OPM 171, August 4th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

I have two prompts for today’s commentaries…actually three.  I encountered the trio this early morning.   The first two are literary aka texts I read while taking my morning coffee.  The third is conceptual, the outcome of a memory inspired speculation/reflection on the past two days of writing that have produced some deep convictions regarding the revelatory power of wilderness and the disclosure of what yesterday I called ‘nature’s law.’   All three help me to pick up and continue with the movement of my thinking.

I’ll begin with the third prompt.    I was reflecting this morning on the category of ‘nature’s law,’ which I used for the first time yesterday.   Given the critique of humanism I articulated a few days ago when I discovered my ‘error’ with a reading of Arendt I wondered this morning about the implications of Heidegger’s anti-humanism (or post-humanism, if one is worried about the bluntness of that label).    The event of appropriation and the disclosure of the ‘strange ownership,’ reveal that we are subjects of Being.   This is how he arrives at the formula: we do not so much possess freedom as freedom possesses us.   This stands with subtle contrast to Arendt’s:  freedom appears in the universe with the birth of humanity, specifically, with each human birth.   Of course, there is a way to reconcile the two positions through something like the following proposition: as humans we are subjects of Being’s Becoming, and, as such, we essentially beings who become.    But that doesn’t necessarily resolve the matter, especially for Arendt, who insists that what make us ‘free’ (or what characterizes ‘freedom’) is spontaneity, i.e., that humans possess the capacity for action, to act outside of the sphere of necessity.   In turn, there is a difference that matters between saying we are “subjects” as opposed to saying we have “subjectivity.”    But the writing/thinking I have been doing this summer through this blog has lead me back to the naturalist’s modality I was in in the two years following the completing of the original experiment ten years ago.   And, so, this morning when I reflecting on the past week’s commentaries, and how they have revealed the predominance of ‘anti-humanism,’ and perhaps deep ecological thinking, in the original meditations, I arrived at the realization that the subjectivity (solitary) v. intersubjectivity (community) tension is present throughout the meditations (and Being and Learning) with the two-sided heuristic ideal: freedom/peace.   In turn, the reflection lead to the following speculation/conjecture:  if the disclosure of the strange ownership, and the realization that we are subjects of Being’s Becoming, happens most forcefully with the event of appropriation by force of Nature’s law (revealed in the primal flow and on the primal ground), then the experienced ontological situation is peace (not freedom).   And here, at this moment when I am writing this commentary, I wonder, in fact, if peace and freedom are compatible? 

Now coincidentally, or not, [maybe I should just drop the word ‘coincidental’ and use ‘synchronicity’?], the writing from this day tend years ago appears to respond to the just raised question by suggesting that, in fact, the peace of the subject who recognizes his place in relation to the whole is not incompatible with the freedom of subjectivity.  In fact, under the terms laid out by Lao Tzu, one leads to the other.  “To be devoted to the Tao is to be appropriated by Nature’s Way that appears with spontaneity, improvisation and the incessant dynamism of creation.”(8/4/04, OPM 171)  The meditation is organized around this existential formula: subject>subjectivity//peace>freedom, and is captured in the ontological category of ‘poetic dwelling,’ which, a decade later, I recognize as better worded: ‘dwelling poetically’, where ‘dwelling’ constitutes peace and ‘poetically’ constitutes freedom, specifically, spontaneity and improvisation aka freedom as poiesis (nb: for my recognition of the tension of claiming that freedom is expressed through art making, cf. my commentary on OPM 169).   So, ten years ago today I wrote: “Poetic dwelling is the enactment or abiding that occurs with this event of appropriation that gives rise to the creative interaction of poetic dialogue.  Poetic dwelling…characterizes human existence as bearing the mark of impermanence…the Way of Creation. To receive the event of appropriation is to recognize the vestige of this process of Creation.”   And, finally, the formula is emphatically present in the following claims that assert freedom to be sheltered within the abode of peace (again, poiesis happens within a location of peace, or what in the past two years I have called the ‘studio’): “The abode that shelters freedom is peace.  Freedom is sheltered by the peace that conserves worldliness, preserves Life itself.  Peace is the name we give to the abiding that preserves Life itself.”

Today (this day, ten years later) I want to emphasize that ‘worldliness’ is the human response to the ‘natural’, to Nature’s law (of creation, spontaneity, flow, and also regularity, apparent stability and effortless balance).  In turn, the peaceful abode is what we make for freedom.   But this abode does not, in fact, preserve Life itself.  No human activity can preserve Life itself.   The opposite is the case, in fact.  In turn, today, I would rewrite the last shared sentence and make it a new aphoristic fragment: 

Peace is the name we give to abiding with Life itself.

Now this fragment brings me to prompts one and two, which I will discuss in short order.  The second arrived from the first, which can be understood as having multiple connotations:  Heraclitus from Aristotle.   Prompt number two is fragment 91 (pointed out to me by Aristotle):

Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind, and to keep things known in common, serves all being; just as laws made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength.  Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the Word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness prevail.

What caught my attention was the phrase ‘mindfulness…is the ground of being…’  Primal ground?  Where all things are rooted?  [Just yesterday I wrote in my commentary: “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.”]  Fragment 91 also seems to express the above articulated formula: subject>subjectivity//peace>freedom.  And it does so in a characteristically circular Heraclitean manner:  laws (cultural and political nomoi) are held in common [here I am reminded of Thoreau’s “common sense” that arises from the common ground: “the solid earth!  the actual world!”] and arise from thinking the common, from mindfulness < the awareness of the common ground.   Logos (the Word) is the source of our laws:  Nature’s law precedes human law. 

The immediately preceding leads me the first prompt, which will be the last matter to be discussed, and that is the realization this morning that I had, in fact, committed another hermeneutic ‘error,’ or, rather, had recalled poorly what I had learned about the Stoics, or perhaps had learned the Stoics poorly, erroneously?  At any rate, when I returned to the encyclopedia early this morning and re-read the bit on Natural law, I realized that the actual source for my newly adopted category of ‘Nature’s law’ was in fact Aristotle, and not the Stoics, who were identified yesterday as the source.  It seems to be Aristotle who, following Socrates and Plato, who followed the earlier philosophers such as Heraclitus, recognized that the inherent parochialism of nomoi (cultural and political laws) and from this postulated Nature’s law to be a higher law because it was, as Heraclitus said in fragment 91, common to all.   And it is from this logic that one can (and I myself have done so) derive a political system of isonomia (no-rule), which is a version of anarchy.  [I learned of isonomia from Arendt.]   Put differently, no-rule is actually the rule of Nature’s law, or what Lao Tzu calls ‘following’ the Tao.   Isonomia is how it appears from the side of humanity; it is an implication of the anti-humanist turn for politics, and perhaps even ethics.   

Here is the important citation from Aristotle, Rhetoric (book 1, chapter 13):

“By two kinds of law I mean particular law and universal law.  Particular law is that which each community lays down and applies to its own members: this is partly written and partly unwritten.  Universal law is the law of nature.  For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.  It is this that Sophocles’ Antigone clear mean when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature.

                  Not of to-day or yesterday it is,

                  But lives eternal: none can date its birth.

                                             (Sophocles, Antigone, 456-7)