OPM 276(277), November 19th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 277-279

5.  Genesis Time

 [PALABRAS ENTRE NOSOTROS: ]

…

All is given for us and to us and we still decide what to do with it, with the Giving. 

      All is not given per se.   We can arrive later than too late.   Or we can never arrive at all.  We can get lost in the labyrinth of choices, and exhaust ourselves at one too many dead ends.  Or we can receive the offering, and pass it along.  We can re-present the Giver in the time of music-making. We can say Yes! (Si, se puede!)

Yesterday’s commentary turned on the turning, and returned to the ever present presencing, the eternal recurrence of the originary dispensation, the offering made to us from Being that, when received and taken up, gathers us into learning, or what I have been calling the τέχνη (technē) of poetic dialogue that is nothing more or less than an ongoing working out of the oral tradition (the cultural tradition I come from, which also includes the cultural tradition that has given us the blues aka the tradition of the Spirituals).   The learning community arises in and through that work, gathered as it is by the particular koinonia that I have described most generically as the relationship between Being and learning.  This project of thinking/writing, which yesterday I described as the time in-between the studio work with the learning community, was initiated by the question concerning the turning around toward that most fundamental ontological/existential relationship.   So the project is essentially a revolutionary one in the sense (as I described it yesterday in the second of the three studio sessions):  the revolutions of a vinyl LP!   Stop and think about that analogy: the vinyl is turning around and around and the stylus remains in the same place while at the same time moving toward the center.  (A remarkable way to re-turn music to the air!!)  So, yes, there is something about the revolutionary movement of the stylus in relation to the vinyl that I find intensely thought-provoking; especially as a way of helping me to describe the relationship between Being and learning, the production τέχνη (technē) of music making philosophy, the gathering of the learning community in a dialogic circle (to borrow from Paulo Freire’s praxis).  It’s all very preliminary, and I remind my reader that these commentaries are field notes that are arising from a commemorative return to the original daily writing experiment I conducted ten years ago, which was ultimately published (in edited form) as the book Being and Learning.   BL 2.0 leans more towards the fragmentary, disjointed, and is mostly a collection of field, or better,  promissory notes I am writing to myself with the intention returning to them in a year from now, fall 2015 (post editing of the PES 2015 yearbook!) during my sabbatical.

Now, before returning to the writing from this day (11/20/04), which is organized around a surprise cameo appearance by Kant, I want to share my discovery this morning of an example of what I was describing yesterday when I wrote: “The question concerning arriving late is thus only ever a question that can be raised when we come to a work after its completion, which happens when we pick up and read ‘It’ (as the voice instructed Augustine to do), or we listen to music that has been recorded, or confront a work of art, or, as all meditative thinkers have done, contemplate ourselves and Being.   And with any and all of these belated encounters what allows for the disclosure of truth is the fact of our immediate local situation.   The effacement with the real happens here and now, which is why the questions raised by my students could only be raised by them, and could only disclose the truth because they were taken up by us together, today.  Let me be clear: the preceding is emphasizing that the reality (the truth) of any thing that is taken up by thinking is disclosed in the facticity of the present.  All is given insists that when we take up Augustine’s Confessions we are not taken up an artifact or a fossil but the confessions of Augustine, which, because of their form and content, do more than most to teach us about the ontology of excess and what is always already offering itself up for learning.”(11/19/20) 

The encounter happened with the fiddler/violinist Hilary Hahn, and at first her performance struck me as completely appropriate for my first learning community, the mostly music education students in my philosophy of education class with whom I have spent the past two weeks studying DuBois, with most of our attention on his use of the spirituals in Souls of Black Folk, and by apparent contrast, the importance role of Wagner’s music in the penultimate chapter, the story of John Jones;  we then turned  to the young Nietzsche, first, by way of a paper I wrote, and next by exploring an excerpt from his Schopenhauer essay.   So, this morning, when I was perusing my mail and reviewed the schedule sent to me from Carnegie Hall, I encountered the brilliant Hilary Hahn and a performance she made in the studio of NPR of a music that, as I wrote my students, takes us to the liminal place where folk and orchestral music overlap, where the Sprituals (Sorrow Songs) and Wagner meet.   Further, Hilary Hahn’s description of the second half of her performance is an example of what I was trying to describe when writing about the always already present offering for the studio work that happens with the τέχνη (technē) of music making philosophy:

