OPM 272(273), November 15th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 273-274

On my way over to the Drew campus this morning I was listening to WQXR, the classical music station (part of public radio WNYC), and heard a brief spot by a Bach scholar whose words were included as a teaser for a Brandenburg Concierto (no. 40).  WQXR is celebrating Bach this month under the banner of “A Month of Peace and Music.”  What caught my attention and, in turn, I wanted to note in this blog was the following description of Bach made by the scholar: “What we learn is that Bach was imperfect, like the rest of us.  That he was deeply human, with a huge heart.  He was a genius, for sure, but human, which makes his music all the more inspiring.  Indeed, it is the work of human hands that resonates with the divine.” There is a place I’d like to go with that description of Bach's humanity, his ‘huge heart’ and his music – the work of human hands --  resonating with the divine.  Perhaps that will be implied in what I write today.  

First and foremost, I would pick up on yesterday’s commentary, and the meditation from 11/14 that is organized around Heraclitus’ “Here too the gods are present.”   And I will pick up and do something with that thread in a moment, but first I want to go back to something I said in yesterday’s commentary about my appropriation of Arendt’s category of the ‘world’.

As I’ve told my students, I move freely and without apology between exegetical and eisegetical readings of the primary source texts I turn to in my work.  The ‘swing’ of my way of reading and responding is evident in the way I read Arendt, and her category of ‘world’ is an example.  I admitted this yesterday when I wrote: “To call friendship the ‘abode’ of the learning community is to describe learning as happening ‘within’ the place of friendship.  And it is also to recall the description of the work (technē) of learning as building, the building of the community.  As I noted a few days ago, I am bending Arendt’s notion of the world, so much that it appears I have made a total reversal from the post-humanist mood of the writing that happened earlier in the year with the so-called naturalist turn I made in my commentaries via Thoreau.   To describe friendship as the ‘common ground’ is to use figurative language that captures what today is denoted by koinonia.  Figurative because ‘ground’ lacks the materiality of the ‘world’ in an Arendtian sense, but only if we insist on limiting the community to the people who constitute it.   And here is where the necessity of Heraclitus’ line shows itself.”(11/14/14) 

The reference to the note from a few days prior was referring to the commentary from 11/2/14, when I wrote: “I stretch Arendt’s category by [describing] ‘worldliness as the dynamic unfolding of the learning community whose ‘product’ and ‘harvest’ is the openness appearing as mindfulness.’ (11/2/04 BL 260)  This is the world as an expression of human action, “the ‘outward’ appearance of [the] originary giving offered in the gift of birth, the gift of Life itself.”   And this is [a] doubling effect of the originary offering:  the recurrence of the advent (the play of originary as birth/rebirth).  “The reception of the ‘newcomer’ into the learning community is the spiritual re-birth of the human be-ing from the ontical status of its historical situation. This ‘re-birth’ is the un-binding of the human spirit as the creative, dynamic and improvisational performer of freedom.  The capacity to perform freedom is the original gift…offered to all creative beings bearing the vestige of Being’s creative unfolding.” (11/2/04 BL 260) 

And on 10/24/14 Arendt’s definition of the political was cited: “to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom and virtuosity can appear.  This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen…’(Arendt)”(OPM 252(253), BL pp. 251-252) 

I wanted to return to these riffs on Arendt’s category of ‘world’ because this morning I was re-reading her essay on freedom  -- mostly to revisit her comments on Paul – and encountered the section on virtuosity and action and its connection to the world, and suddenly I recognized that my apparently eisegetical reading may in fact be exegetical, or a syncretic combination of the two.   And, what’s more, the section I encountered helps me to think further under Heraclitus fragment and its granting me the speculation made yesterday on the presence of the presencing of Being as excessive force that moves the learning community.   

