OPM 255(256), October 28th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 255-256

First and foremost and in the manner of the Roman tradition that will take up some of my focus momentarily I have to pay homage to Dr. Bienvenido Duarte, who this day, after 61 years of practicing medicine, is seeing his last patient.  A life devoted to caring for the well being of thousands, beginning in 1953 in Castillo, La Bomba de Jaiba y Hostos, Republica Dominicana, New York City, Milwaukee, WI, Pendelton, OR, Kankakee, IL, Ancora,  Newark, Jersey City, Passaic, and Summit, NJ.    Were I to equal the span of my father’s professional career I would have to practice my techne until the year I reach his age of 87 years!   That thought alone is enough to humble me beyond the modality of humility and respect I feel today for him!  He has shown me the way to be a rigorous and tireless professional, and for that I will always be grateful.

“I’m here to tell you war is the answer.”  I let that one hang in the air today in both of my HUHC C&E sections that followed a careful and inspiring lecture on Virgil and his Aeneid by my colleague Ilaria Marchesi.   Of course, I was setting up my students; setting them up for a discussion by enacting the very agonism I wanted us to think together.   But please don’t misunderstand me when I say I ‘set them up’, because this wasn’t some kind of cheap teaching trick to prompt discussion.  Rather, as I informed them, this assertion was a strange to me as it sounded to them.   I gave them the full context of the blog commentaries that had taken me into Heraclitus’ war fragments.   And this was not at all an unfamiliar context.  These are the students who were part of the 200 who heard my Heraclitus lecture on October 2^nd. But these are my students, and they are also privy to this blog, which I shared with them as a way of giving them a full picture of myself as a working philosopher, in the way I understand the meaning of that work.   “Read the blog and you’ll see that prior to hearing this morning’s lecture I’d already been gathered into the place of thinking the coincidence of the opposites war/peace and the co-arising of peace, freedom, justice under the rule of ‘war’ (polemos, strife, struggle).”   Indeed, as I listened to Ilari’s lecture, which was made under the premise that the Romans of the first century BCE were, like the people of today, suffering war fatigue, I couldn’t help but think against the implication of her fundamental premise:  Virgil forced the Romans, and the first citizen Augustus, to reconcile themselves with the originary that is armas, the first word of Virgil’s epic.   As she reminded us, the reconciliation can only happen when we think this first word and point of departure, this which means everything to the Romans, specifically those first century Romans who have are intent on (re)founding Rome, with the last word of the epic: shadows, the shadow of death.   War and death thought together, what does that disclose to us?  

If Ilari’s reading is taken up then we have to read Virgil as offering us a cautionary and dark epic.  But I read against that implication.  I read the shadows as the contrast and other of war; what allows for war’s presencing to happen; the darkness that allows for the brightness of lightning to flash in all its brilliance.  When Nietzsche describes the sun as the “over rich star” he is pointing to the excessive brilliance that overwhelms darkness that surrounds it.  Space, that ever presence ‘darkness’, is always granting the sun a place to shine, but each day its excess lulls us into a forgetting of the granting darkness.  This amnesia is what organizes system of thought offered by Plato in The Republic, specifically book seven.   And this is why, if we want to understand the archein (starting point and organizing principle) of Virgil’s epic we need to think with Heraclitus, specifically fragment 44:  Polemos is basileus of all things. 

The students in my C&E sections are earnest, rigorous, and open minded, so they listened attentively yet critically to my reading of Ilaria’s lecture; and they both pushed back against and forward with me, because they shared my ongoing curiosity about the implication of Heraclitus fragment 44, which we’d neglected during our study of him.  Thinking Virgil under the influence of Heraclitus allowed us to take up the shield of Aeneas and compare it to Achilles’.   The latter shield offers the coincidence of peace and war, which, looking ahead to our study of Augustine, I likened to the two cities that we are irreconcilable.  But thinking against that either/or logic I suggested a dialectical reading of the cities of peace and war.  They are twin cities, or, better, the same city perceived through the mask of Janus.  The shield of Aeneas offers us only war, and, it behind this shield that we can think the (re)founding of Roma.  This move is not unlike the one I made earlier in this day with my first class, equally earnest, rigorous and open minded, when we took up DuBois and mapped the place behind the veil as the location of thinking.  Behind the shield and the veil we take up the question of the human condition: how does it feel to be a problem?   To experience an effacement with the human condition through Heraclitus’ 44^th fragment is to begin the process of reconciliation with the work of human hands, our poiein, as an ongoing struggle and strife.  Call is passion, but don’t reduce it to tragedy because, as Arendt reminds us, this work of repairing and renewing [(re)founding] the world is always a work happening in the present that is oriented towards the future.  Reference to passion reminds me again of the blues ontology of Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism, and the thorn encircled flaming heart.  

With prophetic pragmatism we transcend the suffering of the present with the song that gestures towards the future.  This is the hope that is felt in the movement of the blues, the promised salvation that demands work, building.  And it is through the lens of the blues that I want to read the beginning and end of Virgil’s epic:  war and death as the dialectics of (re)founding.  ‘War’ (polemos) as the strife of making, the struggle of building, of bringing together something new from what remains; working in the twilight, that dusk when the Owl of Minerva spreads her wings.  War, the struggle, the work until the shadow arrives, and the dark of night set in.  But here, again, a reversal of what was written three weeks ago: not darkness, but light arrives, for “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.”( 10/6/04 BL 230) 

But this reversal takes us into a further disclosure of the dialectic: “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.”(10/6/14)  “Death is the mysterious and open futural that confounds the now.”(BL 230)

To encounter the complex play of dialectics today is to return to the meditation from this day ten years ago that announces at the onset: “To enter into the strange-land of learning is to cross-over into the openness of the Open as a newcomer bearing the gift of natality, the vestige of the originary dispensation of Being.”(10/28/04 BL 255)  Peace is announced…but it is not that peace that stands as the result or absence of war, for this would not be that place of thinking, that strange-land.   It is not the peace of tranquilty, but of a dynamic unrest “where plurality is cultivated…it is the flourishing of difference that marks the land as strange, un-settled, even wild. But how is it that we identify the ‘cultivation’ of a ‘wild’ sphere?  Does this not collapse the ‘refined’ and ‘cultured’ Apollonian into the ‘raw’ and ‘untamed’ Dionysian? Responding to this query requires us to reflect upon the encompassing investiture that is ‘reserved’ for human freedom.  This sphere, the abode where the learning community is gathered, is the shelter spared by Being through the Open, the temporal horizon appearing in the gap between past-present and future.  The relation between past-present and future binds the horos of mortality.   The finite being-in-the-world of mortal being unfolds within this horos.” (10/28/04 BL 255)