From a calendar perspective I’ve
reached the half-way point two days ago.
From the perspective of the daily writing experiment, today is the
mid-way point to 365! So I suppose it’s
not a coincidence that this morning the conjecture -- or maybe it’s a thesis?
-- came to me that, perhaps, Thoreau is not only an important example of the
Sage figure, but, actually the
exemplar!
What does that entail? I’m not entirely sure at this point. At minimum it means that when the Sage takes
on some flesh and bones, and comes out of the realm of speculation and
imagination, I can point to Thoreau. And from a practical point
of view it directs my scholarship going forward, although I can’t say at this
point if I’ll apply for a special leave to study Thoreau. Again, it’s all rather fuzzy at the
moment. It really was just a kind of
conjecture that came to me while I was looking at an article I found yesterday
“Walden and Yoga,” by Frank Macshane, published in The New England Quarterly (37: 3) Sept. 1964, almost exactly 50
years ago. I found the piece after doing
some research in the wake of the discussion Stacy and I had on Monday regarding
Thoreau’s reading of the Gita. On Monday I was of the mindset that Thoreau’s
naturalism/sensualism placed him at odds, if not at opposition, with the Gita
and the Vedantic traditions two-world theory.
Stacy suggested I consider the holistic strand of the Vendantic
tradition, where the concept of maya
(illusory world) did not necessarily denote a metaphysical demarcation but,
rather, a demarcation of perceptions.
Under this logic phyuisis was
not illusory or ‘unreal’. Yet our
perceptions of it could certainly be just that.
Maya would then denote an
illusory perception of phyuisis,
which would further denote a ‘false’ relation with it. The philosophical question of truth under
this logic is resolved through a consideration of relationality. And thus the
true or authentic relation with phyuisis
happens through Brahman consciousness
where the sensual body achieves a union with the natural world, and division
between self and world diminishes. This
is the event of appropriation happening via the Force of Life.
Of course, nothing in philosophy
is ever straightforward or easily resolvable, for as soon as you take up the
next reading in the afternoon you encounter a compelling argument against the
position you had settled in the morning.
And this is precisely what happened to me yesterday when I was reading
George Stack’s Nietzsche and Emerson: an
elective affinity. Stack makes a
fairly compelling comparative reading that reveals Emerson’s influence on
Nietzsche, specifically on Nietzsche’s position on ‘necessary illusions,’ or
the self-deceptions that, as Stack puts it, prepare for the ecstatic experience.
Emerson’s lecture “The American Scholar” is the apparent source for
Nietzsche on this. But more important is
the position, which folds back on the Maya/Brahman distinction, saying something
like: our illusionary consciousness is the necessary basis of self-overcoming
and it is through our illusions, on only through them, that we can cross into
the effacement with Nature. To me this
all sounds like what I was writing about in June with the turn from the mind to
the heart. Again, these are complicated
issues, and ones that aren’t resolved but only identified in the space of these
daily commentaries.
On that note, back to Thoreau as
the exemplary Sage. After sending her
some of the resources I found, Stacy sent me a link to The Walden Woods Project
(the digital collection of Thoreau’s writing).
The homepage of the project includes a quotation from his journal, and
the one they feature today, from this date in 1841 seems to be a response by
Thoreau himself to my conjecture: “If I am not, who will be?” Of course!
As for the writing I did ten years
ago this day, it is coincidental to encounter the return of the Sage on this
day when I wondered if Thoreau might be the exemplar I was, apparently, looking
for…(resisting for now and for all times the manic enthusiasm of the young
Nietzsche when he encountered Schopenhauer…but no mention of Emerson?!) And not only does the Sage return, but so too
Heraclitus and also Socrates’ Diotima!
The meditation from 08/15/04 is
organized around the metaphor of forging
to describe the poiesis of learning
and the learning community.
Learning is a forging, but the
learning community is also said to be “forged anew.” What’s more, the forge is the place of learning. A forge is a ‘a place where anything is made;
a workshop.’ I then go on to recall the
story of Heraclitus’ visitors (the focus of the chapter in Being and Learning), and make a link between the fire of a forge
and the fire in Heraclitus’ hearth, where he is standing warming his hands when
he greets his visitors by saying, “Here too the gods are present.” I wrote in the meditation from today: “The
forge is defined by the hearth, and the essence of the hearth is the fire whose
heat enables the smith to work iron and steel.
The community emerges from this first, the compassion offered by the
sage whose loving heart conveys the gathering directive of the sage.” (And this
is where I will make the connection with Socrates’ Diotima and the doctrine
expressed by him in Symposium: “I try
to bring others to the same creed, and to convince them that, if we are to make
this gift our own, Love will help our mortal nature more than all the
world.”) From the heat of the hearth – made by the fire
(‘Fire’ for Heraclitus symbolizing the originary flux, and primary matter, the
generating force) – is linked to the sage’s loving heart – conveying the Love
of which Diotima spoke -- via passion
and compassion. This is called the “ardour of the sage’s mindfulness, her
steadfast compassion, love for all living beings…” This love as a generating heat is thus
understood as the power of the forge, and thus eros and poiesis are
joined together as ardor and arduous.
