Today I need to go to the well today for the nourishment I need for today's commentary writing. The well being Coltrane
Live at the Vanguard (Nov, 1961)
I
can’t help but experience the taste of bittersweet irony this day, the day
before the penultimate meeting of my HUHC sections that are part of the C&E
fall 2014 course that has been organized around the theme of friendship. It was in this very course that I gave my
Heraclitus lecture two month ago, and, as a result of the lecture, made a long
sojourn with koinōnia that took me in and out of my trip to Memphis, through the
intense study of Paul, and then culminated in the group study of Late to Love. It was a sojourn that included my phil of ed
course, with our studies of Irigaray, DuBois, Nietzsche and now, this week Late to Love. It is not uncommon to experience a
bittersweet taste at the end of period of work that has been as intensive as
the past two months, which, I should add, included the reception of 160
submissions in response to the CFP for PES Memphis. But the source of this bittersweet taste is
not arriving from the imminent conclusion of the semester. Rather, the source is the irony that I’ve
been writing on the friend and friendship here in these commentaries for the
past week or more, and have been unable to connect the work here to the work in
my C&E discussions. Of course,
there was the holiday last week. That is
one reason. And during yesterday’s
discussion of Abelard and question universals I shared, very briefly, some of
my commentary from 12/1/14. But nothing
on the friend. Perhaps tomorrow?
The meditation from
12/3/04 is the beginning of the trio of meditations that conclude ninth chapter
of Being and Learning, “Zarathustra’s
Descent.” It is thus fitting that it
begins with Zarathustra’s meeting with a hermit, the figure that was the first
he encountered upon descended from his mountain cave where he had grown too
wise, like a bee that has gathered too much honey. “Zarathustra tells us of the hermit who
says, ‘I and me are always too deep in conversation: how could one stand if
there were no friend?’ Zarathustra
responds, ‘For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third is
the cork that prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the
depths.’”(BL 294) On 12/3/04 I read
this exchange as denoting the friend as the one who prevents the conversation
between ‘I’ and ‘me’ from sinking into self-study. And this seems to me right and consistent
with the thinking/writing that has been happening under the banner of koinōnia. The conversation between me and myself (eme emauto), which Arendt heralds as the
mark of thinking and the modality of being thoughtful, is, from within the
discourse of what I am calling the education of philosophy, self study, and may be the form of study
touted these days by so many friends (colleagues)
as a modality of resistance to the dominant neoliberal logic of what they call ‘learning.’ This is not
the place to stage the very agonistic encounter with my dearest friends who, on
the matter of learning, constitute my most intense enemies because they are my dearest friends, and part of a very small
number of thinkers I work with consistently.
I only mention this here and now because there is an intense
disagreement at the heart of the contrasting descriptions of learning that my
friends and I are making. And here the
dialectic of ἀγάπη (agápē)
and ἀγών (agón), summarized in the commentary OPM 281(82), written
here at the Drew U library November 24th
“I read ‘common world’ as koinōnia
in the sense that what is common is not the facticity of the congregating
bodies, but the particular spirit (espiritu)
that is generated by their working together.
What enjoins each together, and what bridges them is agapē,
and it is precisely this loves that grants them the power to endure as a
community (sustain common cause) through the tension of the agonal.
Perhaps the coincidence of opposites that is revealing itself is the one
between ἀγάπη
(agápē)
and ἀγών (agón), both of which can denote ‘gathering’. The gathering force of the learning
community (koinōnia)
is the dynamic equilibrium between ἀγάπη
(agápē)
and ἀγών (agón), the syncretic interaction between
the spirit of self-less love and the spirit of opposition (in the sense of a
contest or competition). If community is
what philia achieves, then the love
between friends is only ever the necessary prior condition of working and
struggling together/with others to make freedom and justice.
This is a serious issue
for me, this question of self-study, or the self in study, or the Cartesian
meditation as an end-in-and-for-itself.
It is too easy to write of it as the necessary complement to the work
happening in the learning community. Of
course, that has been my position in the two decades or more that I have been a
student of Arendt. The conversation
between ‘me’ and ‘I’ is the time when I am gathered back into the company of
myself, when I reflect upon my contribution to the learning community, when I
reflect upon on the contributions of others, and when I rehearse and prepare
for returning to the learning community. [I have even described the work
undertaken on these pages as the time and space to both reflect upon what has
happened and to prepare for what may happen in the next gathering.] But this back and forth seems not to do
justice to what my colleagues, specifically Tyson Lewis, is describing when he
talks of study as the experience of one’s impotentiality, impotence, and
non-directionality of the event itself.
It is not teleologically,
dialectically, nor in any way related directly to anything beyond itself. At best this
is a description of a kind of cura sui,
or amor proper. At worst it is a description of a degenerated
figure of late existentialism, what Nietzsche would describe as a nihilist, and
Sartre we deride as a person of bad faith.
To me it is a dystopian figure held up as mock hero, a carnivalesque
‘freak show’ performer. Nietzsche expressed
only the slightest hint of sympathy for the hermit, and his Zarathustra quickly
moves on in search of friends.
