OPM 294(295), December 9th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 304-305

First and foremost it must be recognized, and thus acknowledged in the manner of the witness at a revival meeting, that today marks the 50^th anniversary of the 4 hour studio session that resulted in Coltrane’s Love Supreme.  At some point in the not too distant future I will attempt to make a deeper inquiry into Coltrane’s studio sessions as well as his live performances, for reasons that have been mentioned too many times in the pages of this blog and elsewhere, e.g., my paper “Learning by Jamming,” which begins in the following way: 

Threshold of Excitation: Before beginning, I invite my reader to take a moment and cue up the performances of John Coltrane et al recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ on November 23, 1965.  Released under the album title, Meditations, the performances are named, respectively, “The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost,” “Compassion,” “Love,”  “Consequences,” and “Serenity.” (Coltrane, 1966)  These performances are dialogic encounters in the ek-static sense I indicate below:  an exceptional case of collective improvisational music making.   The musicians are taken ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ the ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ manner of making music.  They are jamming: making music together ‘ex nihilio,’ in the sense that the performances are not following a score or even rehearsed arrangement but are moving freely behind the charismatic spirit of Coltrane whose saxophone playing set the melodic mood and tonality of each performance.  Granted, the recordings can only indicate (point to) but not fully capture the experience of the performance as it was happening en vivo. Yet, like the writings of Plotinus, which offer a phenomenology of contemplation (descriptions after the mystical experience), these recordings of Coltrane et al allow the listener to become re-collected with their jamming in an manner akin to the Augustine of Hippo’s experiments in memory: listening to the recordings places us back into the event by bringing it forward into the present.  In sum, I invite you to listen to Coltrane et al from November, 1965, and hope your are prompted to reach the threshold of excitation where you might be taken over into the proper modality where my writing can be ‘heard.’

Before moving on to the writing/thinking from 12/9/04 I have to acknowledge, again, the place of Coltrane’s music in the early stages of the original experiment.   In February, 2004, WKCR 89.9FM (Columbia U’s radio station), celebrated Coltrane’s music for two weeks (14 days of non-stop Trane), and it is not an exaggeration to credit Coltrane for being the single most important inspiration and exemplar for the project that came to be called experiments in originary thinking.   I took from Coltrane the example of courage, and the need to be audacious and fearless but also rigorous and uncompromising in working on one’s craft.  Today, on the last class meeting of the semester, I showed the students in my second section a copy of Being and Learning, pointing out to them the Jackson Pollock image that had made it on to the cover.   Did they know Pollock and his style of painting as shown on the cover art?  They did indeed.  And did they know that Pollock often listened to jazz when he was working?  No, they did not.  Well, I too listen to jazz and improvisational music when working, and, I dare say – and did – I have tried to do with words and ideas what Pollock did with paint. (I was only half serious when I said this, because I was attempting to replicated the voice of a kind of academic that takes themselves much too seriously).  That is to say, listening to jazz and improvisational music when writing helps me to focus away from the trap that reason sets for itself, that is, the trap of reasoning.  Music reminds me not only that I am leaning to the Good and Beautiful side of the spectrum, but that whatever Truth I am able to think is always already one that has been offered by way of art, especially music, and specifically improvisational music performed live before an audience or in the studio.   The danger I discussed in yesterday’s commentary with the description of the solipsistic self is the every present trap of falling into ‘sense making’.  Stop making sense!  More poetry, less prose!  (nb:  less prose but never no prose).  Phenomenological descriptions are often too prosaic, but they avoid a manner of thinking that is moving under the force of veritas if they are self-consciously aware that they are always already taking up a perspective, rendering a portrait, and in that portrait expressing something that at one and same time is taking up and leaving aside the excess of what is being portrayed.   In this sense the description and the described remain distinct, and the portrait emerges as what Kant and then Hegel called a thing in-and-for-itself.  In sum, the phenomenal discloses, reveals and illuminates the noumenal.

Appearance, the principal category of phenomenology, initiates the writing on 12/9/04, a meditation that continues to work on Arendt’s portrait of the meditative thinker, the one who can appear to herself as another self, and because of this she can experience plurality [diff’rence] as the essential condition of thinking.  For the past few years I have emphasized this perspective in my January session graduate course on the philosophy of difference (aka foundational perspectives in multicultural education).   If it is the case that thinking is only ever possible because we are able to experience diff’rence  from within, then it is follows that the foundation of learning (to use anachronistic terminology) is diff’rence.  That is, if we grant that learning is grounded in thinking.  Of course, this leads us to take up the matter of thinking, and whether or not it is something we can do together, that is, a dialogic praxis.  The working conjecture is that thinking is meditative and something undertaken in that the ‘hour of consciousness,’ the time opening up in the threshold between past and future when we reflect upon the work of the learning community and prepare ourselves to return to that work.   But even in that time apart we remain subject to the dialogic.  In this sense, the gathering of the meditative thinker  and the gathering of the learning community happens by way of the same dialogic force.   [nb: here is the way the set of terms was put forward to my HUHC students’ final  as prompt 9.   λέγειν (légein, to gather) λόγου, Logos (Word? Truth? Reason?)   διά (diá, “through, inter”)  λέγειν (légein, “to speak”)    Dialogue.  Dialectic.]

