OPM 302(303), December 18th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 315-316

Writing in the stream of:

https://archive.org/details/gd1993-12-18.sbd.miller.91962.sbeok.flac16

Starting (and repeating several times; the spur happening at 4:06) with the meditative 7/8 adagio “Playing in the Band” >"Uncle John's Band"> "Drums"> “Space”

The meditation on 12/18/04 picks up where the previous day’s writing/thinking concluded: on the initial and originary of the aesthetic called ‘rapture’ (Rausch)   I searched the pages of this blog before beginning today’s commentary and I discovered that ‘attunement’ appears in 18 of the previous 301 commentaries, and here is where I introduced ‘attunement,’ during the second week of Being and Learning 2.0, when I was only writing short one paragraph summaries and recording videos of myself reading the original meditation:

PPM11 February 23

I introduce the musical metaphor of 'mood' to play with Heidegger's category of 'mood of attunement' (der Stimmung).  I write: "if mood if understood to be the capacity of flexibility, then it relates to the term as it used in the lexicon of musical performance.  Here temperament refers to the adjustment of tone of an instrument to fit the scale in any key, especially with those instruments  that have fixed intonation, like  a piano....The key here is that mood, as mode and temperament, is a way of describing the result of an adjustment or, to push the point a-tuning." In the beginning of the video, I note the connections between this writing and the most recent writing I have completed on music-making philosophy.”

 My search was prompted by the citation of Heidegger made on 12/18 that offers context for my sudden turn to ‘rapture’ as a way of describing originary state or modality of learning: “Heidegger, in responding to Nietzsche, says, ‘Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment.  But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it in the plentitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster enhancement.’”(BL 315)

‘The learner is in a state of rapture’ is the claim that is now driving the meditation, and the meditation on 12/18/04 begins, “Rapture is ‘the general essence of the aesthetic state.’[Heidegger] To ‘be’ en-raptured is to be captivated, as we said above (6/15/04) ‘to be seized is to be captivated and drawn into…To be devoted to learning is to be carried into and seized by that which is always already beyond us…’”(BL 315)  And, as I wrote yesterday, this moment of seizure, which is now being thought as rapture, is the starting point for my phenomenology of transcendence, and to reiterate what I wrote yesterday:

“The passion of learning is experienced as a ‘seizure’ of person, a “dis-location from the ‘ordinary’ and a seizure into the ‘extra-ordinary.’”(BL 314)  Here is where I would begin my own phenomenology of transcendence, and describe learning as an event, a movement from without.  [And at the writing of that, the performance of Bach’s music comes to a conclusion.]  Indeed, the formation of the learning community via koinōnia is a gathering into a ‘third’, but there is a force or power that gathers, a gathering force.  My phenomenology of transcendence follows Nietzsche’s description of the artistic state as the self-overcoming that is a proper overcoming of the ‘self’, specifically, the will.  “Learning is a de-struktion of the anthropocentric…the seizure of the ‘self’ away from ‘it-self,’ from the ‘certainty’ of its unilateral projection…This initial and originary state of the aesthetic is called rapture (Rausch).(BL 315)”(12/17/14)

Zarlino interests me because he emphasizes the power of music to move the listener by “inducing” passions.”  Zarlino’s describes what he calls harmonia propria, which includes both consonance and dissonance, and can induce passions.  The ‘proper’ (propia) music is the one capable of inducing passions.  In my debate with Arendt I turned to Schoenberg and thus developed a category of a ‘higher harmony,’ but Zarlino is equally helpful. There isn’t anything coincidental about ‘passion’ appearing apart from ‘compassion’ on the 50^th anniversary of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and for it to be introduced as existential event that is induced from without by music.  Indeed, this is  where we discover the originary state of rapture from whence unfolds learning as music-making philosophy.  – [The “Uncle John’s Band” from 12/18/93 is remarkable…and only today after 40 years of listening to the Grateful Dead have I understood that Uncle John is the Gospelist John!!! Yesterday, 1 hr and 53mins of Bach’s The Passion of St. John, today, the Grateful Dead’s 12/18/93 unusually long 23:06 “Uncle John’s Band”:  “oh oh, I want to know, how does the song go? Come hear Uncle John’s band, by the riverside, got some things to talk about here beside the rising tide. Come hear Uncle John’s band playing to the tide, come on along or go alone, he’s come to take his children home…………….”] --  

“The seizure into the strange is the condition of learning, a condition we now call the ‘artistic state.’  When we are learning we abide in ‘rapture,’ which both liberates and sustains artistic creation/learning.”(BL 315)  [recall the important moment from the 300^th meditation:

 “CREATION is definitely out, because it is entirely misleading, and I’ve rehearsed that point so many times in these commentaries and elsewhere that I needn’t say another word.   In fact, I only need to say single words to remind [myself] of the replacement of CREATION: technē, mimesis, mediation.]    In turn: to abide in rapture, to be enraptured is to be liberated into learning/artistic technē (mimesis, mediation)   ‘Seizure into the strange’ --  want an example?   Listen to “Drums” from 12/18/93, specifically around the 6min mark forward to the Bachian psychedelic moment happening at the threshold between Drums>Space…then remember you’re listening to a soundboard documentation of a live and totally improvised performance.   This is a demonstration of musicians seized into the artistic state.  Is the audience?  That is a question I can not take up here and now.  What I will commit to here and now is the following conjecture: with the demonstration the enraptured artist is revealing the actuality of the passion of learning qua making.  And this revelation is what I call teaching.  

Teaching reveals learning, and, thus, learning begins in the aesthetic state that evolves into the proper (propia) state of art making.

“The work appears en-raptured in/with Being and thereby enraptures those who en-counter it.  The learner is seized by learning…and the one(s) who conduct and arrange the production of learning are the one(s) who [are] letting the learning of learning be learned by en-joining the aesthetic state.” (BL 315)

When Heidegger talks of ‘rapture’ he describes that state as the one that ‘attunes’ us to the “plentitude” of our “capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster enhancement.”  I read ‘enhancement’ as the quality of the intensity of the experience happening with rapture, and describe this as “heightened aliveness,” which today I understand as complementing ‘higher harmony.’   Again, if the higher harmony is that which induces our passions, then heightened aliveness is the modality appearing with the passion of learning.  And the teacher is the one who draws the learner into an encounter with the higher harmony.  She doesn’t ‘make’ the harmony, but only conveys it,  indicates its presence, and draws our attention to it.

The meditation from 12/18/04 concludes: “we have called the modality of the teacher or sage the one who ‘lets learning be learned,’ the one whose provocative questioning evokes an encounter with the ‘not yet,’ with the conditions of the actuality of learning, with ownmost potentiality.  The teacher estranges and thereby invites the learning of learning, the ongoing, perpetual inter-activity that en-acts the be-ing with the Being of beings.”(BL 316)