Examples
of Paul on koinonia:
The grace of the Lord Jesus
Christ, and the love of God, and the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. 2nd Corinthians 13:14
Is not the cup of blessing
which we bless a sharing in the
blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? 1st Corinthians 10:16
…that I may know Him and the
power of His resurrection and the
fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death. Phillipians 3:10
Therefore if there is any
encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any
affection and compassion, 2make my joy complete by being of the same mind,
maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.… Phillipians 2:1
In
yesterday’s commentary I postponed the inevitable confrontation between
Nietzsche and Paul. Today I have to
address it without placing myself within the place where that confrontation is
happening. It may turn out in the end
that I am already in that place, but, again, that remains to be taken up on
another day. Today, however, in light of
the ongoing engagement with Zarathustra speech on the love that is higher than
the love of the neighbor, I want to address at minimum the inevitable.
The
confrontation between Nietzsche and Paul that produces much tension for my
project, happens around the organization of the learning community, and the
gathering force of koinonia. Indeed, the confrontation is not so much that
the learning community is gathered by this spirit of fellowship, but the
character and quality of the koinonia,
which is another way of saying the character and quality of the learning
community.
Again,
today is not the day to go full throttle with a comparative analysis; today’s
commentary is meant first to revisit the meditation from 11/22/04, and second
to write myself promissory notes for future work. Before revisiting the writing from today I
read the pages on koinonia from
Guiterrez A Theology of Liberation
that Rocha had recently called my attention to. Again, only a promissory note to take up
Guiterrez, especially in relation to Freire and the project that has so greatly
influenced my own. But Guiterrez in a
few pages is revealing on this matter of koinonia
and the gathering of the learning community.
First and foremost Guiterrez reminds us that the koinonia gathering Paul’s communities is the fellowship that
“celebrates the action of the Lord which establishes a profound community among
men.”(264) Ultimately, as he shows, this
celebration of the Eucharist as the radical act of ‘breaking bread and sharing
wine’ as the praxis of solidarity and
justice. This community, he tells us by
citing Camilo Torres, “cannot offer the sacrifice in an authentic form if it
has not first fulfilled in an effective manner the precept of ‘love of thy
neighbor.’”(264) Now, I want that
citation of Torres to hang in the air a bit and resonate (via a feedback loop),
and I’ll come back to it in a moment.
First, however, further context for Guiterrez on the koinonia of the Pauline congregation,
which is to say, more on the spiritual work or praxis (a form of the celebration via technē that
I describe as dialogic music-making philosophy) that is moved by ‘love of thy
neighbor’. Guiterrez emphasizes that
Paul was emphatic that the Eucharistic celebration was always an expression of
that love of neighbor as a form of service. Celebration is a praxis of servitude. I would add (in light of the recent study of
Bernard) that this celebration, like the monastic cycle of spiritual life that
had no fixed beginning, middle or end but was ongoing and cyclical, was
ongoing. The community is always in the
process of being repaired and renewed.
An example of this what Guiterrez calls “the necessary precondition if
the participation in the Eucharist…fraternal charity…”(264) Citing Paul’s reproach to the
Corinthians, but before that Matthew
(5:23-24) “First go and make your peace with your brother, and only then come
back and offer your gift.” The
disclosure of koinonia happens
episodically, and for Guiterrez there is a trinitarian structure to the
episodes. He appropriates Yves Congar’s
description of the tripartite manifestation of koinonia. The first, which
is the fundamental ontological condition of the ground, Heraclitus’ ‘thinking
is common to all, is the koinon
(common) of shared earthly existence: Guiterrez, “the common ownership of the
goods necessary for earthly existence,” which I read not as ‘dominion’ but as
fellowship with the earth that
demands an economy of sustainability.
Here Thoreau’s twofold community the Nature (first in the forests,
rivers, mountains of Maine, second at Walden) are exemplary demonstrations of
the koinonia that gathers us into an
economia of ‘common ownership.’ “Koinonia is a concrete gesture of
fraternal charity…Paul uses this word to designate the collection…”(264) In the second sense, “koinonia designates the union of the faithful with Christ through
the Eucharist…”(264). This is the
celebration that literally brings together a community that is of one body and
one blood. And this is the force of koinonia as the gathering force of agape, because the celebration is one of
the fellowship itself, the love of friendship.
