OPM 296(297), December 12th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 307-308

For some reason there are duplicates of the original printed pages from the meditation from this day, 12/12.   A set of pages 507-508!  If I were into numerology I might  look for some ‘hidden meaning’ in the repetition of the number 12 (12^th month of the year, twelfth day, meditation begins on p. 507 (5+7 = 12), and the first number of my coding system for each meditation also produces the sum of 12 when the digits are added together: 4701 [2004 in the Chinese calendar…nb: I started the project in February 2004 during the Chinese New Year celebration, and so it made sense if the year of the project was running from Feb-Feb, that it was happening during the year of 4701.  I also elected to use the Chinese year because the project was moving ostensibly from the time of ancient philosophy – ostensible from ostensibility from ostens- ‘stretched out to view’.

I’m not one for numerology, although the influence of Pythagoras on Plato and also on harmonics reminds me to keep open to the philosophical revelatory power of math.  I am inclined to keep company with the sensibilities that give credence to intuition, and I’m also one to notice coincidences.   I say this because I couldn’t help but notice the coincidence between the focus of the commentary I wrote yesterday and a few pages I read this morning in Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless (one of three new books I picked up in the wake of the intense study of Paul that happened in October and early November.  The other two are Taubes’ The Political Theology of Paul, and Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which was recommended to me by my HUHC C&E colleague, Jane Huber, who delivered the lecture on Bernard a few weeks ago.)   I’ve been reading Taubes front to end.  But with I’ve been skipping around a bit with Critchley.   Both are very readable. The content of the Taubes book is a series of lectures he gave, the last before his untimely passing, and the narrative is building in a dramatic way, such that I feel the need to place myself in the seat of an audience member and listen to him carefully.  Critchley is sharing work that one senses was presented here and there and ultimately collected into one volume.  So this morning I picked up a the fourth section from chapter 4 “You Are Not Your Own: On the Nature of Faith.”  The section is titled “Heidegger on Paul.” 

This is not the place to respond to Critchley, who I take to be earnest but writing for a mostly secular audience with little or no background or training in theology.   I’ll certainly come back to this section at some point, because it is a fascinating reading of the very young Heidegger’s letters that reveal his turn from Catholicism (on philosophical grounds) towards the Protestant ‘thinking’ of Paul through Luther.   For Critchley, the key to reading Heidegger’s turn to Paul is threefold:  enactment (Vollzug), crisis, and anguish.   And three are gathered together by the decision made in responding to the question (calling) of faith.   In response to the question How is Christian life enacted?,  Critchley cites Heidegger as responding: “The enactment of life is decisive.” 

The first time I wrote of decision happened in the wake of Jane Huber’s lecture on Bernard, in the commentary from OPM 280(281), November 23^rd: “The medieval category of the free will was reserved in large part to denote our existential decision to move into the temporal horizon of holy time.”  Yesterday’s commentary was organized around confrontation, but used the term ‘decision’ 9 times; and always together with ‘decisive’: “the first line of the meditation from 12/11/04 that describes a  “decisive decision” that is compelled by the fact of diff’rence.”(12/11/14)   Today, I want to read this decisive decision as enactment of what this past year or more I have been signifying via the sign of Yes! – my syncretic arrangement of Nietzsche’s “Yes” with Chavez’s “Si, se puede!”.   Yes! was introduced in my Palabras Entre Nosotros, which I contributed to Rocha’s Late to Love album, and appears in between track 4 “Rest in You,” and track 5, “Genesis Time”:

If rapture is a feeling, and a feeling of enhancement of force and plentitude, then the rapture of the blues is a bad mood.   This bad mood is otherwise called being in a funk, and so we can describe this music-making philosophy as funky.  To be in a funk is to remain in the bad mood, to endure it.  To say Yes!  to the human condition itself: to the truth in the lie, and the lie in the truth.

[nb: The preceding is also the conclusion to an unpublished paper I presented in February, “Feeling the Funk:  Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a Music-Making Philosophy,” which, as the title denotes, is a much longer treatment of Nietzsche on the important category of ‘music-making philosophy’.]

