OPM 284(285), November 27th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 287-288

The question placed in the category of ‘First’, How is it with the nothing?, takes us back to the originary place of thinking.  That is, it takes us back, or re-turns us to the place time and place before modern science and its progenitor metaphysics.  So insinuates Heidegger in the narrative he offers in the essay, ‘What is Metaphysics?’  I borrow the question concerning the nothing as a way describing what I mean by ‘originary’ as both a place (special time and space), but also as a force: the question disclose the original time and space of thinking, that is, the place where philosophy was first undertaken (both historically and ontologically), and is also discloses the originating force that generates philosophy as a thinking that takes up and puts before us what has not yet been heard and said before.  This is why I describe philosophy as learning, and learning as a technē, and, further, insist on making the link between philosophy, learning and the work of art, specifically, but not exclusively, the performance arts, with a special emphasis on music.   This is why I have become taken up with the young Nietzsche’s category of music-making philosophy, which he announced in Birth of Tragedy, and, as a complement, DuBois musical arrangement of The Souls of Black Folk, and its culminating chapter, ‘The Sorrow Songs.’ 

It is within this context that one has to read the meditation from 11/27/04 that begins  “the dynamic equilibrium unfolding from the poetic dwelling of the learning community is encountered as the gap over which over which saying are exchanged, received and…”(BL 287)   This is a loaded opening line, but the crux of the matter the identification of the ‘gap’.   First it needs to be said that the sentence is misleading, because the learning community’s dynamic equilibrium is not encountered as the gap, but disclosed by the gap.  The gap grants the condition for the possibility for the poetic dwelling of the learning community.   The question, How is it with the nothing?, returns us to this original Open that grants the work of the learning community.   “This unfathomable abyss lurks beneath the sway of the essential…”(BL 287)   The ‘nothing’ or Nothing (to use Heidegger’s capitalized form) is indeed ‘something’ as Heidegger is quick to point out, and confounding to a logic that is always intent on speaking about ‘what-is.’  But this leads him to ask, “But, it may be asked, can the law of ‘logic’ be assailed?”  And I want to add, as I have been throughout this project, and especially since it has been moving under the title of  ‘originary thinking,’ that it is not simply a matter of breaking or transgressing the  so-called law of logic, but of moving into a place of thinking outside and beyond this law and in that place inventing a new logic.  This is the work of the learning community I have been describing; the one that is taking up the challenge made by Luce Irigaray, among others, who insist that we have no other choice but to invent a new logic under via the trinitarian frames of listening, thinking, teaching.  The question of the Nothing is thus a question that takes us into the location where this work of invention and experiment is happening, where learning is a collective poetic undertaking, a koinõnia poiein.

In the same essay when Heidegger says that “question and answer are equally nonsensical in themselves where Nothing is concerned,” he does not refer to what I am describing with dialogue, which has fallen into complete degeneration in the contemporary landscape under the caricature that is sometime called ‘Socratic pedagogy.’   It is precisely the degenerate form of dialectics that Heidegger has in mind when he describes the ‘question and answer’ that are rendered nonsense with an effacement with the Nothing.  Consider how a contemporary teacher education would respond to my describe of the dialogue I am describing as “happening as a ecstatic situation”? (BL 288)  My guess is that they would perhaps be dumbfounded and in this way thrown into the very situation of thinking (deep and utter perplexity).   But the irruption of the status quo is not what I want to describe in this commentary.  Rather, I wanted to note the call that my project is responding to vis-à-vis the predominant logic of scientism.

The call issued by Irigaray to invent a new logic happened 3-4 years after my 2004-05 daily writing project.  However, on 11/27/04 I focused my attention on contrasting modalities of Socrates and Descartes.  Descartes, for whom I have the highest admiration and deepest empathy, advances a project of meditation that discovers the Nothing within himself.   “Here we see the problem of the ‘hermit’, the one sinking into the unfathomable deep in the silent dialogue of ‘pure’ thought, eme emauto, between ‘me and myself.’  Solitude, the silent study of self by self…If ‘I’ am a question to ‘my-self’, to who is the question raised, and ‘who’ can be trusted to receive the disquiet of ‘my’ questioning? Can ‘I’ be re-posed by ‘my-self’?  This is the path taken by Descartes.”(11/27/04)  Like the caricature of Socrates, there is one of Descartes (‘Cartesian reasoning’, or something like that) that we see bandied about in the contemporary scene by many who have never sat with the box of dynamite that is the Meditations on First Philosophy, an originary work par excellence in title, form and content.    On 11/27/04 Descartes is rendered a tragic figure, at worst, and at the very least a lonely figure because he is unable to find redemption with his discovery of methodical doubt.  His proof of God underwrites the more significant revelation of his mind (cogito) as indubitable.  A false bravado is the stand in for realization that one has become world-less, disembodied, a self within itself, making not music by the noise of the feedback loop,  unbearable after only a moment or two.  “Descartes sought to explore the depth of the cup he bore, and in this turning back upon him-self encountered the self-same ‘self’ who raised the questions.  The echo returned in the doubt was the re-sounding of the very voice who posed the questions.”(BL 288)  The danger of Descartes meditative project is literally a pitfall, or as Nietzsche warned in what he described as his untimely meditations, the danger of discovering the Nothing when turning within.  It is a danger because the discovery of the free floating autonomous mind is the discovery of the possibility of living a life detached from the company of others, which is hardly a life at all, but, nevertheless, a modality that humans are capable of and, sometimes, incapable of escaping.  In those cases, the real tragedy is experienced by those who are left behind, the loved ones, friends and family.