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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