OPM 230(31), October 2nd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 225-226

First, a debrief on the lecture: it seemed to go well, and better than it felt when I giving it.  I say that because there were moments when I lost my focus…or maybe it was just my place…or both…and whatever it was, there were moments when it didn’t feel as if what I was saying corresponded to what I had intended to say, or corresponded to the way I had imagine it would sound when I said it.  I realize this all sound a bit confusing…and this seems to be the way of things for me today…which is actually quite close to a demonstration of the Heraclitean pursuit of wisdom: the practice of learning how to listen to Logos, which is another way of say, the practice of learning how to listen closely to the hidden harmony…the way things are being gathered around us…including ourselves.   So my self-perception/perception of my self making the presentation on Heraclitus was, well, fragmentary…or Heraclitean.  But what else could I have expected from the lecture?  After all one of the major aims of the lecture was ‘to welcome Heraclitus into our company,’ or, as I suggested at the end, to stand by the Fire with him.  Presuming that aim was plausible, how would one know if Heraclitus had entered into our company?   That would depend on what one means by ‘Heraclitus’ and here my definition of the philosopher as  ‘trope’ or ‘worldview’ is helpful, I suppose, because the presence of ‘Heraclitus’ or the Heraclitean worldview would be felt in the  mood of the room, but, moreover, in the legein (speaking, saying) of the one who is welcoming him…in this case me.  All this now a circular way of describing the experience as a ‘success’ insofar as I was able to welcome ‘Heraclitus’ into our midst, into the company of the 250 Hofstra Honors College students and their faculty for the Fall 2014 semester of Culture and Expression. 

From a practical perspective, ‘success’ can also be measured in quantitative terms:  I was able to make through each and every one of my slides – although at one point I lost track of the correspondence between my notes and the slides.   Nevertheless I neither felt rushed, nor did it end with too much time remaining.  In fact, I ended at precisely 5 minutes after the hour (the scheduled end of session) and did so with an emphatic conclusion via Schürmann and “the hardest apprenticeship”.  The notes for the final slide read:

To listen to Heraclitus listening to Logos is to hear a call for a kind of learning, what 20^th century philosopher, and one of my teachers, Reiner Schürmann called: “The hardest apprenticement.”

"The hardest apprenticeship is that by which [people] learn how to hear and heed no other imperative than the relation…of human logos in its proper relation to the Logos.  There is then a practical wisdom…to preserve from the Greeks…Originary knowledge is thus something to be gained…over hubris…This is a practical conquest, the birth of practical wisdom."

I improvised with Schürmann’s words, which helped underline and bring to conclusion what I repeatedly (unexpectedly and spontaneously) called the ‘educational question’ and the ‘educational challenge’ or the ‘implication for learning’.  That phrasing arose out of my philosophy of education class, which meets in the hour and a half before the honors college course.   And it is, in large part, because of the focus of that group on Heidegger this week that I’ve was totally primed to give the Heraclitus lecture.   

The ‘disconnect’ between self perception/perception of the self and the reception of the self is confounding, for sure, and is actually a case of the necessity of community qua fellowship koinonia as the only corrective to this trap of solipsism.  In short, the stultifying limits of the didactic teacher are overcome in and through the learning community.  And with that claim I return to the commemorative…

Yesterday when taking up the physicality and embodied experience of ‘hestitation’ I was recounting the traces of this category in subsequent presentations, publications, and even the video I recorded on the threshold scholar.  I had also intended to include one of the most recent publications, one of the meditations placed in-between the lyrics and/or song titles in the libretto of Sam Rocha’s album Late to Love.  The relevant “Palabras Entre Nosotros,” as each of the mediations are called, which expresses the embodied swaying and swinging of ‘hesitation’ is the one appearing in-between “Alien House” and “Nemo Est (Qui Non Amet)”:

La voz del pueblecito was interrupted one day, on Fourth Street, by a troubadour who sauntered into town with a gait not seen in the hamlet since the time before the elders were children.  He was soon followed by another, and then another, and still another who moved a bit slower than the rest, lingering from time to time to admire the hanging flower pots on the verandas.   The second troubadour sang ahead to the first, “Look, see the river!”  The third one responded, “I heard it before we entered this valley.  I felt its current in my heart.”  The fourth one smiled, eyes closed, and registered the river’s flow in his heart.  A longing for home filled him with a desire for freedom.  But his wings were not ready for flight.  

