OPM 224(25), September 26th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 219-220

The neologism ‘anthropoetikos’ (derived from a synthesis of anthrõpros [human being] and poiētikos [poetic, relating to poets]) appeared in yesterday’s commentary had multiple influences behind it.  The categories Arendt articulates in The Human Condition (e.g., vita contemplativa, vita active, homo laborans, etc.) are an important influence.   Philosophically, of course, the neologism emerges from the post-humanist move that drives the meditations and Being and Learning.  The figure of Mother Memory (appearing in the past two days) only makes sense with that move that takes us on to the originary ground of thinking where the philosopher arises as learner, as the phenomenologist, the passive recipient of a directive from without.  This is the exegesis happening with self-disclosure, the reading of the self that leads out of the precinct the will.   This is self-disclosure as an account of the self’s experiences, a writing that documents, phenomenologically, all that is happening to it.  Anthropoetikos is thinker who gives an account of those formative encounters that make up what we could call ‘experiential learning.’

Anthropoetikos is the thinker qua learner drawn out from the place of philosophy that degenerated with the solipsism of the Cartesian meditation.  It is the figure who is called out by Husserl’s clarion call ‘To the things themselves!’, but understands this call as one that Husserl is delivering as a message from the ‘things themselves’. From (but not thru) the self to the things that call us.   Heraclitus initiated this tradition of meditation when he declared in his fragment (80) “I have sought for myself.” [Burnet] “I have inquired of myself.” [Patrick] “Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.” [Haxton]  But with Heraclitus the turn to self was a way or path to the ground, the more fundamental organizing power of Logos.  Homologein is the gathering of the self in relation to the gathering happening via Logos.    It takes little effort to understand how our terms ‘meditation’ and ‘meditate’ retain the original sense of a thinking that attends to otherwise than the self, that thinks from beyond the self; a horizontal transcendence into things that, with this evacuation opens up the possibility for ‘self’-transformation, a formation of the self.  (This is the exegesis announced above).  The etymology of meditate and meditation reveals the roots in the Latin meditari (meditate) and the Greek medeshtai (care for).  The Greek roots reveal how meditation is an attentiveness, and its link to ‘mete’ (to measure out) reveal how meditation is a careful measuring, a proportionate formation. 

To understand this move I’ve just sketched out I need to show the connection between my neologism ‘anthropoetikos’ and the Heraclitean homologein, which is to say, I need to share a revelatory passage from Schürmann that I re-read this morning as part of my ongoing preparation for next week’s C&E lecture on Heraclitus:

“Heidegger sometimes writes ‘the Logos’ (capitalized) to underscore it’s a priori character and to point out the relation between condition and conditioned.  ‘The Logos preserve man’s obedient belonging to being, that is to say, by its measures it grants [such belonging] and by its measures it simultaneously denies it.’  Such gauging, which inescapably situates all our doings, is what Heraclitus called homologein: homologizing in the sense of ‘setting the human logos in its proper relation to Logos.’   The hardest apprenticeship is that by which man learns how to hear and heed no imperative other than that relation.  There is, then, a practical wisdom that consists in speaking and acting (human legein) by attending solely to the layout of presencing (economic Logos).  Acting as homologizing is nothing other than acting kata phusin: following the coming-about of phenomena, giving oneself over to the movement of presencing-absencing…Indeed, ‘human legein is in itself at the same time poiein, ‘leading forth’; now homologein means to conform human legein to ‘the Logos as Aletheia as Phusis’ – to act, therefore, is to homologize with the aletheiological constellations as they come about… ‘Proper knowing comes about as the soul’s legein corresponds to ‘the Logos.’…Originary knowledge is thus something to be gained, conquered by the logical measure over hubris, the lack of measure.  This is a practical conquest, the birth of practical wisdom: ‘The issue of logic understood more originarily is such a ‘doing’, which is at the same time a ‘letting.’”(176)

‘Anthropoetikos’: the learner as mimetic thinker, the one who learns by following instructions: this is the practical turn of learning that happens when subjectivity – the will to power, domination – gives way to subjectus (modality of being ‘brought under’)  This is person as the subject of learning in the sense of being the phenomenon of study.  Here Thoreau’s ‘translation’ indicates homologein (homologizing) as the self-study happening to the person.  The solipsism is broken when the self recognizes it is subject to the law of presencing, to Being’s Becoming immediately and viscerally experienced as the force of Nature’s law.    There is no mystery, no mysticism here, because the onotological is disclosed phenomenologically.   Effacement with fire, lightning, forest, mountain, lake, etc., prepare one for the greater challenge of following the presencing within the human world.  This is why dialogue, which is always organized through silence and listening,  is hailed as the way of mimetically building a community, an intersubjective relational network that imitates the organic unity of Nature.   ‘Culture follows Nature’ is the most succinct way of articulating the subjectus that brings forth the apprenticeship of homologizing that forms (gathers, measures, metes, meditates)  anthropoetikos.

The writing from this day ten years ago describes how the ‘logic’ of homologizing is encountered in a twofold break with the present, and a return to the past.   The return of Mother Memory is thus understood as what Schürmann calls the never ceasing ‘shining’ of the “original wisdom, sophia” through the “erasure” happening under the weight of contemporary dogmas (for my project, the dogma of ‘measurable outcomes’, an assessment regime that has little or nothing to do with the measuring made by Logos).  “Original wisdom, sophia, never ceases shining through the dogmas of sapiential metaphysics.”  Mother Memory stands for the learning of practical wisdom  that begins with learning of close listening, the return to originary hearing and the original silence.  The writing from 9/26/04 (BL 220) describes the epoch of going under as the movement into the place where the sophia  is shining.   The move is described as a ‘closing’ of an era when “we experience a re-turn to the past as a re-collection and re-newing of tradition.”  The renewal is a building of a poetic dwelling in that place, the clearing, where the perennial wisdom of Logos is appearing.  This is the work of anthropoetikos, the building that is renewal, and, overall, an ‘imitation’ of past practices.  “Making the new is a rebuilding of the old, a reconstruction of that tradition.  The era of going under is thus not a nostalgic and romantic flight from the present into the past.  On the contrary, only with the re-appropriation of the past can the sacrifice to the futural be made.”   As Schürmann puts it: ‘this is a practical conquest; originary knowledge is something to be gained.’  Running ahead to the past, is how Heidegger puts it.   I would shift it to: running back to the future.  (Although I might prefer ‘hiking’ to ‘running’.)