The other day (OPM 164, July 28th) when I pulled Schurmann’s book off the shelf
to locate the Nietzsche quotation that offers important context for my thinking
I found the still new-looking Heidegger book The Event. It was asking to
be taken off the shelf. I was intensely
focused on The Event in the late
winter of 2013 when I was preparing for PES 2013, specifically the author meets
critics symposium that was organized around Being
and Learning. Unfortunately, when
my attention shifted to writing two papers that I was scheduled to present (one
in April, 2013 at the first LAPES organized conference – set within the ALAS
gathering at TC; the second, also at TC, for the philosophy of music ed conf –
a paper I discussed in my commentary on OPM 161, July 25th) I shelved The
Event. Today, however, I pick it
up, literally, at the very spot where I stopped reading it 16 months ago.
Given my ongoing interest in the
‘origins’ of thinking, captured in the name for my project of “originary
thinking,” it’s not at all surprising that I that place where I stopped my
study of The Event was section 85
from the first part of the book titled “I. The first beginning.” Section 85 is titled In regard to the interpretation of the first beginning “Myth” and
“philosophy”, and falls within division F of part 1, also titled “The first
beginning.” (Here an opportunity arises for me to take up the matter, again,
[pun intended] of repetition that borders on redundancy, but I’m not going to
digress on that subject, which, in fact, I am feeling confident that I have
tackled for the time being with the writing I did on this matter just two days
ago in the commentary that ended with the above mentioned citation of Nietzsche
from the Schurmann book that brought me back to Heidegger’s The Event.) The whole organization of The Event is an important exemplar for
me. There are 386 sections, organized
into XII parts, each with its own divisions and subdivisions. The sections are heteronomous, sometimes
appearing in paragraph form, and at other times, as with section 85, in the
form of a list. All told, the work is
an example of originary thinking insofar as that category advocates on behalf
on of ‘non-traditional’ forms of
philosophical writing. Now, all of this
is, in some ways, besides the point, because it is the content of section 85
that caught my attention because of the way it connected with yesterday’s commentary
on the primacy of the primal, specifically when I wrote about the temporality
of that location appearing as “imagined or mythic time.”
Yesterday, the initial question of my project (then and
now) arose in the wake of Thoreau’s “dim and misty” perception of those
distance figures who, I understood, were moving on the primal ground and primal
flow. Yesterday I wrote: “Today, then,
the force of the question arises with the periagoge
(turning around…of the soul) [no pun intended!], and does so in the following
way: in the sense that the ‘turn’ or the
‘turning around’ or the ‘returning’ is historicized insofar as we can call an
imagined or mythic time ‘historical.’”
What remained un-thought yesterday was the characterization of Thoreau’s
(or Plato’s, for that matter) ‘historical’ perception as ‘imagined’ or
‘mythic’. I felt the sentence to be
provocative, for sure, but also one that could only be written from the
threshold, that is, in that location where the mantra [of the originary
thinking project] “more poetry, less prose” is heard. The mantra does not say “yes poetry, no
prose,” but seeks to invoke the balance between prose and poetry that has been
forgotten since Aristotle put an end to any and all remnants of myth, allegory,
lyrics, etc., in the writing of philosophy.
Plato remained open, recognizing, if nothing else, the rhetorical power
of a well placed allegory. I also
suspect he remained faithful to the tradition of Parmenides, if not
Heraclitus. All this to say that when
Heidegger raised the hermeneutic problem regarding the interpretation of the
first beginning, he had to go back to this very problem that he discusses in
the lectures collected under the title What
is Called Thinking?: the fateful decoupling
of mythos and logos.
Because ‘myth’ and ‘logic’ are
human constructions there always remains the possibility of ‘recoupling’ them,
or, rather, of our being gathered into a thinking where they always already
remain together. And for Heidegger, like
Nietzsche before him, ‘philosophy’ (theoria) is not meditative
thinking. Thinking demands, in fact,
what I call music-making, which can take the form of, say, the speeches of an
imagined or mythical character by the name of Zarathustra. In section 85 of The Event Heidegger reiterates that to explain ‘philosophy’ from myth is erroneous for several reasons
that he reduces to a list of 4. Of
course, the ‘error’ has nothing to do with getting ‘philosophy,’ but, rather,
of making an interpretation of the first beginning, which happens by way of
what he calls “the only recourse
the leap
of recollection...” [nb: sentence was
published with unusual break.]
While I
the Leap is one of those themes that I have repeated so much that it reminds me
of the way a DJ uses a sampling of music [so far the Leap has appeared in 18 of
the 197 posts, and hundreds of time in the meditations], on this occasion I
connect it to the Chase, which was introduced in yesterday’s meditation.
The 4
reasons why ‘philosophy’ can not be explained from myth are typically confounding, and, for me, only serve to
clarify better the balance between poetry and prose that is called for from the
threshold.
