OPM 174, August 7 Meditation (2004 & 2014)

Back in the first few years of my time teaching at Hofstra I recall searching for some kind of intellectual community, something like the one I experienced when I was in grad school.  I more or less searched in vain to recreate something that would only come together for me in the past three years, and well over a decade from my first years at Hofstra.  One of my unsuccessful attempts at forming community happened when I ventured out to Stony Brook and sat in on a grad seminar that was ostensibly about thinking difference, but was really focused on Heidegger, which turned out to be ok by me.   I mostly enjoyed listening to my colleague who was conducting the seminar, but I hardly connected with the students, most of whom seemed a bit snarky.  A few were humble and open, and others were on the quiet and even sheepish side.  And there was the older guy who was the most sincere person in the room, taking the course toward his Masters degree that he was earning because he wanted a Masters in Philosophy, which is to say, he wanted to study philosophy for philosophy’s sake.   When I reflect back on that scene I realize it was only one student in particular who unnerved me with his mix of sarcasm and arrogance.   And it is the memory of his reaction to a comment I made one day in the seminar that has prompted my commentary today.  

I recalled this particular moment in the seminar as I was thinking about this Emerson v. Thoureau tension that is based on a important philosophical disagreement, one that I suspect was running throughout my original meditations, and is actually at the heart of the category I gave to them as examples of  ‘poetic phenomenology.’   So here’s what happened:  we were probably in the midway point of the semester, and by then the snarky student had become a source of irritation for me.  At some moment, and I don’t recall the details, he was going on about something, carrying on in what I would describe as Derridean evasion: a circuitous interpretation that rendered the matter at hand nothing other than his interpretation.  What he offered was far away from phenomenological description, and I’m fairly certain the question on the table had to do with transcendence and/or transcendental thinking – and by ‘transcendental’ I mean vertical transcendence, the Platonic move to the Good, or even what Aristotle describes when he talks about thinking the Unmoved Mover, which he identifies in Bk 12 of his Metaphysics.    The snarky and sarcastic reduction of transcendence to our talk of transcendence, to the what we can and can not or do not say but yet say about transcendence…etc., etc., was too much for me hear on that particular afternoon as it became clear to me that he and I had totally opposing views on the matter at hand, which for him was not the matter but the way we talked and, I gathered, wrote about the so-called ‘matter.’  “Wait, a minute,” I interjected with what probably came across  in an overly patronizing way, “what are we talking about here?!”  “Let’s not reduce all of this to ‘metaphor’”, I commanded.   I’ll never be sure it was the style or substance of my comment, the assertion stated as a command, or the content of said command, that pushed him off his mark, but he was, for moment, and then another, totally speechless and concretely flabbergasted.  The physicality of his response -- his jaw dropping his hands dropping to the table, the grunt that replaced his normally confident rhetorical flourishes – said everything that needed to be said, and, for me, undermined the entirety of what today, in the wake of the Emerson v. Thoreau tension, I would describe as his ‘phenomenalist’ ontology.   In other words, there was nothing ironic about the incredulity he felt toward my statement.  And now that I recall the scene, and especially in light of the thinking happening these past few days, it seems most probable that what he found utterly unbelievable was the premise of my statement:  that we could do philosophy in a non-metaphoric way; that there was something real to be described, and, more, that our descriptions weren’t all that we had to actually talk about; indeed, there was something there to be described, and not just what Immanuel Kant called the ‘thing in itself’ that was always presumed to be there but at the same time beyond our experience and thus beyond our knowledge.  Rather, what was appearing to us was there, was real, and, what’s more, there might be ways of thinking about and perceiving it that would allow us to talk and write about it in a faithful manner…that is in a way that allowed us to be faithful to what was there and not just caught up in the circles of our own talk!  “Really?! You just said that?!?”, the snarky fellow ‘said’ with his jaw and hands dropping and his grunt.   The silence that followed was palatable, and I was in no rush to fill it, as I’d said all that needed to be said.  And because there was nothing that followed, the story ends there, as it should because the relevant point has been made.