The larger context is Arendt’s insistence that freedom is a worldly or externally appearing phenomenon.  It is something that happens in the world via action.  [Action for Arendt is the actualization of freedom, which is on the surface, categorically, the opposite of τέχνη (technē) ‘the ‘messy’ and ‘dirty’ undertaking associated with people who were bound to necessity…chiefly operative in the [unfree] sphere…and not in the free realm of the polis.’  “Unless of course what is meant by τέχνη (technē), precisely as the ‘messy’ work of the folk, is something that does not correspond to the liberal sense of freedom as liberty (i.e., the freedom from the communal, and the so-called freedom to pursue one’s private ‘happiness’) but to something we might call the work of emancipation and liberation, a vertical transcendence that actualizes the force of a movement into an not yet known future under the sign of hope?   What else would the work of faith entail?”(11/13/14)] Freedom and work, action and τέχνη (technē)  are categorically opposite only when we fall into the trap of reducing ‘freedom’ to ‘liberty’, which is nothing else but the atomistic ‘weak’ form of negative freedom from.   When we avoid that trap of reducing freedom to liberty, we leave ourselves open to the complementary positive ‘strong’ freedom for. While both are necessarily granted,  the latter sense of freedom is one that always tied to emancipation and empowerment, or as Arendt puts it is “action insofar as it is free is…springs from…a principle.  Principles do not operate from with the self as motives do…but inspire, as it were, from without…the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself….In distinction from its goal, the principle of an action can be repeated time and again, it is inexhaustible, and in distinction from its motive, the validity of a principle is universal, it is not bound to any particular person or to any particular group.  However, the manifestation of principles comes about only through action, they are manifest in the world as long as the action lasts, but no longer.”(“Freedom,” 152)   Principles inspire or breathe into us the power to act.  Action, which is something that only is when it is happening and thereby exists within the temporality of kairos, and like thinking, happens within the nunc stans (standing now), is also work in the sense of art work, but only in the sense of being a performing art; “the appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with the performing act.  Men are free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.”(152-153)  And ‘virtuosity’ is that excellence [in the sense of disclosure, shining, or presencing] “where the accomplishment lies in the performance itself…”(153)

In my reading the learning community constitutes the political as that unique place (sphere) where freedom in the form of action appears, and for me ‘learning’ is the actualization of ‘action’ and ‘freedom’.   But with my reading of Arendt I want emphasize inspiration of principles as binding.   Once called into and gathered in the learning community we are bound to act according to certain principles (as opposed to others).  [I’m now burdened with making  description of the principles of learning!]   This is Heraclitus beckoning to his visitors: cross the threshold into my place of dwelling, and you will encounter the presencing of a force that will compel us into thinking, which is common to all.  [nb: They didn’t cross over!]   If it is the case that action springs from principles that arrive to us then action and freedom are bound by the necessity of principles.   If the political – the ‘theater of freedom’ – is the necessary place for action, then principles offer the force that puts action into motion.  Principles brings freedom into being; action is made and formed by principles.  Here one can hear an echo Nietzsche’s artist that becomes the work of art: “Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he produces the copy of this Primal Unity as music…The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity...”(Birth of Tragedy 14, emphasis mine)   

The categorical opposition between action and techne breaks down when we see that freedom is happening under the logic of necessity and dependence.  And this is where the description of the learning community as the ‘gathering reconciliation’ emerges from, not to mention the thinking that has identifies learning as mimetic music-making happening via the call of compassionate listening and the servitude toward the other.  And here we see the occasion for Arendt’s sense of horizontal dependence: “Performing artists – dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like – need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their ‘work,’ and both depend on others for the performance itself.”(154)

The preceding was in no way meant as a prelude to the meditation that happened this day ten years ago.  However, the reading of Being and Learning pp. 273-274 will certainly have all the context they need once they have read and thought along with the impromptu commentary I have just written in response to reading some Arendt this morning along with my morning coffee.  Hours later, in the Drew library, after re-reading the writing from 11/15/04 there is not much more I can add.  I will, however, note the strange ‘edit’ that happened when this material was published.  The first line of the original reads, “The eternal, breaking through and appearing in the temporal, arrives with the spontaneous act of creation and is released in the improvisational performance of freedom.”(11/15/04).   This is no explanatory note on the original manuscript to explain why  “eternal, breaking through and appearing in the” does not appear on BL 273.   The corresponding sentence in BL reads: “The temporal, arrives with the spontaneous…” The reflexive conjecture is that it was decided (by me, or an editor at Sense?) to drop ‘eternal’.  But that conjecture is quickly refuted by reading further down on BL 273 where the words from the original have been retained, and on that page appears what above I called the gathering force of reconciliation that moves learning by re-collection (re-calling, calling again into being): “Thus the dialogic event of learning is a…re-collective situation, where the originary dispensation, the offering through the birth of a be-ing, is re-membered in the expression and reception of the novel conveyed through the improvisational.  But the novelty of this novel offering…is the ‘breaking-through’ of the eternal into the temporal, the appearance of Being’s dynamic processural unfolding as the ongoing investiture of being-in-the-world.”(BL 273)

A final note: more description of virtuosity as a complement to improvisation is needed.