OPM 169, August 2nd Mediation (2004 & 2014)

In OPM 168 [the writing from 8/1/04] an unresolved tension arises from an 'error' I make with a misinterpretation or misapplication of Arendt’s concept of ‘world.’  I write, correctly, that “we abide with the abodes of our creation.” ‘Abide’ is understood to denote all existential modalities.   However, it seems I have committed an error when I collapsed ‘worldliness’ – as a fundamental condition of our existence – with ‘natality’.   The ‘fact’ of our natality is a birthright: “The fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that his world is constantly renewed by birth.”(Arendt, “Crisis in Education”)   The renewal of the world, which is the product of human hands (and hearts) is possible because we can make (and repair) things.  And this is what she calls ‘work.’  The world is made by our work. 

The error in OPM 168 is probably one that I have been making throughout the experiment yet only noticed today when I was re-reading the material from yesterday’s meditation that immediately precedes the meditation from this day ten years ago.  The 'error'  is based on my collapsing ‘worldliness’ with ‘natality,’ ‘work’ and ‘action’.  For Arendt, the two are fundamentally distinct, with the later having a superior human value because it is the manner through which our freedom comes into being.   As she puts it in the Human Condition:  “To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule’ indicates), to set something in motion. Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action.”

The error happens when I describe ‘worldliness’ as “the originary mark of our existence…that builds poetic dwelling.  Such building, however, follows from the releasement into the Way of building that is shown with the dynamic appearance of Nature.”   The error resides in the claim that poiesis (making) is an expression of our originary mark, and one that bears the stamp of Becoming -- the dynamic appearance of Nature I will later call ‘ceaseless nativity’ – which is actually a conceptual construction based on this ‘error’ of collapsing work and action.  This (erroneous) claim resides in the assumption that the originary mark of ‘natality’ – that we are beginners, initiators – is only the basis of our capacity to act and disclose freedom, but also the basis of our capacity to act, to make, and to imitate creation.  In other words: action and work are on the same spectrum, and not existing under distinct conditions (existential locations). 

Action is the hallmark of freedom for Arendt because it is outside the logic of necessity, outside the means/ends logic.  Action is outside of intentionality.  Action is event-like, for Arendt, which means it expresses the mark of natality: like our birth, it can never be replicated.   Fabrication (making) exists partially within the sphere of necessity. Work is intentional.  

But what of art, the making of art, specifically, music making,  , which is always the example I have in mind when I write of poiesis?  Is the 'making' of art not happening in the threshold where the intentional and unintentional meet?  I believe this to be the case,  and here is where my ‘error’ is rooted.  But it turns out that it is Arendt who has mis-lead me,  specifically, with the examples she gives when she wants to illustrate thinking: the example of flute-playing, the one she borrows from Aristotle, which, she says, we don’t do because we have to do it (it is outside the logic of necessity), but only because we can.  The playing of music, in other words, is something we do in-and-for-itself. Is music-playing poiesis or action, fabrication or freedom?  This case presents a serious problem because there is no 'worldly' outcome, nothing left behind, nothing concrete that is made...aside from the recording of the performance (be it the bootlegged copy of  live show or the studio session).

This all brings me back to the focus of the meditations under focus these days, and leads me to recognize that I did not so much make an 'error' as offer an alternative, which is another way of describing a 'critique.'  Let me reiterate what I have been claiming that past week or more:  our encounter with the primacy of the primal, the Way of Nature, is where and when the event of appropriation, the disclosure of Being’s ‘strange ownership,’ happens (cf. the examples of Nietzsche and Thoreau)   But the disclosure of this ‘strange ownership’ indicates that we are, in fact, not free, but, rather, subjects of Being, specifically, subjects of the force of Becoming.   My ‘error’ is thus really a critique of Arendt's humanism, which is the basis of her declaring that humanity is freedom: “Man does not so much possess freedom as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning…”(Human Condition)  My critique suggests that 'freedom' is hardly a human phenomenon, but, rather, a phenomenon of Life. Put otherwise,  freedom is human insofar as it is our ‘translation’ of encounter of the originary force, our rendering (in the sense of writing, or art, music-making, etc.) the dynamic Becoming of Being.  In OPM 168 (8/1/04) I write: “Freedom is the releasement into this dynamic process, a process that shelters the possibility of creation.  To be with the Way of Nature is to be gathered by this most dynamic process…”, to experience Contact!

I feel as if I may have written myself through the perception of my reading of Arendt as an ‘error’  and reconciled myself with my own position, one that renders my reading a ‘critique.’   And the critique is one of the cosmopolitan and urban thinker, and certainly one who would in no way be described as a ‘naturalist.’   What is strange to me, however, is how, despite the strong naturalist impulse of my own thinking I consistently return to the human community, to what in OPM 169, written this day ten years ago, I call the ‘adoration for the human community’ that follows from the ‘love of all living beings.’  Perhaps living in such close proximity to Manhattan when I was writing ten years ago? (In fact, ten years ago this week I was on my way to Madrid for the International Network of Philosophy of Education).   So, in retrospect,  it doesn't seem so strange, but is, rather, a disappointment of sorts.  And this just another expression of my recurring doubts about the humanism that remains at the center of the meditations.   Indeed,  if the writing made a decade ago ultimately produced the book titled Being and Learning, that is because Being (and not the human being) is prior and principal.  In turn, what is so obvious to me today (a decade later), and that became very clear to me in the week I was 8 miles north of my house and perched on the shore of Casco Bay at the top of Town Landing Road in Falmouth Foreside, is the fundamental relationship of Being and Learning presumes the reduction of Learning to ‘meditative thinking’ that is itself reduced to the modality of the solitary thinker, specifically the thinker who is moving ‘alone’ on the primal ground in concord with the primal flow.  Again, my exemplars are Nietzsche’s and Thoreau’s ecstatic experiences while hiking in mountain forests.  They were ‘alone’ but hardly ‘lonely,’ yet solitary subjects in the sense of being subjected to the profound force of Nature: Life! 

It may be the case that the ‘mindfulness’ that I wrote about this day ten years ago is in fact an implication of the ecstatic experience with Nature that is certainly an exceptional but not exclusive experience.   But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the experience has to be reduced to that ethical implication; or that the implication needs to take descriptive priority over the experience, which is what I seem to be doing in the meditations.  It seems, then, that the real error I have discovered is the mistake of allowing my writing/thinking to be influenced by the dominant humanist conceptions of education.