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I remember reading in
Arendt something about the irreducibility of singularity; that is the
existential manifestation of natality in each and every human being which is
the foundation of what she calls the fact of plurality. And then she uses the example of physical
pain to illustrate our own experience of our uniqueness, which is to say, our
experience of ourselves that can not
be communicated, that can never be
communicated because what comes with bearing our own unique existential vestige
of natality is what we might call the blues of singularity: in the end of the
day we are these embodied beings that move through time and space, alongside
others, but always apart. Put
otherwise, we can express ourselves, we can communicate, but we alone
experience ourselves; we are alone in our experience. I was reminded of this train of thought
because I am wide awake at 1:55am on Sunday morning, and this is not because I
have insomnia, but, rather, because I have a horrible toothache!!! And the example Arendt uses when she is
describing the irreducibility of singularity is…the toothache! And so it is the case that try as I might to
explain the pain I am experiencing, I have to endure it and the sleep
deprivation that accompanies it too. But
like any writer/thinker worthy of the practice, I take to my desk and work with
and through the pain throbbing in my mouth.
[nb: for whatever it’s worth, this toothache is a very old injury
that I remember well, because it was the beginning of an upsetting series of
events. I was in ninth grade – I almost
wrote ‘the ninth grade’ but that is a convention that comes from another
generation – and I was attending the boys ninth grade basketball game at
Oratory Prep. During the half-time
break – in those days they still played four quarters at every level of basketball,
and took an extended break in between the second and third quarters. And during the breaks kids would grab balls
and shoot around. And it was during the
shoot around, as I was standing under the basket waiting to catch a rebound,
that I took a ball straight off the rim and into my mouth, with my top right
front tooth taking it for the team! I
didn’t lose the tooth, but the ball did some damage to the nerve. And for some reason I never visited the
dentist, and it ‘healed’ on its own. But
it never really healed, and from time
to time it flares up. There’s really no
explanation. Could be the dip in
temperature that we’ve experienced the past few days. It could the tension in my body from all the
PES work that has been non-stop for well over two months, which is causing me
to grind my teeth? Or it could be
exhaustion and dehydration – now I’m getting dramatic! – from the non-stop work
plus the overly salty food I prepared last night, which featured the Dominican
household favorite: tostones!!!
Whatever the cause, I’m awake at 2:11am with the company of myself and
the meditation from this day ten years ago.
Before I begin my
commentary, one that will not be
written in the stream of music -- what
music can replace the silence of this Matins, made even quieter by the fresh
blanket of snow that has fallen? – I want to share a link to the Hannah Arendt
Center, which I discovered just now when searching for the citation for the
toothache example.
In lieu of not finding
the toothache citation, I share the quotation from the website banner: “There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.”
Is thinking
dangerous? Indeed it is dangerous, and
not because the thoughts themselves are a danger, or hazardous. Thinking it itself a dangerous
undertaking. And this is precisely why
I often describe it as risk-taking.
Why? Because it involves a leap
of faith; which means we are transformed by thinking; thinking changes us
because through it we are taking into the ceaseless nativity offered to us by
Being itself. Through thinking we enter
the flow of Becoming, and when we enter that flow we don’t know where we will
be taken. That is, when we stop and
think by ourselves or in the company of others we are entering into a
transformative, dynamic and unpredictable enterprise. This is the danger of thinking: we only know
that we will be changed by it, and because we are certain that we will be
changed, we can also be sure that the experience will leave us in a different
place. This is why thinking is always
described as ‘self-overcoming’.
The meditation on 1/4/05
is organized around the danger associated with thinking, which is described as
“disquiet questioning” and identified with “Socratic perplexity and the
aporetic condition.”(BL 335) Socrates’ represents the exemplary thinker
because of his strength to endure the unpredictability of thinking, and because
he was fearless. He understood the risk
of thinking, and, to his credit, he attempted to take others along for the wild
ride. “Socrates remained steadfast in
the modality of questioning and understood his work as a ‘teacher’ to be
complete when he had guided others into a state of contradiction and had put
the discursive exchange in motion.”(BL
335)
While it doesn’t make a ‘worldly’ appearance,
which is to say that thinking happens as a event, there are political
consequences that add another dimension to the aforementioned danger. There is something threatening about thinking
to those who are not responding to the call to think. But that is hardly the danger inherent to
thinking. Rather, it is the ontological
ground, described by Heidegger as always shifting – and for this reason I
described the Open (the place of thinking) as a collision zone -- that is
the source of the danger. The one who
enters into that place, i.e., the learner, is subjected to the force of actualization;
the power of the ceaseless Becoming of Being that one can say has almost little
or no regard for human welfare. Is that
the case? Perhaps that description is an
exaggeration? Or perhaps what has now
fallen under the sign of Being is the properly post-humanist. Indeed, Logos,
whether in Heraclitus or John, remains first and foremost, originary. What follows from Logos will be whatever it is but there is no pre-determined
privileging of the human. On the
contrary, the concern for human welfare
is precisely that: a human
concern. Logos is indifferent to ethics and politics. And those who take up the life of thinking become – as Heraclitus demonstrated, and
in a radical different way, Paul too – anti-political. Heraclitus was known for having refused the
invitation to help in the writing of the laws of his Ephesus. And Paul, as Taubes has noted in his study of
the apostle, expressed a political theology in his refusal and resistance
towards the existing authority, specifically, the Roman state authority. And I read DuBois within that same tradition
which placed thinking (learning) outside of the state precisely because of its
being a leap taking enterprise, precisely because it is transformative and
emancipatory and for that reason can never be accommodated by state authority. “The uncertainty and unpredictability of Logos, (re)presented in the dialogic
situation, entails an an-archc political life.”(BL 335) We might call this the anti-political politics of thinking/learning.
On 1/4/05 the danger is
the risk of living a life that is “’govenered’ by the ‘irrational’”(BL 335)
Thinking is described as
‘irrational’ in the sense that is it not simply rational or reduced to reason. That is, if by ‘reason’ we mean what is taken
today to be ‘rationality.’ A more
complex category of reason and rationality would rest on the dialectical and
dynamic character of thinking. And thus
it would be a translation of Logos
that attends to the dialectic without privileging as Hegel does the
synthetic. As noted in the preceding
pages of this blog, the synthetic must be replaced by the syncretic; a
gathering together that is ‘unified’ by the play of diff’rence. For the
thinking, this diff’rence that
manifests ‘reasoning’ is the actualization of the ontological difference, the
difference between Being and human be-ing, that grants to solitude and
singularity to the thinker. The play of diff’rence is a granting of excess in
the form of singularity, in the not-Being
of the human being. And here we
encounter a response to the originary question, How is it with the
nothing? A compelling response is found
in thinking, in the enactment of thinking that actualizes the ontological
difference. ‘How is it with the
Nothing?’ entails the work of the
singular person. Again, I emphasized in
yesterday’s commentary, thinking begins
with questioning, with originary questioning; originary because it takes us to
the originary source, Being, and also because it initiates and propels us into
the proper relation of our becoming, which is now understood as the generic
category for learning.
1/4/05 is clear about
the post-humanist implications: the attunement with thinking places us beyond ourselves. And from this place we are capable of making
art. “To be with Being is to be released
from the confines of all anthropocentric systems, and to diminish into the
abode of artistic creation, the dwelling of the artwork. To be artistic is to deny the modality of the
citizen. The artist creates in/with
life, and does not live ‘under’ rules or systems of governance. The only governing system s/he lives under is
the an-archic sway of Being.”(BL
335)
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