Has to be Soulive at the State Theater in Portland, Maine that takes
me from 2014 into 2015!!!
Thinking/Writing in the stream of
[The GD played many
memorable New Years gig, but the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is
the 12/31/84 show, which happens to be from exactly 30 years ago! I remember being at a lively party at my
neighbor’s house. I put on the radio broadcast of the show and young and old
danced away! And it was the powerful
“Shakedown” opener that jolted everyone onto the makeshift dance floor. So that’s what I’ll be repeating a few times,
then the “Bird Song,” then the “Scarlet>Fire” and finally the
“Drums>Space”…or perhaps I’ll write in the quiet of this early Maine
morning?!]
As I sit
down to write the last commentary of 2014, day 320 of Being and Learning 2.0, there are three items that have jumped onto
my ‘previous writing to be shared’ list.
All of them are organized around what, for the past few days, I have
calling the heteronomy of Learning vis-à-vis Being. That is, they are all related to the call
into learning, and, in turn, to the musical response to that call. This will make for a very long blog post, but
it seems to me necessary to collect them all together before making a commentary on the writing from 12/31/04.
In the
spirit of this day, which is an occasion to reflect on the past year and point
to some its highlight, I want only to share without commentar two moments from
this past year’s commentary writing.
The first is the result of the search I did this morning when I combed
the commentaries for the phrase “song is existence.” Here is what I wrote on November 4th
OPM 263(264):
The writing form 11/4/04 returns to Heidegger’s musings
on Rilke’s “song is existence”. On
10/17/14 while in Memphis I wrote on the fragment: Rilke’s aphorism/fragment
“Song is existence.” Song is
existence! The mimetic making, a
copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music making. Music is existence, the existence of human legein the saying that imitates the flow ῥεῖ
(rhei) of Logos. But this musical existence needs to be
learned, it is the hardest apprenticeship.
Learned first and foremost through listening, which is what is
emphasized in the preparatory work of apathetic
reading, where the phenomenology of reception is practiced.” (OPM 245(246) On 11/4/04
“song is existence” expresses the article of faith in the human poetic
response to Being’s Becoming that is experienced as an offering. The reception of the offering in its full
force gathers the learning community.
Put otherwise, the learner is the one who receives the call (klēsis, calling
or vocation). Here is not the place to
return to the relation between calling and saying something via vocare.
(cf.PPM10 2/22/14, OPM 218(9), 09/20/14) It is the place to note the importance of
the gathering call as having such a force that the one who receives it is
totally turned around, such that the original (and originary) question raised
in Being and Learning regarding the
turning around of the soul to contemplate Being (ie., to begin learning) is
here ‘answered’ again via the force of the call (klēsis)
that is uncompromising and we might even say total if not totalizing of the
subject. This is the other side of
Kierkegaard’s muscular subject: he is radically subjected by his faith. But
if we follow the Pauline congregational we end up with the learning community
that is gathered together by muscular subjects, a powerful chorus, the
proverbial Fisk University singers whose faith is actualized in the
congregation they form and that forms them.
Heidegger is cited on 11/04/04 to express this: “The more venturesome
are those who say in a greater degree, in the manner of the singer. Their singing is turned away from all
purposeful self-assertion. It is not a
willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be
produced.”(‘What are Poets For?’)
The next is
from an undated file I discovered this morning when I was cleaning up my
desktop. The file is titled “For the
Past Week I Have Been Writing on the Retreat From Past and Present.” And after searching the B&L 2.0 archives, I discovered was
the commentary from July 10th
OPM 146. The commentary takes up an
meditation that was not published in Being
and Learning:
For the past week
I have been writing on the retreat from past and present, from the world,
community and self. Retreat to...?
"I've always
been looking for answers...looking for the answer." This I said
today to my very good friend and colleague Stacy Smith when we met to complete
our close reading of the Bhagavad
Gita. We have been meeting a few times a month since February, and,
as I noted, we've passed through three seasons. As I completed my reading
of the Gita today in anticipation of our
meeting I couldn't help but hear a distinct harmony between the voice of
Krishna and the Stoics, specifically, Marcus. Here then is an example of
what Aby Warburg (cited in yesterday's post) calls reading "from an old
book," i.e., the teaching of the kinship between ancient philosophies.
