OPM 252(253), October 24th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 251-252

Before making another step forward I must take one step back.  Back to the conclusion of yesterday’s commentary.  Back to the conditional I declared when writing about the movement of the learning community: “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.”(10/24/14)  This is an implication of all the thinking/writing on koinonia.  I should hope to recall it when I undertake my sabbatical project in exactly one year from now.  And it is an exact follow-up on of the description of the learning community made two days ago, written in the 18^th hour of a 20 hour day: “Spatially it ‘expands’ and takes on the force of an insurgency that has the aim of becoming a full-blown revolutionary movement toward planetary peace.   Such is the necessary implication of a catholic spiritual revolution: one that is universal, diverse, diversified, all-encompassing and all-embracing.”   The play on ‘catholic’ is obvious, especially in the wake of the reading I made of Acts 2:1 & 6 in Memphis, but it is at the same time part of the insurgency of ideas and ideals I am identifying with the movement of the learning community.  It is a political  movement in the Arendtian sense of the movement of that particular place (space) where freedom arises.  [Here I need to recall the commentary from 10/23/14 that took up the meditation from the same day ten years ago that started with one of the signature excerpts from Arendt on the political: “To understand what is meant here by quality requires a recollection of the cartographical and the phenomenology of place.  The ‘political’ is the place where learning as a dialogic event unfolds.   In this sense, the political is what she calls the ‘theater of freedom,’ and there is no better description for the learning that is claimed to be happening improvisationally. Sustaining the political, as the place of learning, is the primary responsibility of educator, which is to say, her authority resides in her taking responsibility for maintaining the political, ‘to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom and virtuosity can appear.  This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen…’(Arendt)”

This step back to yesterday and the day before – in effect, Mao’s proverbial two step back – is not just a recollection of the ‘hidden’ revolutionary discourse in Being and Learning, but also a recollection of the promise made on 10/18/14: “Indeed, if we are going to speak of the common (koinon) and of koinonia then we have to think in terms of the transformative political movement. More on this to come…”  This promise is fulfilled with commentaries that have been unfolding since Memphis. 

In one of his most well known fragments, which I would wager Emerson knew well, Heraclitus declares that ‘War is the father of all things.’  This is actually only part of the fragment.  Burnet gives us the whole: “War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bonded and some free.”(44)   Schürmann, not to mention Fink and Heidegger, would caution against reading this in a literal way.  An analogical hermeneutics is required:  Logos is the gathering force that organizes aletheialogically.  Both Hegel and Nietzsche (who might have learned this from Emerson), understood well the dialectical strife at the heart of Logos.  Hegel built his whole system from it.  And Nietzsche’s hammer was forged in the nexus of that confrontation.  And he used the hammer in the same way.  In between Hegel and Nietzsche we find Marx’s writing arising in the midst of the same conflict and clash of presencing/absencing, what Heidegger calls the ‘fury’.  The aforementioned are philosophers, thinkers, writers, cultural critics, and, in varying degrees, intellectual warriors.   There are many others like them, but these happen to be the cast of characters I was schooled in at the New School’s German founded Graduate Faculty philosophy department, where Arendt was a faculty member, and the person who hired Schürmann, who I was very fortunate to study with, and to this day regret not accepting his invitation to help in the translation of his last published book Broken Hegemonies.

The citation of Heraclitus’ fragment 44  is necessary in order to emphasize in no uncertain terms the insurgent implications of the gathered koinonia of the learning community, especially when it is moved into the streets.   War rules all, and thinking is common (koinon) to all.  One can play with the parts of these fragments and make a syllogism that concludes: War rules thinking, or, Thinking is subjected to War, or, Thinking is the subject of War.   [‘Subject’ in the sense of being a subject of a ruler.]    We have no choice, especially today, to layout a discourse of warfare, and to push forward and into the ferocious battle of ideas and ideals that is being waged on multiple fronts.   Indeed, it appears to be a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, to wage a war for peace.  But the contradiction is only felt when we mistake this for a peaceful warfare.  To cite Frederick Douglass: there is no peace without justice.  And in his footsteps walked many warriors for freedom.   Peace and freedom, as I’ve written throughout, co-arise, and the political is that place where this advent occurs.  But, as Arendt reminds us, the making of all art is inherently violent, especially when we are referring to the material (‘plastic’) arts.  And the poiein of the learning community retains the violence of artistic production.   It is not the violence of blood spilled, although the passion can not be forgotten, but the violence of blood rising, the agitation of the agonism that marks the movement of the dialogic event of learning.   Perhaps the passion should be recalled here and now with the meditation from this day ten years ago, where the poiein of dialogue, “the improvisational performance of freedom,” is described as “a showing of the wholly un-bound, the authentically free bearing of the heart that is offered up for questioning.” [The thorn encircled heart of Howlin Wolf, with its upward transcending flames, comes to mind.  Cf. 10/19/14]  An offering is held out, and like the cup, spills over.  But, in this war of ideas and ideals, what is spilling over from the heart of the community is the beating of that heart, the force of its incessant rhythm, its ceaseless nativity.

On 10/24/04, we encounter the figure of the sage as the fearless leading of the movement.  Zarathustra, the exemplar, who “sang the songs of the initiative, the initiate, the original and originary songs of the one setting out.”(BL 250) His first song is a hymn in praise of the sun: “Like you, I must go under – go under, as is said by man, to whom I want to descend…For 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 cited BL 250)  Here he “echoed the songs of Orpheus,”(BL 250), who is an underexplored figure, but worthy of attention because of his descent into the underworld, which, as I discussed a week ago, demonstrates the link between song and redemption in the face of tragedy.