Chapter 9 of Being and Learning is organized under the title “Zarathustra’s
Descent.” Chapter 8 on “Meditative
Thinking” is meant to show the preparatory and anticipatory action undertaken
via intradialogic dwelling, a mediation that can reach contemplation. But as Thoreau reminds us, the solitary
meditative thinker is never alone, which is, actually, something I learned from
Arendt again and again with her citation of the stoic Cato, which concludes The Human Condition, and begins The
Life of the Mind: “never am I less
alone than when I am by myself thinking, and never am I more active than when I
am doing nothing else but thinking.” [That’s a paraphrase of Cato’s aphorism,
which has drawn so much of my attention over the years.] The meditative thinker may be solo but never
alone, and in Thoreau’s case experiences what I would call a koinonia with the natural world when
moving about in the wilderness. The
descent of Zarathustra signals the end of solitude and the communion with self
and nature (a thoroughly Stoic position that was inherited from
Heraclitus). Zarathustra leaves his
mountain cave and the companionship of his friends, the eagle and the serpent,
and descends back into the world. From
the wilderness to the world, the place of human habitation. His return is identified as his
‘going-under’.
Going-under has been described in
various ways, and in the meditation from this day ten years ago, it receives a
unique description via Socrates that
is consistent with the urban feeling that has been flowing in these
commentaries this past week, inspired by trip to Memphis, no doubt. If Heraclitus’ is properly a philosophy of
nature, and one that fulfills the naturalist turn, Socrates’ is properly a
philosophy of the city. With Heraclitus
we move in the mountains and through the forests. With Socrates we move in the squares, cafes
(marketplaces), and the streets. And with Socrates we encounter the formation
of the learning community by way of questioning, a singing that expresses
uncertainty and profound doubt. This is
the phrasing of Heidegger who told the students in his seminar on
thinking: “Our hour is the epoch of going-under,’
the time of constant questioning.”
On
10/15/14 I wrote that “going-under is thus a going onto
the Open, that primal ground where, to paraphrase the young Marx, everything is
questioned.” This maps the Open as the
place of the political, and, further, indicates this properly the place where
the learning is gathered because it give rise to radical questioning, which is
not the same as analytic critique, but, rather, the strangeness disclosed by
the encounter with natality, difference, plurality. As Irigaray puts it, it is only in the
encounter with the other as other that I can question myself, question the path
I am on. “The essential sway is a wave
crashing upon the shores of the island of self-assertion…A pounding resounds
with the singing of evocative songs, of songs that express the overflowing of
Being…Socrates received the pounding wave of Being’s call and was thrown,
tossed about…caught and thrown with his doubt
that the injunction, the tidings from the gods, were intended for him.
And this doubt enjoined him in the proper relation to Being’s essential
sway.”(10/24/04, BL 250)
The excess we encounter with
Socrates is one that spills over from his doubt, and expressed in his well
known aphorism: “all I know is that I know nothing at all.” His going-under was the movement of one
living under uncertainty, and bring this to others. He is a sage, for sure, and is wisdom, as he
understood it, was rooted in his particularly human quality of embracing his
uncertainty. He was empowered by his
doubt, and his questioning was a way to empower others. In this sense he was a blues thinker, the one
who fully embraced the tragedy of the human condition and was empowered by
it. His was a muscular doubt, as opposed
to a debilitating skepticism or cynicism.
Heidegger describes him as having the unique strength of one who could
withstand the draft of aletheia, the
simultaneous presencing and absencing of things that manifested itself most
powerfully in the swerve of language.
But hie did not run for cover in writing, Heidegger says, and for this
reason he was the ‘purest’ thinking in the west.
On 10/16/14 I wrote in response
to Heidegger: “Socrates would himself have wholeheartedly confronted that label
on the ontological grounds that no human could claim ‘purity’. He more than anyone he knew of embraced the
totality of his impurity. He fundamentally flawed in the sense that he
claimed to possess no knowledge. What he
had was strength and courage, the power to endure questioning and to compel
others to do the same. It is a matter of
the strength to endure the corruption
(impurity) of our mortal being, and to bring others into the full embrace of
that corruption. The Athenians well
understood this was what Socrates was about, and for this reason brought him to
trial for ‘corrupting the youth.’”
But with Heidegger I concur on Socrates’ strength and
the muscularity of his dialogic thinking
that “withstands the utmost fury of the abandonment of being.”(cited on
10/15/04, BL 240) And on 10/16/14 I
wrote: “This ‘withstanding’ happens with
the Socratic endurance that is capable of remaining in the draft, that current
created by the withdrawal and blowing through those cracks, the gap between
‘self’ and ‘self.’ The one who can remain steadfast in that
draft has the strength to dwell in the ontological uncertainty of the gap
between past and future, the moving present.
