianesque 'thinker.'
Heidegger helps me to make the connection between freedom and peace, when he makes an etymological connection between building and dwelling via the roots of these German words: "The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the word bauen, means to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye; and fry, means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded..." In turn, OPM 94 offers: "If the fundamental character of poetic dwelling is preservation, freedom and peace as the safeguarding...then building is... the cultivation and construction of peace and freedom. This is the fundamental and inherent aim of the learning community: to cultivate and construct the abode of peace and freedom through poetic dialogue."
Reading OPM 94 in the context of my LAPES inspired project, I'm struck at how I uncritically appropriate Heidegger's etymology. Ten years later I embrace wholeheartedly his etymological method, which he inherited from earlier hemeneutics and even earlier exegetical traditions, but made his own as a way of clearing a space for making an original move in philosophy. He has shown me why a retrieval of the originary is the way to be original in one's work, and, for me this means going back to the originary, that is, offering a story and philosophical documentation of the the original way Being is disclosed to human beings and shape us. I call the originary disclosing the showing of Being's dynamic processural unfolding, and call 'thinking/learning' the shaping that happens in our encounter (being-with, dwelling-in) with Being. And while I concur the words that best describe the actualization of this encounter are 'freedom' and 'peace,' the words I would want to use now would have to be traced back to the originary encounter between the Iberian and the Indigenous American cosmologies. For 'peace' I might trace back to the originary language of the Incans, and deploy huaca as the dwelling where peace is disclosed. What is important at this point is to follow a narrative that is more consistently my own, and if, as Heidegger says in a quotation that appears in OPM 94, that "Language is the house of Being, because language, as Saying, is the mode of Appropriation," then it is imperative to understand of the house where one dwells, where one is gathered into Being.
A definition of 'appropriation' is: "the action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission," which is quite interesting, indeed! When Heidegger says 'mode of appropriation' he seems to be indicating we are appropriated by Being through language (the house where we dwell). Our 'thinking' happens via the language that appropriates us, or, rather, we are appropriated and our thinking 'speaks' the language that has appropriated us. But when we are truly thinking/learning we are attempting to 'know' this language, which is to say, tracing back the origins of ourselves. Yet this poses any number of complicated problems. For if we are formed by the house where we dwell, then are we only ever being directed by the language that has appropriated us without our permission? And if this is the case, which I'd like to entertain as a possibility, then we are being called and moved by any number of cultural forces, so much that they are like conflicting/intersecting vectors moving through us. We dwell at the nexus point where these cultural forces meet, and perhaps, to switch metaphors, our thinking is no unlike the transduction of radio wave by a receiver that picks up signal, and in the way a radio dial works, we 'tune into' one of these vectors/cultural waves, and let is move us. This seems to be the way Heidegger was lead to move always through the German poets, like Holderlin who is cited in OPM 94, "soon we shall be song," and also the earliest Greek philosophers like Heraclitus. For me, the example of the Argentinian Rodolfo Kusch who understood the need to live in this hemisphere and to think in an American way, which is, necessarily, to think in and through the Indigenous cosmologies, first and foremost.
Heidegger helps me to make the connection between freedom and peace, when he makes an etymological connection between building and dwelling via the roots of these German words: "The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the word bauen, means to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye; and fry, means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded..." In turn, OPM 94 offers: "If the fundamental character of poetic dwelling is preservation, freedom and peace as the safeguarding...then building is... the cultivation and construction of peace and freedom. This is the fundamental and inherent aim of the learning community: to cultivate and construct the abode of peace and freedom through poetic dialogue."
Reading OPM 94 in the context of my LAPES inspired project, I'm struck at how I uncritically appropriate Heidegger's etymology. Ten years later I embrace wholeheartedly his etymological method, which he inherited from earlier hemeneutics and even earlier exegetical traditions, but made his own as a way of clearing a space for making an original move in philosophy. He has shown me why a retrieval of the originary is the way to be original in one's work, and, for me this means going back to the originary, that is, offering a story and philosophical documentation of the the original way Being is disclosed to human beings and shape us. I call the originary disclosing the showing of Being's dynamic processural unfolding, and call 'thinking/learning' the shaping that happens in our encounter (being-with, dwelling-in) with Being. And while I concur the words that best describe the actualization of this encounter are 'freedom' and 'peace,' the words I would want to use now would have to be traced back to the originary encounter between the Iberian and the Indigenous American cosmologies. For 'peace' I might trace back to the originary language of the Incans, and deploy huaca as the dwelling where peace is disclosed. What is important at this point is to follow a narrative that is more consistently my own, and if, as Heidegger says in a quotation that appears in OPM 94, that "Language is the house of Being, because language, as Saying, is the mode of Appropriation," then it is imperative to understand of the house where one dwells, where one is gathered into Being.