Today I understand this 'kinship' is one that is heard, musically, for
it is expressed in the harmonies created by the fundamental or originary words
spoken by the ancients. Yet, because they co-exist and 'sing' across time
and space it is only we who are able to hear the harmony.
It is one thing to
describe the enactment of so-called 'negative liberty,' the move away from the past and present, an
interruption. This week (OPM 144) I wrote of this movement as the
necessary retreat that locates one in the place of letting-be. And for
this reason the move was linked to gelassenheit,
the freedom one is released into (emancipated). Retreat to....?
The question is rather retreat or gathered? But that is a rhetorical
question, because I have been insisting that this move into meditative thinking
is a releasement, and, as (later) Heidegger insisted, and I documented
consistently in the original meditations, we don't possess but, rather, are
possessed by freedom. Hence we are released by....? (here thinking
arrives at the line of question that takes me to an answer...the answer?)
This is why it is actually misleading to place priority on enacting
negative liberty. 'Enactment' or 'exercising' freedom is the talk of
liberal political theory. Indeed, we are released by...Being,
specifically the processural flow or dynamic becoming of Being, which is how we
experience Being, or how Being is disclosed to us. And when we are thinking
this event we perceive the event of appropriation, our being gathered away from
the past and present and into the arrival of the future. In OPM 144
I borrowed the Dreyfus translation and wrote of this arrival as 'coming into'
ourselves. Now I can understand how this arrival happens by way of
attunement, by way of being tuned.
But how is the
event of appropriation, the experienced of being retrieved, gathered and released,
also a retreat? Here we arrive at what Heidegger calls 'willing
non-willing,' or the active passivity that also marks the phenomenological
attitude of letting-be. This willing of non-willing is the practice that
the Stoics calls apatheia,
or detachment. And this is also the practice of renunciation that is
described in the Gita, reduced to the word TAT,
which signifies both the "renunciation of all reward," but also the
"work of sacrifice, gift or self-harmony" being done "by those
seekers of Infinite Freedom."(17:25) Renunciation is akin to apatheia and the willing
of non-willing insofar as it leads to a interruption of the willing subject
(ego), and leads to a higher order of freedom, one that we experience as a
renewed and empowered self. Paradoxically this 'self' is the
consciousness of an 'I' that is joined with Nature, Being, or the One
(depending on the discourse). This awareness of this unity with the
totality is how the higher order of freedom is experienced. In my
translation Krishna calls this awareness 'self-harmony,' but I would conjecture
that I preferable translation would be 'harmonized self' in order to
indicate this awareness or consciousness as an attunement with the totality.
To be harmonized is to be in tune.
Here is the fragment distilled from the
meditation written this day ten years ago, but not published in Being and Learning:
Heidegger
writes of a “mutual challenge [that] drives home to us with startling force
that and how man is delivered to the ownership of Being and Being is the
appropriate to the essence of man.” And
he calls a “strange ownership and a strange appropriation.” Finally, to experience the strangeness of
these strange situations we must enter in to the event of appropriation. There is certainly a strangeness to what
Heidegger is saying here. It is a
strangeness that, to use the German of Brecht, envinces the Verfremdung
Effect. That is, it completely disrupts
our expectations regarding the relationship we have between the totality,
Being. Why? Because any talk of ‘ownership’ is
inextricably linked to the horror of bondage and its lasting aftermath in the
history of racial oppression. Everything
is lost in translation. Until we recognize the radicality of the asymmetrical
relationship we have with Being.
The third
and final piece is one that I had recalled when I was discussing with Rocha a
paper he’d completed in late October.
I’d promised to send it to him, and it was only this morning that I was
able to locate it in my Lacie archive.