And that brings me back to the meditations, specifically the material written these days ten years ago, and the subsequent commentary I have written the past week, specifically the naturalist  (re)turn happening through Thoreau but still in concert with Lao Tzu, Heraclitus and Heidegger; the (re)turn that culminated with Aristotle’s naming of that universal law, what I am calling Nature’s law, and his naming of it in his Rhetoric.   I suppose the place to begin to move today on this issue is Thoreau’s flourish toward the end of his “Ktaadn” essay:

“Think of our life in nature, -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, -- rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

So the questions, the originary questions, the questions that initiate/originate thinking arise from our contact with nature, those things that situate our life.  The sentence ‘Think of our life in nature” is a direct and emphatic prompt. And given that he uses italics for emphasis in the very same long sentence, Thoreau might have written the beginning as “Think of our life in nature” and in doing so he would have then directed us to recognize that such ‘thinking’ emerges from that life...our life in nature, which is to say, with the disclosure of the real, coming in contact with “the solid earth! the actual world!”   Such Contact! is the beginning of thinking, a thinking that unfolds with the pursuit of two fundamental questions, Who are we? Where are we?  

All this to say that a (re)turn to the actual world (our life in nature) positions us to raise the fundamental questions, and it is thus a move one needs to make as kind of preparatory and anticipatory one.   That is, if the event of appropriation is something like the epiphanic event that happens to us, then we can anticipate this event by keeping our sensibilities close to the ground where the contact is made.   Close proximity to the solid and actual entails something like the recognition that Nature (in the way Thoreau is referring to it) is neither inanimate, nor symbolic.   If we render some part of nature a poem or a painting, we have not turned it into something else, but, rather, made something else altogether, and, what’s more, replaced nature.  And this is not the same as making something from it, for the basket woven, or the canoe dug, are no different from the bird’s nest, or the beaver’s damn, as all are made from what is gathered, from what is offered.  In sum,  it's important that we keep a clear head and have sober sensibilities and recognize the essential difference between the rhetorical metaphoric rendition of nature, and the phenomenological description of our experience with nature.   The former is a replacement, while the latter is location -- an answer to the question Where are we?

In the writing done this day ten years ago I cite again sentence from Heidegger that speaks of the strange ownership: “a mutual challenge drives home to us with startling force that and how man is delivered over the ownership of Being and Being is appropriate to the essence of man.”   What Heidegger identifies as the “startling force” seems to me precisely what I have been calling the epiphanic event that happens when, like Thoreau, we find ourselves in a sublime moment with the powerful force revealed in the substantial concreteness of the natural world, even when that concrete is revealed in its fluid form:  the rising fog, the claps of thunder, the rising and setting of the sun, the rising and lowering of the tide.    Throughout all this movement (flux) is a coherence, a dynamic relatedness between sky and earth and water. Might this be Heraclitus' 'hidden harmony'?   What's more, can we derive normative implications from our perceptions of that dynamic relatedness?  Of course, and this is why Thoreau asks first, Who are we? and next Where are we?   The second question holds out a way to answer the first, but does not replace it.  It merely interrupts it, and delays it.  To think Who we are we must think Where we are, and to do the latter we must think the contact we have with the place where we are.  In turn our being is our being-there (Dasein, to use Heidegger’s category).  Who we are is where we are. 

The startling force may be delivered through the unexpected bolt of lightning, or the from the summit of a mountain, but the delivery over to Nature, to Being disclosed as Life, is the same.  We could re-write Heidegger’s sentence to read: “Life is appropriate to the essence of humanity.”  Or, borrowing from Thoreau, "Human life is delivered over to the ownership of Nature, and Nature is appropriate to the essence of humanity."  But if we make this move then it must be that humanity has an essence, and our thinking of this essence happens sensually, through our physical contact with the natural world.  Here, then, we might see what I have been calling the shift from the mind to the heart, where the heart stands for our embodied experience, the perception of our contact? 

All this pre-metaphysical thinking stands in direct conflict with the post-metaphysical talk of symbolists and metaphor makers.   Indeed, mine is the talk of naturalists, or dare I say realists, those for whom language must always a reflection of own inability to actually deal with the force of Nature.   For language, like the boots and heavy slicker we put on against  the cold and insisting rain, is our only defense against the overwhelming force of Being.