1. “Inceptual thinking...[Heidegger’s
name for what I call originary thinking] is not yet ‘philosophy’…since Plato.
2. Thinking as the thinking of
being is intrinsically and essentially a beginning and cannot itself be an
‘heir’ of ‘myth.’
3. Inceptual thinking cannot at all
be ‘explained.’ It must in each case only be begun; those who think it must
think inceptually.
4. The mixing in of historiology
blocks every path into the first beginning and foists on us the opinion that
one could know what ‘myth’ and ‘philosophy’ are so as to deduce them from each
other and make everything ‘understandable.’”
Now, it
is obvious why the encounter this morning with section 85 from The Event finds concordance with the
beginning of Emerson’s “Nature,” which I cited at the end of yesterday’s
commentary. Reasons 3 & 4 make it
clear that originary (inceptual) thinking does not emerge from our groping
“among the dry bones of the past.” “The
sun shines to-day also,” yes, and with the light of this morning star we can
and ought “enjoy an original relation to the universe”! But all this just begs
the question of our ‘enjoyment’ of ‘thinking inceptually’. How so?
This is my ongoing question,
which, to me, is as much a matter of form as it is of content, and, in fact,
these two are inextricably linked – therein emerges the always already coupled
prosaic and poetic. “Historiology”
(whatever that is) seems to me not so much a ‘block’ but, in fact, the starting
point, if only because we need to move (swiftly and rigorously) into the depths
of the book of Nature along those paths that anticipate and prepare us for the
disclosure offered to originary thinking. In this sense ‘history’ is the
facticity of the world that we need to move on/over in order for us to perceive
(dimly through mist) the primacy of the primal ground. And that
perception is indeed not the ‘heir’ of myth because it is not ‘myth’ but Contact! that is offered to us.
The originary thinking that proceeds from that factual Contact!, which becomes part of the historical, has to call upon the same faculty of imagination if only to process what has been disclosed. Thoreau, for example, imagines the paddlers when he is, in fact, descending from the summit of Katahdin. And the writing that relays that vision is a poetic infused interruption of his naturalist’s chronicle. Nothing is explained in that moment. Yet much thinking is originated, thinking that becomes historical and yet full of future. Like the rows of beans he planted outside his cabin along Walden pond, Thoreau’s writing is not so much dry bones as seeds that have long since taken deep roots and are now not unlike the towering pine trees he encountered in his multiple trips to the Maine woods.
The originary thinking that proceeds from that factual Contact!, which becomes part of the historical, has to call upon the same faculty of imagination if only to process what has been disclosed. Thoreau, for example, imagines the paddlers when he is, in fact, descending from the summit of Katahdin. And the writing that relays that vision is a poetic infused interruption of his naturalist’s chronicle. Nothing is explained in that moment. Yet much thinking is originated, thinking that becomes historical and yet full of future. Like the rows of beans he planted outside his cabin along Walden pond, Thoreau’s writing is not so much dry bones as seeds that have long since taken deep roots and are now not unlike the towering pine trees he encountered in his multiple trips to the Maine woods.
In light of the preceding, that
took me from yesterday’s musings on ‘chasing’ Nature that ‘loves to hide’, I
distill the following fragment that is, actually, a few lines taken verbatim
from the writing made this day ten years ago:
Hiding
is a preserving, and the realm of openness itself is the ultimate field of
cultivation…learning…the reconciliation of the relational being appropriated by
the dynamic unfolding of Nature.
3.0 (Tuesday, Bar Habor, ME) - The above deserves some response, but the day has gone by, the place we are staying has virtually no wifi connection AND I wrote for two hours this morning material for my sabbatical book, and so I've decided to post it. At this point 2.0 seems to have taken its own path, so why shouldn't 3.0?!?