The decisive decision to say Yes! is precisely to endure the funk, or what Heidegger calls “anguish” (Not).  Here’s how Critchley puts it: “The basic Pauline subjective attitude is anguished waiting…it is anguish in relation to a calling…If Christian life is enacted in a proclamation, then what is proclaimed is a calling.  Such is the core experience of faith.”(170)  The Pauline decisive decision is to enact life by saying Yes! to the calling.   Paul receives the call, or what I describe as the evocative invocation (note: vocare at the center), and once turned-around/(re)turned/converted, he writes his gathering letters, his epistles, which convey the “euaggelion, announcement or gospel.”(170)  We know the importance of Paul identifying himself at the beginning of Galatians, but also in Romans, as ‘apostle,’ which announces him as messenger of the Gospel.   And it also positions him as the one who is gathering together the (small) communities of faith.  This is all very significant for my project because it gestures toward the gathering force of fellowship (koinōnia) that is generated through enactment by a principal (principalis) aka a sage.  

I haven’t read enough of his book, but I will be disappointed if Critchley doesn’t take up Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger on this very point of anguish, specifically the anguish in relation to the calling (originary gathering) that compels a decisive decision, the risk-taking leap of faith.     Heidegger’s turn from Catholicism to Luther’s protest could not be for ‘philosophical’ reasons, especially when we take a most philosophical of Catholic philosophers, Peter Abelard, and encounter ‘reason’ (dialectical, confrontation) based faith: intelligo ut credam.  With Kierkegaard we encounter a return to the sentiments of earliest ‘philosophy’ of the Christian era that is organized around the absurdity of faith:  credo quia absurdum est.  (Read him on Paul, and being the apostle!) Anguish and absurdity are twin modalities, and encompass the experience of faith as passion.  The sublimation of this passion through music-making philosophy is precisely what we encounter with the spirituals, sorrow songs, the blues: I suffer, I sing, it is absurd, yet I feel the force of grace.   Yet, here, I read Paul as catholic, which is to say, as one who has the aspiration of gathering together communities of faith, and whose aspiration is an enactment of the very calling he is receiving: he is an apostle, conveying the universal (catholic), and thus relaying or delivering the message of the always already present Holy Spirit.  Being the apostle (to borrow Kierkegaard’s language) in this case is enacting the role of conveying the force of the universal gathering spirit (koinōnia); making proclamations (writing letters) that gather communities.  And this is precisely what I read Critchley as indicating when he reads past Heidegger’s Lutherian Paul, and understands the Epistles to re-present the decisive decision, which is to say, to make a confrontation that compels others to make an answer and respond to the question of faith. “It is anguish that leads Paul to act, to intervene again and again in the life of the churches.  Finally, anguish not only describes the condition in which [according to Heidegger] ‘each stands alone before God.’  It is also the anguish that Paul wants to induce in the readers or listeners of his Epistles in order to bring them to the decision of faith.  If the Epistles are rightly addressed and they reach their audience, then they will create communities of anguish.”(Critchley, 171)

So back to the reverberating meditation from 12/12/04 [a second set of printed pages creates the reverb]  Yesterday I finally made my way into the Osher map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, which is located in USM Portland’s Glickman library, where I work when I’m back home in Maine.  The map library is a treasure trove of resource for my emerging huacaslogical project, which I initiated with my Lapiz paper.  I am now making the first small steps toward becoming a recognized researcher at the Osher, which would mean be able to work with the earliest maps of the Americas.  Yesterday was all about introductions, and the receiving of ceremonial gifts.  Among those gifts I received was a set of salutation cards that the Osher has made up to commemorate their 25^th anniversary exhibits “The Art of the Hand-Drawn Map.”  Each of the four cards in the set has a reproduction of one an image from a 1759 German surveying manual that is part of the exhibit. Of those images the following has been selected for the announcements and for the first page of the exhibit’s catalog:

