OPM 164, July 28th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

Some weeks ago I wrote critically about the meditations that I was reading, finding them difficult to read because the material appeared to me repetitive to the point of being redundant.  I tried (in vain, perhaps) to be generous to the project, reminding myself that it was meant to be an experiment and one that would go wherever it would go.  (I really want to use the simile that the original experiment was in this way ‘like a river’ but that seems forced, given where I’m about to go with Heraclitus and the meditation from this day ten years ago.   But I’ve made the simile anyway, and will repeat it!)  In this sense, the original meditations have the flow of the proverbial river that Heraclitus himself presumed when he wrote what is perhaps his most famous fragment of all: “You can’t step in the same river twice.”  That fragment works quite well to describe the repetitive and redundant appearance of the meditations. (And here, now, with that spirit of generosity to the project, I begin another attempt to understand the gnawing repetition, doing so by looking at it through an aesthetic lens.) 

“You can’t step in the same river twice.”   Consider this to be an exemplary Heraclitean fragment because it holds together the contradictory logic that allows a fragment, such as the foregoing, to be at one and the same time “true” and “false”.  (nb: two years before I ran the writing experiment I wrote and presented a paper at the TC Philosophy and Education colloquium title: “True or False, or None of the Above.”  As I recall it, the piece was a Nietzschean critique of the Platonic foundations of the dominant ‘outcomes based’ school practices and policies.)  Yes, it’s true, each time we enter the river is not the same.  The question, however, is whether or not the ‘difference’ is what the medieval metaphysics under the heavy influence of Aristotle called ‘substantial’ or ‘accidental’?  If it is accidental the river remains the same.  If it is substantial then the essence of the river is to be different;  the essence of the river is flux.    To understand the apparent ‘difference’ in the river one needs only visit any flowing body of water.  For example, visit the dramatically changing tidal Casco Bay, first when it is at its mudflat low, and a half a day later when it is flooded at high tide.  The bay at low tide and the one at high tide are not the same, or so appears to the observer, and certainly to someone ‘stepping’ in the bay, e.g., a kayaker.  Of course Heraclitus’ point is a bit more subtle, and is meant to inspire us to think about the ongoing flux that is present in the flowing river that appears to be the same aka one that doesn’t demonstrate on a daily basis such dramatic changes.  In turn, the observation of tides actually cuts against the subtlety of his point, which is to compel us to think the difference that is present in what appears to remain the same.  This is where we discover the coincidence of the opposites that, for me, is what is present in the apparently repetitive meditations.   From an Aristotelian logic, based on the principle of non-contradiction, the difference that Heraclitus wants us to think should be written off as merely accidental, because there is in fact no substantial change or difference to the river as such.  It remains a river, as opposed to a bay, or sea, or stream, or brook.  Moreover, each river remains the same in-and-for-itself.  The Mississippi remains the Mississippi in contrast to the Amazon or any other river.   Heraclitus’ response would certainly be that the Aristotelian logic is one-sided and thereby incomplete and fails to account for the possibility of something being defined by difference, formed by flux.  Further, he would say we should think how a river can remain a river, and a specific one at that, yet always be different in-and-for-itself.   For Heraclitus the coupling of the same with difference discloses the dynamism of Being aka the Becoming of being.   This does not reduce Being to Becoming or render Becoming a quality of Being.   The challenge is to thinking Being and Becoming together.

The writing from this day, July 28, 2004, makes an attempt to think the togetherness of Being and Becoming by describing the phenomenal disclosure of it as the “strange appearance” of Nature.   The key citation is taken from Heraclitus who offers an aphorism that complements the river fragment:  “Nature loves to hide.”  On 7/28/14 I read this aphorism as indicating the “processural unfolding of Nature’s creative dynamism.”   But more important is the existential and ontological implication, which takes us back to the past few days’ discussion of the ‘primal ground’ (Urgrund) and our Contact! Contact! with it.  Actually, I’m brought back to an position I have found myself in for much of this summer’s revisiting of the original meditations, and that is to the conjecture that the ‘original’ or ‘first’ encounter with Being happens when we have an effacement in Nature with the Life spirit that moves through and gathers all living beings.  Under the influence of Thoreau I would, today, call this experience an epiphanic transcendental contact with the totality, and one that is a deeply embodied and felt experience.  Nietzsche, who was also a student of Thoreau’s mentor Emerson (reading him from afar), called discovered his Eternal Recurrence of the Same.  From Nietzsche I gather the experience as disclosing to us a positive and undeniable affirmation, what he say is the saying Yes! to life. 

Here is a good place to cite Reiner Schurmann (discussed in PPM 12, and OPM 119 & 120. nb: I shifted from the label PPM to OPM on April 21^st), who is the teacher who pointed me to Nietzsche when citing Nietzsche’s account (in Ecce Homo) of that transformative event in Nature that Schurmann describes as a ‘crisis’: “Now I shall related the history of my Zarathustra.  The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and time’.  That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana: at a powerful pyramidal rock not from from Surlei I stopped.  It was then that this idea came to me…it invaded me…That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”  Schurmann adds: “In the discovery of the eternal recurrence, described here as the convergence between becoming and being, between flux and form, “meditation” – not theoria but thinking – culminates.” (pp. 48-49 RS: 1987)

Finally, a fragment…an aphorism, distilled from this July 28^th writing ’04 and ’14:

If what is common to all is the solid earth, then what is equally uncommon is earth’s fluid form.    If the former is called the ‘primal ground’, then what is the originary name of the latter?  The ‘primal flow’?