Last
day in Portland. Back to Hofstra tomorrow. Heraclitus lecture on Thursday. All goes well in the preparations for that,
and, unlike last year’s manic Plotinus lecture, this one appears to be gathered
by the very Logos that Heraclitus is
pointing us towards, which is to say, organized and measured, and put together
with some precision. I’m looking forward
to sharing Schürmann’s etymological analysis of Logos, and also to the challenge of showing how Heraclitus is one
of, if not, the first philosopher in the Greek (‘Western’) tradition, without going into tremendous detail
regarding his difference from the Milesians (Anaximander, Anaximenes, and
Thales) who are predecessors but not innovators in the full blown way of
Heraclitus.
The
meditation from this day (BL 222-223)
returns to the temporality of Zarathustra as context for what has been called
the “epoch of going under”. The writing
begins by drawing a connection between Zarathustra’s descent from his mountain
cave and the ostensible arrival of the ‘single-minded man’ of instrumental reasoning
into the learning community. In
yesterday’s commentary I called attention to this figure, and also to the
radical hospitality of the learning community that is always ready to receive
and dismantle the modality of the single-minded man and his will to power. Zarathustra’s ‘out stretched arms’ are said
to “enact the Leap taken by the hospitable one,” which is a reference to the
learning community as a whole, but also an indexical reference to Heraclitus
welcoming his unexpected visitors.
“Zarathustra’s going-under is a diminishment,” and this claim is
reinforced by recalling Lao Tzu’s writing: “He who devotes himself to learning
(seeks) from day to day to increase (his knowledge); he who devotes himself to
the Tao (seeks) from day to day to diminish (his doing). He diminishes it and again diminishes it,
till he arrives at doing nothing (on purpose).
Having arrived at this point of non-action, there is nothing which he does
not do.”(Tao, II: 48: 1-2)
I
have in mind to cite this in the beginning part of my lecture on Thursday, when
I share Geldard’s grand conjecture that the writings of Lao Tzu, amongst other
‘treasures’ from the East, had arrived and were circulating in cosmopolitan
Ephesus, and that Heraclitus most likely had come into contact with them. There is absolutely no evidence of that, but,
nevertheless, it is the kind of speculation that widens the cultural ground
that we return to in our hermeneutical circular movement. It matters not if Heraclitus read Lao Tzu,
or vice versa, because only a completely narrow-minded, arrogant, and wholly
interesting person would ignore the obvious symmetry between the two. And this is not a self-serving way of
defending my own choice to have a chapter devoted to each of them. Rather, I would never have done so if I did
not believe their thinking moved around a common axis, one that was named Logos by Heraclitus, and Tao by Lao Tzu.
Zarathustra
offers ‘truth’ in the form of his evocative saying, not so much in content, nor
form, but in the force they convey, what, in the spirit of Heraclitus, I will
call the gathering force of Logos:
the word that brings together. In
preparing for the lecture I discovered that koinon
(common) also appears as koinonia: the
experience of community, communion, joint participation, sharing and
intimacy. The sage is the one who
gathers through his evocative speaking, gathers the learning community into
communion. The learning event of this
gathering is one of close listening.
Zarathustra’s
speech making is said to be an offering, and one made by outstretched
arms. The gesture of outstretched arms
is not only one of the welcoming embrace, the gesture of radical hospitality,
but also what Heidegger calls a ‘pointing’, a gesture indicating the future the
“not yet where the truth abides, hidden, concealed, and distant…His
outstretched hands are a pointing, a pointing to this distance, the boundless
boundary. Citing Heidegger, the learners gathered into the community are
claimed to be “ ‘suffused with what is coming, (what is futural) and sacrifice
themselves to it as its future invisible ground…” I add: “This suggests that the diminishment
and sacrifice to the future, the seeking of the futural, is the authentic
‘finding’ of self in the diminishment that relinquishes self to other.” Ten years later I find this a bit off the
mark, especially when I revisit the supporting citation from Heidegger. It’s off the mark because it remains too much
within the circulation of the human domain, and doesn’t attend sufficiently, at
this juncture, to Being. Put otherwise,
the existential gestures too much towards the ethical and away from the
ontological. Attention to the boundless
boundary, as a synonym for the open region, should have been sustained in this
meditation. Where is Zarathustra, the sage, descending into? That is the question that needs to be taken
up.
Heidegger
helps me to identify the temporality of going-under with the locality of this
event: “In itself seeking is futural and
a coming-into-the-nearness of being…seeking brings the seeker first to its
self, i.e., into the selfhood of Da-sein, in which clearing and
sheltering-concealing of being occur.”
There is a recovery, of sorts, with the return to Zarathustra’s gesture:
his out-stretched arms. “Going-under
is…the offering of outstretched hands that is the lighting up of that vista
where the learners behold the distance of the beyond, the ‘not yet’ of the
boundless boundary and become unbound in this be-holding…” The shift from the sonic to the visual is
abrupt, but not contradictory. Here
Heraclitus is relevant: “The things that
can be seen, heard, and learned are what I prize the most.” In other words, ‘hearing’ is both the
specific sonic experience and the generic experience of receptivity: the
phenomenological stance of receiving the disclosure of phusis. Zarathustra’s
gesture, the outstretched arms, is a embodiment of the phenomenological stance. The formation of the community participates
in the gathering of all that can be seen and heard, the panta. Learners are “seized”
by the “hidden harmony, heard though close listening.”
3.0 (Sunday, Portland, ME) I won't repeat what I wrote yesterday about the project's current thinking/writing and the critique of "single-mindedness" that appears above. I would only add in the spirit of Lao Tzu, who is cited above, that there is an imbalance that is expressed in the fragment from the OPM from this day in 2004: “This suggests that the diminishment and sacrifice to the future, the seeking of the futural, is the authentic ‘finding’ of self in the diminishment that relinquishes self to other.” A diminished and relinquished self can be understood as what I'm currently describing as the periagogê of the student away from "self-certainty" i.e, away from the Cartesian ego, which is held out as the measure of education as the attainment of 'clear and distinct' knowledge. But this turning away from the quest for certainty is also a turning towards the solitude of study where the student's singularity (a version of 'single-mindedness') is cultivated by philosophical learning, by a particular way of receiving and responding to the text, which is phenomenological. Attention to the text, what I am calling the significant object of study, is not a relinquishment of the 'self' to the text. There is priority given to the object of study, to attentively listening to it, but the student isn't sacrificing themselves to the authority of the text. Rather, they are affirming the autonomy of the text as having something meaningful to offer. And then when the student their peers and shares what they have learned from the text they are joining the learning community but retaining their singularity. Together the learning community is a koinonia of plurality. All that to say the project has evolved.
ReplyDeleteOne comment on that C&E lecture: I don't recall it going especially well or unwell. I do recall it as part of the set of lectures I offered in C&E that, aside from my Homer lecture, which was a performance, didn't receive the kind of affirmation that I had anticipated and/or desired. I attribute it to the stylistic differences, but also to whatever biases and presumptions my colleagues have about what constitutes a "good" lecture. In a few days I'll read my account of what happened. I'm curious to read how I felt afterwards.