Today was one of the most
physically active days of the summer for me, and up to this point (at exactly
8:14 pm) I’ve done no reading. The day
started with rising at 6am, lacrosse
from 7:30-9, breakfast, kayaking off Casino beach in Cape Elizabeth (as well as
relaxing with friends and family) from 11-4, dinner, then play time with my
son. And now, as I sit down to do some
writing I’m tuning into the live Phish show from Alpharetta, Georgia, which
just started…and the first song is “My Soul”!
mmmmm my soul, mmmmm my soul,
it’s my soul..
Ok. So a physical day, lots of it
spent out of doors, together with others, in the relatively untouched spaces of
the beach and bay. In a very
straightforward way this day showed the ethical implication of attuning to the
flow of the natural world, or what in the meditation from this I call
‘mindfulness’. That is, “mindfulness is
the wide-awakeness…is sustatined in the compassion that appears as a love for
all living beings” and is “awoken” with the attunement to the Way of Nature.
Yesterday I said that it wasn’t necessary to derive an ethical
implication from the attunement with what Lao Tzu calls the Way of Nature. Now that assertion is not necessarily opposite
to what Lao Tzu has written, but most certainly opposite to the position of the
Stoics who also idealize Nature, and are often credited with what has been
handed down to us as ‘natural law.’ But
natural law was not handed down to us qua nature’s law, but, rather, as ethical
theories and jurisprudence, in other words human
law that was (supposedly) derived from nature’s law. However, if there is a reduction to be found
in Stoic philosophy, which seems to be not too far from the Taoists, then I’m
tempted to take my critique of humanism (expressed in yesterday’s commentary)
and from that position follow the path of nature’s law, especially its most basic
formulation in something as that found in an encyclopedia description of
Stoicism: “Within humans is a "divine spark"
which helps them to live in accordance with nature. The Stoics felt that there
was a way in which the universe had been designed and natural law helped us to
harmonise with this.”
Nature’s
law in distinction from natural law would be something primordial that humans
are capable of becoming attuned to. Put
differently, the natural law is a primordial process that all living beings
participate in and humans are capable of becoming aware of their participation
in the process, which a lingering humanism would insist is a unique
participation. But that strikes me as a
tautology. Of course the human
participation is unique. So is the
turtle’s, which is not to knock the terrapin, but only to underline the
tautological character of claiming exceptionality from uniqueness. My point is that we don’t have a unique way
of participating in nature’s law, but, like all living beings, are subject to
and are governed by it. What is unique,
but, again, I am loathe to qualify it as exceptional, is our capacity to think this process, to think the law. For me this is precisely
the what is happening with meditative thinking, and, further what is given to
us in the offering made with the even of appropriation where we are shown the
‘strange ownership’ of Being over us.
Again, this disclosure reveals that we are subject to Being’s Becoming,
or what today I describing as Nature’s law.
The
experience of this disclosure is what I have been focusing on this past week
when I have been highlighting examples of attunement with Thoreau and
Nietzsche. And what we have encountered
are two distinct yet complementary disclosures.
Thoreau’s “dim and misty” vision of the primordial man, his Contact!
with the primal, and the identification of the original twin existential
questions: Who are we? where are we? And with Nietzsche: the idea that came to him…it
invaded him: “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of
becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”
These two are exemplars because
neither reduced to the human sphere. Nietzsche’s vision was, as he put it, “Six
thousand feet beyond man and time,” and Thoreau’s into the eons of the
past. Yet these distances (in space and
time) are bridged to the present, with the ‘invasion’ of the body and its Contact! with the earth. And it is from this present that questions
(the kind articulated by Thoreau), are offered to the future, which is to say,
the fundamental question inviting others to think the originary thought. And this isn’t a reduction to the human, but
an invitation to the human community to become attuned to Nature’s law.
In light of the preceding I share
a fragment taken from the writing made
this day, August 3, ten years ago:
“Meditative thinking is the
practice that is attuned to the mark of natality in all living beings. To be attuned to the Way of Nature is to be
wide-awake to the ongoing appearance of Life as dynamic energia and to be
actively engaged in the care for this process.” (8/3/2004)
3.0 (Saturday, Portland, Maine) I'm glad to read the autobiographical moments that recall what I was up to ten years ago. On that note I should document: back from Bar Harbor/Acadia, humid morning made more so by the overnight downpour, so far the day is wide open.
ReplyDeleteThe Nietzsche/Thoreau comparison is a good one, and maybe something I'll explore at some point. I became a member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance this past week after announcing that after I finish the Routledge book I'm retiring from academic writing, or, put differently, I'm going to focus on writing fiction. I have a bunch of short story drafts, some finished, most incomplete, and a play I started writing in fall 2023 that was based on the English film from the 1960s "Crash." I recall when I was 5th grader and wrote what I believed to be a fantastic poem, something that culminated with "desire" and my drums being "on fire." I can still recall the intense feeling of accomplishment after I finished that piece. I definitely thought I had a talent for writing. Maybe. Folks have told me I'm a good writer. But as I told Kelly this week, for me it's not so much that I might have some talent (or don't), but that I truly enjoy it. For some folks, writing is a grind. I've heard even the best and most successful writers describe it as a labor of love, with emphasis on the labor. Not so for me. And I have a vivid imagination, to say the least. Not as much now, in large part because I'm not involved in many social or group activities, but in the past I've had quite the paranoia persona! And for good reason. As the poster in my 7th grade English class shouted: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out t get you." I suspect that the poster was a demonstration of some grammatical rule, the double negative, perhaps? And it was wrapped up in a puzzle that brilliantly elicited "paranoia". My point is that I'm good at imagining situations and conversations. Kelly and I creating characters from the folks we encounter when we are out and about. All that to say, I'm planning to turn to fiction as a focus in 2025! I'll write what I know (as the 2.0 blog posts from last week were exploring). But for now I'll continue with my theoretical and speculative philosophy. On that that note, I want to share my latest take on Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence of the same" that is noted above. I started writing the third and final part of the sabbatical book last week up in Bar Harbor, at cafe Choco-Latte. Here's what I wrote: 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).