I wrote the piece in March, 2008 in the wake of the fire that destroyed
my home, 77 Coles Avenue. Both of my
daughters escaped the burning house, my daughter Sofia leaping from her second
story bedroom window and my daughter Katerina crawling through her bedroom
window out onto the porch roof. In the
aftermath of the chaos I repeated again
and again that my daughters had not been saved but had saved themselves, that
they had enacted the will to power. And then I wrote the following piece, which I
read at PES Cambridge 2008, thinking the life-saving, life-affirming deep
breaths and the leaps that my daughters took on March 3, 2008:
Re-membering
to Breathe:
Silence,
and the Beginning of Learning
Eduardo
Manuel Duarte,
Hofstra
University
A contribution to the panel on Humanism After
Anti-humanism: Problems and Prospect,
PES, Cambridge, MA, April 11-14,
2008.
Beginning With A Breath:
Before saying, breathing. Before the word is spoken, a deep breath,
taken. Before the dialogue, a pause, in between hearing and
speaking.
I would like to begin, now, with a moment of silence, so I invite us to
pause, re-membering to breathe deeply, once, maybe twice.
[pause]
A Call to Begin:
We are called to be mindful, to dwell in the
time of natality, before liberation.
Meditative re-collection is a response to this call to be mindful, to be aware of this time, this before,
this beginning of learning, of initiating something new. To begin, then, is to re-call this time, to
be with this presencing, to re-member to breathe, and to hear, the silence,
before the saying.
Another Beginning: Learning to Exist in the Nameless
The contribution I am offering today is an
attempt to recall the relation between being and learning. As I understand it, this relation, while always present is mostly forgotten and
thus eclipsed by the so-called 'research' on education. We might identify the persistent presencing
of this obscured relationship as occurring in the temporality of beginning, or
what Arendt called natality, the temporal event when the new is initiated.
(Arendt, 1958, 1961) And we might describe this eternally recurring event as
the immanence of an ambiguous present that is pregnant with possibility, Being. Further, we might call the response to this
possibility learning. And we might
name this response as first learning, after Heidegger, who, in his letter on humanism, says that if we
are to once again to find our way "into the nearness of Being [we]
must first learn to exist in the nameless."(Heidegger, 223,
emphasis mine) Learning is the ontology that comes before
education, before research.
How might we recall this relationship between
being and learning, and thereby encounter the time of natality? Following an old model, the exemplar of which
is Augustine's Confessions, I propose that re-calling this relationship
happens when we take up a meditative re-collection, or what today some might
call 'memory work'. To recall the relation between being and
learning is to re-member, first, in the senses conveyed by the Latin
origin., rememorari to ‘call to mind,’ which is a compound of re- (expressing
intensive force) and memor
‘mindful.’ These two senses of
'remembering' together suggest a forceful calling to mindfulness. Meditative re-collection of the relation
between being and learning is also re-membering in the sense of
re-joining. Thus, the meditative
recollection I am proposing to undertake is
a practice -- the learning of which provokes a whole host of so-called
'educational' questions -- is a response to the call to mindfulness, the
force of which arises from the pull of Being, that, like a gravitational force,
grounds us and positions us, again and again.
To respond to this call is to be claimed by this force arising from the
memory of Being, the re-collection of radical possibility.
Inspired by Heidegger's response to Sartre, the
contribution I am offering today in relation to the question concerning
humanism is presented as a thinking disclosed by the movement of memory, a
re-collection that re-calls the sayings
that echo from the initial saying of humanitas. The movement of memory begins with the
hearing of 'anti-anti-humanism,' the last of the sayings that following from
the intial saying of humanitas.
And from this end point the movement
takes us toward the silence
preceding that initial saying of 'humanism'.
The thinking arising from a recollection of the silence revealed at the
beginning. My comments are a response to
this thinking before 'humanism' and 'anti-humanism.'
Thus, to
respond to the question concerning humanism through a series of recollections
is to understand this question today as the opportunity to return again, to
turn back, to the question of being.
