[Started writing on the Hofstra shuttle bus,
‘The Blue Beetle’, from campus to Mineola Station. Finished on the NJ Transit to Summit].
I
want to begin my commentary by writing about a rare but not unexpected
experience I’ve had today that is more of a conglomeration of experiences that
might be understood to be part of a single extended experience. What holds the conglomeration together, what
unifies them, is probably the nervous energy building steadily like a wave that
is destined to crash to the shore on Thursday morning. It’s inevitable, question remains open
whether I will be able to ride the wave or crash onto the shore with it. I suspect and anticipate the former, but one
never knows. And the possibility of the
latter occurring showed itself today, like a distance ominous cloud threatening
to gather into a storm. Lack of sleep
(I’ve been awake since shortly after 2am this morning) is promoting the nervous
energy, but I have no shortage of surplus humor to bolster me. That reserve is crucial to ward off the
perception that my dear colleagues in the Honors College were exercising
(unwittingly, of course) a disciplinary direction towards me when they called
upon ‘clarification’ on the Heraclitus reading. The humor I speak of is more of a
self-effacement regarding the request for clarification, which is completely
justified, and a polite reminder that I’d offered no directions regarding
the Heraclitus reading. So if it was a disciplinary action it was a
just one, if we can speak of such discursive actions as just. I perceive it in this way because the call
for clarification is not unlike the call to show cards when all bet have been
made. “Show us what you got!” Totally justified because I was playing my
cards very close to my chest. What’s
more, I was almost guilty of bluffing insofar as I got chilled feet at the
eleventh hour about sharing the protocol for contemplative reading that had
been offered to me by Stacy Smith, who is using it in her seminar at
Bates. Anxiety about disclosure my
proclivity for contemplative thinking (what Arendt calls the vita contemplativa) lead me to hold off until this very afternoon
when, while recording the Dead Zone (to be aired this Sunday) I found myself
confronting the call for clarification, and inspired by a probing “Playing In
the Band” jam I made a few abridgements to Stacy’s protocol and sent it off to
my students. Moments later a rogue wave
of vulnerability blindsided me, and left me flailing for hours afterwards until
I encountered my colleague Ilaria Marchesi, the Latinist who is part of the
C&E team, at the Jamaica station platform.
(nb: I started writing this
commentary on the bus, continued on the train from Mineola to Jamaica, where I
ran into Ilaria, and I’m now completing it on the train from Penn Station to
NJ.) Ilaria quite sincerely
congratulated me on sending the protocol to the students, and, in that moment,
I recovered my composure and my commitment, nevertheless recognizing the need
to stay focused on the matter at hand.
Remaining in the state of vulnerability and humility is crucially
important. Having said all of that, it
seemed that the anxiety I confessed to above dissipated the moment I disclosed
it, and, further, when I remembered Arendt’s name for the ‘life of the mind’: vita contemplativa. I think I’ll say something about Arendt and
her category at the beginning of my lecture when I make the claim that we are
experiencing something de novo when
we take up Heraclitus, something that is new for our course, and something that
was new for Hellenistic tradition we have focused so much attention on. And
because it is new for us and in history, I offered them something new with the
protocol for contemplative reading, which one could perhaps practice with any
text, but is designed for and arises from the encounter with texts, like
Heraclitus’ fragments, that are heavily laden with meaning that requires time
to unpack. This is the work of exegesis, the kind of interpretative
reading that mediates exegesis.
I’d
like to believe that the meditations that were ultimately published as Being and Learning were written from the
modality of contemplation, and the subtitle of the book could have been: a work
of contemplative education, or, better: a work of phenomenology, meditation and
contemplation. How does the writing
from this day ten years ago express that?
