OPM 221(22), September 23nd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 217-218

There is a Listening Studies Group at PES, and I received an email yesterday that the LSG has new blog.   I applauded the new initiative and shared the link to this blog, and invited other LSG members to check out my post from 9/21, which is captures so well what I am calling my ‘thinking under the banner of close listening.’  Up to now, the LSG has organized panels at some of the bigger conferences, and has published a volume of papers, or perhaps two.  I’ve been an occasional participant, but support the work of the group even if I’m not as active as others. 

This week will see most of my attention focused on next week’s Heraclitus lecture that I am scheduled to give in C&E (the Hofstra Honors College first year course I am co-teaching with 13 other faculty members to 250 first year students).   I generally over-prepare for these C&E lectures and the result is a somewhat disaggregated presentation fueled by manic energy.  I’m determined to deliver a relatively composed lecture that is faithful to my approach of getting to the matter of thinking with the philosopher being presented, as opposed to talking about him.   But I’m hoping to do something that stays within some boundaries that are clearly delineated, while letting the lecture be guided by the question, Who is Heraclitus?, a question that is intended to draw us into his manner of thinking, and the truth conveyed by his fragmentary form of writing.  The question is also a way to prompt an engagement through Heraclitus with the semester’s theme of friendship, and I plan to ask what I anticipate will be received as a bizarre question:  How shall we welcome Heraclitus into our community of learning?, or How can we become friends with Heraclitus?

So long as I’m able to stay within the boundaries and deliver the question in a way that is generative, the experience will be a constructive one.   A way to stay within those boundaries is to make certain that Logos receives a majority of the attention.   With Logos as a primary focus the lecture will follow the question regarding the ‘identity’ of Heraclitus to Heraclitus himself, who we will ‘befriend’, and in making our acquaintance with him he will point us beyond himself and his writing, and insist that we listen to Logos. 

In preparing the Logos section of the lecture I returned to Schürmann’s Heidegger book, where he takes up the six primary words of philosophy: eon, phusis, aletheia, logos, hen, nous.  While Logos is the one I will focus on because I want emphasize the ‘sonic’ fragments and thereby emphasize the practice of listening, Heraclitus can be understood through all of these primary words, which Schürmann calls ‘categories’ --  because the force of these words is sustained despite their being ‘forgotten’ or falling out of usage, or morphing into other forms. Phusis is important, and will receive some attention, especially because it has been taken up in this blog when I wrote on Heraclitus’ fragment: ‘nature loves to hide’ “φύσις (Nature) loves to hide”. (cf. OPM 172, August 5^th)  So too aletheia and hen.  Heraclitus fragmentary writing is a disclosure of aletheia, and hen denotes the common or koinon of Logos, both the everlasting fire, and the lightning that reveals in the epiphanic flash of an instant.  But it is logos that will receive the most attention, because it is what will gather us into the community of learning insofar as we are told by Heraclitus to listen to it and not to him.

And all this as a way of maintaining a fidelity to the meditations happening under the banner of close listening, which on this day ten years ago, is called “the modality of painstaking/compassionate listening” that is “the originary invocation and the originary reception or leap into learning.”  The mediation continues the retrospective, initiated a day earlier, that returns all the way to the first days of the project, when I was writing of the “First Questions” (a category I borrowed from Kant via Arendt), and their evocation of learning.  The reception of these first questions – the most originary is the Being question articulated as the ‘practical’ question: How is it that we are turned around to contemplate Being? – establishes the logic of the ‘twofold play’ of evocative speech and painstaking/compassionate listening. Painstaking because it demands a sacrifice, or, rather, involves suffering (passion...hence, com-passion: with passion): the destruction of the juridical subject.  Evocative speech subjugates.

The retrospective is a reminder that evocative speech and painstaking listening co-arise, and are interdependent in such way that the logic of cause and effect is distorted if not dismantled.   And for this reason I found it more revealing to borrow the Buddhist category of pratitya samutpada (dependent origination, dependent arising, interdependent co-arising).  Evocative speech and painstaking listening co-emerge, and co-respond each to the other, “for neither emerges ‘before’ nor ‘after’ the other. The moment Zarathustra, or any sage, offers their speech, those who listen receive it as evocative.”(9/23/04)

But how does the logic of pratitya samutpada operate within a temporality of learning that presumes movement?  Heidegger’s counsel that we have to learn close listening suggests that we are not yet listening.  Does this mean we have yet to hear evocative speech? 

The borrowed Buddhist category prompts the meditation to conclude with a set of questions that follow from the apparent incompatibility between the claim that evocative speech and painstaking listening co-arise, and the claim that close listening (another name for painstaking listening) must first be learned: “Is this learning of listening the initiative we take, a kind of exercise or preparatory practice…?  Is this the practice that culminates in the letting-go of the juridical voice…? Has the learner always already become an apprentice before the co-arising of evocative speaking and [painstaking] compassionate listening?  Is this ‘original turning’ an event that is more original than the [evocative] invocation offered by the sage? Is there a more original invocation that is spoken, mysteriously, obscurely and even hidden, one that is still more silent and still than the quiet of peace?  Is this learning of ‘close listening’ a re-membering of an original modality, the (re)emergence of a compassion that has always been with us?  Is this close listening the original, pre-natal ‘hearing’ of the mother’s heartbeat? Is the most primal and original modality one of hearing…?(09/23/04)

As I was (re)typing those questions I was experiencing a visceral memory, such that I could almost feel myself connected to the moment when I wrote those question ten years ago.  And it may be that I was sitting at the same desk, this old IKEA desk that I’ve had since 1998.   I most definitely remember reaching that moment of plenitude when the question concerning the most originary sparked the rhetorical question about the pre-natal ‘hearing’ of the mother’s heartbeat.   (I often reached that state of plenitude, and/or would work towards the moment in the daily writing.)  Ten years later I would want to go one step further from the question concerning the primal modality of hearing, and thereby resolve the inquiry by returning to the logic of dependent co-arising: heartbeat and hearing co-arise interdependently, one with the other.  The category mistake – to borrow a phrase from Schürmann that I read today – is happening with the equivocation on the term ‘listening’, and not with the conflict of temporalities: the synchronic originary co-arising  of evocative speaking/compassionate listening versus the diachronic learning of close listening.  Listening should be dropped in the first instance, because it is not listening but hearing that is occurring.   Hearing is primal and originary.  And listening is something we have to learn; close listening is something we have to practice: it is a modality of attentiveness to originary primal hearing.  And this is why meditative thinking, or meditation, is a practice that places us in close proximity to our heartbeat, and to the rhythm and flow of our breathing.