Monday, January 12, 2015

OPM 324(325), January 12th (2015) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 343-344


Here are two iterations of the fundamental ontological claim:

Being’s Becoming appears with the present.  (12/24/14)

[Repeat] Being’s Becoming appears with the present.  The present discloses this excess, which is the offering made to learning, for learning, in learning.  (12/24/14)


And these two iterations must be read within the context of Schürmann:  “With the originary concept of ontology and the ontological concept of the originary we leave the phenomenology of reversals…Rather, presencing itself is to be understood as originary…as pure coming-about.”(140)

In sum, the reduction to becoming takes us to the originary, which, in turn, propels learning as technē:

Presencing understood (thought) as orignary, as pure coming-about, demands a thinking of becoming, that is, of actualization, realization.(1/7/05)

With this context one needs to read the writing from 1/12/05 as already describing learning as the actualization and realization of becoming: “When the learner takes up learning she (re)presents Being.  We call this ‘(re)presentation’ the mimetic artwork of learning…”(BL 343)

Again, the description is emphasizing the re in re-presentation, as presencing again.  This does not constitute a reversal or return.  Thinking the temporality of the event of learning discloses the (re)turn to Being as having happened when the moment of re-presentation is occurring.  Such is the extended stretching character of the kairos and the nunc stans.  The ‘standing’ of the ‘standing now’ is not quiet standing still; it is moving because it is organized within dynamic of presencing.   Further, presencing again constitutes the appearance of Being as becoming.   This is the sense in which Nietzsche describes the Eternal Recurrence (hence, not ‘return’ nor ‘reversal’): 

“Now I shall related the history of my Zarathustra.  The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and time’.  That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana: at a powerful pyramidal rock not from from Surlei I stopped.  It was then that this idea came to me…it invaded me…That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”  

I offer another example with the poetic phenomenological description I wrote in one of my Palabras for Rocha’s Late to Love:

Genesis Time, the time of origin, the temporal modality of formation, messianic time?  The time when It gives, the time of giving, the eternal recurrence of the offering: ceaseless nativity.  All is given.
What’s up?  What’s going down?  What’s going on?  What gives?
It gives. “Es gibt.”
All is given.  All is present.  All is presence.
If All is present, is All presented?
What gives continues to give, and is a ceaseless nativity, an eternally recurring beginning.  To further denote ceaseless nativity we can play with the word ‘giving’ and ‘gift’ and say ‘presenting.’  But this doesn’t capture the offering made with the given, with the Giving.

Here the important link is made between Ceaselss Nativity and Eternal Recurrence, and between presence, presencing, and presenting.  ‘Presenting’ is meant to denote both the act of showing and the act of offering.  And it is in this sense that (re)presenting is a mimetic disclosure (showing) of Becoming: when the learner re-presents s/he is presenting again the presencing of Being; she is mediating the recurrence of becoming.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s commentary, it is not at all to me clear how one moves from the primary (ontology) to the secondary (ethical) without operating under the force of desire.   Description of learning remains within the primary, and constitute the existential shaped and formed by the ontological.  And the divorce between the existential and the ethical is reinforced on 1/12/05 when the technē of learning is described has happening from an existential modality “that moves beyond good and evil, truth and falsity, in the realm where freedom makes its appearance, unbound from the confines of judgment.”(BL 343)


 What is shown by the description on 1/12/05 is that the desire turned on in the re-turn is the pathos of freedom.   The work of art arises “from the spontaneity of improvisation, composed…from out-of-time, from the ek-static seizure of reason that unleashes imagination.  And with this movement artwork represents the truth of representation, the truth of showing, displaying, performing and setting forth.”(BL 343)   If the work of art is a mediation of the recurrence of becoming then it is “the delegate of Being’s unfolding…”(BL 343)   And as the representative of Being, artwork is a “showing and unveiling of freedom.”(BL 343)  The rise of the poetic is not then a displacement of the prosaic, but a diminishing of it.  The prosaic is diminished in the moment of self-overcoming, which occurs when the self is seized; “the ek-staic seizure of reason that unleashes the imagination.”  The poetic arises from the gap that opens when reason qua analysis is tempered.  Enter the phenomenological, the descriptive as poetic re-presentation; production, realization, actualization of becoming: “In this diminishing, judgment is absent, and this absencing is exhibited with the ex-cess of meaning that spills over in the performance of poetic dialogue.  In the absence of judgment, compassionate listening allows for the spilling over of meaning in the letting be of the unbounded imagination enacted with artwork. Something remains ‘not yet’ said in the dialogic, and the poetic saying (re)presents this by pointing beyond it-self…”(BL 344)

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