For the past week I
have been writing on the retreat from past and present, from the world,
community and self. Retreat to...?
"I've always
been looking for answers...looking for the answer." This I said
today to my very good friend and colleague Stacy Smith when we met to complete
our close reading of the Bhagavad
Gita. We have been meeting a few times a month since February, and,
as I noted, we've passed through three seasons. As I completed my reading
of the Gita today in anticipation of our meeting
I couldn't help but hear a distinct harmony between the voice of Krishna and
the Stoics, specifically, Marcus. Here then is an example of what Aby
Warburg (cited in yesterday's post/July 9th) calls learning "the from an old book,"
i.e., understanding the kinship between ancient philosophies. Today I
understand this 'kinship' is one that is heard, musically, in the harmonies made by the fundamental or originary words spoken by the
ancients. Yet, because they co-existed and 'sang' across time and space, it
is only we who are able to hear the harmony.
It is one thing to
describe the enactment of so-called 'negative liberty,' the move away from the past and present. This week (in OPM 144) I wrote of this movement as the
necessary retreat that locates one in the place of letting-be. And for
this reason the move was linked to gelassenheit,
the freedom one is released into (emancipated). Retreat to....?
The question is rather: does one retreat or is one gathered? But that is a rhetorical
question, because I have been insisting that this move into meditative thinking
is a releasement, and, as (later) Heidegger insisted, and I have consistently documented in the original meditations, we don't possess but, rather, are
possessed by freedom. Hence the fundamental question is: but what are we released? (here thinking
arrives at the line of question that takes me to an answer...the answer?) Given this question, it is actually misleading to place priority on enacting
negative liberty. 'Enactment' or 'exercising' freedom is the talk of
liberal political theory, which is derivative of all philosophies of singularity. A response to the fundamental question: we are released by...Being,
specifically the processural flow or dynamic becoming of Being, which is how we
experience Being, or how Being is disclosed to us. And when we are in the midst of thinking
this event we perceive the event of appropriation, our being gathered away from
the past and present and into the arrival of the future. In OPM 144
I borrowed the Dreyfus translation and wrote of this arrival as 'coming into'
ourselves. Now I understand how this arrival happens by way of
attunement, by way of being tuned.
But
how is the event of appropriation, the experienced of being retrieved, gathered
and released, also a retreat? Here we arrive at what Heidegger calls
'willing non-willing,' or the active passivity that also marks the phenomenological
attitude of letting-be. This willing of non-willing is the practice that
the Stoics calls apatheia,
or detachment. And this is also the practice of renunciation that is
described in the Gita, reduced to the word TAT,
which signifies both the "renunciation of all reward," but also the
"work of sacrifice, gift or self-harmony" being done "by those
seekers of Infinite Freedom."(17:25) Renunciation is akin to apatheia and the willing
of non-willing insofar as it leads to a interruption of the willing subject
(ego), and leads to a higher order of freedom, one that we experience as a
renewed and empowered self. Paradoxically this 'self' is the
consciousness of an 'I' that is joined with Nature, Being, or the One
(depending on the discourse). This awareness of this unity with the
totality is how the higher order of freedom is experienced. In my
translation Krishna calls this awareness 'self-harmony,' but I would conjecture
that I preferable translation would be 'harmonized self' in order to indicate
this awareness or consciousness as an attunement with the totality. To be
harmonized is to be in tune in with Nature, Being, the One...
Here, then, is the
fragment distilled from the meditation written this day ten years ago, but not
published in Being and Learning:
Heidegger writes of a “mutual challenge [that] drives home
to us with startling force that and how man is delivered to the ownership of
Being and Being is the appropriate to the essence of man.” And he calls a “strange ownership and a
strange appropriation.” Finally, to experience
the strangeness of these strange situations we must enter in to the event of
appropriation. There is certainly a
strangeness to what Heidegger is saying here.
It is a strangeness that, to use the German of Brecht, envinces the verfremdungseffekt*. That is, it
completely disrupts our expectations regarding the relationship we have between
the totality, Being. Why? Because any talk of ‘ownership’ is
inextricably linked to the horror of bondage and its lasting aftermath in the
history of racial oppression.
Everything
is lost in translation. Until we recognize the radicality of the asymmetrical
relationship we have with Being.
*I did some writing on Brecht's verfremdungseffekt in my paper Effecting V.
3.0 - (Wednesda evening, Portland, ME) - I usually write this 20/10 years later commentary in the morning. For a few months it was an early morning, first thing with the first cup of coffee writing/thinking exercise. But as the sabbatical book project has taken priority I've lowered the already lower expectations I had for this 2024 version of the OPM experiment, the epic year of writing every day, picking up wherever I left off the day before. I'm writing every day, but the expectations were lowered from the get go that 3.0 would not be meditative. I've reserved my thinking energy for the sabbatical book. Having said all that, I'm writing in the evening and during my reco time that includes the puffing of cannabis sativa. I've just recalled that the Nancy paper I wrote last summer ends with Ellison's Invisible Man stoner trip! That Nancy group kind of ghosted me after Salt Lake. Oh well, they're a cagey bunch. I know they mean well, and probably read too much into my announcing that I was going on sabbatical and wouldn't be participating in this summer Nancy book discussion. At any rate, I'm definitely in a unique frame of mind as I write what will be only a few sentences in response to the 2.0 commentary and the fragment distilled from OPM 146. First, sadly, Stacy and I drifted apart. I'm not exactly sure why it happened, and in saying that I'm reminded that 10 years ago this day I told Stacy that I was someone who is always looking for "The" answer. I wouldn't describe myself in that way now. I'm definitely more interested in form, in beauty, sound, music, art, and believe the current project is far from the ontological depth of the 2004 OPM Being and Learning project. I arrived at the phenomenological through last summer's above mentioned Nancy paper. Using examples or cases was kind of breakthrough. I picked that up from reading Wehylie with Frank, and my discussion with Frank that lead to my learning of the category of "assemblage". But one theme that continues to flow through my work, and which appears above in the 2.0 commentary: the disruption/silencing/re-placement of the cogito ego, the self-certain subject. That's when learning begins. The learning I'm describing and calling "philosophical education" and "liberal arts education". Indeed, describing not explaining. And that is keeping with the phenomenological approach. And that also means dispensing with the Why? question. To the questions: Why are you describing this learning as a "philosophical education"?, Or why is what you are describing "liberal arts education"? ; my answer: because I am describing that way. The question is turned around and the order of inquiry reversed with the following response: I am operating propositionally. A philosophical education is...dialectical, etc., etc., etc. The description is the answer to Why question. This is how I am describing it. Or better, much better, this is how it is appears to me
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