Thursday, September 18, 2014

OPM 216(7), September 18th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 212-213

Indeed, listening is fundamental.  Today, this day, and this day a decade ago, listening remains fundamental.  In preparing for my lecture on Heraclitus, this morning, on the train from New Providence to Penn Station, I read from Heidegger’s last undelivered lecture (XII) from the summer semester 1952, that is published in the book edited by my old New School friend and classmate David Jacobs.   In the lecture, ostensibly about the fragments from Parmenides’ poem, Heidegger says, in his preliminaries, that the challenge before us is to establish a dialogic relation with the earliest thinkers, so that we can hear them in their thinking as opposed to through our own.  Listening is fundamental.  “Everything depends on whether the dialogue initiated by this later thinking opens itself freely from the outset, and constantly, so as to let itself be addressed in an authoritative manner by the earlier thinking…”(p. 175)  Listening is fundamental, and the first challenge is to think under the banner of ATTENTIVE, PAINSTAKING, and COMPASSIONATE LISTENING, but before we meet that challenge we must think the practice of this listening, and we must practice the thinking that is this listening.  Listening is fundamental in the sense that it is the original and originary, it is the practice through which learning begins, the beginning practice of learning, and also the practice through which learning begins.  We listen, first, and hear the old adage:  Learn to Listen, Listen to Learn.  

I was listening to Sappho this morning, before reading Heidegger.   Today’s lecture takes up Sappho.    Her fragment 10 grabbed my attention,  and I wondered about the oak tree, and whether it grew on the island of Lesbos, and, if it did, whether it grew on the highest ground?  I wondered if there was a tree line on the mountains of Lesbos?   These are strictly empirical questions, and ones I will find answers to when I arrive to campus within the hour.  For now, I conclude these alba remarks with Sappho’s 10th fragment, as translated by my Hofstra colleague Tom MacCary, who will be delivering today’s lecture:

         10. Eros d’etinaxe moi…

       Eros has stirred my senses
Like a wind whipping through the oaks
                  On a mountain top.


Listening is fundamental.  This is where the meditation from this day ten years ago begins, declaring it to be the central focus of concern: “”our interest is is to describe this precondition, this hearing that is presumed and demanded by all narration, by all saying.  This is the hearing of painstaking and compassionate listening that mus be practiced as the invocation of the learning that unfolds from the letting-be of questioning, from the releasement of the juridical voice.”  The chapter where this material is organized is given the title “Zarathustra’s Descent,” and it is the existential modality of Zarathustra that gathers the focus of the meditations.   And this modality is identified as the formation he has received on the mountain, which, in today’s hegemonic language would be described as the ‘outcome’ of his education.  “Zarathustra’s going under, his descending is a carrying forth of the one who bears the openness of reception…”

His descent begins when he declares  to the great star that he is overflowing from the wisdom he had received, he is weary “like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need outstretched hands to receive it.  I would give away and distribute…For that I must descend to the depths, as you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, you overrich star.”(Nietzsche)  Zarathustra has much to say because he had gathered much, too much, and is overflowing.   The title of Nietzsche’s book, which emphasizes the speech making of Zarathustra, only works because Zarathustra has reached the capacity of his listening.   And this is why I needed to write a legend of Zarathustra’s ascent; the story of the listening that formed him into the speech maker. 

What kind of speeches are those given by the one who is overflowing from what he has gathered in listening?  Hardly speeches at all, but stories, parables, and above all else messages.   The German Sprache, which is the word Nietzsche uses in his title, does not suggest speeches in the formal sense of that word, but the more everyday speaking.  ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ is the way the title is usually translated, and with the translation we hear better the sonic force as well as the common character of his speaking, his voice.   In the reading that informs the meditation from this day ten years ago, the force Zarathustra’s is measured by his capacity to deliver what he has gathered;  it is a force that he does not produce or make but only transmits.   In this sense he is a messenger of the wisdom he has gathered.  Like Hermes, the one who brings the message, and for whom hermeneutics owes its origin, Zarathustra offers hermeneuin, or “that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message.” This is the citation of Heidegger I make in the meditation to back track into the fundamental receptivity of listening.  Zarathustra offers an exposition of a received message; he speaks after he has listened.  He is conveying a message, put it out there, putting into the public, but stopping short of explaining.  His is an offering.