The fury is withdrawal of being felt by the experience of uncertainty,
of not knowing, which is the mark of the Socratic wisdom, the Socratic strength
to embrace the corruption of our mortal being.
“Uncertainty arrives with the questioning the enjoins the standing
before the unfathomable depth of the ‘not yet’.” (10/15/04, BL 240)
On 10/25/14 the return of the
force of the Natural Law: “[Socrates’] doubting was his going-under unto this shaking ground of dis-quiet questioning,
where the learner stands before the gaping groan of Being’s beckoning
resounding from the deepest depths of the overflowing sea. But he was tossed
back with the tidings of this pounding wave, with the fury of the tidal
reversal. His doubting signaled the
arrival of Being’s essential sway into the marketplace. Here is the encroaching
movement of the learning community as an intruding force of revolutionary
change. .”(BL 250)
I suspect the few readers of Being and Learning who have ventured
into a close reading of the book have encountered this virtually hidden moment
of revolutionary discourse! The
meditation writes of an insurgency of a thinking that disrupts the logic of
analytics and analytic logic; the ‘metrics’ that are hegemonic, the rule that
rules, the rules that rule. And there is
even a hint of class warfare, as if this is unavoidable once we recognize that
the logic of ‘success’ in contemporary schooling is simply the colonization and
conquest of the ‘successful’ class upon the entire system of education. The learning community and its disruptive
excessive movement is “the pounding wave that crashes upon the shores of those
‘exclusive’ enclaves inhabited by the
men of ‘today,’ those fashionable ones of the marketplace…”(BL 250)
It is a proper insurgency, but
not a civil warfare, despite it being a revolution of ideas fought from within,
a family battle amongst siblings who have been vested with authority in
competing domains. The learning community
might be said to be waging a decolonial struggle, but only because it is
reclaiming the originary ground that, in the world, is the place of the
political, where freedom arises and circulates.
“The learning community marches upon those isolated enclaves with the
beating of battering questions, dis-rupting the domestic security of the
recurring same. The learning community
arrives upon the wave that crashes with Being’s reclamation, and re-claims
those who have been en-trapped within their guilded exclusive ‘communities.’” (BL 251)
If this is an insurgency of an ideal of communal life, then it is a
communist revolution, the total destruction of the philosophical assessment
regime that is producing the atomistic disaggregation of human life. “The encroachment of the learning community
is a march of the Open, resounding with the beating hearts of humanity,
swelling with a fury of a fellowship that sweeps over the gates built and
guarded by those who remain en-trapped behind the ‘security’ of private
interests.”(10/23/04 BL 251)
3.0 (Thursday, Portland, ME). "LEARN" is definitely continuing the critical spirit of "Being and Learning" insofar as it is offering an alternative to the contemporary data driven discourse of teaching and learning. Stylistically the current writing is not as far from the writing that happened in 2004. When I started writing "LEARN" I was committed to producing something that was a bit more straight forward. And the first bit of writing, the Intro and Preface, both of which will have to be edited, was straight forward. But once I got into the flow of the project the thinking/writing was very much an expression of the way I have been doing philosophy for well over 30 years. While the questions I've been exploring and the material I have been studying has changed, my response has more or less remained consistent. It has been and will continue to be an attempt to describe and express philosophical learning as poetic thinking. The Cato fragment from above, which Arendt cites at the end of the Human Condition and that begins Life of the Mind caught my attention. “never am I less alone than when I am by myself thinking, and never am I more active than when I am doing nothing else but thinking.” I'm wondering if I should cite this as an epigram? It seems like it expresses the spirit of the solitude of study. But then again, it doesn't. There's too much of the Cartesian meditator, too much of the "I." The student engaged in philosophical learning is turned away from the "I" and turned towards the significant object of study, i.e, the book. When they are studying they are not alone, this is true. But the relational solitude they experience is with the book, and not with themself. This is an important distinction, and one that I realized echoes the early Derrida's critique of Husserl. I describe the solitude of study as an experience of phenomenological reading, but only in the sense of it being an modality of receptivity. It's not phenomenological in the intentional, meaning-making sense. And the study, or the modality of the learner, is not listening to his own voice, not in dialogue with himself. Rather, he is truly silent, and receiving the voice of the text. This is kind of silence that Derrida says is lacking in Husserl's phenomenological subject.
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