OPM 234(35), October 6th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 229-230

Yesterday’s commentary culminated with the following:

Death is thus a confirmation of Life, and with its disclosure the totality of existence presents itself, and in this sense its disclosure is not unlike the encounter with the sublime and the experience of perceiving from that high altitude.   In both cases the ‘self’ is perceived in its most mortal, finite and diminutive.  

And the meditation from 10/6/04, which I am revisiting today, ten years later concludes with: “Death is thus the ongoing arrival of the new, the light of the futural shining forth from the past and through the darkness of the present.”(BL 230) 

Death as ongoing arrival of the new is announcement, almost prophetic – if that logic is applicable to a work of meditation, a sojourn of the soul --  of the forthcoming category ceaseless nativity.   Death, the withdrawing offering, the granting absencing.   The reduction to aleitheia is manifest: the play of life/death. 

“Death is the mysterious and open futural that confounds the now.”(BL 230) The hidden presence of death announces with reticence the ceaseless arriving of the new.  Indeed, it is the hesitation, the silence from which the other beginning is announced.  Heidegger’s ‘running ahead to the past’ from his earliest lecture on time and temporality comes to mind.   The disclosure of death is a halting of that running, and a turning around.  The temporality disclosed by death is the time of natality, the time of the originary.  “Death reveals the way of Being, and is ‘the highest and utmost corroboration of be-ing.’”  This revealed way is Being’s Becoming, but, as noted in a recent commentary – and also underlined in my Heraclitus lecture – we have to be careful not to identify ‘becoming’ as a teleological way, in a destinal way.   The fatalism of all progressive thinking does not think the ceaseless nativity of be-ing, the eternally recurring play of death/life.   This thinking of this play, which learning is always attempting to learn, places us in a temporality that is more original than the epic narratives from which we derive the prescriptions for our ethics and politics. 

But for Heidegger there is an imperative that we can derive from thinking the ceaseless nativity and learning how to place ourselves in the midst of the play of death/life and the temporality of natality, a time that is neither past, nor present.  Heidegger identifies the “comportment of the ones given over to the futural. ‘The enactment of being-toward-death is a duty only for the thinkers of the other beginning.  However, every essential human being among those creating in the future can know of it.’” Originary thinking is thus an ‘enactment’ or existential modality arising from our orientation toward death.  ‘Being-toward-death’ is not a nihilistic, nor morbid consciousness, nor attitude, but the exact opposite.  It is the affirmative saying of ‘Yes!’ Yes! to the condition we find ourselves in, that is granted to us.  Here the link between ‘thinking’ and ‘thanking’ is recalled.  Gratitude is expressed in the saying of Yes!  And this is an imperative:  the work of learning how to place ourselves in the midst of the play of death/life is a ‘duty’.  Only a duty for those oriented toward originary thinking? Yes!   The affirmation is a confirmation of the commitment of the ones learning thinking toward the imperative of teaching.  If teaching is nothing else than letting learning be learned, then the commitment to learn thinking is a commitment to create the conditions for the possibility of learning.  ‘Creating in the future’ is thus the work of those who are letting learning be learned, which is both the project of learning thinking and, in the process of making that project, creating the conditions for learning to be learned.   What is ‘known’ is the imperative of the project, and what is ‘thought’ is the project of learning.  In a sense, the usual teleological organization of education is reversed, for we know first and learn next.  Knowing precedes learning, which sounds oddly reminiscent [pun intended] of Plato’s theory of recollection.   Again, as I wrote in a preceding commentary, implied with this move is a reversal of Heidegger’s ‘running ahead to the past,’ for with the reversal of the teleological order of education we articulate the maxim: ‘striding back to the future.’    In a previous commentary I replaced Heidegger’s ‘running’ with ‘hiking’, and today with ‘striding’, but I’m inclined to recline with the threshold scholar’s ‘dwelling’, so that the maxim would be: ‘dwelling back to the future’.  Dwelling back is something like laying back, which in a colloquial sense expresses a kind of relaxation, and in a philosophical sense expresses the gelassenheit of ‘letting-be’ or going-with-the-flow (flux) of both Heraclitus and Lao Tzu.  It is also the diminishment before the sublime.