What remains to be understood from the meditation written this day is
the distinction between this love and the love of the neighbor. The fulfillment of the first two culminates
in the third, which is the realization of the community’s faith in one another,
a realization that happens with the affirmation of the presencing of the Holy
Spirit (‘here too the gods are present’).
The celebration culminates in the shared recognition of the excess that
has granted a time and space, a place, that is always already outside the
hegemonic, always already outside the state and market economy. But, as I have
noted in recent commentaries, this place places
a clear demand on those who are granted its time and space. Guiterrez offers a succinct summary: “Without
a real commitment against exploitation and alienation and for a society of
solidarity and justice, the Eucharistic celebration is an empty action, lacking
any genuine endorsement by those who participate in it.”(265)
The
preceding is the context for revisiting the meditation from 11/22/04 that
begins with the following citation of a speech from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:
“Higher than the love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future.”(BL 281)
The question I posed in response: “Why does Zarathustra point in this
direction and to whom is he pointing?”
My response, as I read today ten years later, is to keep company with
Nietzsche who offers what I take to be a critique of bad faith and false
generosity, the kind that Guiterrez calls attention to when he speaks of ‘empty
actions’. For that is higher that ‘love
of the neighbor’ is love of what is beyond in space and time, which is all that
is granted in the place of excess; and such love appears the commitment against
what is happening today in the name of what will come tomorrow. This may be called both ‘the struggle’ and ‘the movement’. Love of neighbor is necessary but not
sufficient. And if it constitutes the
‘peace making’ with ‘the wrong’ that is the required pre-condition for entering
into the making of ‘the right,’ then I take this as the charity that one offers
to those one is intent on vanquishing.
This is Grace appearing in the form of Mercy towards ones enemies in the
form that one will reserve the right to destroy the ideology under the maxim
that the ‘pen is mightier than the sword.’
Love of thy neighbor is the precondition of a commitment to waging a
non-violent revolution, a war of ideas, a struggle of hearts and minds. “When Zarathustra points to ‘the love of the
future and the farthest’ and ‘recommends flight from the neighbor,’ he is
indicating the irruption of the ordinary…”(BL
282)
The
irruption spoken of here is the one happening by via the strange music made by
the learning community in its struggle against the “white noise” of the
neighborhood, “within the ‘safe’ confines of the domestic…”(11/22/04 BL 282) It is an meditation that is an
expression of unease, especially at the logic of the ‘neighborhood’ that
controls the polite and safe conversations of academia, which underwrite the
status quo of rewards and penalties.
The meditation describes this sound of these ‘conversations’ as “ ‘white
noise,’ the negation of the dynamic…manifesting
in the learning community. ‘White noise’
is not the confusion of perplexity, but the anti-aesthetic unfolding from the
complete and utter denial of
difference.” What is normative and what most
in academia hear is received for others as “static, ‘marked by loud cracking noises,’…that produce ‘poor’ reception.”(11/22/04
BL 282) And, indeed, it is only just that: a
reception that appears in contrast to what was above described as a
celebration. And for those who
participate in the aforementioned celebration, the reception feels like a “deception
of ‘self-lessness’ circulating with the imposition of the self upon the other….with
the noise of ‘polite’ and ‘civil’ conversation
and ‘idle chatter’….” (11/22/04 BL 282)
3.0 (Friday, Portland ME). Resonances from then to now via fragments from "LEARN": "The derangement of the seminar room. When the students enter the seminar room they encounter a single table, or a circular arrangement of desks, where they will gather alongside their teacher. The scene supports a circular/non-linear discussion that is improvisational and spontaneous. Blanchot describes the commonality emerging from this derangement: “Everything as accepted…(Nietzsche could be said to be its inspiration)...an innocent presence, a ‘common presence’ (René Char), ignoring its limits…because of its refusal to exclude anything…with the impossible as its only challenge.”(UC, 30, 31) Blanchot calls the commonality of discussion the “unavowable community,” and with this name he helps us to describe what cannot be declared as once-and-for-all, namely, the sui generis of each discussion. The learning community is a commonality of action, enacted through discussion -- a performance of freedom. But its existence is never guaranteed, nor is it ever sustained beyond the Moment in which it arrives and is present (happening, presencing). The learning community is “without project,” without a goal it was organized to achieve, without an outcome that can be measured and assessed.