  “I’ve never played it before, and it doesn’t really exist.  So…. What it is is a series of tunes from hymns and folks songs that appear in Charles Ives’ Four Sonatas for violin and piano.  So I realized in the course of learning these sonatas and recording them is that there are all of these different melodies.  I knew there were these melodies there but I didn’t know which ones were which exactly and I realized there were ones I hadn’t even identified that were hidden beneath the surface.  So I thought that I would just play four of those, and you may recognize them maybe after hearing these if you hear the sonatas, ‘I know that part, I already know that!’   I’ve enjoyed finding them, and I hope you enjoy this.”  Hillary Hahn  Studio Session at NPR

***** 

There are many notes I’d like to write today about the writing from 11/20/04 (BL 277-279), that is organized around the sudden unexpected visit by Kant!  Kant is meant to provide a contrast, a shading that brings into sharper focus the gathering of the learning community.   Ten years later, especially after the October writing/thinking on Heraclitus’ war fragments and the necessity of polemos, I have to admit that the truth of the matter is being revealed in the dark blue shade where Kant is moving when he writes, in the fourth thesis of his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” of the need to pay homage to the agonal spirit.   Kant, I write, “conjectures that the natural movement of humankind is to gather together is a destiny achieved through antagonism, and is thereby a destiny carried forth under the guiding presence of the agonal spirit. [Kant writes] ‘The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all capacities of men is their antagonism…Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped.’”(BL 278) 

The writing/thinking on 11/20/04 responds by making a critique of Kant’s assertion.  But today I would critique the critique, because Kant is in fact offering a description of that very same creative tension I described  OPM 274(275) when I wrote: “Given the commentaries that have written about the necessity of strife and struggle (polemos), coupled together with those that have taken up reconciliation, it seems on 11/17/14 I am prepared to say that the learning that happens within the community and that constantly renews the community is one that is in [large] part, guided by the agonal spirit insofar as this is a quality of the gathering spirit that maintains the necessary creative tension that insures dialogue (the dynamic movement) of voices is happening.   The learning community is a place where dialogue happens,  and not an echo chamber.  The logic of justice is organized by the agonistic play disclosed in the dialectic of dialogue…” [nb: I just now inserted ‘large’ and emphasized ‘creative tension,’ which I know Rocha has much to say…]    First and foremost I need to laugh with Kant who is certainly offering a somewhat ironic gratitude to Nature for making us hungry to compete with one another.  Kant is well aware that this same hunger when it becomes famine drives masochistic desires, and can lead to violence that reveals those not so excellent natural capacities of humanity that we should want to remain asleep.  Nevertheless, his cameo appearance at this moment is prescient, and helps me to accomplish what is nothing else but a revision of my original reading of Heraclitus’ “hidden harmony,” which, it turns out, remained obscured from my perception until I returned to his fragments the past few months.   For the purposes of the descriptions that are happening now, it is not sufficient to say “humankind achieves its destiny through the peace and freedom of the dialogic event.”(BL 279)  This becomes especially clear in light of the conclusion of the commentary on 11/17/14, the open-ended fragment: “The logic of justice is organized by the agonistic play disclosed in the dialectic of dialogue…”   This dialectic is nothing else but that which is hidden in the hidden harmony, the creative tension (the necessary difference) that grants harmony.   Hidden too is struggle and strife (polemos) between freedom and necessity that gives rise to justice.   And here, I reverse the original intentionality of the following sentence I wrote this day ten years ago: “Kant, it seems, would concur…when he says, ‘Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord.’”(BL 278-279) 

For now I’ll leave aside my rebuttal on 11/20/04 to Kant’s depiction of Nature.  I can see by glancing down on BL 279 that it continued the next day on 11/21/04, so I will, mostly likely, return to it tomorrow.  But unlike Kant’s sudden appearance on 11/20/04, there is nothing surprising in my rebuttal, especially for folks who’ve been reading this blog; for it expresses the spirit of Concord; the spirit of the transcendentalist peace-minded people of 19^th century that organized many of the notes I wrote on this pages in July and August!   Indeed, we desire concord, and I Concord, but Nature’s law knows better, and wills concord, first with ourselves (the divided will), and with one another…and most intensely with those we love most: our friends, and family!