A definition of 'appropriation' is: "the action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission," which is quite interesting, indeed! When Heidegger says 'mode of appropriation' he seems to be indicating we are appropriated by Being through language (the house where we dwell). Our 'thinking' happens via the language that appropriates us, or, rather, we are appropriated and our thinking 'speaks' the language that has appropriated us. But when we are truly thinking/learning we are attempting to 'know' this language, which is to say, tracing back the origins of ourselves. Yet this poses any number of complicated problems. For if we are formed by the house where we dwell, then are we only ever being directed by the language that has appropriated us without our permission? And if this is the case, which I'd like to entertain as a possibility, then we are being called and moved by any number of cultural forces, so much that they are like conflicting/intersecting vectors moving through us. We dwell at the nexus point where these cultural forces meet, and perhaps, to switch metaphors, our thinking is no unlike the transduction of radio wave by a receiver that picks up signal, and in the way a radio dial works, we 'tune into' one of these vectors/cultural waves, and let is move us. This seems to be the way Heidegger was lead to move always through the German poets, like Holderlin who is cited in OPM 94, "soon we shall be song," and also the earliest Greek philosophers like Heraclitus. For me, the example of the Argentinian Rodolfo Kusch who understood the need to live in this hemisphere and to think in an American way, which is, necessarily, to think in and through the Indigenous cosmologies, first and foremost.
3.0 - I first want to comment on how Heidegger's etymological method inspired this project, both the writing of the original OPMs but also my teaching. My first encounter with that approach happened at Fordham, when I was an undergrad studying philosophy with the Jesuits. Attic Greek words were written on the chalk board, and we learned the lexicon of ancient Greek philosophy. But they didn't bridge the gap from then to now, didn't link past and present. For them that lexicon was timeless, like the ideas they expressed. Heidegger's approach is to move from the present to the past and then return to the present via the past. I prefer that approach. For example, in the important fragment that I took up this day 20 years ago, Heidegger links "dwelling" with "peace" and "freedom": "Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye; and fry, means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded..." This would be a good fragment to recover and place alongside Irigaray's discussion of thinking as dwelling, and then connect with Arendt's description of thinking as a the two-in-one dialogue between me and myself. In the sabbatical book I'm anticipating presenting the first section on the book, or on study, or on reading. (I haven't finalized it, and there's where the excitement is generating, the openness of a project that is going to be written!). However I approach it, the first dialectic, let's call it the dialectic of study, will be constructed as a listening to the book, which may or may not be the same as listening to the author, and there may be yet another dialectic at work between author and work (Blanchot), with the book (word) achieving autonomy. The encounter with the book, i.e, reading, will be described as listening. This listening is the first moment of learning. But all along the way I will be placing "thinking" as the dialectical other to the moment. Thinking, which is itself dialectical and dialogic, occurs in the withdrawal from the moment, but is included in the event of learning that endures moment to moment. Thinking happens when the reader steps back from listening to the book. The taking of notes is part of this stepping back. Annotating the reading. Are these responses to the book, part of the conversation with the book? More needs to be considered here. Another way of approaching it is to suggest that each moment is itself an occurrence of thinking. Study/reading happens with dwelling, which is perhaps the only moment when the learner is "at peace" and "free." Although once established, the description of the dialogic learning community can articulate "peace" and "freedom" as the decisive factors, i.e., the gathering will be measured relative to achieving both peace and freedom amongst the members of the community. The learning community is not necessarily requiring consensus, but it does prioritizing mutual understanding. The learning community is not a political sphere, in the Arendtian sense, so it is not agonistic or a contest between opponents. Listening is prioritized, and listening emerges from the modality of peace. And listening establishes the conditions for the possibility of the free movement of ideas, which is how I understand the appearance of "freedom" in the learning community. It is not that the participants are "free" but that the ideas they are sharing are moving freely, like music, especially the music that is made under the inspiration of the muse Improvisation. This is what I describe as learning by jamming!
ReplyDeleteIn turn, OPM 94 offers: "If the fundamental character of poetic dwelling is preservation, freedom and peace as the safeguarding...then building is... the cultivation and construction of peace and freedom. This is the fundamental and inherent aim of the learning community: to cultivate and construct the abode of peace and freedom through poetic dialogue."