Such a return, today, shows the
movement of memory to be a reversal, or an overturning, of a dominant logic of
our day, which invites us to leap beyond the present, and, with such leaps,
perform, in mid-air, an acrobatic spectacle of language. Nietzsche wrote of the tightrope walker, and
his untimely fall. I write of
acrobats, who defy the laws of gravity, the force of memory, who float freely, turning like cosmo-nauts,
or cosmo-politans, above, beyond the
ground, the world [alienated]. I write
as one who has been grounded, and in response to a call, by a memory to turn back, and in this
re-turn, turn-over/away from the logic
of the 'post', the beyond; and with this
turning, to go under, beneath, and
before, to remember that beginning, to encounter the mood of possibility. The movement of memory thus takes me to this
place where I have been grounded, to a time, in the open, the moment before the decision, before the
initial saying of humanitas.
This movement of memory, might it re-call the
way of the learning that moves into the nearness of Being, so that once more,
again, we might relate to the word 'humanism' as a call to what Heidegger calls
"meditating and caring, that [we] be human and not inhumane," that
is, resolutely open, attentive,
receptive, steadfast in the silence before knowing, before willing, before
judging?
Where went the feeling of possibility, the
vision of the paths that were present before the decision to say humanitas? Can we remember this feeling before we knew,
what to say, and how to say it? Where is
this moment, this time of natality, this beginning, and how does it feel? My contribution is an attempt to re-call
these questions, and, thereby, to invite
us to think about them.
A Return to the Beginning
Towards the conclusion of his letter on
humanism, his response to Sartre's essay on existentialism as a
humanism, Heidegger writes, "Everything depends on this alone, that the
truth of Being come to language and that thinking attain to this language. Perhaps, then, language requires much less
precipitate expression than proper silence.
But who of us today would want to imagine that his attempts to think are
at home on the path of silence?" (Heidegger, 246)
Why begin my comments with a moment of silence,
with breathing? What was I intending by
asking you to listen to this pause, to this silence? Not simply a reflection, but a
recollection. This was my intention,
offered as an invitation, to stop, and breathe. A recollection, a recalling. Can silence be re-called? How can we call silence? How can we say 'silence'?
'Silence please,' the signs say throughout the
Bodleian Library. Do these signs say
the silence that I am recalling, do they
call us to that silence, do they point us to a recollection of this
silence? A memory of the moment before
saying, this is what I hoped we might recall with and through our silence. Re-calling the silence that is always
before. When is this before and why do
I invite us to recall it, with a moment, a moment of silence? When, where?
To recall this silence is to remember what
precedes, what is prior, before the saying of the names 'humanism' and
'anti-humanism'. My invitation was
sent to you from the memory of that which was before we speak and thus think
the concepts 'humanism' and 'anti-humanism'.
Why? To locate myself. My invitation is sent from the location where
I dwell in relation to the question put before us today. The location of a memory, of a silence, of a
peace, and rest, before the saying. To
send this invitation in the form of a recollection, a recollection of the
moment of silence, is to remember this silence as the silent pause before all
speaking, all writing, before language.
How was it that I came to this location of
silence as the place from which I offer my comments today in response to the
questions concerning 'humanism' and 'anti-humanism'? The location came from a series of
meditations, initiated by a recollection of the time when I first heard mention
of a debate occurring under the name 'anti-humanism'. Coincidentally, one of the members of the
debate is an honored guest at this weekend's conference. The past has caught up with the present,
perhaps.
This first memory of the
'humanism/anti-humanism' debate played out on the pages of Praxis International by Professors
Bernstein and Schürmann, lead me to a review of the exchange. Schürmann's piece, published under the
playful title, "Adventures of the Double Negation: On Richard Bernstein's
Call for Anti-Anti-Humanism," indicated the path to the location of
silence.
First, in the opening section, where a new
discursive category is introduced, one rarely uttered in these discussions, and
as yet to be heard today.
"Anti-anti-humanism" is identified as a discourse rooted in
possibility of redemption, Schürmann
quotes Bernstein's adoption of
the Hegelian dialectic as a "'beginning that at once presupposes what has
been, breaks with it, and fulfills and redeems it.'" (Schürmann, 283) Talk of a beginning that presupposes a moment
before points to a moment before all beginning that remains unbreakable,
because it remains unspeakable. To break
with this beginning is to break the silence.
