OPM 129, June 22rd Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 6, pp. 133-135

OPM 129.  Day two on the bucolic Mt. Desert Island.   Two prompts. First, the trumpet of a moose call from the forest hills across the pond piercing the silence of the sun drenched afternoon just as we are entering our kayaks.   This is the start of afternoon of communing with Nature.    This is a kind of dwelling that finds us flowing with Nature (felt intensely with the slow, easy movement of a kayak on fresh water).  We find ourselves moving with this flow, the silence of sage is experienced, and we prepared to receive the unexpected that is the hidden characteristic of Nature.  

To be silent is not only to restrain from speaking, but to prioritize listening without reference to speaking.  This kind of listening is a reading to hear, as opposed to not speaking.   If listening were only the absence of speaking, then it would only be a pause in speaking.   Listening that is a readiness for hearing is neither a reduction from speaking, nor an absence of speaking.   Such listening is a modality that arises in our beyond language, and is a reduction to what is more fundamental than language: Nature. 

Western philosophy has often mis-understood  Nature as repetitive cycles, and thus understood it only from the perception of the human being.   Freedom, so the story goes, is only introduced when human consciousness arises as apart from Nature.  Hegel documents this as ‘alienation’ that give way to self-consciousness, awareness of a self apart from Nature.  However, with meditative thinking it is not only this western subject that is deconstructed by way of relationality (dialogic intersubjectivity), but also deconstructed is the categorizing of Nature as predictable repetitive cycle.  That view of Nature is dispensed with when we appreciate Heraclitus’ phenomenology of flux and the Taoist ethics of spontaneity.  

The second prompt emerged in the afternoon when I was reading a somewhat random book that I bought in April at the Chatham (NJ) book store (in Madison, of course!) on one of my last days of working at Drew University.   It was the day after I had presented my LAPES paper and I was motivated to read philosophy in Spanish, which lead me, in a contradictory moment, to buy a Spanish translation of Jurgen Habermas’ On Nietszche and other essays.  I really hesitated about buying the book, because in the wake of my LAPES presentation I felt quite inauthentic about reading German philosophy.   But Habermas, like Nietzsche, was an old interlocutor of mine, and it wasn’t so easy to turn your back on an old friend.  (Here I am stretching the notion of philosophy as a dialogue between friends.) 

So I picked up Sobre Nietzsche y otros ensayos, and read most of the first essay, when I encountered the following sentence: “El fragment es, y no casualmente, la forma literaria de un pensamiento que busca sustraerse a lo coercion del sistema.”(p. 36)  There was a lot that caught my eye in this quotation. First and foremost his designation of Nietzsche’s fragments as an intentional literary form.  Yes!  Here is a prompt not only for this day of blogging, but also for the writing to come!  Next, and closer to OPM 129,  is the intention of Nietzsche’s fragments as a separation from the coercion of system.   Reading this was a jolt.   Especially when I reflect on the daily writing of the project undertaken ten years ago and contrast it with the more easy going manner of this commemorative blog.    The repetition of phrases, e.g., in OPM 129 we read again the phrases: ‘arrival of the ineffable’ and ‘processural unfolding of Being’s twofold play,’ and ‘cultivation of freedom and peace.’  I have criticized this repetition a lot in this blog, and tried to make sense of it, because I often find it irritating.   And today, in view of Habermas description of Nietzsche’s intention, I wonder if all this repetition is not just really a departure from system building, but a kind of degenerated system building?  Could I allow myself to see Being and Learning  in such a way?  Have I already done so?  And if I have, what to do with this perception? 

This is all too harsh, but it wouldn’t be out of character with my tendency to be, as my advisor Richard Bernstein once said, my own worse critic.  But who else would be so critical?

But is this criticism fair to the person who conducted the experiment in earnest?  I don’t believe it is.  Especially when I read OPM 129, which was an attempt to break out of the repetition by taking on a new conversation partner, Aristotle.   In fact, it is with that conversation that I was able to move, for the first time, into theology, talking freely about God.  OPM 129: “Aristotle’s position complements our own insofar as he identifies learning and teaching, when they appear most authentically, as the ontological analogy of the divine.  For Aristotle, the most meaningful and significant, yet useless, science is the ‘divine,’ the science of knowledge of God.”  What is the ‘science of God’ if not theology?  Here then a spirited (pun intended) response to my worse critic (‘me’) who enters the scene with Nietzsche’s hammer (and not the one that strikes the piano strings, but the one that destroys all moral systems masquerading as philosophical truths, exposing what lies beneath them: i.e., a will to power, to see the world in the image it has perceived)  The response:  YES! (striking a chord played by that other Nietzsche, the music-making philosopher).  Yes!  I write with the will to power to write of a world of peace and freedom.  Yes!  I write of a world economized by the making art rather than production of commodities.  And Yes! I write of Nature, the Tao, the Word, Being, and God, earnestly.