I’m on the final day of
preparation for the Heraclitus lecture.
Yesterday when recording the DZ for this Sunday, I moved by the
acoustic ‘Bird Song’ from 10.2.80 Warfield Theater (SF, CA)and experienced the impulsive
desire to play the jam in the moments before I begin my lecture on Thursday. Music has
to be at the beginning of a lecture like this, and I disappointed in myself
that I haven’t been using music as a way to begin each and every one of my
classes. Perhaps I’ll invite my
philosophy of education students to recommend music that they think corresponds
to the material we’re studying? After
all 80% of them are music education majors!
Anyway, at the very moment that I brought up the two minutes of the
‘Bird Song’ jam I happened to look out the library window and saw that one of
the roof workers who is on the crew that is laying down new cedar shingles is
wearing a Steal Your Face t-shirt! I
suppose I have to take that as an example of hearing the hidden harmony, and,
with that, I’ll go with the ‘Bird Song’.
(For the record, the roofing crew are compadres, latin brothers, which I find even more uncanny! I rarely encounter fellow latin brother
deadheads!)….some hours later the notes for the presentation are complete. All told the notes are a relatively small
amount (2429), supporting 29 slides.
Talking is much different than reading, however, and I’ll have to be
very careful to allow for enough time to let the heavy philosophy stuff sink
in, while moving briskly over the
historical stuff that is necessary to give some context. I have a little less than an hour, which,
this time around, seems to be just enough time. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the
lecture. My strategy is to set the tone,
light the fire and draw them close, and the once they have been properly warmed
up, offer them a chance to watch the fire burn and relax with some historical
stuff before adding a few more logs and finishing with some heat. Here is what the excerpt that I hope will
get them warmed up:
De Novo From the beginning, beginning again.
[granted
it’s Latin!]
With
Heraclitus we begin something new for us, but we also encounter something new
in history: thinking for oneself: the pursuit of wisdom (sophon, Sophia) not in
the form of a goddess we call to, but the pursuit of an existential modality, a
way of being.
“I
have sought for myself” (frag 80)
Wisdom
is both a practice and the result of the practice, a kind of learning from the
self that forms the self; a turn from the self to the world, Nature (phusis), and its harmonious gathering (Logos) into a unity (Hen).
I call
this gathering Ceaseless Nativity: the
Eternal Return of the Same beginning, the gathering force that organizes
existence, the cycle of birth and death harmonized by Life itself.
Sophon,
Sophia, the practice of wisdom is the contemplation of this Ceaseless Nativity,
the phenomenological reception of Nature’s harmonious gathering. This is what Heraclitus calls listening to
Logos and hearing the hidden harmony.
Sophon is the practice of learning to listen to this hidden harmony
and thereby learning to become
harmonious, balanced, and gathered into the unity.
“Thinking
is common to all.” (frag 91a)
“The
hidden attunement (harmony) is better than the open (known).”(frag. 47)
We’ll
talk a bit more about the common
(koinon) and what it means to participate (think) what is common to all. That is, experience koinonia. I place it here,
at the beginning, as way of indicating that while it may be the case that not
everyone is inclined to think (aka listen to Logos), Heraclitus is claiming
that it is a fact of the human condition:
We are,
all of us, always already listening to Logos. Wise are those who learn to listen closely,
who become attuned to the harmony, who turn off and tune in…
And what
might we hear, and, likewise, what might we write (or, to borrow a phrase from
Nietzsche, what kind of music-making philosophy might we produce?)
We might
recall two familiar narratives in order to realize that what we hear is in a
harmony made of minor chords, or what we call the blues, the tragic reality of
the practice of wisdom: the banishment
from Eden, and the death of Enkidu.
Those stories remind us that the ‘hiding’ of the hidden harmony
discloses our perennial separation from Nature.
Our wisdom is the wisdom of the blues, an effacement with the reality of
our imperfection and, despite that, a hope and faith in the possibility of
overcoming that condition.
The song
of Sophon, Sophia is the blues. [nb:
this is a play on the Song of Songs, which we read and discussed two weeks
ago.]
We are The Blues Exception (to
the rule of harmonics): neither fully animal nor
fully spiritual, we are the mismatch, of sorts: the dissonant third that is
unique and unsettled from other two; aware of our mortality, aware of our animality, our place in Nature; and aware of eternity, the universal, the
global. Our perception (intellectual,
physical, emotion, spiritual) places us this strange and unsettling third
position.
