Yesterday
immediately before I began writing my commentary I was speaking with Kelly
about the content of the meditation from 12/10/04, specifically my
appropriation of Heidegger’s existential category of ‘being-toward-death’ as
the dialectical other of Arendt’s natality.
I offered a thumbnail sketch of the category and the work it was
allowing me to do. And in that sketch I
emphasized the decision that is
placed before us when we enter into the modality of being-toward-death. And by this I mean that when any time we
enter an ontological location we find ourselves in specific topoi that is existentially analogous to
the ‘commonplaces’ I wrote about earlier this week after I had a conversation
with a Penn State grad student in rhetoric.
If the koinos topos (Latin locus communis) are ‘topics of
invention,’ or the places where we
locate things to say, then the so-called ‘ontological’ topoi determine the manner or way we say what we say. It is a very fine line that distinguishes the
rhetorical from the ontological topoi,
but it is safe to say that the difference between the two maps the relation
between Being and learning. ‘Saying
something’ [nb: as I’ve mentioned
before in these pages, I take this phrase from ethnomusicologist Ingrid Munson
and her book on jazz.] is the work of
learning. But this work is always contextualized,
or happening from a perspective (to borrow from Nietzsche). For me it’s insufficient to reduce this
context to ‘culture’ or ‘gender’ or ‘class’ etc., etc. In fact, as a philosopher of education, these
historical or ontic categories are ‘accidental’ (to borrow a term from the
Scholastics). For me, as a thinker
working on ‘first philosophy’ (the generic under which ‘originary thinking’ is
placed), both of the principal dialogic moments of learning (thinking and
community) are always situated within the existential modalities that mediate specific
ontologies that grant and govern them.
[nb: principal always denotes principalis ‘first, original’] For better or worse philosophy aspires to
render itself through a lingua franca
and that aspiration demands that we think ‘below the surface,’ that we burrow
into the noumenal and describe the ontological topoi that give rise to the specific modalities of learning. The topoi are not unlike the register in
music that designates what an instrument can and can not do. In terms of describing it as a governing
force we might even draw an analogy between these topoi and the Time Signature or even the Key.
The
preceding was prompted by the first line of the meditation from 12/11/04 that
describes a “decisive decision” that is
compelled by the fact of diff’rence. In
my conversation with Kelly we spoke of the decisive decision that we are
confronted with when moving in the topoi
of being-toward-death. Put otherwise,
when death is disclosed we are confronted with the decisive decision. Today (ten years later on 12/11/14) it is
this confrontation that I am most interested in describing. Not so much the ‘decision’ but the
confrontation that compels it. The
confrontation is described as “the ‘duress’ of estrangement. It appears, then, that the confounding
experience that defamiliarizes unfolds with its own kind of compulsion, with
the force that compels a decision.”(BL
306) I’m inclined to follow Heraclitus
all the way both with his elevation of Πόλεμος (polemos, war) and his reduction to ἔρις (eris,
chaos, strife, discord); the former steers (‘from above’) while the other
gathers (‘from below’). [nb:
here I recall Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung as
a translation of Heraclitus Πόλεμος; my commentary on
OPM 240(41), October 12th was focused on Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung, which means both ‘confrontation’, but also ‘discussion’
and ‘engagement’; and as a translation of Heraclitus’ Πόλεμος
denotes the principle of differentiation or ‘setting apart.’ Taking the path of
inquiry I have been pursuing, the topoi
of Πόλεμος
differentiates or governs us through the essential confrontation or discord that sets us ‘against’
one another and set us ‘against’ ourselves.
Thus diff’rence is the common (koinon)
place (topos) by virtue of setting us
all apart from one another.]
The confrontation is originary,
and perhaps the confrontation is the
originary; this conjecture will have to be revisited when ceaseless nativity
arrives, because there is a sense in which the eternally recurring offering is
a confrontation of the new with the old, of life with death. The confrontation is originary and is what
initiates learning; what initiated the original question concerning the turn
toward Being. That original (re)turn to
Being constitutes a confrontation; an interruption and even an interpolation -- as opposed to an interpellation -- because the turn only happens when we are called into question, that is, when
we hear ourselves being addressed in a manner that is otherwise than we
understand to be; addressed as if we knew not who we are, nor where we are: Donde Estamos? The confrontation (re)turns us to the principalis, Being, and learning begins.
