OPM 222(23), September 24th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 218-219

The meditation from this day ten years ago remains with Heidegger’s prescription that we must learn to listen closely, and makes an attempt to link the lecture from What is Called Thinking?, where he makes his recommendation, and a fragment from Contribution to Philosophy (From Enowing), that resonates with Zarathustra’s itinerary: “When Heidegger prescribes the learning of close listening he is conveying to his students their location within the epoch of going under. ‘Our hour is the epoch of going-under,’ the time of constant questioning.  IIs this time of gathering, of re-collection, when Memory, Mother of the Muses, returns with her nine daughters to inspire poetic dwelling?”(09/24/04, BL 218)

Before continuing with the close reading, I want to make a few observations about the writing/thinking.  First, it’s obvious that the stylistic break that happened with the writing of the Zarathustra legend loosened things up, and what’s unfolding is some audacious work; writing/thinking that is fully engaged with Heidegger and that is taking full advantage of the perceived license his work grants.  I say ‘perceived license’ because I’ve been reminded these past few days while working on my Heraclitus lecture, and reading Schürmann along the way, that audacity can also be reckless, and what is called for is a measured and careful pushing of the boundaries.  Second, as I revisit these meditations while preparing for my Heraclitus lecture, I’m struck by the extent of the Heraclitean logic that has saturated the writing/thinking.  I’m guessing I had internalized so deeply Schürmann’s exegesis of Logos as ‘gathering’ so much that I’d forgotten the source of this category, which was appearing again and again.  There is no category that appears as frequently as ‘gathering’, nor a category that appears with such force.

The third and final preliminary comment I want to make has to do with the learning of close listening.  As I was preparing today for next week’s lecture I came across a moment in the Heidegger/Fink seminar when Heidegger offers a translation of fragment 55 in Diels' standard listing, or Burnet’s no. 13: “The things that can be seen, heard, and learned are what I prize most.” Heidegger translates it: “Everything of which there is learning from sight and hearing, that do I prefer.  What one can see and hear, that gives learning.”

The Fink/Heidegger text calls attention to μανθάνω learning.  I was taken aback, because I had never encountered this Heraclitean word for learning. Manthanó. Indeed,  I was totally ignorant of μανθάνω while using the category ‘learning’ throughout this project, and insisting on it despite the fashionable critiques of learning (coming from my colleagues who prefer ‘education’ or ‘study’).  I’ve always rooted the project in the first lecture from What is Called Thinking? where 'letting learning be learned' is offered as a maxim that stands alongside the repeated "most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking."  Until this day I’d never considered that Heidegger’s use of learning was in any way rooted in Heraclitus.   There is the obvious phenomenological move happening with his translation: what one can see and hear, that gives learning.  But there is something else happening with this emphasis, something that I only discerned when I did a bit of etymological work on μανθάνω.    

The ready-to-hand sources for μανθάνω are the online Biblical concordances.   But what I discovered was interesting.  Timothy is a place where μανθάνω  appears quite frequently. For example, 2 Timothy 3:14:  “you moreover abide in the things you did learn.”  And 1 Timothy 2:11:  “in quietness let learn” ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ  μανθανέτω and “to be in quietness” εἶναι ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ. 

Now, these fragments are taken out of context, for now, only to make a neutral connection to learning and close listening.  When we place them back into the proper context,  quietness is understood as the quality of the way a woman should learn.   And while a knee jerk response would be to dismiss this out of hand, I would want to counter by insisting that Heidegger’s valuing of listening as the starting point of a learning that prepares the way for meditative thinking is a valuing of a feminine modality.  One needs only to read Irigaray (e.g., “Listening, Thinking, Teaching”) to understand the point I am trying to advance here.  

Finally, in the wake of  yesterday's commentary I was struck by a comment made by Fink immediately following Heidegger’s alternative translation of fragment 55.   Yesterday I concluded my commentary in the following way: “Hearing is primal and originary.  But listening is something we have to learn; close listening is something we have to practice, because it is a modality of attentiveness to the originary primary 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.”   It seems I was on the right track here, but didn’t go far enough, because I failed to identify the originary silence, which is akin to the open and clearing that allows for the primal beat to sound and be heard.  Fink: “One would have to form here the concept of an original silence that is the same as light with seeing.  Every sound breaks the silence and must be understood as silence-breaking.  There is also the silence into which we harken, without hearing something determinate. The original silence is a constitutive element forming the distance of the auditory space of hearing.”  To which Heidegger responds: “Perhaps the silence reaches still further into the direction of collection and gathering.”  Indeed, the originary silence that gathers!

What is the epoch of going-under?  This is the question that organizes the writing from 9/24/04, BL, 218-219.   It is a time marked by a return of the Mother (Memory) and her daughters (Muses).  It is a time marked as a “poetic gathering of music, song, dance, drama, tragedy and comedy.”   The epoch of going under is the time beyond the present, and so it is ‘not yet’.  It is a messianic moment, a time we anticipate.  We prepare for that time.  How do we prepare?  By learning close listening.    This learning is said to attend to primal hearing, and this attention is a return, it is a re-collection, a gathering with Memory, a reconnection with the Mother.  “We are held in this new era, held by the mother of the muses, Mnemosyne, the one who call out through her daughters.”  Here a gesture that responds to the projects original question concerning the contemplative turn.  The reconnection is the “the turning around occurring with the reception of that call, voiced by the returning of Memory and her daughters, the re-hearing of that originary sounding of the nurturing heart beat, the loving rhythm of caring.  In this hour of going under we are held by this rhythm…”  

The meditation makes a sudden shift with “out-stretched arms” the gathering is organized around the sharing of the cup that “bears the songs of the past…an improvisational ‘break-through’…”  and culminates with the citation of Heidegger in order to qualify the substance in the cup as the “poesy of ‘the water that at times flows backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking back, a recollection.”