It
does so by beginning with a description of the place of thinking, where the
epoch of going-under unfolds, the boundless boundary, calling it the sublime:
“the sublimity of that distant distance…”
This place “seizes” the learning/one learning close listening through
the event of appropriation, “the strange and mysterious regioning.” Regioning is the proper name for the event
that seizes the learner, for the event is an opening, a widening that makes one
a receiver, readies one for the phenomenological stance. “To be seized by the grandeur of the openness
of this regioning is to be stilled and silenced, and thrown out of the habitual
habitat of ordinary language and everyday speaking. Learning unfolds in the other of that
habitation, in the enchanted realm of the poetic.”(BL 223) Here the writing is
not only audacious phenomenology (here one can observe echoes of the early
intense influence of Hegel, a model of audacity) but a definitive mapping of
the ontological: the place (open region) organizes the form of thinking into a
“language of hesitation, an improvisational and spontaneous form of
expression.”( BL 223) It is the writing of a phenomenology that
documents epiphanic understanding: “the expression is the a posteriori response
to the seizure, to the estrangement occurring with the en-opening of the
clearing…This is an extra-ordinary form of expression, thus its improvisational
and spontaneous character…[that] irrupts from within the conventional….This
irruption marks the releasement of the letting-go…happening with the seizure”
happening with the diminishment into the epoch of going-under. In the terms of everyday and ordinary
language, the irruption is a sudden break “of the conventional and parochial.”(BL 224)
3.0 (Monday, Portland, ME) The 2.0 commentary is a chronicle of that anxiety I'm certainly NOT feeling on this morning. Sabbatical is a break from the routine, and in my case the routine of a 4am wake-up on Tuesdays. It often happens that I have difficulty sleeping the night before the commute, anxious the alarm will fail me? That and the prep for the C&E lecture must have had me reeling. I can laugh about it ten years later, but there was nothing funny about the anxiety produced by the uncertainty or rather the lack of confidence I experienced going into those C&E lectures. It always happened, and is one of the reasons I no longer participate in that course. That and the fact that my colleague who runs the course hasn't "invited" me in years. I volunteered a few years ago and then pulled out after the first meeting. My colleague takes himself too seriously, although he does have a more natural side that is quite affable. Either way, I'm not interested in doing anything with Honors College. I prefer the freedom I enjoy in teaching my own courses. I suppose that's what drives the nerves: the judgment of the other faculty who are on the team that teaches C&E. I'm looking up at the citation from the OPM and reading how the phenomenological language I am deploying is a sudden break in “the conventional and parochial.”(BL 224). That's what makes the OPM "originary" or poetic. The problem of writing after metaphysics returns - if it's too poetic and "originary" it may fail to communicate. But that problem is only a problem for Ango-American so-called "ordinary" language philosophers. The originary is a negation of the ordinary. For me that's one of the legacies of Socrates: a disruption of the ordinary. The French philosophers I'm drawn to are writing the way they do because they are working within the post-metaphysical, under the sign of différance. Here's how Wiki summarizes Derrida's breakthrough: "The term différance means both 'difference of meaning' (différance) and 'deferral of meaning' (différance), and is made of combining the two French words. Roughly speaking, the method of différance is a way to analyze how signs (words, symbols, metaphors, etc) come to have meanings. It suggests that meaning is not inherent in a sign but arises from its relationships with other signs, a continual process of contrasting with what comes before and later. That is, a sign acquires meaning by being different from other signs. The meaning of a sign changes over time, as new signs keep appearing and old signs keep disappearing. However, the meaning of a sign is not just determined by the system of signs present currently. Past meanings leave "traces", and possible future meanings "haunt". The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs present right now." And, importantly, for Derrida différance is registered in writing. The problem I have with the Ango-American ordinary language philosophers is their demand that philosophical writing must be transparent and "mean" exactly what it is "saying." They put all their investment in truthfulness, and have little appreciation for the aesthetic dimension of philosophical writing, for the truth of beauty. As I am suggesting in "LEARN" the central organizing principle of the philosophical education I'm describing is kalon (beauty). I'll leave at that for today.
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