But such breaking does not fulfill and redeem, because the silence
remains a silence before all beginnings, which are, as Hannah Arendt tells us,
the appearing of human distinctness through the word. Talk of a beginning is thus already a
beginning, the initiation of something new, unique, and distinct. But these beginnings always proceed from
something prior, they arise from a ground, from a break that is silence, open,
the space through which the new appears, the poria of possibility. To remain silent is to dwell in the
beginning, before speech and action, within a break that is made by a
meditative thinking, what Heidegger calls "inconspicuous furrows in
language,"(Heidegger, 265) , furrows or grooves of possibility from which
arises the word 'humanism' as "a
name that is a lucus a non lucendo [literally, a grove where no light
penetrates." (Heidegger, 248)
And this brings me to a second directive moment
in Schürmann, where he argues that "Richard Bernstein has indeed given a
paper on anti-anti-humanism and Heidegger in which he says not only little
about humanism and nothing about anti-humanism, but equally little about
Heidegger's one persistent question, the being question."(Schürmann,
287) As I read it through
Schuürmann, Bernstein's silence about
the one persistent question in Heidegger re-calls that question in what it does
not remember to say. Schürmann's
reading, his deconstruction, reveals the fundamental gap in Bernstein's
anti-anti-humanism, the clearing upon which this discourse's dialectic
unfolds. The pause of the silence that
stops and recalls this clearing, is the interruption of the dialectic, the
dialogue, that pauses to pay homage to this ground upon which philosophy
arises. To thank this ground, and to be
grateful for the possibility that it has granted, this is what we remember when
we take a moment of silence before speaking.
From this gratitude arises the thoughtfulness of care and concern.
To return to the movement of memory,
Bernstein's silence on the being question is an echo of the silence we
encounter in Sartre. "Existence
comes before essence," Sartre famously and confidently writes in his essay
on existentialism as a humanism.
Existence precedes essence, it is the beginning, the point of
departure. But in what sense does Sartre
identify this 'before' of Existence?
For Heidegger, Sartre's before
is already after the being question; indeed, it is an assertion, and
thus not a dwelling with Being, with the question of Being. It is a claim made upon Being, while the
beginning, for Heidegger, is a relation where we are claimed by Being. The claim made upon Being is already a
forgetting of the claim made by Being, the call to remain open, silent.
The memory of Sartre's silence, his forgetting
of Existence as Being, re-calls his mis-appropriation of Heidegger who, Sartre
tells us, "amongst we must place" within his own group of existential
humanists. "What they have in
common," Sartre continues, "is
simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence
-- or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?"
(Sartre, 348) What indeed does Sartre
mean by that? For Heidegger, the meaning
of the existence that comes before essence, that precedes, is the silence of
the nameless that holds open the possibility of speech and action. Sartre has forgotten this silence when he
says we must begin from the subjective.
The saying of the beginning as "the subjective" is already a
forgetting of the silence, and a leap into the beyond, where, Sartre tells us,
we discover ourselves, all others,
liberation. This is the essence,
liberation, that comes after existence, through word and deed, with
speech and action.
But before all this, Heidegger responds, we
remain, with existence, "ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the
open region that clears the 'between'," (Heidegger, 252), the gap between
past and future, the beginning, or what Arendt identified as the nunc stans,
the standing now. (Arendt, 1978) To
dwell in this standing now, this openness of Being, is to dwell in relation to
Being as the presence of possibility.
And to dwell in this relation is to remember the silence of this
openness, this gap, this clearing, from whence arises the speech and action
that is radically new, revolutionary, and hence, disclosing of liberation. Might we describe the re-collection of this
relation as the beginning of the event of what Arendt called education, when
she described it as the "conservation of the revolutionary" in each
child? Might we understand the attentiveness
in terms of the educator taking up her position as educator within this
openness that is radically attentive to the learner as beginner? To welcome the beginner, perhaps, is to take
care to preserve the openness of the clearing where the new is initiated.
To recall the existence before human existence,
is to remember the silence before the saying of 'humanism,' 'anti-humanism,'
and 'anti-anti-humanism.' All these are
possibilities, possible ways of being, exemplars of the plurality of essences
that arise and co-exist in the history of humanity. These essences proceed existence, Being. When we re-call the silence before the saying
of these essences, we remember to say and act anew, and we preserve the
possibility of the revolutionary, the deep breath before the leap.