The meditation from this day concludes: Zarathustra “brings the tidings as the one who has remained, essentially, the one who can listen.


2 comments:

  1. 3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME). Before I even read the 2.0 commentary on the OPM from this day 20 years ago, I want to share an edit I made towards the end of the Intro to "LEARN," which includes a citation from Heidegger's "Country Path Conversations," one of the few dialogues he wrote - Of course, if by “result” we mean something lasting or even permanent, like a new skill that is learned, then, yes, a philosophical dialogue can appear to finish without a result. On the one hand, this is because there is always more to take up, and thus when the discussion is finished there is a collective sense of To be Continued, as opposed to The End. On the other hand, there is a sense that the seminar discussion has produced a result, the production of something truly meaningful, which is to say, a meaningful learning experience, or what I will describe below as a collective performance of freedom. “Meaning…must be permanent and lose nothing of its character, whether it be achieved, or rather, found by [students] or fails [them] or is missed by [them].” (HC, 155) What Arendt calls the durability and permanence of meaning can be disclosed by significant objects students are invited to study. To say the students are “invited” is to acknowledge that they may reject the offer, or not be captivated by the book, and feel uninspired by the works they are asked to study. Still the invitation extends beyond the solitude of study because it may be that during the discussion they are inspired by what others have to say about the text. Like Socrates, a philosophical education is patient and recognizes that dialogue has an uncanny power to take on a life of its own. And when that is happening the experience of learning together with others can be lasting and can have a formative effect that seems like an outcome or result. Even the errantry of philosophical wandering on crooked paths takes us somewhere. Heidegger, who like Arendt figures prominently in this book, calls the liberation described in Plato’s cave allegory “releasement” (Gelassenheit), and suggests that philosophical dialogue “brings us onto that path which seems to be nothing other than releasement itself.” (CPC, 76) Dialogue happens by way of Gelassenheit, which is “the way” and also “the movement,” both path and process.(CPC, 77) “Where does this strange way go?,” he asks in the voice of the Scholar who is one of the characters in the dialogue Country Path Conversations. He responds in the voice of the Guide, “Where else than in the open-region”(CPC, 77) that remains “nameless.” Might we tentatively call this nameless strange path that leads to the open-region the crooked path of thinking?

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  2. 3.0b - And, of course, the coincidence of reading a Heidegger citation that refers to "dialogue"! - 'Listening is fundamental. “Everything depends on whether the dialogue initiated by this later thinking opens itself freely from the outset, and constantly, so as to let itself be addressed in an authoritative manner by the earlier thinking…”(p. 175)'. Listening was back then (20/10 years ago) and remain today the central modality of the practice I am calling a philosophical education. Sharing another edit I made, which moved the following from the Intro to the beginning of Part 1 - Reading:
    "Leaning begins with listening, which means it begins in silence. To be silent is not only to restrain from speaking, but to prioritize listening without reference to speaking. This kind of listening is a readiness to hear, as opposed to not speaking. If listening were only the absence of speaking, then it would only be a pause in speaking. Listening that is a readiness for hearing is neither a reduction from speaking, nor an absence of speaking. Such listening is a modality of reception that anticipates meaning, and it is essentially experiential." In turn, it's worth reciting the end of the 2.0 that ends with the ending of the OPM from this day: "The meditation from this day concludes: Zarathustra 'brings the tidings as the one who has remained, essentially, the one who can listen.'" I suppose it's fitting that Part 1 - Reading has as its epigraph a citation from Nietzsche!

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