OPM 253(254), October 25th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 252-253

Like the original experiment, Being and Learning 2.0 takes me to places I could never anticipate going.  The daily writing exercise has a way of allowing for hidden tropes to emerge, suddenly, like the rays of sunlight that have broken through the clouds just now on this classic Maine autumn afternoon.   The daily writing/thinking meditation often reveals a path of thinking I had taken before but had moved along so quickly that it was hardly noticed, and, so, quickly forgotten.  When this happens it seems as if the epiphanic break in the clouds is, like the movement of the sun itself (Nietzsche’s “over rich star”): a ceaseless nativity, or eternal recurrence of the same offering (advent, aventura,  l’avenir); a repetition of the very same event; in this moment arriving as a bursting forth of sunlight from the cloud cover refracted through limbs of the same mighty oak that inspired a meditation (Palabras Entre Nosotros) that found its way into Rocha’s Late to Love album libretto.  Same sun, same tree, different day, same offering: think/write new.  The play of old/new, same/different. 

The tropological rays of light that have burst through suddenly the past two days reveal the hidden presence of revolutionary discourse in Being and Learning, and, more generally, in the project of originary thinking.  The dialogic gathering of the learning community is an insurgency, and a violent struggle of ideas and ideals.  As I wrote yesterday, there is an expression of Heraclitus’ “War is the ruler of all things”, which I combined with another fragment to make the aphorism:  thinking is the subject of war.  There is something disturbing about that aphorism, and something unsettling about the revolutionary discourse, especially its necessarily violent connotations.  But I’m committed to letting the flow take me wherever it takes me, and perhaps it has taken me to an effacement with the dialectic that rules everything, including thinking.  If this is the case then thinking, as a dutiful subject of the dialectic that rules it, must pay homage.

Thinking is the subject of war; the learning community must wage a global struggle for peace by leading the movement of the political, the tour of freedom’s theater company. 

Return of the same: the learning community as movement.  It turns out, the sudden bursting of forth of this trope of warfare and confrontation is the return of writing I had completed earlier this year (in April), when I wrote my review essay for Ed Theory on Ilan Gur Ze’ev’s last published book [https://hofstra.academia.edu/EduardoDuarte/Book-Reviews].  In that review essay I already identified the learning community as movement of struggle.  “I also remain inspired and energized by the memory of ‘Gur Ze’ev’: the Promethean critic.  In those critical moments when I take up the hammer, I feel the original force of theorein, that power of philosophy that arises when working (learning, studying) with my friends in the manner of ‘Ilan.’   The collective work with friends empowers and strengthens me to lift high and mighty the hammer of the Promethean parrhesiast and bring it down fearlessly upon the dwellings of policy philistines, metrics minders, and ‘non-ideal’ theorists who celebrate the degeneration of thinking, and the entropic dissipation of dialectical critique.”

Tyson Lewis called it the ‘first epic’ in philosophy of education…and this is true in the sense that the meditations and then Being Learning are organized around so much repetition – Homeric repetition, perhaps – or, better, what my colleague Neil Donahue in his excellent Lucretius lecture (as opposed to what happened on 10/22/14) called didactic repetition.   So I invoke what I want to call the rhythmic logic – the steady repeating beat that sets the groove – of didactic repetition here by repeating what I have written today (above), and then show how this same beat is repeating the one written ten years ago yesterday and today…

…The daily writing exercise has a way of allowing for hidden tropes to emerge, suddenly, like the rays of sunlight that have broken through the clouds just now on this classic Maine autumn afternoon.

 The daily writing/thinking meditation often reveals a path of thinking I had taken before but had moved along so quickly that it was hardly noticed, and, so, quickly forgotten. 

When this happens it seems as if the epiphanic break in the clouds is, like the movement of the sun itself (Nietzsche’s “over rich star”): a ceaseless nativity, or eternal recurrence of the same offering…

This ‘breaking sunlight’ is the sage’s going under, which has been described as the going into and going onto the Open, now identified as the political, the place where the learning community gathers.   Like the sun the breaks through the obscuring clouds and cascades through the tree branches, the sing of the sage, his saying something, breaks into the open.  “Bringing light to the underworld, the sage’s going-under is the descent of the one who arrives to call out…”(10/24/04 BL 251)  The sage, Socrates comes to mind, disrupts by moving against the flow of the marketplace.  Kierkegaard moving against the crowd with “a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere….”  He moved against the crowd, and declared an allegiance to the Apostle to be ‘that one!’  And I suspect Kierkegaard sought a congregation, and actually presumed one to exist in the form of Christendom.  To become what one is…this is what it means for him to exist in his congregation.  And to take on this task of becoming demanding that one take to the street against the movement of the crowd, the mob.  I read Kierkegaard as a sage in search of community, a kind of Zarathustra, or even a Diogenes with his lamp.   That lamp, with its light shining into the faces in the crowd, “that ‘directing’ light held aloft by the sage who conveys the way of learning…the baton of the conductor.” (10/24/04 BL 251)   But this ‘conductor’ does not stand apart nor aloof from the music making.  He is the lead music-making.  If the solo is described as saying something then “the improvisational performance of freedom is the essence of this shining” of the lamp, the breaking of the darkness, the lightning bolt that steers all things.

Heraclitus, fragment 28…and related fragments

Τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός. 

It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things

or

Lightning rules all.

follow the common (koinon)  ἕπεσθαι τῷ κοινῷ hepesthai tō koinō

We must know that war (πόλεμος polemos) is common to all and strife is justice (dike eris), and that all things come into being through strife necessarily.

§

The sage is leads (conducts) by way of gathering together (placing in common) after the manner of the common.  Schürmann: the hardest apprentice is to learn how to follow Logos.  The sage gathers together and leads a community of apprentices; together they pursue the hardest learning; hardest because it is a strife, and struggle; and they follow the course lead by the light of the world (φῶς), the lightning.  Their course of learning is a movement of making, a building. “Edification names the building of poetic dwelling as a creative abiding, and ongoing (re)construction…”(10/26/04 BL 253)  Movement as building is “the encroachment of [a] realm of peace into and upon a realm of constant struggle of all against all…the law of the marketplace…the calculative and instrumental…”(10/26/04 BL 253)  Today I want to emphasize the hardest apprenticeship as a struggle for each together, as opposed to a struggle of each against the other.  It is a stuggle (war πόλεμος polemos) of each to come into being, of each to become the person he/she is; but it is also a collective struggle against the instrumental logic of the marketplace, and the illogical ideology of the State in all its totalitarian manifestations, both close to home and abroad.