La voz del pueblecito exhaled and gathered itself, but not before the first troubadour stopped and removed a colorful bag from his back and revealed a mandolin.   He began to pluck the strings, while the second and third joined him, removing similar bags from their shoulders.  They unpacked various small drums, bells, and a slightly larger mandolin with thicker strings.  The fourth troubadour turned and walked toward the river.   

La voz del pueblecito began to sing, while the trio of troubadours coaxed it to registers both higher and lower than it had ever sung before.   Dancing followed, then laughter.  It was all very natural, and without a hint of self-awareness every resident of the hamlet joined in the festivities.   Well, almost everyone.

There were some who were away that day.  Others who arrived later than too late to sing, or dance.  And still others who shrugged their shoulders and went in the opposite direction when they heard the music, turning their backs to the festival of dance and song.  And at least two of the villagers slept soundly during the impromptu festival, and dreamed the whole scene.  (And no one believed them when they shared their shared dream.)

The writing/thinking/mediation from this day ten years ago is revealing mix of exegesis and what I would now call originary thinking (a category that could only have been identified after the year long experiment as my own exercise of phenomenology after Heidegger).   The originary writing follows the exegesis, which is the proper order of things, as I suggest in the paper on apathetic reading that I wrote and presented earlier this year and mentioned in yesterday’s commentary.  Originary writing is an exegetical response, and thus an example of the mimetic process of human legein following Logos, although here it presumed there are works worthy of imitating, or those that are hermeneutically fecund.   Heraclitus’ fragment, “Wise are those who listen not to me but to Logos,” presents the schemata of a originary writing that we may have to call ‘primal’ because it is first in the Logos>legein order.   When Heraclitus tells us to listen to Logos he means both ‘listen for yourself to Logos,’ and ‘listen to me listening to Logos.’  It is the later that I would describe as the ‘primary’ or ‘elementary’ instruction that teaches us to read exegetically – which has everything to do with the exit from ourselves and into the open region, the location of receptivity – and, in turn, mimetically reproduce what we have read/heard.

10.2.04 (BL 225) begins and is sustained with an exegetical response to Heidegger’s ‘reticence’ that I read as ‘hesitation.’  In this hesitation we have recognized the pause before entering the learning community.  Next it appears as the learning of close listening and the formation happening via the reception of legein: the formation of the logic of perception, the logos of perceiving the gathering of things: “reticence in silence is the ‘logic’ of philosophy, insofar as philosophy asks the grounding-question from within the other-beginning.”(BL 225)  ‘Other-beginning’ was deployed again years later in the very PES 2011 St. Louis paper I cited in yesterday’s commentary.  This ‘other-beginning’ is the second beginning, originary thinking as an outcome of the event of appropriation. On 10.2.04 it is “the epoch of going-under” or the movement into learning community and attaining “the consciousness of being-together.”  Zarathustra is the exemplar of the one whose descent embodies the essential swaying.  In what sense does the one with outstretched arms embody the essential swaying?  In the sense that out-stretched arms embody the receptivity of close listening.  Before making speeches, Zarathustra makes the gesture of one ready to listen, one not yet ready to speak.  In this sense he is reticent: “reticence in silence [which] means mindful lawfulness…the hinting-resonating hiddenness (mystery) of enowing (the hesitating refusal).” 

Closing the circle from today’s lecture, the meditation written this same day ten years ago turns to Heraclitus and describes the essential swaying as what he “calls the hidden harmony.”  This is the gathering force of Logos that moves us: “a movement moved by the hearing of the ‘hinting-resonating hiddenness (mystery) of enowing.”   Hidden and hiddenness are analogous or perhaps synonymous, and in either case the essential swaying of Logos gathers and moves those who have learned to listen to it.