As for
the writing from this day ten years ago 10/01/04, it begins with a recitation
of the “movements occurring with learning…: ‘Leap,’ ‘stillness,’ ‘going under,’
‘releasement,’ ‘reposing,’ and now ‘hesitation.’ Hesitation identifies that ‘pause’ before the
gap opening up in the opening of the open region. It is also the ‘pause’ before the crossing over into the regioning.”(BL
)
Although I don’t have a vivid
recollection of where I was when I
wrote this meditation, I do have a vivid recollection of the appearance of
‘hesitation’, which in under different terms is a ‘movement’ [posture, move] I
have called upon in the past ten years, most recently in the paper I presented
at PES 2014 Albuquerque Apathetic Reading: Becoming Primed for Originary Thinking, which uses a section of the
same Rafael fresco “The School of Athens,” that I will use tomorrow. Here is a snap-shot from the paper: “At the preliminary moment of introduction,
apathetic reading compels us to remain in the threshold, in the time and place
in-between the domestic safe house and the country paths, our gaze held aloft
to the lines leading us into the that threshold outside the School [of Athens]
but not yet beyond it.”
‘Hesitation’ was also the
hallmark of the threshold scholar, the one who dwells in-between. And here is an occasion to share the video I
recorded in Fall 2012, titled
That paper, which I wrote for the
American Educational Studies 2012 conference I could not attend because of the
superstorm Sandy, was an attempt to build on my paper I wrote for PES 2011 St.
Louis. "Being Different: Speaking My Others, Hearing Your Selves."
Finally, ‘hesitation’ is in many respects the modality of the educator
who is learning to listen, and is compelled into reticence by the
students. This compelled reticence is something
I experienced when teaching an online course, and I wrote about this, with the
help of Heidegger and Irigaray, in my paper “Together and Apart in the Time of Study: Teaching, Learning, Listening in Online Courses (An Application of the Technology of Difference),” Journal of the Philosophical Study of Education, Spring: 2014.
All that to say that the
‘hesitation’ I described for the first time ten years ago today remained part
of my thinking. However, the term
morphed from its initial articulation, and with that morphing there was some
loss of the physicality, the embodiment of the move, such that it was deployed
less as a full-bodied action and, on the contrary, became part of the listening
schemata: hesitation from speaking. With so much emphasis on language,
especially speaking and listening, it is no surprise that hesitation would
almost immediately give was to reticence.
But it is much more than that!
Hesitation is a “dramatic halt” that results from “the irruption of the
conventional…an arresting of the
will...” It is the experience of the one
who hesitates before entering into the learning community and “identifies the
unsteadiness of the one making transition from the familiar, the
habitual…” And hesitation is also what
is experienced by “those going under” making the descent into the open
region. In essence, hesitation is
experienced by all who receive the call to learning.
A final note on ‘hesitation’ from
a full-bodied perspective happens at the conclusion of the meditation, and
there the link is made to what Heidegger calls the “essential swaying of being…”
Philosophy “looks for this essential swaying,” and I conclude by
completing the link between the flowing movement of being and the movement of
the reluctant learner “carried forward by the faltering, haltering, staggering
movement of the ones who have been carried forward by the faltering, haltering,
staggering movement of the ones who have set out upon the wayward paths.”(BL 225)
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME). I'm basically fried this morning. Looks like I may have overdone the yardwork/workouts the past few days, or didn't eat enough to support all that movement. I barely slept last night, as I was kept awake by a headache and general stiffness that I associated with hunger and possibly not enough coffee. I'm not totally surprised, because it seems I ended super sore in my legs and back after I go up the aluminum ladder and prune the massive Norway Maple in our back yard. It's a process that involves setting a climbing line way up the tree and then using a harness and a grigri, which is a belay device that will catch you if you fall. At any rate, my energy is kind of funky and it doesn't look like I'll have much to say at the moment, so I'll comment on the Heraclitus lecture and overlap that with the OPM from this day. First I'll note that my nerves, as usual, seem to have gotten the better of me as I was prepping for the lecture. I remember talking to some of my C&E colleagues about how silly it was that we were getting ourselves all worked up over an undergrad lecture. But now that I reflect back on my experiences, I think its the culture or tone set by my colleague who is Dean of HUHC. He's an affable enough person, but he's also kind of intense about C&E, and the presumption is that each of us is going to offer a lecture that will have a lasting impact on the students. That's a relatively high bar, especially when lecturing on someone like Heraclitus who is mostly an obscure figure in the history of philosophy. But in an attempt to say something memorable I end up sounded a bit like a crazy man, in large part because of my Heideggerean approach, which presumes I high level of commitment to ideas like Logos, which is the central idea in Heraclitus. In some ways "LEARN" is an attempt to describe a form of study that doesn't demand that level of commitment. This original project was coming from the opposite direction, emerging from a full-throated belief that I was engaging ontologically with Being through the figures I was responding to. So in some ways this 3.0 project is a daily reminder that I don't want to sound like a crazy man, or at least I'm trying to avoid writing from the deep end of the philosophy pool. That's not to say "LEARN" is shallow. On the contrary, there is depth. There just isn't the same level of commitment as the OPMs. There's no mention of "the essential swaying of Being." And, as a result, I'm feeling more confident and certainly not as nerve wracked as I was ten years ago this week when I was preparing my C&E lecture.
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