OPM 232(33), October 4th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 227-228

I want to begin with notes form the 2006 Moleskine, which will bring me back into the commemoration of the writing experiment.  And with the return of the old name ‘363’, I am inclined to call this work ‘363 2.0’. 

There’s no date, so I’m assuming the following note is part of a set of notes from 3.26.07:

Thinking thinks presencing, the dynamic unfolding of Being.  Thinking represents this dynamis, it is with Being.  Being with Being, thinking reveals the essence of the human as mortal, for Being’s absencing – the withholding that grants presencing – beings do not sustain…can not sustain, for there would be no difference, no space.  Mortality is the gift of Being.

What’s important in this fragment – and this is, after all what the notebooks are gathering – is the identification of space as the withdrawal of Being, the absencing that grants presencing.    To say ‘mortality is the gift of Being’ is to say it is an offering.  In what sense an offering?  In the sense that would assign to Being an existence other than the mortal, and other than essence in the sense of substance.  It is not enough to call Being ‘Existence’, although this is a proper name, one best written as phusis (Nature) or bios (Life).  Being also demands to be called Logos, the organizing or unifying force of phusis, which also helps us to assign the temporality of eternity to Being: a temporality that is one of ‘existing forever’ and/or ‘holding forever’ (eontos ai ei, ἐόντος αἰεὶ).   As unified, but a unity, Being is called ‘the one’ or ‘all together’ (hen).  What is other than Being is not ‘non-Being’ but the absence of Being qua phusis, although this doesn’t quite capture the ‘a’ of aletheia, which doesn’t signifying ‘non-gathering’ or ‘un-gathering’ but the non-organized organization of things.  And when we understand Heraclitus’ and the Gospelist deployment of legein as human logos as ‘saying’, helps us to understand aletheia as silence.  Being’s absencing is the withholding of legein (saying and gathering) that grants the space of the non-organized organization.  What is granted is thus more than a ‘time of possibility’ and a ‘time for spontaneity’ and ‘improvisation’ the kairos, which it most certainly offers.  It is also a granting that is identified in the ‘hesitation’ and ‘reticence’ taken up this past week.  A withholding silence that offers the space for the arrival of saying, a saying of something ‘new’ and ‘different’, and it is this difference that is key.  

Aletheia is the non-organization in a substantial sense of post-metaphysical (non)ordering:  things have yet to come into their completion, and in this sense ‘lack’ form or essence.  Substance without essence: ‘neither a wave nor a particle’.   This is precisely where ‘freedom’ is granted, if we want to think in ethical and political terms.  The granted space is the ‘negative’ atopos or better utopos (utopia): the presence of the absence that grants the possibility of an other gathering, an other arrangement of things.  Thinking is the letting-be of this aletheialogical  unfolding, which can be assigned the name ‘becoming’ but only in the non-teleological sense: becoming otherwise; aletheia, a letheia, alogical, a logical.

The overlap with Oct 04 & 14 and March 07 happens with the offering made in Being’s withdrawal, the offering made in the presence of absencing and the experience with the sublime as an up-lifting.  Here we encounter the arrival or arising of the phenomenal in the gap offered by the absence. Up-lifting is the appearance but not just the facticity of things; rather their shining forth, their glory, their illumination, or being-illuminated, their arrangement into significance, 'meaning' in the sense of gathering our attention, our perception.  This is the phenomenal origin of phenomenology.   Here there is an obvious genealogical connection with ‘en-lightenment’, but making this connection would only work if we, first, return the Florentine revival of Platonism, then leap back to Heraclitus’ allusions to Fire, making these moves under the guidance of Heidegger’s mapping of the open region as that location where not only sound but light is granted the space to arrive.   Parallel to that retro-activity is the return to the huacas, those spaces mapped by the Incans as ‘sacred’ because they have been ‘lit up’ or ‘en-lightened’ by lightening.   Unlike the Aztec pyramids that allow for the reënactment of the being-lifted, the Incan huacas are registered sights that have been assigned by and within Nature itself, specifically at the peaks and along the ridges of mountains.  These places have been illuminated by the lightning that Heraclitus says ‘steers all things,’ and if we follow the seminar conversation undertaken by Heidegger and Fink on this ‘steering’, we are amongst ta panta (the things, the many) directed by the steering.  Put otherwise, the lightning illuminates the location and, like a beacon, steers our movement...upward.  And this is precisely the seizure or the captivation happening with the experience of the sublime, which on this day ten years ago remained the focus of attention.

The granting absence of Being’s withdrawal is recognized by Kant in his most famous discussion of the sublime.  “Kant identifies the reception of the sublime as distinct from an encounter with the ‘beautiful’.  Both encounters are deemed ‘pleasant,’ but the encounter with the sublime ‘merits the name of a negative pleasure’…” (10.04.04, BL 227)  However, on this day a decade ago, Kant’s ‘negative’ was not assigned to the granting absencing, but to the displacement and “humbling of judgment.”  Again, the reticence of hesitation  the “humility [of] the noble-mindedness of the one who is diminished by the overwhelming grandeur of the sublime.”  The experience with the sublime is the coincidental diminishing up-lifting, “the ‘negative’ arising”.  [I am bending the grammar here…for sure…because on 10.04.04 it was the negative itself that was arising…rather than a ‘negative arising’ as I am reading it today on 10.04.14]  Perceptive becomes en-opened to the greater vista made possible with the increased altitude, with the consequence that we recognize our diminutive status in relation to the awesome grandeur.  Such is the sublime.   

There is a powerful echo, of the sort one experiences in the space of the open region [such as the lake where we kayaking on Mt. Desert Island in June], of the Gospelist in the description I make towards the end of the meditation (BL 228): “The sublime is the redemption occurring with the reclamation of that originary ‘strange event of appropriation.’”  ‘Redemption’ was left unqualified, but today it would have to read in the wake of McCary’s  reading of Sappho's poetry as offering the “redemption of the real.”  Redemption happening with the negative arising is the upward gesture of going-under: the hands of Zarathustra are not simply ‘out-stretched’ but raised, so that it is not just the welcoming gesture of the one ready to embrace the singular other (a la Levinas asymmetric ethical stance), but the gesture of the one gesturing in media res (in the midst of things), so that it is not toward a singular other (person, tree, etc.) that the gesture is made, but toward the many gathered, gathering many.  It is a sign as much as a gesture of welcoming and gathering.