The beginning is described on
12/11/04 as a violent confrontation; shattering. “At this juncture, where the ‘self’ of the
learner has become fragmented like so many pieces of a shattered mirror, we
recognize the peculiar intensity of the ‘decision’ made within a chaotic and
an-archic situation.”(BL 307) Is the confrontation a shattering of the
self? Or is it a disclosure of the fact of diff’rence that appears to show us
the self in ruins? Here is where the
decisive decision arises! “What occurs
then is the appearance of the condition of learning as a paradoxical situation
where the singular ‘will,’ placed under duress, restrained, and, ultimately,
negated, gives way to the most authentic freedom. This is the peculiar intensity of the
situation of estrangement that exculpates ‘freedom’ from the bondage of the
singular, calculative ‘self,’ and releases it into the radicality of the
freedom experienced in the fragmented ‘self’ that is now understood to ‘exist’
within a seemingly infinite number of relations, a web of interdependency. For the human being, this fragmented
existence unfolds through the experience of intersubjectivity, where the ‘self’
arises as a co-existing multiplicity of ‘selves’…”(BL 307) It turns out that
the ‘decisive decision’ is one that arrives, analogous to the initial evocative
invocation that turns us toward that awful sublime eternity of Being. This is precisely what I have been describing
in the pages of this blog as the epiphanic moment. As Schürmann has described this in his
retelling of Nietzsche’s discovery of the Eternal Recurrence, “it came to
him.” The decisive decision comes to us. It arrives and do so in the form of a
confrontation. This is why learning qua
thinking and community are arduous work, and why we can describe the it as the
experience of passion. Moreover, learning is something that is,
first and foremost, happening to us. The
most common sense sentiment towards learning is that it is painful, and most
describe the formal parts of school as necessary evils. And this is precisely why many of my
colleagues totally misunderstand ‘learning,’ even as they recognize its
essentially dictatorial and asymmetric logic.
The misunderstanding happens by way of an amnesia, a category mistake
that forgets the essential gelassenheit
(letting be) that lets learning be learned happens after that desire for power is released from domination of the
will. If metaphysics comes to a closure
with the will to power, then the self-overcoming that transcends is one that
leaps beyond the will. “The negation of
the will exonerates the ‘fact’ of [diff’rence] (unfolding with the chaotic,
an-archic and contradictory) from the charge of ‘un-truth.’”(BL 307)
The will is negated by the uncompromising demand of learning. In this sense, the learner is confronted, compelled,
and then emancipated. [And all paths
re-turn to the Plato’s cave!]
3.0 (Wednesday, Big Sky, Montana) This fragment from the OPM/B&L jumped out at me: “At this juncture, where the ‘self’ of the learner has become fragmented like so many pieces of a shattered mirror, we recognize the peculiar intensity of the ‘decision’ made within a chaotic and an-archic situation.”(BL 307). In "LEARN" the self is not fragmented. First there is turn away from the self-certain cogito ego and movement into solitude of study where the student encounters the significant object of study, the book/text and receives whatever essentials call out to him. That is where "fragmentation" appears: in the aphoristic fragments that break through the noise of schooling. Here is an example from "LEARN": "What is Called Thinking? is a collection of lectures that are introducing the students to an alternative way of learning. As a way of beginning our course of philosophical study I invite my students to read Heidegger’s lectures, and to select fragments that stand out to them. They often select the line, which he emphasizes and repeats mantra like, “Most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking.” This fragment seems to be Heidegger’s way of reminding the students of the same concern that Foucault identifies with the misleading “Cartesian Moment.” We are not yet thinking because, as Foucault suggests, “thinking” is not something that is immediate but requires a transformation in the learner, specifically, a reorientation of their expectation that there is something to be definitively “known” in the object of philosophical study. This reorientation shifts the student’s expectation from learning as the knowing of facts to learning as the reception of meaningful fragments that inspire questions that may lead to thinking. Learning phenomenologically is a process, and a slow one at that. In this sense, thinking is a euphemism for learning. Heidegger is inviting his students to get underway with him in the process that reveals the significance of things, that reveals the existence of meaning, and existence as meaningful. Heidegger’s central question -- What is the meaning of Being (Existence)? -- can only be addressed over time, experientially. And because philosophical learning is a process, this central question and the exploration of it via the text can be repeated, da capo."
ReplyDelete3.0b - Resonance with Heidegger and the being-towards-death (the dialectical other of Arendt's natality): ".” For Socrates and the existentialist and postmodern thinkers who reconnected with his spirit two millennia after his death, uncertainty is the unavoidable situation of the human condition. We are aware of our mortality, but the time between our birth and death remains an open-ended script. Tempus fugit, carpe diem: time flies, seize the day! In turn, the call of the teacher to the student, pick up and read!, is an evocative call that turns the student around and points them to the enduring fecundity of meaning offered by a work of art. It is also a call that directs the student to the positionality of phenomenological receptivity by inviting them to listen to the text. This encounter with the work of art offers a response to the uncertainty that is prompted by that most significant question of all: What is the meaning of life? The enduring object of study provides a kind of “answer” to this question by responding with the demonstration of durability, of what endures in cultural history as meaningful." AND: "The so-called “death of the author” is a sacrifice followed by a resurrection: the return of the reader. After the reader has risen, a writer comes along: one who is first and foremost a translator, a documentarian, a phenomenological exegete. In turn, with the arrival of the writer completes a reversal: the author’s authority is returned to the book and the reader." AND: "The original Noli me legere was directed at the author and is received as a mortal blow to his authority over the text. The book appears “unreadable” to the author. Blanchot says the situation “can also be described this way: the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence.” Does this situation indicate La mort de l’auteur, the proverbial death of the author? Perhaps. Or perhaps the Noli me legere merely exiles the author, which is a kind of mortal blow. (Socrates was offered the possibility of exile from Athens, but he chose to drink the cup of hemlock. For him, exile from Athens would be akin to a living death.) Blanchot: “No one who has written the work can linger close to it.”
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