OPM 298(299), December 14th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 309-310

Today, snow covered, six thousand feet above the sea! 

First, a reflection on the conclusion of yesterday’s commentary, which ended with a citation of John 1:1, and a contrived play on the revisiting of my appropriation of Schürmann’s turn to anarchy.   In the beginning, Logos. Without beginning there is dialogue.  The archaic use of ‘without’ can denote ‘outside’ or ‘on the outside,’ such that ‘without beginning’ signifies ‘outside of the original’ and the contrived fragment reads: outside of the original there is dialogue.  The an of anarchē can be read through this archaic denotation of ‘outside of,’ and we read it this way by splitting it from archē for emphasis, then we can hear it as saying ‘outside of the original.’  And when we hear it this way ‘without’ takes on the quality of the possessive, such that dialogue exists without the original.   This second reading places emphasis on the relationship between Being and learning by reminding us of what Heidegger called the ontological difference: in the beginning Logos; outside the beginning dialogue.  Or, the original (the beginning) Being; the originary (outside the beginning) learning.   

Second, a very brief anecdote.  This morning we were driving to pick up my daughter Sofia, who, after the conclusion of her first semester at Bates College, went home with her roommate who lives in North Conway, New Hampshire, where her father is the GM of Cranmore ski mountain.  Today was the first day of skiing for my son, Jaime (4), and on our way to New Hampshire his mama and I were explaining to him that he would be taking a lesson.  He said, “I hope my ski professor is nice.”  “Yes, that’s right, you’ll have a ski professor.  Like daddy, a professor. What kind of professor is daddy?”  “He’s a professor of lacrosse.”   “Yes, but he’s also a professor of thinking.  What’s thinking?”  “Thinking is when you don’t know things.  And looks like this.”  “YES!  That’s right son!  Thinking is when you don’t know things, and looks exactly like that!”

In the wake of my four year old son’s succinct description and enactment of thinking, I consider it totally appropriate that the meditation from this day begins with an indictment of ‘the system of state controlled/corporate sponsored schooling.’(BL 310) Of course, I’m reminded of the critique made by Castoriadis regarding such indictments, which calls attention to the delusion we have that somehow we can say something about a system as if we were already caught within the discourse;  the institution has us before we have it.  And this is precisely why I begin by writing: “metaphysics is the name given for all totalizing projects of ‘scientific knowledge’ and the institutional precincts that they both undergird and are sustained within…”(BL 310)  That is to say, only one who has already been caught within the discourse of metaphysics and then has worked his way into the threshold beyond metaphysics can confront the totalizing logic as one who is now standing without.  With this kind of confrontation one is only ever speaking back to the power with its own force; this is critique by way of reverberation.

A long citation from Heidegger’s Towards A Definition of Philosophy amplifies the indictment of state controlled/corporate sponsored schooling as metaphysics.   Through Heidegger the totalizing project of schooling vis-à-vis thinking is disclosed by its inability to ‘calculate’ diff’rence, which always exceeds calculation because it is the essence of diff’rence to be in excess.  A tautology?  Perhaps!  “If scientific knowledge is set the task of depicting and describing reality as it is, then this is immediately seen to be an impossible undertaking, for reality is an ‘incalculable multiplicity’ which cannot be mastered by concepts.”(BL 310)   Heidegger’s ‘incalculable multiplicity’ is what I am describing with the category of diff’rence.  And for Heidegger the problem with scientific knowledge is the fundamental problem of all systems that fail because they seek to mimetically repeat through symbolic logic and cybernetics what can only ever be described or mimetically rendered poetically through art.   The conceptual and the rational capture only what “is vanishingly small compared with what remains.  It is also said that realty is irrational compared with rational concepts and cannot be captured by the latter without something being left over.  There are old sayings: everything flows…all of reality is a continuum…no part of reality is absolutely identical with another….There is nothing absolutely homogeneous; everything is different, everything real is heterogeneous. In sum, reality is a heterogeneous continuum.” (Heidegger cited on BL 310)

The remainder of the writing from 12/14/04 takes up the tragedy of metaphysics in contrast to “the hope sustained by the affirmation of the fecundity of possibility, which is preserved in the fact of [diff’rence], the heterogeneous continuum.”(BL 311)   Today, ten years later, my thinking on the relation of tragedy and redemption leads me to be more cautious in my phrasing.   The emphasis is on suffering, on the passion of education.   In turn, one suffers the tragedy that is state controlled/corporate sponsored education, but there is redemption located in the absurdity of that system and the institutions it operates.  credo quia absurdum est.  Faith arises because the system does not exhaust reality; because it is woefully incompetent and is only ever controlling what is ‘vanishingly small’; and because thinkers are able to occupy those institutions, both because we are required to demarcate the wrong, and because, once isolated and placed ‘outside of’ we are left alone to do the work that reverberates.