OPM 150, July 14th Meditation (commemoration)

Warburg’s ‘old book’ was a real inspiration and arrived at an important moment in this commemorative writing.   I was beginning to lose the thread of the original meditations.  Or perhaps I was reliving the original loss that happened ten years ago?  Whatever the case, the material was appearing to me with dulled features, the sharpness of the first weeks of writing no longer perceived.   Was it a matter of mood, or the existential situation I as I read the material?  In some ways,  yes.  But I sense the problem I found myself in was more of a hermeneutical one, a problem of reception, or how I was reading the material.    An example of this problem is the reading of the material in the context of Mt. Desert Island.    The writing of ten years ago was not yet happening in the forest of eastern Long Island, so there was a disconnect, or so it seemed.   Of course this just points to an apparent aporia I had not considered until this moment:  the inevitable disconnection between the locations where the writing originally happened and the locations where this writing would be taken up again.    Unavoidable, but necessarily problematic? 

All that to say that when I encountered Warburg’s ‘old book’ [cf. the epigram cited and discussed in OPM 145, July 9th] it pointed me to a hermeneutic location where I could perceive the deeply ecumenical spirit of the writing. [cf. OPM 117, June 10th  for a discussion of Ewert Cousins’ influence on the inter religious aspect of my thinking].    To continue the dialectical theme I introduced the other day I would identify the ecumenical dimension of my thinking as the spiritual, or the way Spirit gathers my thought.   Here it is important to note that spiritual, spirituality and Spirit are distinct yet closely related terms for me.  The spiritual denotes the particular force and character of a text, specifically that writing that makes up Warburg’s ‘old book.’   My thinking is gathered through an exegetical reading of the material from this ‘old book.’   Spirituality is a term borrowed from Foucault who defines [cf. OPM 145, July 9th] it as the necessary work undertaken by the thinker to experience an encounter with the truth.  Spirituality is what I call the anticipatory, and preparatory work; the work that conditions us to become adept at the turnings, such as the turn from the mind to the heart.   In this way, spirituality prepares us for the experience of compassion.   In turn, compassion is an example of the event of appropriation, when we are gathered into an experience of the totality, which has a host of names, and one of them is Spirit.  

Spirit is complemented and completed by Nature, and for this reason Nature is another name for the totality.   I would say that the names are aspects or perspectives disclosed to us.   The name Being would be the most fundamental name because it shows what is disclosed in each and every aspect that is disclosed to us.  Unfortunately, the writing experiment too often described the disclosure of Spirit, with the writing representing almost exclusively the exegetical reading and even translation of the ‘old book.’   Here, then, I arrive at perception of the writing to come.  I should say, rather, that I return to this perception of the writing to come because this future writing I perceive is a phenomenology of Nature that called me two years after completing the writing experiment.   I heard but did not receive the call in a set of papers I completed and presented in 2006 and 2007.   I hear this call again when I recognize that alongside the ‘old book’ of ancient philosophies we have the proverbial book of Nature and the exegetical writing it inspires when people 'read' Nature's book.   Such exegetical writing also appears across time and space, along a wide cultural spectrum, and demands an ecumenical attitude when we take it up.  How else could we begin to understand the kinship between the Wabanaki petroglyphs and Thoureau’s writing?  Of course, this question only accounts for a hermeneutics and not for a phenomenology, and the writing to come that I foresee is the latter…unless that writing will have mimetic moments!  Or, perhaps, in the reading of the book of Nature we experience a collapsing of the phenomenological and the hermeneutical?

I want to conclude by connecting the just written commentary to a quotation of Heidegger that is cited in the meditation I completed ten years ago today:  “Therefore the field of vision is something open, but its openness is not due to our looking…It strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests…And the enchantment of this region might well be the reign of its nature, its regioning…”

First, with this ‘field of vision…not due to our looking,’ one understands the perspectival, or the ways we experience fundamental ontology through the distinct encounter with the disclosure of Spirit, Nature, Being.  Second,  with this ‘region…enchanted region where everything…returns...” we understand the gathering of the self into the location where the fundamental is disclosed.   The latter precedes the former, although an act of the will (preparatory, anticipatory) takes us into the receptive modality where we can be gathered.   Here, given the just completed commentary, I want to conjecture that the exegetical work of reading the complementary ‘old book’ and book of Nature is an example of the preparatory and anticipatory work that makes us ready for meditative thinking.  

Finally, a fragment distilled from the writing completed this day ten years ago and the just completed commentary:

All writing is preceded by reading.    But this is not to say that writing is simply a translation of what has been read.    Yet there is no question that all writing is, ultimately, mimetic.   The challenge, then, is to make a copy that combines such disparate elements so as to disclose originality.