OPM 162, July 26th Meditation (commemoration)

For the past two days I’ve been trying to take up a passage I read at the end of Thoreau’s “Ktaadn” essay.   I had the intention of writing about it the day I first read it, which was three days ago, and then the following day, and then, finally, yesterday when I even set up the discussion, or so I thought.  So it happens today, this morning, and that seems really appropriate given what was written this day ten years ago.  I’ll begin with the two moments from 7/26/04 that jumped out at me, both of them quotations.  The first I’ll cite is the quotation that ends the meditation, which is from the Taoist Chuang Tzu:

“Nature is not only spontaneity but nature in the state of constant flux and incessant transformation.  This is the universal process that binds all things into one, equalizing all things and all opinions.  The pure man makes this oneness his eternal abode, in which he becomes a ‘companion’ of Nature and does not attempt to interfere with it by imposing the way of man on it.  His goal is absolute spiritual emancipation and peace, to be achieved through knowing the capacity and limitations of one’s own nature, nourishing it, and adapting it to the universal process of transformation…Having attained enlightenment through the light of Nature, he moves in the realm of ‘great knowledge’ and ‘profound virtue.’ Thus he is free.”

The second quotation, which my marginal notes on the draft highlight as ‘Key!!’ and ‘needs to be unpacked,’  is from Heidegger, and follows the sentence when I write: “Meditative practice, the experiential modality of poetic dialogue, expresses the ‘abground character of philosophy.’ [Heidegger:] “Abgrund strictly ‘earth going down(wards)’, i.e., ‘unfathomable depths, abyss, underground, etc.’; Ungrund, ‘unground’, i.e., ‘groundless ground’; and Urgrund, ‘primal ground’.”

And now the quotation from Thoreau’s essay:

“Thus a man shall lead his life here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.  Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century by my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me.  Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets.  Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay!  -- for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former.  In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with horn beam paddles, he dips his way along.  He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau.”

Exhibiting these three quotations side by side is an example of what I have been for the past month or more calling my ecumenical attitude, which is a label I use to describe my unapologetic close comparative reading of authors who are often writing from distant times and places.   The ecumenical attitude is one that presumes it possible and desirable to find a common ground between authors so as to recognize that however distant they may be from one another in time, they indeed share a common ground.    Of course I’m not simply punning but with ‘ground,’ which is conceptually what is common between the three writers/thinkers I have just cited, but making an allusion to ‘ground’ as the ‘common’ in the way that Thoreau used ‘common sense’ in the citation I made of him in my commentary on July 23^rd OPM 159: “the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

Although on that day it was necessary to share the total and complete mind blowing reaction I experienced when I read “Who are we? where are we?”, I had very much wanted to come back to that keystone in the middle of the quotation: the common sense! 

My first response was the memory of reading Arendt on sensus communis, which she calls our ‘sixth sense.’   It’s a brilliant on her part, as I recall it.  We have, she tells us, our five senses: sight, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling.  And each of these, or even combined in any possible way, are primary insofar as they offer us our non-negotiable individual take on what’s been offered to us.  I recall this also in connection to Immanuel Kant’s elegant way of describing the immediacy of aesthetic ‘taste’:  it immediately smells good or bad, so to speak.  Now, the immediacy of the way things appear to each and every one of us individually is, of course, absolutely crucial for Arendt, as it’s part of the way our singularity manifests itself in the world.  But, ah, yes, there’s the world!  The place from which these things appear to us.   And we should (I believe) recognize that the world is actually a multiplicity of worlds when we think of it materially was what we make aka culture.  (Arendt calls the ‘world’ what me make or fabricate, or what both brings us together and separates us).   Now, the world (or worlds) is what we share and what is common between each and every one of us.  We might perceive its smells or sounds differently, but we will, insofar as we are capable to perceive whatever it is that is appearing, agree that there is smell or sound.   In this sense we can talk of sensus communis, or the communal sense, and thereby register what Thoreau exclaiming with his “the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”

Of the three ‘grunds’ Heidegger lists, the one that names the solid and actual, with which we have Contact! Contact!, is Urgrund ‘primal ground.’  I say this because originary thinking is originated (initiated) by the Contact! Contact! with this ‘primal ground’.    But here is where I find myself facing question that requires a decision, not a final one, of course, but one that expresses the taking of a position.  And the decision takes the form of a response to the following question:  if the Urgrund is the common sense (sensus communis) we all share aka the solid earth! the actual world!, then how does it follow that us philosophy types are perceiving an exceptional modality moving on that primal ground?

The question is motivated by Chuang Tzu’s talk of “the pure man” who makes the primal ground “his eternal abode, in which he becomes a ‘companion’ of Nature…Thus he is free.”   (And, of course, I’m especially interested in his talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘emancipation’ and ‘peace’.)  The motivation is also coming from this figure that Thoreau ‘perceives,’ the one who “lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets.”  And beyond that figure there is another who “turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former…He is but dim and misty to me…”   In my reading, we have multiple figures, personae, or what I call existential modalities, that in some way are moving along the solid earth, this actual world (or else we couldn’t perceive them, yes?) but at the same time, they are dwelling in an uncommon place, in a relation with Nature that, as Thoreau puts it, is dim and misty to us.   Indeed, all these figures are too distant for me to perceive with any clarity  -- the one living three thousand years deep, the still more ancient one, and the pure, free and one at peace.   Yes, I share a world with them, but it’s not clear to me what world that is?  And so from where I am they remain not simply obscure to me, but exceptional.  So here then the decision is made and the conjecture offered along with it, and a conjecture it must be because I can only guess or speculate (yes, speculate!) on that which remains dim and misty to me (and something tells me that when Warburg spoke of an ‘ancient book’ he too was only speculating on what he never actually read but only heard about…his was a lesson told to him but one who had himself been told of one who had heard about a book….so on and so forth!).  Conjecture in the form, then, of a fragment distilled from that cross road where the writing (the citations!) from ten years ago this date meet the writing (the citations!) from today:

Although it’s not entirely clear to me where they are, nor who they are, I perceive figures, personae, and without thinking, but only going with the immediacy of that dim perception, they appear to be on the primal ground.  Are they at ‘peace’ or ‘free’?  This I certainly cannot say.  But, anyway, it seems to me those words are mine and not theirs.