Before moving forward into the
present I want to return to yesterday’s meditation and the commentary written
in response to it.
This morning when re-reading the
meditation from 8/5/04 I came upon the figure of the ‘peace-maker’, a persona
who is in some ways a figure that is distinct from the sage, and in other ways
a qualification of the sage. This
figure is important because it expresses so well the direction of my thinking
then and now, specifically as I make this (re)turn to the primacy of Nature’s
law. In my recent commentaries I’ve
written about this primacy as the primal flow and primal ground (thereby
expanding on the writing from a decade ago that was moving on Heidegger’s urgrund (primal ground). A decade ago, however, I had the important
insight that recognized the primacy and originary status of peace. Peace is the abode or shelter of
freedom. Of course, this puts me in
opposition with Heraclitus, who claimed ‘War is the King of all’ in one of his
fragments. So be it! At any rate,
‘peace’ is a sign for that subjective modality that is pre-subjectivity. It is a sign for the modality of dwelling
under the sovereignty of Nature, of being-subject to the force of Nature’s
law. In other words, it has everything
to do with the human in relation to the originary disclosure of Being, now
thought under a reduction to Nature. In
turn, the ‘peace-maker’ is the one who directs us toward this modality, who
re-presents the sign of peace. Here’s
how I expressed in on 8/5/04:
“Thus, the learner in the modality
of receiving and responding abides in peace.
We may call this abiding the making of peace, and the one who shelters
possibility…the peace maker. The peace
maker is the one who builds the abode of poetic dwelling, who maintains the
realm of openness itself.”
The meditation goes on to discuss
the abode of poetic dwelling as the field of openness where the community is
cultivated, and gets away, I would say, from the fundamental disclosure and
thus from thinking the urgrund, or,
better, the abgrund (‘underground’) of
the open field. Here is another moment
where the power of humanism interrupted my thinking a decade ago. And it precisely because he avoids the trap
of humanism that I have become so enamored with Thoreau’s writing.
I’d like to read the meditations
from 8/5-6/04 on the peace maker or peace-maker…( I’m tempted to get a bit
Derridean and muse on what is said with the use of the dash, or its absence)… in
light of yesterday’s commentary, specifically the encounter with Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Here’s what I wrote yesterday:
in a rhetorical demonstration the
writer (or speaker) communicates his persuasion [persuades] using primary terms
that remain signs, and retain probable but not yet certain meaning; such is
character of concepts that have taken
root in the thinker but are not capable of being fully articulated via spoken or written language. Meditative thinking remains silent. The writing and speaking that follows is
‘rhetoric.’
And in light of the preceding
here’s what I’d like to offer today in response to the appearance of the peace
maker:
If the peace maker is offering the
sign of ‘peace’ (this is his poiesis as a teacher), then he does so
by re-presenting peace. And in doing so
he is working (making) under the guidance (rule) of the logic of rhetoric aka
demonstration through his manner of what must remain unsaid because it remains
‘hidden’ in the originary ground. Here’s what is shown: the demonstration by silence indicates the
priority of receptivity, of listening;
the demonstration indicates the restraint of meditative thinking: en (within) thumos (mind); the
demonstration by re-presentation makes the sign of peace: indicates the source
of freedom aka spontaneity guaranteed by an originary probability (the fecundity of the primal ground).
And here’s what was written on
8/5/04: “The peace maker’s steadfast openness is the offering, the passing on,
of this gift of possibility, and in this way is the offering of the tidings
conveyed in the arrival of the ineffable.
The peace maker indicates this arrival, and points toward the truth of
concealment in the manner of Heraclitus who indicates the gathering directive
of wisdom in the mysterious way of the Word.”
Followed up on 8/6/04 with: “This peace is the offering of openness as
the region and the ground upon which freedom makes its appearance…But, [I] say
again, freedom is ‘dependent’ upon peace as always already ready and waiting
for the appearance of the unforeseen that bursts upward with every creative
action.”
The connection between thinking
then and now is rather intense, and I’ll let it be for now.
I want to conclude with a few
signs that can be taken up in the near or distant future:
a) the
tension I learned of yesterday between Emerson and Thoreau, which yielded a new
understanding of the New England Transcendentalist, and has left me wondering
where I stand (or stood) with respective to Emerson’s ‘phenomenality’ v
Thoreau’s ‘sensuality’. Perhaps my twin
categories of ‘primal flow’ and ‘primal ground’ as designations of the source
of originary thinking can mediate the apparent meta/physical divide between
them? Much of this matter (pun intended)
revolves around their reading of the Gita
as well as their appropriation of the Buddha’s categories. Some resolution of this tension is necessary
for me to make sense of the naturalist turn vis-à-vis sentences like the
following which I wrote this day ten years ago: “The peace-maker is the one who
abides in the silence of anatman
(nonself), who has been seized by the arrival of the ineffable and thereby
marked by the Seal of anitya
(impermanence). The peace-maker is the
apprentice who has been ‘covered over’ by this impermanence that preserves
possibility, the ‘not yet’.”
b) Healing. I’ve revisited a few times in my
commentaries, from the initial citation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “compassionate
listening leads to healing,” to the etymological work from (7/29/04): “To ‘heal’ is to ‘make
sound or whole: to restore to health,’ but it also denotes ‘to cover (as in
seeds) with earth.’ The latter is
derived from the Middle English Helen
which says ‘to hide, conceal, cover.’”
