OPM 286(287), November 29th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 289-290

With Augustine we encounter a meditative thinking that is beyond the inner dialogue Arendt describes as the ‘conversation between me and myself’ (eme emauto).  In the Plotinus lecture I made a year ago to Hofstra Honors College I offered a typology of thinking that distinguished meditation from contemplation.    Meditation prepares one for contemplation. And if we read Plotinus carefully it seems he is suggesting that the experience of contemplation (being with the One, or what I would describe as the effacement with Being that puts learning underway, or moves learning) is not a technē.  Meditation, on the other, is a technē, and the one that is required of us if we are going to be ready for the arrival of the epiphanic moment when we are gathered into contemplation.   By meditation, however, I mean the kind of technē demonstrated by Augustine when he confronts his divided self (specifically, the division between his thinking and willing, which, at a deeper level is division between his loving and knowing, his spirituality and rationality).   In all of its nuance and complexity, what is significant for me here at this moment is Augustine’s demonstration of a meditative practice that is akin to what Nietzsche calls ‘self-overcoming,’ a soulful thinking that is capable of diminishing from the rational mind and into the Godhead, or what Nietzsche calls the Primal Unity [nb: here I am deploying without discretion the hermeneutic license granted to me by the method eisegetical interpretation].   The preceding is meant to offer context for the meditation on 11/29/04 that continues to describe friendship and the Open; which is to say, the context of a genealogy of a thinking that is moved by a kind of internalized agonal spirit, or struggle with the self to overcome the self and diminish into a unity with the originary that has granted its existence (Being, Primal Unity, God, et al)   The contrasting tradition of meditative thinking, which is best demonstrated by Descartes, is distinct in retaining the self, that is in regaining the self as the empowered thinking mind.  God figures prominently in the Cartesian meditation, and figures as the ultimate ontological guarantor.   The contrast between the two traditions arises as a clash between the Greco-Roman and Modern-Liberal ontologies of freedom, or, perhaps, political theologies (given that these ontologies are ultimately distinguished (for me, today) by the presence of God vis-à-vis the thinker.  Put simply, which is all I can do in the hour I have for this commentary, I am distinguished between the Augustinian and Cartesian in order to initiate the description of two kinds of freedom:  one that we might describe using terms like ‘emancipation’, and the other we might describe using terms like ‘liberty’; with the former demonstrating a meditation that emancipates us from the present through a transcendence that is both vertical and horizontal (leaping ahead into the future via a leap out of the present into the Eternal).  The Augustinian mediation is an empowerment through grace.  The Cartesian is a mediation that is liberated from the excesses of history and the present state of affairs (status quo, State power).   It is libertarian, and offers the self the possibility of complete independence and liberty, and the strength of solitude.   

Solitude v. Friendship.  It is an existential choice, for certain, even if one subscribes to the notion that we are chosen before we recognize we have a choice to make.  Under that logic Descartes was called to his solitude in as much as Augustine was called to his conversion. 

 Friendship continues to be chosen on 11/29/04.   Chosen as the one who will receive the self.  “To the friend the ‘self’ is offered as a question. To the self the ‘self’ remains concealed, hidden, mysterious, a question.”(BL 289-290)  The one who undertakes meditation is always confronted with the question of the ‘self’ and thus the distinction arises in how this question is raised and how it is explored.  Descartes raises it to himself; Augustine to his God. “ “ ‘I’ have become a question to ‘myself’,” says the meditator.  “I seek ‘my-self’.” In seeking this ‘self’ the meditator turns to the friend.”(BL 290)  The covenant of friendship made by the dialogic thinker forecloses upon autonomy and solitude.  I seek ‘my-self’ because ‘I’ have become a question.  And I find ‘you’, my friend, my community.   In this moment I recognize the ‘self’ I am seeking is not my self.   What I am seeking is the company of other thinkers, others who have been called to raise the question.  Descartes is seeking clear and distinct ideas.  I am seeking others who are singing sorrow songs.  The question that I have become, my existential situation, is a prompt for taking up music-making philosophy.  “The question is offered in the spontaneous and improvisational creation, the dynamic making that happens with learning.”(BL 290)

On 11/29/04 the meditation turns on a crude rendering of the Nietzschean concept of the artist becoming the work of art.  On 11/29/14 I want retain the description that declares “the learner is the artist whose performance enacts the question, ‘Freedom for what?’  But I want to revise the description of the relation between the learner qua performance artist and the friend as compassionate critic/audience member/spectator.  This strikes me today as a misplacing of compassionate listening, and a misunderstanding of the dynamic relation between the hearts (the one overflowing, the other empty and resounding).  If the learning community unfolds dialogically then, as I emphasized in yesterday’s commentary, it is a congregation of colleagues, a collaboration and a fellowship.  The meditation slides down the slope of a  subjectivism that is disclosed when the learner is described as a soloist,  performance artist who “unveils her work of art before the friend…”(BL 290)  It is helpful to encounter what are category mistakes such as the one appearing on 11/29/04 when the performance of the learner is identified as happening outside the learning community.  Indeed,  for this project learning happens within community and community arises with learning. Solitude and liberty are foreclosed by solidarity and emancipation.  And the co-existence and coincidence of learning and community is a mimetic [art, technē] repetition of the originary ontological relationship Being and becoming.   In sum, the category mistake on 11/29/04 is here on 11/29/14 corrected by minor revisions of the final sentence of the meditation, which should be heard as something like the voice of the community qua Chorus: “The learner as artists asks, ‘For what is my performance?,’ and the [learning community] responds, ‘For us, for the we that stand here waiting upon the gift you have brought with the novelty of your [work], with the artistry of your [contribution].  We become other with the reception of your project's [offering], and thus we remain a community of learning.”(BL 290)