Monday, December 8, 2014

OPM 294(295), December 8th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 303-304

This project’s delimitation of so-called self-study is a critique of a kind of meditation that while significant in the history of philosophy arising in the wake of Socrates death, specifically with the practices of care of the self initiated by the Stoics, should be understood as always related to the work of the learning community.  Positively it is a preparatory practice, on part reflection, another part rehearsal.  If these commentaries are a demonstration and experimentation in preparatory meditation then it is only in the sense that I have been attempting to allow my thinking to be grounded, first and foremost, in the facticity of the daily cycle of experience, and, second, in my work on campus that is happening in the seminar room, the radio station studio, the café(s), and libraries.   This hour of writing I take to myself, this daily retreat is a third moment, a movement into what I call the threshold, that place organized temporally via kairos, the time that remains, the time of opportunity, perhaps even the time of natality, the excessive time,  that time that ‘remains’.  It is a threshold because it is where the retrospective (the past) and the prospective (the future) intersect, and in this sense it is categorically the place of the originary.   In this sense I don’t withdraw (in the manner of the Stoic) into the threshold, but move through the threshold.   The thinker can dwell for a moment but not reside in the threshold.  Like the monastic cycle, there is a designated time (measured chronologically as ‘an hour’) and place (writing desk…wherever that may be, e.g., at this moment the kitchen table in 29 Sunset Drive) that is observed each and every day at some point.  And because this hour of thinking appears when it appears and whenever it does my meditative thinking discloses the unmediated ontology of improvisation, and often feels like a purloined hour.   

Camus describes best the purloined hour when he describes the descent of Sisyphus as his “hour of consciousness.”   He makes his slow measured descent and at the end returns to his rock, his struggle, his work.  Again, the cycle of monastic life – always present in the repetitions and rituals we practice at the university – is revelatory and illuminating.  To a point, because, in the end, there is no redemption for Sisyphus, and not simply because he has no ‘hope’ for escaping his life sentence, but there is no possibility of faith – he is enslaved to his toil, himself; one cannot have faith in oneself.  He can only have fidelity in himself, and because of this he lacks the possibility of faith.   In Camus’ existentialism it is not in other people but in the solipsistic self where we encounter le enfer (hell).

Here the meditative practice arrives from and is returning to the fellowship of the learning community; what is stolen is always brought back to the community as an offering.    And so there is never a total withdrawal, and the meditative practice being demonstrated here is always grounded in the historicity of the inhabited world.  The emptied kitchen as the study, and the table – after the common meal has been cleared -- as the writing desk.   I move into the threshold and carry with me the energeia of the gathering, empowered by “real love, real love, real, real, real love….”[listen to Brent Myland at the 10min mark on “Blow Away” https://archive.org/details/gd1989-12-08.sbd.walker-scotton-miller.88398.sbeok.flac16]  What is the lingering presence of this love, this ἀγάπη?  “An ‘other self’ is always already present with the thinking ‘I.’” (BL 303)

The solipsistic self – what I call the ‘juridical self’ – creates its own hell through the delusion of its self-creation; the libertarian myth that is a completely degenerated form of Nietzsche’s will to power.   As we are taught already in Birth of Tragedy, the will to power is Willed by the Primal Unity that the self is diminished into via self-overcoming.  The solipsistic self, the one who wears with pride the mask of ressentiment, lives in fear of the presence of the other whose presence he can never fully exorcize from himself.  “The re-collection of this presence is the source of the ‘fear of contradiction…”(BL 303)  On 12/8/04 the ‘other’ is thought through the force of alterity. “Alterity resides as the ground of being-in-the-world, processurally  moving as the essential sway of the play of difference.  Alterity appears as that which ex-ceeds, and thereby disrupts and de-constructs the ‘given’ order and presents the possibility of contradiction.”(BL 303)   While it is not the case that we always abide as learners – although there is a powerful temptation to make that claim – “learning dwells with this play of difference, with the always already present alterity.”(BL 303)  [nb:  there is a strong analogy between the time of meditative thinking and the time of learning; here it would be too facile to insist that they both happen in the threshold; and so too it would be too facile to describe both as ‘events’;  both are unfolding via originary technē….]

The critique of the solipsistic self made on 12/8/04 can on 12/8/14 be turned on the learning community, specifically, on the koinōnia of the learning community. This is recurring critique that is taking up the actually existing play of difference and the necessary tension (contradiction) in the dialogic praxis (the specific technē of the learning community).  This day, a decade ago and today, draws a double-edged sword: “Every ‘unity’ is a subltion of difference that is always undone by the impermanent, processural movement of be-ing. Every ‘unity’ is the imposition of the one-sided truth of appearance that is always in danger of being mis-recognized as a ‘permanent truth.’”(BL 303)  [nb: this critique demands a return to the thinking/writing on universals, on principles, and on each and every spectre of metaphysics that remains present like the ancestors venerated in the East.  Veneration!  Isn’t this precisely what is happening with the retrospective gaze of originary thinking?]  But it is a haunting, nonetheless.   Faith offered by the excess remains a risk.  Here is our fear and anxiety: in this writing/thinking, in this meditative moment.  “Within the learning situation talking with ‘self’ is [described] as the performance of evocative speech, as ex-cessive saying, as the saying that points beyond it-self, beyond ‘self.’  Such saying invokes the persisting difference that is always potentially [actually!! 12/8/14] a ‘contradiction.’ The learning situation is the encounter with the ‘other’ (hetero), the ‘stranger’…To learn is to abide in the encounter with the ‘not yet,’ in the meaning created within the un-stable…Anxiety and fear of this estranging situation remains the source of learning.”(BL 304)


Dread.  Grateful thinking.  Thinking as thanking. Gratitude expressed as risk taking leap of collective amor mundi.  Together, the koinōnia of grateful dread.

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