This above is a digital photo of the card that reverses the direction, and thus reverses the flow of the river, that is, reverses the direction of the flow that is being represented in the map in the manual.  I wanted to share the image as a visual representation of what is described on 12/12/04 as “the uncommon and unusual way” of the learning being described in the meditations, which is to say, the learning being enacted in these meditations, not to mention the commentary.  [Enacted – a term that appears throughout Being and Learning – is used here to remind me that these meditations where identified as the work of ‘poetic phenomenology,’ which is the subtitle of the book: Being and Learning: A Poetic Phenomenology of Education.  I’ll put aside for another day this coupling of ‘learning’ and ‘education,’ which many of my readers, especially my toughest critics, seem to overlook!]  These mediations – and these commentaries are, after all, the work of meditative thinking too! – enact the dialectical other to the predominant analytic and quantitative, instrumental and strategic.  And in this sense they enact a confrontation to “the familiar way of things that arises from the usual encounter with the ‘discrete.’ To ‘perceive’ things as discrete entia…The uncommon and unusual way dwells with the movement itself…”(BL 307)   The documentation, here, of an image that is a reproduction from a manual that instructs the art of map making is appropriately a reversal of said image.  The image can be appropriated as an iconic rendering of Plato’s rendering of Heraclitus in the Cratylus: Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) “everything flows.”   Indeed, all the things (ta panta) in the image can be perceived as directional signs of movement, or caught within that direction.  From a distance (and the viewer is held at a distance from the landscape ‘below’ – one can presume the surveyor was standing on a hilltop) the trees appear to be directing ‘upward’ (north?) while the ‘tufts of grass’? are indicating a sideways (‘easterly’) direction.  Of course, the digital photo has reversed the direction signaled by the tufts.  The flow of the river, indicated by the arrow, is at the center of the image and the center of the river so as to organize the flow, which is to say, to organize the direction logic of the cartographical image.  In other words, we can only perceive the trees and tufts of grass as directional signs because of the presence of the arrow.  The genius of the map is that it forces us to perceive the whole as something other than a landscape drawing.  A map orients and directs us within the landscape; it places us there and governs us to make a decision with regard to the place we are placed: move with the flow of the river, or against the flow.  

Meditative thinking flows with the common (ho koinos), which for Heraclitus is logos.  John 1:1: En archē ēn ho Logos.  The common is the beginning, the originary.  A phenomenology of meditative thinking offers descriptions that move with the flow.   And because this flow is dialectical (contradictory, full of reversals, multidirectional, reverberating) it demands a phenomenology that is some parts prosaic, and more parts poetic.   “While a preferential option might be designated to those forms that en-act the improvisational and spontaneous character of poetic dialogue, the ex-cessive quality of the poetic saying does not require an ‘ornate’ form to convey the complexity of the an-archic dynamic.  The ‘complex’ conveys the being of [diff’rence] as a web of interdependency too ‘difficult to understand or explain because there are many different parts.’” (BL 308, with citation from Oxford dictionary definition of ‘complex’)

What the map as the didactic image is able to convey, and what is conveyed again by the reversal happening in the digital reproduction and documentation of said image, is the impossibility of any sign system reproducing the ‘thing itself.’  If any discrete, whole ‘thing’ itself exists at all, we (humans) have no way of verifying it symbolically.  Veritas is a delusion, and one that has the potential to unfold as psychosis.   This all follows from the starting point of phenomenology, that we can only ever describe and interpret, and this we can do artistically, or not.   We only ever convey (proclaim, announce) by way of imitating the originary ceaseless nativity.  We can make, but not create.  Veritas can, of course, delude us into the psychosis that we can create ex nihilio (‘something out of nothing’).  When Heidegger asks, Why is there something rather than nothing?, he is proclaiming the command issued by his teacher, Husserl, who, we must remember said, “To the things themselves!”  Things…plural.  Things…together and apart.   We can think the meaning of things.  We can describe things.  This is possible.  This is necessary.  This is the work of learning.  This is possible yet difficult, very very difficult, and thus it is called, first and foremost, work. “But it is not simply a matter of ‘difficulty,’ for the radicality of the difference irrupts even the be-ing of the ‘parts’ as ‘wholes.’  Indeed, the move toward the aesthetic [to making art] is beckoned by the impossibility of the ‘understanding’ that is gathered into the fact of [diff’rence]….Only an [artistic] performance, namely a poetic saying that unfolds as making and building, is capable of enacting the dynamic process….a ‘participation’ in the creative process itself.  Chanting of the ‘first’ words…Much remains to be said about this aesthetic [artistic] experience.  Suffice it here to indicate this experience as ‘guided’ or ‘framed’ by the ‘principle of anarchy’ mediated through the poetic sayings offered in the dialogic event.”(BL 308)