Two days ago, when doing my prep work for my Heraclitus lecture I
encountered a fragment I’d not read before, listed as #130 by Haxton it is the
most rudimentary kind of fragment: just one word: Akea (translanted by Haxton with two words: silence and healing. The connection
between silence>healing>teaching demand further thinking.
c) And
from yesterday’s musings on the ‘wild’ and the ‘wilderness,’ specifically, the
witnessing of the fog lifting from the Back Cove, and, as I wrote yesterday: “appeared
to me as if the sky and earth’s water were decoupling…for the first
time…again. There was something primal
in that moment, and it happened in the unique body of water that flows into a
residential and commercial area. Not the
wilderness, for sure, but something ‘wild’ (extraordinary) nonetheless.” An hour or so after writing that I read this
from Thoreau’s journal poem “The Fisher’s Son” (1840):
I know the world where land and water meet,
By yonder hill abutting on the main;
One while I hear the waves incessant beat,
Then,
turning round, survey the land again.
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME) As I noted yesterday, the mood that inspired what I wrote 10 years ago isn't the one I'm feeling these days. Even though I spent last week up at Acadia/MDI, I'm not feeling the New England transcendentalist vibe. On the contrary, I've been hacking and sawing and for the first time had a machete out in the forest today. I've been at war with an intensely invasive vine for the past two summers, and I've more or less won. But I was a late arrival to the war, a Grant figure who took no mercy and slaughtered the vines. Yet like they had done quite a job in the grove of White Pines in the years before I lived here, and there are at least 4 enormous carcasses strewn in the forest, choked by the vines. But it has to be noted that the Transcendentalists weren't Romantics, and recognized the dialectic within Nature. Thoreau was a pacifist, but I'm sure he didn't derive that from his meditations on Nature. I fairly certain he got it from reading the Gita. Speaking of peace, here's the fragment from today, 20 years ago: "This peace is the offering of openness as the region and the ground upon which freedom makes its appearance…But, I say again, freedom is ‘dependent’ upon peace as always already ready and waiting for the appearance of the unforeseen that bursts upward with every creative action.” Again, I applaud my 38 year old self for the embrace of Heideggerian poetic philosophical style. Why not?! I remember a colleague once teasing me for having "learned how to speak Heidegger." I think it may be around the time I was writing or soon after writing the original experiment. I remember feeling caught off guard and sensed they group he was with, which I happened to walk past in the evening as they were consuming stiff drinks, had been talking trash about me. I'm sure my reaction expressed my surprise and displeasure (I had wanted to respond, Yeah, and what of it?), but I brushed it off because my colleague was in a bad state, his depression having gotten the better of him. After many years of medication, he was a shell of his old self. So I more or less smiled and continued walking. I figure those fellows were about the age I am now, but I don't know that I would have be that obnoxious toward a younger colleague, unless he was acting cocky, which I was not. On the contrary, if I recall that time, I was mostly spending time by myself, and was probably returning from a music club. That's neither here nor there. But what remains 'here' is the figure of the peace-maker, or the teacher who insists that the learning community is a non-agonistic gathering, a sharing of partial perspectives as opposed to a debate or contest. I wrote as much this morning and will share it in the 3.0b post.
ReplyDelete3.0b - The solidarity that gathers the group into a learning community happens by way of the propitiatory nature of listening. A union or fellowship is organized by listening. The listening that gathers the learning community is a kind of inoculation against an ethos of competition. Students share with one another, and the esprit de corps can only be disrupted by a combative and agonistic mood. When this mood takes hold of the seminar a kind of amnesia sets in. Humility is forgotten. Arrogance takes hold, and learners morph into combatants. The self-certain ego cogito has returned. This is when the teacher emerges to remind the students that what is even more difficult than fighting to have one’s voice heard above others, and even more difficult than becoming queen or king of the hill of knowledge, is to let learning happen. Being “right” or “most interesting” or however one codes “winning” an argument over what is deemed most significant in the reading has little to do with the learning that happens by way of dialogue. The dialectic that negates the self-certain ego also negates what Heidegger calls “the authority of the the know-it-all…the authoritative sway of the official.” (WCT, 15) In turn, the teacher reminds the students that they are gathered together to learn, and that “we are all on the way together, and not reproving each other.” (WCT, 14) Indeed, it is not really a matter of listening to or expressing one’s “own” voice. Amnesia sets in when the dialogue becomes a matter of “speaking one’s truth.” With the dialectic of a philosophical education learning is not a matter of sharing “one’s truth” but of sharing one’s partial and incomplete understanding of a reading/text, which is to say, the sharing of “whatever essentials” from the text that “addressed themselves” during study. Agnonism is suspended by principle of insufficiency, which disarms students of the habits they have developed in schooling. Competition is rendered moot by the egalitarian character of “whatever,” which denotes that “everything” and “anything” that is highlighted from the text can and will be shared, now matter what.
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