ReplyDeleteHeidegger helps us describe the move from the solitude of study to the learning community. His early lecture “The Concept of Time,” takes us back to the temporality of study and the intensity of the solitude of learning that unfolds in the Moment. The provecho that is experienced in study is the benefit of being in the Moment. Here “benefit” can be understood as denoting how the temporality of study has a formative effect on the learning. The root of “benefit” is the Latin bene facere “do good (to).” To suggest that this temporality benefits the learner is to say that it works on or makes possible the relationship between the student and the object of study. Facere est docere: to make is to teach. But what is “made” by this temporality, by the Moment, the Now? A response can be unpacked from Heidegger’s fragment that the discovery of one’s “ownmost possibility” (CT, 12e) happens when we are “running ahead to the past” (Vorlaufen zum Vorbei) (CT, 15e)
3.0b - The student’s move to the learning community is always already happening during the solitude of study. We described from the perspective of time the principle of insufficiency is characterized as placing the student in a dynamic relation with past and future. The text endures in the past, it is historical, something that has been written and that can never be fully read. It resists ever being fully present. The principle of insufficiency emerges with the book/text as its incompleteness. And this incompleteness is felt by the one who studies it, and in this way the principle works on the student by calling him to read and then write: begin, stop, and begin again. Study, the solitude of reading and writing on the book/text, happens when the student is “running ahead to the past.” This “running ahead” is the movement towards the learning community where the student will share their incomplete response to the reading. How is the learning community “the past”? And how does this align with the description of the provecho of study as the benefit of being in the Moment? This is complicated by Heidegger’s claim “that the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future.”(CT, 14e)
ReplyDeleteThe learning community is “the past” insofar as it is the negation of solitude. For Heidegger “the past” is the uncertain certainty of our mortality that stands before us. In standing “before” us our mortality is both our finitude but also our singularity, what distinguishes us from all others. In this sense it is not the “past” and what has already occurred or happened, but as the limit to who we are. But this limit is “authenticity” of who we are, what makes us real (actual) and “what constitutes [our] most extreme possibility of Being.”(CT, 10e) Our singularity is thus never exhausted and is always incomplete and determined by the principle of indeterminacy. Heidegger describes this as “the indeterminate certainty of its ownmost possibility of being at an end.”(CT, 11e) Within the framework of the dialectic of study “death” is the existential negations of, first, the self-certain subject and, then, the self in solitude. And the “possibility” is the potentiality of learning that is guaranteed by our incompleteness: the possibility of something happening or of someone doing something in the future. This is how the learning community constitutes what is always already “before” the student, both as the negation of solitude and the present potentiality of further learning. The solitude of study (reading, writing) is suspended when the student is moved into the dialogic community by the force of the realization that “what I am thinking I have not thought all alone.” His incompleteness always already indicates community (the coming together with others), but also his singularity, his authenticity, that what he will share is his own, original digestion of the reading. It is incomplete but remains a mark of his distinction, an expression of the provecho de estar solo. And this indicates that the community of learning is a collective, a gathering of individuals, a congregation of a many, the proverbial e pluribus unum, with an emphasis on plurality. Thus when he enters into the learning community the student says, “I never am the Other.” (11e)
3.0c
ReplyDeleteThe learning community is the “past” in the sense that it is the future possibility that stands “before” the solitude of study. It is both the limit of solitude, but also the location where the incomplete results of study can be shared and circulated. Here we can understand how the dialectic of a philosophical education expresses what Aristotle indicates with his description of Motion, or “that which realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential.” The term entelechia denotes Motion as “the mode in which the future belongs to the present, is the present absence of just those particular absent things which are about to be.” (IEP, Joe Sachs) The Moment of study is thus a dynamic present where the future as potential is actual, and in this case also the presence of the learning community that stands “before” the student. Joe Sachs reminds us that Thomas Aquinas’ reading of Aristotle description of entelechia suggests that motion “is a consequence of the way in which present states of things are ordered toward other actualities which do not belong to them…that is, of those directed potentialities which cause a thing to move, to pass over from the actuality it possesses to another which it lacks but to which it is ordered.” Motion, or what I am here calling “movement,” is how the dialectic of learning organizes every present moment of study as “incomplete.” Motion actualizes the principle of insufficiency without which learning could not happen. Learning is always conditioned by an incompleteness that seeks but can never fully attain completeness. This is perhaps an implication of what Tyson Lewis denotes study as the non-teleological persistence of impotentiality and the suspension of arriving at knowledge. If impotentiality is ‘actual’ then it denotes the manner in which the principle of insufficiency is a dynamic present, the Moment where past and future meet. This congress between past and future, as Nietzsche describes it, is a recurrence, an event that is occurring and thus enduring. To endure is to remain steadfast. In turn, the Moment is the dynamic recurring meeting of past and future, such that both co-exist at the “same time.” The Moment is the time of learning when “the dynamic actuality of the present state which is determined by its own future.” (Sachs) This is the sense in which the learning community stands before the student: present as the future situation. But dialectically this future is also related to the past, to the object of study that also stands before the student as the actuality of the present state which is determined by its own past, its fata. The dialectic of a philosophical education is thus always in motion (entelechia). Aquinas’ reading of Aristotle expresses this well: “St. Thomas observes that to say that something is in motion is just to say that it is both what it is already and something else that it is not yet. Accordingly, motion is the mode in which the future belongs to the present, it is the present absence of just those particular absent things which are about to be.”(Sachs) The dialectic includes the past in this description of entelechia, emphasizing how the “already” is located in the endurance of the object of study (its meaningfulness, but also its illegibility). The “something” that is in motion is the dialectic, which is composed of multiple parts and their corresponding moments: book/text, student, community and reading, writing, discussion.