(UC, 30) It arrives in the Moment as the “presence of the ‘people’ in their limitless power which, in order not to limit itself, accepts doing nothing.”(UC, 32) “Doing nothing” denotes a learning for learning’s sake, the performance of discussion that happens but does not make anything. The learning community is thus an “organized disorganization,” an experience of “friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there, not as a person or subject.” (UC, 32) The amor fati that is expressed in the phenomenological receptivity of the discussion is complemented by another expression of love, the love of friendship: philia. As Arendt describes it: “The community comes into being through equalizing, isasthénai” and the “noneconomic equalization is friendship, philia.”(PP, 83) The commonality is a sharing, a circulation of whatever essentials have broken through and spoken to the students. And because their appearance has arrived spontaneously the essentials remain free when they are shared. No one claims ownership. The discussion circulates around the openness of the open text through which the circulated aphorisms arrive and are received."
ReplyDeleteAND "The amor fati that is expressed in the phenomenological receptivity of the discussion is complemented by another expression of love, the love of friendship: philia. As Arendt describes it: “The community comes into being through equalizing, isasthénai” and the “noneconomic equalization is friendship, philia.”(PP, 83) The commonality is a sharing, a circulation of whatever essentials have broken through and spoken to the students. And because their appearance has arrived spontaneously the essentials remain free when they are shared. No one claims ownership. The discussion circulates around the openness of the open text through which the circulated aphorisms arrive and are received."
3.0b - AND: AND: "There are any number of reasons why something from the text appeals to the student, and in the spirit of amor fati and hospitality, every contribution is welcomed. When the teacher welcomes the arrival of each and every highlight from the reading that is being shared, and also encouraging students to listen attentively and respond when they are moved by something they hear during the discussion, then she is following the example of Socrates who called the dialogues he staged the practice of “maieutic, the art of midwifery: he wanted to help other give birth to what they themselves thought anyhow.”(PP, 81) The birth of presence, the arrival of the new, this is what is shared and circulates with discussion. The essential is the “dokei moi, that is, of what appears to me. This doxa…comprehended the world as it opens itself to me…The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it, and that the ‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness (koinon, as the Greeks would say, common to all) or ‘objectivity’...resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all the differences between men and the positions in the world… ‘both you and I are human.’”(PP, 80)
ReplyDeleteAND: "They arrive and share what has called out to them from the reading, and in this sharing what has arrived continues arriving into the presence of others who will have an experience of “friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there.”(UC, 32) Being there, present with others, they experience the particularity, partiality, and the collective plurality of the common text they have studied apart from one another. It is enough that they have arrived and shared what has appeared to them as significant. Being there listening openly and without judgment and speaking without attempting to persuade. Being there thinking together with others, the discussion is autotelic (complete in itself). The discussion is an event, sui generis, and “ends” inconclusively, without a result, and “without project.” A philosophical education is a learning for learning’s sake. And this discloses the autotelic tenor of discussion. Arendt declares “it is obvious that this kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends. Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness but develops and expands and finally…begins to constitute a little of its own which is shared in friendship.” (PP, 82) This “little world” shared by the students arrives, is present, and then withdraws. It is the sudden spontaneous appearance of an authentically shared reality, the arrival of the Moment when all are present, attentively listening and responding.
AND just now endnoted (#11) in "LEARN" from above and B&L: "What is normative and what most in academia hear is received for others as “static, ‘marked by loud cracking noises,’…that produce ‘poor’ reception.”(11/22/04 BL 282)