“For Arendt, meditative thinking reveals the fundamental condition of plurality, for ‘even if I were to live entirely by myself I would, as long as I am alive, live in the condition of plurality [diff’rence].  I have put up with myself, and nowhere does this I-with-myself show more clearly than in pure thought, always a dialogue between the two who I am.  The philosopher who, trying to escape the human condition of plurality, takes his flight into absolute solitude, is more radically delivered to this plurality inherent in every human being than anybody else…”(Arendt cited in BL 303)

On 12/9/04 the ‘status of the appearance of plurality’ is designated as a fundamental phenomenon to be examined.  This ‘status’ is denoted as the how or manner in which the self as plural ‘appears’.   In this sense ‘status’ is less a ranking as it is a state, condition, or situation.  Statūs is an existential: a specifically human ontological modality.  And it is fundamental, or essential (to use another anachronistic term).   And with this I push back against Arendt who follows the Socrates of the Gorgias  and insists “that plurality indicates the ‘self’…as ‘one single, unique human being speaking with but one voice.’”(BL 304)  As I’ve indicated in a recent post, and reiterated above in today’s commentary, there is no reason to suppose neither that the ‘harmony’ of the two-in-one of the self is an ‘agreement’ or concordant.    Dissonant denotes  ‘not agreeing in sound’, but as Schoenberg has told us, harmony is a relative concept.  [nb:  this line of discussion prompted me to retrieve an endnote to my paper “Retrieving Music’s Soulful Education”: “It is, of course, mostly in a metaphorical sense that I am calling Socrates’ dialogic practice a kind of ‘folk music.’  But the descriptor pushes along the principal question concerning the music making of the philosopher, especially when we begin to pursue this question within the wider context provided by the Attic μουσική (mousike).  And as we move closer in our pursuit, we should keep in mind what Socrates says about his work in the Gorgias, which aims to produce a ‘harmonious soul.’ Socrates, now closer to Pythagoras than Orpheus, declares that he would rather be in disharmony with everyone so long as he is in harmony with himself. (Gorgias, 482b-c)  And this of course raises questions regarding the actual intention of his work: Is Socrates seeking to produce a harmony with his own soul, or the harmony of the soul of others and by doing so the harmony of Athens?  These questions lead me to the more general questions concerning harmony --  understood in the widest sense that includes polyphonic and atonal --  in relation to the question concerning the music making of the philosopher and its educational export.   While Schoenberg’s (2010) Theory of Harmony is moved along by the fundamental claim that harmony is a ‘relative concept,’ we already find this claim implied in Gioseffo Zarlino’s 1558 The Art of Counterpoint (1558).  Zarlino interests me because he emphasizes the power of music to move the listener by “inducing” passions.  He begins the third part by reminding us of the distinction between proper harmony (harmonia propria) and improper harmony (harmonia non propria).  The former, he tells us, “has the power to induce the mind to various passions.  It arises not only from consonances but also from dissonances, for good musicians in their harmonies exert every effort to make dissonances accord and to be consonant with marvelous effect…Improper harmony (harmonia non propria) may better be called harmonious consonance than harmony, because it does not contain any part movement (modulatione)…This kind of harmony has not power to move the mind to various passions as does proper harmony, which consists of many improper harmonies.” Footnote number 1, from chapter 1 “What Counterpoint Is and Why It Is So Called.”  The footnote is an excerpt from part two of Zarlino’s Le Istitutioni Harmoniche (Zarlino, 1976, p. 1). This second part is of some relevance to the question I am taking up, because it “deals with the Greek tonal system, Greek music in general,” according to the introduction by translator Claude V. Palisca.”]

Zarlino’s harmonia non propria is the dissonant, or the disagreement (dialectical logic) at the core of thinking that is disclosed as diff’rence.  Arendt herself acknowledges that Socrates fear of being ‘out of tune’ is “the fear of contradiction…the fear of splitting up, of no longer remaining one, and this is the reason why the axiom of contradiction could become the fundamental rule of thought.”(Arendt cited BL 305)  But is this a fundamental or a normative rule?  Once we acknowledge the historicity of philosophy, all claims about thinking are reduced to ontological claims.  In turn, if diff’rence is an existential, then the fundamental rule of thought would be dialectical (in the Heraclitean, but not the Hegelian sense).   Heraclitus: oppositional processes ἔρις eris, "strife" is harmonized as δίκη dikê, or "justice."  But is δίκη dike a state or resolution of ἔρις eris?  And what of the ‘hidden harmony’? Does this refer to the inner constitution (the noumenal), a thing in-and-for-itself?  If we suppose this to be the case then we can conjecture that the inner constitution of thinking is contra-diction, which denotes speaking against in the sense of a revealing contrast, e.g., shadowing or shading in the visual arts. [nb: more needs to be said about tonal and rhythmic relations].    The problem that persists with Arendt is her shifting from ontological to psychological terms in her attempt to criticize the philosopher’s anxiety about the plurality of the world, which, for the philosopher, appears messy and disorderly.  To me this seems an arbitrary way to make a critique, when what is demanded is a recovery of the initial disclosure of aporetic questioning by Socrates who seems to have discovered the technē  of thinking in maieutics.  In this sense, as soon as he returned to the dialogic encounter with others he put into motion the conjecture that “learning begins in the re-posing of [the] fear and anxiety,”(BL 305) he felt in solitary thinking.  And so in this discovery he revealed the necessity of the other who is ‘not me’, the fellow thinker.