OPM 215(6), September 17th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 211-213

Wow…adding the title of the book and the corresponding page numbers feels like the beginning of an entirely new project!  I suppose these major turning points reveal what Tyson called the epic quality of Being and Learning.   And the unfolding naturalist I’ve become,  the thinker who continues to be gathered by the ontology of the wilderness and who is experiencing a ‘translation’ by the phenomenology of the forest, can not avoid identifying the exact coincidence happening between the occurrence of these turning points and the changing of the seasons, a word that, in Spanish, hits the target: temporadas.  In fact, each of the nouns that can be used for ‘season’ expresses well the felt force of the ontology that is mysteriously working on me, or so it seems, in this year long project: la temporada: season, time, spell; la estación: station, season, resort; la época: time, era, period, season, age, epoch.   Temporada works best because it combines time and magic, which is another way of identifying the unique and ineffable quality of each of the four seasons.  Estación does well to express the project’s day to day repetition, which is not unlike the movement and arrival of the trains.  I take up my station each day…I arrive at my station each day, and write…Reminds me of what Foucault wrote about Socrates, about his taking up his position like a soldier, his practice of askesis, which is seems to be where the word asceticism comes from, because it means exercise, training, or even ‘severe self-discipline’.  I’m not sure I would ever describe this project as ‘severe’, but I have definitely likened it to training, and have drawn analogies to the daily practice required of one who is seriously committed to playing a musical instrument; I drew that analogy when I was wondering about the repetitive and sometime redundant quality of the meditations.  [Last week I wanted to note a comment made by my colleague during his lecture on Homer’s Iliad, when he identified the repetition happening throughout the poem, and then explained why this was proof that these were originally songs that were ‘stitched’ together over time, and, being so many, would have to include some repetition because it was impossible to imagine anyone performing the entire book of songs in one performance.  Again, more evidence to support Tyson’s reading of Being and Learning as “the first epic in philosophy of education.”  Perhaps it is even more so when we consider it from this structural perspective.] Finally, época resonates will the Schürmannian reading of Heidegger: the epochs of Being’s opening and closing, arriving and departing; the aleithialogical history of this writing is rendered by época.  

All this to introduce this next época of Being and Learning 2.0, which begun with the original meditations that announced and articulated the originary writing back in the late part of winter, when the days were getting longer, and the sun was getting brighter, if not stronger.  The writing, like the snow and ice, thawed and melted, becoming increasingly full of energy and the audacity brought on by the project’s increasing momentum that was carried forward with the torrents of spring expressed in those meditations that were ultimately published as the first eight chapters of Being and Learning.

On this ten years ago I marked the end of the writing that was carried along by the unequalled feeling of freedom experienced in the summer months.   With what looks to be determination and conviction, I marked the end of summer and the beginning of autumn (four days prior to the Autumnal Equinox) with the following banner:

“ATTENTIVE, PAINSTAKING, and COMPASSIONATE LISTENING: Teaching and Learning as Philosophical Practice, as the Enactment of an Ideal”

It is entirely unclear to me if that banner was intended to prompt the writing to come, and, if so, what I was projecting in terms of the number of days I would meditate under that banner?  Revisiting it a decade later, it appears to me more a fragment than a banner, and, what’s more, it may just be the keystone of the entire project!  Were I to be asked, no…compelled to put down in a single fragment a reduction of the project, it may just be this banner; especially if I forced to take a single sentence from the whole year of writing and have it represent the totality! 

The writing that happened on this day works under the banner, although at the beginning it appears as if it will be a continuation of the legend.   [And this would only be know if one has actually read the legend, which makes this commemoration, this Being and Learning 2.0 even more relevant to anyone who would dare read Being and Learning!]   But there is an important caveat that marks the transition from poetics to prose, and it happens with the identification of Zarathustra as “Nietzsche’s”: “On the epiphanic day when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra emerges from his home in the mountains, the cave he had lived in for a decade, and declares to the Sun, that great star ‘we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you, and blessed you for it,’ he identified the openness of compassionate listening.  Zarathustra awoke each morning, ready and waiting upon the saying of the sun.  Like Heraclitus, who invites his visitors, his readers, the strangers who arrive at his abode, who read his fragments, and hear his songs – that collection of wisdom poetry – Zarathustra enacts the heeding of the Word that offers wisdom.”

There’s no need to cite long passages, because the reader of this blog can find the material in the pages of Being and Learning (identified above).  Today, I am struck by the connection made immediately between Zarathustra and Heraclitus; surprised because I am in the midst of preparing a lecture on Heraclitus, and will, no doubt, use that exact passage in two weeks in the opening moments of that lecture, when I try to draw the large audience of students into the question concerning Heraclitus.   Following Heidegger and Fink, I will try to make compelling a reading that happens by way of approximating the thinker.   He is with us…and yet he remains hidden.  I will have the privilege and the awesome opportunity to present the first philosopher to be read and discussed in this course, and what I hope to do in my lecture is make real the claim that what makes a philosopher a philosopher, and what makes a philosophical text a work of philosophy, is the unique demands that it makes on us.  More than any other kind of work, the work of a philosopher is ‘timeless’ standing in the eternal present…where we too dwell when we are thinking, thinking philosophically, or what I have been calling meditatively.

I recall vividly writing the following sentence this day: “For too long has philosophy understood itself as the practice of the singular cogito fulfilling its capacity to give reasons, to rationalize.”  And then making the retort through the dialogic, insisting that the reasoning subject is always intending towards others, “enjoined by an other, real or imagined, who waits upon them, ready and waiting to receive them.  Reasoning is inevitably linked to the openness of listening…to the humility and compassion of one who has ‘let-go’ of their own voice and, in silence, receives the saying of the reasoned.”  

The writing from this day ten years ago happening under the banner culminates with the claim that all philosophical saying proceeds listening, which is only repeating the relationship between the event of appropriation and the action that follows.  “Filled, overflowing, was Zarathustra when he embarked on his journey of speaking…he is ‘awakened’, Nietzsche tells us, and this awakening, this wide-awakeness is the bearing of the wise, the one who has learning listening.  Zarathustra descends from the mountains, ful-filled, as the sage, the evocative speaker.  He has learned listening, the precondition of all evocative saying, and is ready to narrate, to share the stories he has received upon the mountain.”