On 12/3/04 I read the hermit
as issuing a warning to Zarathustra: “he is instructing the friend to keep at
bay the one who is engaged in ‘self-study’.”(BL 294) And this is where I
gather my understanding that Nietzsche is no friend of the hermit, and has no
patience for self-study/study of the self (a position he already announced in
his essay on Schopenhauer). It is an
odd exchange, for sure. Zarathustra
understands the hermit’s need for a friend, or one who can enable him to
stand. But in recognizing him as a hermit, Zarathustra can not be his friend. He must refuse the call to help him stand
insofar as he recognizes the hermit’s will to power to be a hermit. The one who withdraws must be acknowledged
and supported in their decision to withdraw and be alone. To do otherwise is to impose one’s will on
the other. And, yet, under the steering
of a strange logic, Zarathustra befriends the hermit through the compassion of
letting him be. And at the same time he
dis-identifies with the hermit. On
12/3/04 this gesture of withdrawal indicates “the unfamiliarity conveyed with
the guess….The guess un-binds the self from self.” (BL 294) What self? The self of…? The selves of the hermit and
Zarathustra. They un-bound each from the
other. The event reveals the encounter
with the friend as sometimes occasional, unexpected, fleeting. Zarathustra is no friend of the hermit in
the usual way we say “friend,” but he is most certainly his friend in the sense
that he is witness to his will to power to be withdrawn, and to sink into the
depths of the conversation of ‘me’ and ‘I’.
What is disclosed in the
preceding is the koinōnina of the
Heideggerian learning community as he describes it in the first lecture of What is Called Thinking? That gathering is arranged by the sage who
lets nothing else be learned but learning itself; the sage who has to learn to
let the students learn. But this sage
is unsure of himself, so unsure in fact that Heidegger says he gives off the
impression that he has nothing to teach, and has nothing to offer to the
students. He is the opposite of the
authoritative know it all. His learning
to let the students is the inverse of the one operates by way of calcuclative
thinking. He is rather a speculative
thinking, one who makes his way by guessing, by way of a dialogue that can
never be reduced to or mistaken for a mere conversation. “To be ‘conversant’ is to be acquainted and
familiar with…A learner is the one who remains non-conversant, and the learning
community the realm free from conversation.
Dialogue is the communicative action of guessing. The guess collects and responds to that which
exceeds the binding of the strategic, one-track ‘rationalizer’. The guess is offered ‘without calculating or
measuring and without definite knowledge.’
The guess un-binds and re-turns to the originary beginning…”(BL 294-295)
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME) - Echoes of 'guess' from B&L resonate in "LEARN" with 'riddle'. From today 20 years ago: "the unfamiliarity conveyed with the guess….The guess un-binds the self from self.” (BL 294) AND: "Dialogue is the communicative action of guessing. The guess collects and responds to that which exceeds the binding of the strategic, one-track ‘rationalizer’. The guess is offered ‘without calculating or measuring and without definite knowledge.’ The guess un-binds and re-turns to the originary beginning…”(BL 294-295). AND "LEARN": “But why a ‘riddle’?,” Heidegger asks. He conjectures: a riddle is an open text, and as such is most thought-provoking. The riddle yields thinking, which is to say, invites study, enabling us to read and discuss it again and again. The indecisive (inconclusive, unsettled) and enigmatic address of the riddle to philosophical study animates its repetitive character, compelling the circularity of its movement that takes the students back to the beginning, enabling each session to begin as if it were the original encounter with the text. “What the riddle conceals and contains becomes open to view whenever it is surmised.” An open text, like a riddle, remains closed to the instrumental or calculative way of reading that is imposed by schooling. By contrast, when the student receives whatever essentials are calling out in the moment of study, the open text is heard as offering up something that can be taken up with others in a hermeneutical discussion that will surmise possible meaning, that will enable students to conjecture, imagine, guess, suppose and think together. When the text is encountered as a “riddle” it also remains silent, retaining something that may be disclosed during another study session, and/or by another student. And by also remaining and retaining something essential, the text “restrains” the student from attempting to explain it, and thereby inspires in the student “a defensive attitude toward what has been said: only in that attitude do we keep the distance needed for a quick running dash by which one or the other of us may succeed in making the leap into thinking.” AND: "Heidegger insists that to surmise is to make a leap. And with this leap we land in what he calls the open region , which can be mapped as the location where discussion is happening. The leap Heidegger describes is akin to what he calls “running ahead to the past/Vorlaufen zu dem Vorbei,” which we can borrow to portray the moment of discussion that gathers the learning community to the original moments of inspiration experienced by each student in the solitude of study. The open region is enigmatic because the open text that inspires philosophical learning is an appearance of the “riddle.” It is an “untraveled and uncharted region” that the philosophical student must venture both in the solitude of study and then again as a member of the learning. Heidegger’s gloss on Nietzsche’s writing is an especially plausible depiction of philosophical study as a dialectical negation of schooling, or what Nietzsche calls “sham education.” Heidegger calls our attention to an illuminating note Nietzsche wrote in 1881 when he was writing The Dawn: “What is novel about the position we take toward philosophy is a conviction that no prior age shared: that we do not possess the truth. All earlier men ‘possessed the truth.’” The riddle of the Moment, as it appears in a book when it is encountered in study and then again in discussion, offers the student the chance to experience learning as the encounter with meaning, as opposed to the acquisition of “certainty” of facts."
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