Together they channel energia.
Today, energia is understood to denote Force of Life.
3.0 (Thursday, Portland, ME) - Is the learning community "forged"? Yes and no. It is made, but does not endure, and in that sense what is "forged" is a forgery, not a fake but not a "thing" that endures. The learning community lacks worldliness. Rather, the world is what makes possible the gathering of the learning community, or what I have been calling the commonality. Here is what I wrote this morning:
ReplyDelete3.0b - The invitation to the students is issued by the teacher in the spirit of hospitality. In his description of Socrates’ trial, Derrida emphasizes that Socrates insisted that he would speak in his accustomed manner, that is to say, as a philosopher and thereby raising questions as opposed to attempting to persuade them of his innocence. He would deploy dialegesthai and thereby attempt to talk through the accusations with them, as opposed to deploying rhétoriké in order to persuade them. As much as possible he would dialogue them as a collective body as opposed to addressing them as a multitude to be persuaded (peithein ta pléthé). As Derrida reminds us, when Socrates insists he will speak in his natural way, he is declaring himself l’étranger, a stranger, an outsider, a foreigner to the court, and when he insists that he will speak as a philosopher, i.e., in a way that is outside the rhetorical norm of the court, he is also invoking the principle of hospitality and the rite of listening that enacted it. In this court, Socrates declares, I am a stranger (xenos), and thus I am entitled to your hospitality (xenia). Derrida describes Socrates’ declaration this way: “if I were a foreigner, here in the court, he says, you would tolerate not only my accent, my voice, my elocution, but the turns of phrase in my spontaneous, original, idiomatic rhetoric. There is thus a foreigners' right, a right of hospitality for foreigners at Athens.”(OH, 19) Derrida continues: “Sometimes the foreigner is Socrates himself, Socrates the disturbing man of question and irony (which is to say, of question, another meaning of the word "irony"), the man of the midwifely question. Socrates himself has the characteristics of the foreigner, he represents, he figures the foreigner, he plays the foreigner he is not.” (OH, 13) For Derrida, as a philosopher Socrates was always l’étranger, operating outside the norms by introducing a new kind of relationship with others, what Arendt describes as “a specifically philosophical form of speech, dialegesthai, as the opposite of persuasion and rhetoric.”(PP, 79)
ReplyDelete3.0c - There are several novel characteristics to dialegesthai that are found in the discussion that gathers the learning community and stages the performance of commonality. One of them was the aporetic or inconclusive character of the dialogue, and the other is the equality between the participants that limited the “outcome” to the occurrence of dialogue experience. Socratic dialogue happens between equals, and is governed by isonomia, or the equality of all speech (the right to be heard by and also to hear anyone and everyone who was present in the dialogue). As Arendt reminds us, to Socrates the discussion is “a give and take, fundamentally on a basis of strict equality, the fruits of which could not be measured by the result of arriving at this or that general truth. It is therefore obviously still quite in the Socratic tradition that Plato’s early dialogues frequently conclude inconclusively, without a result. To have talked something through, to have talked about something…seemed result enough.”(PP, 81-82)
ReplyDeleteThe “something” that is talked through is whatever essential has appeared significant and thus worthy of sharing and discussing with others. The essential is not simply what is there, but what appears or resonates, what shows out, what is arriving. If the teacher is welcoming the arrival of each and every highlight from the reading that is being shared, then she is following the example of Socrates who called the dialogues he staged the practice of “maieutic, the art of midwifery: he wanted to help other give birth to what they themselves thought anyhow.”(PP, 81) The birth of presence, the arrival of the new, this is what is shared and then circulated with the discussion. The essential is the “dokei moi, that is, of what appears to me. This doxa…comprehended the world as it opens itself to me…The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it, and that the ‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness (koinon, as the Greeks would say, common to all) or ‘objectivity’...resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all the differences between men and the positions in the world… ‘both you and I are human.’”(PP, 80)
3.0d - The coexistence of the principles of hospitality and equality provide the force that gathers the learners together into an experience of commonality. Each student arrives to the seminar room, and they are unique, each on their own journey of study. They are each different from one another, but also different from the teacher who, in that role, is distinct with respect to the responsibility they have toward the staging of the discussion. They all arrive as strangers to one another, and the teacher, who is responsible to conduct (guide) the discussion, is the host, the one who will embody the hospitality (xenia) and the amor fati that inspires the discussion. They arrive and share what has arrived to them from the reading, and in this sharing what has arrived continues arriving into the presence of others who will have an experience of “friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there.”(UC, 32) Being there, present with others, they experience the particularity, partiality, and the collective plurality of the common book/text they have studied apart from one another. It is enough that they have arrived and shared what has appeared to them as significant. Being there, wondering and wandering together with others, speaking without attempting to persuade and listening without judgment, is both necessary and sufficient. Being there together with others in discussion is autotelic (complete in itself). The learning community “without project.” Learning for learning’s sake. This is the discussion that performs commonality. Arendt declares “it is obvious that this kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends. Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and finally…begins to constitute a little of its own which is shared in friendship.”(PP, 82)
ReplyDelete