Bibliography
Augustine. Confessions of Saint Augustine. Translated by John K. Ryan. (New York:
Image, 1960).
Arendt, Hannah. The
Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958).
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin, 1961).
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. (New York: HBJ, 1978).
Bernstein, Richard “Heidegger on Humanism” Praxis
International 5 (July 1985): 95-114.
Heidegger, Martin. "Letter on Humanism," Basic
Writings. Edited by David Farrell
Krell. (San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1977).
Sartre, Jean Paul. "Existentialism is a Humanism," Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. Selected and Introducted by Walter Kaufman.
(New York: Penguin, 1975).
Schurmann, Reiner.
"Adventures of the Double Negation: On Richard Bernstein's Call For
Anti-Anti-Humanism," Praxis International 5:3 (1985) 289-290.
NOW in the
wake of the preceding a commentary on the writing from 12/31/04.
The
originary silence is broken with the exhale.
We listen…we hear the originary fecund
Silence, and we are called to…music-making philosophy?
Recall:
Heidegger writes,
"Everything depends on this alone, that the truth of
Being come to language and that thinking attain
to this language. Perhaps, then,
language requires much less precipitate expression than proper silence. But who of us today would want to imagine
that his attempts to think are at home on the path of silence?"
(Heidegger, 246)
Everything depends on this alone: the truth of Being comes
to language – calls us to learning
(thinking attains – responds – to this language, the language of Being). Heidegger wonders if language, our response, demands proper silence
rather than expression. The language of
Being entails the path of silence, this much we know for sure. The ‘home’
of thinking/learning, the place where it abides, is the fecund ground of
silence. But this originary silence is
broken, with the exhale, with music-making philosophy. With learning the proper homage is not
reverential silence but celebratory song. “The poetic dwelling of learning
abiding in/with Being’s essential sway is expressed musically. ‘Music’ is the name for the artwork of poetic
dialogue…”(BL 330)
On 12/31/04
the project moves toward its conclusion with a return to Heraclitus, the
original thinker, and his privileging of hearing. With Heraclitus we recall that our
musicality is an expression of the ‘hidden harmony.’ Recall from yesterday’s commentary: “The
musicality of diff’rence is an ontological description; it describes the
modality of learning; it is a description of what we hear when we listen to learning.”(12/30/14) Musicality
is proper ontological category, an originary existentiell , a primary or fundamental existential situation; this
is what is described on 12/31/04, and I’m reminded that the project is one of
fundamental ontology. The commemorative
work has inserted secondary phenomenological descriptions, historical
occasions, memories of specific moments, particular expression of the
musicality of learning. “2.0” denotes
the second level phenomenological description.
Originary thinking is signified as 1.0. Being signified as 0.
Musicality
describes the fundamental ontological situation of attunement, the realization
‘ownmost potentiality.’ “…’musicality’
names the manner of the expression that reflects the attunement of being
in/with the dynamic dispersal. This
attunement is the heightened awareness…”(BL
330) Yesterday ‘heightened
awareness’ was thought through Nietzsche’s ‘six thousand feet’. Today the altitude reveals the air that
Irigaray insists that Heidegger has forgotten. What air?
The cool, crisp air of the earliest morning, where the light first
touches this land, the summit of Katahdin.
At that altitude we remember the silent beckoning of the air.
Attunement
is the heightened awareness, the breathing of the air moving at that altitude (‘six
thousand feet beyond us’) the memory of a mutual dependence between Being and
Learning, described on 12/31/04 as the “an-archc interdependency”. We listen,
we hear the call, and we remember to breath that air, and inhale, deeply. And then we exhale, we sing holy songs and we
are wholly human. Song is existence. Musicality,
the mimetic re-presentation and expression of the interdependency
between Being and human, gathered and propelled by Spirit, making holy time and
space; abiding in sacred place. “Musicality is the name [of] the poetic…the
excess…the ex-cessive open-endedness of the poetic…”(BL 330)
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