Yesterday in the afternoon I had a tutorial (via Zoom) with my colleague Steven Smith, the classicist, whose is teaching the
intro to ancient Greek class this semester.
Because my travel schedule has me on and off campus on days that
are contrary to the class schedule, and because the snows have cancelled so
many days in the beginning of this semester, I’ve been playing the part of the
autodidact and then yesterday had a tutorial with Steven, who reassured me that
I am making solid work from the start.
Like this project of originary thinking, which is already ten years in
the making, the reading of ancient Greek will be a practice that I am forecasting
as a long term undertaking. But I
mention this because during our tutorial we were reviewing the infinitive forms
of verbs, and when I asked him, Steven confirmed that the infinitive form is
indeed what is used most often in the writing of philosophy. This is a obvious point, really, but one that
struck me when he described the infinitive form as ‘unbounded’ (hence, infinite
in its application). And, of course, I
offered αρχειν (archein) as my example.
Αρχειν to begin. The beginning? The beginning that begins, again and again:
ceaseless nativity.
This is how I begin today, the beginning of the last full week of 2.0. This project, of writing/thinking,
documenting, commenting, etc., got underway on 2/13/14, and it concludes on
2/14/05, ten years after the original experiment concluded. Each day, for no less than an hour, an hour
that Camus described so well in his Myth
of Sisyphus as the ‘hour of consciousness.’
To enter, each day, that hour of consciousness. This has been the experiment. This is the experiment in meditative thinking
and poetic phenomenology.
But it is not so much an entering as a responding, a response to a call, to
a calling, and in this sense the experiment is about documenting – a category
that revealed itself powerfully yesterday when Rocha and I were speaking – what
is happening in that hour of consciousness.
If phenomenology is indeed a philosophy without standpoints this only
means that it is a documenting of thinking’s spontaneity, of the
improvisational appearance of thinking.
For me, then, the experiment undertaken here entails receiving (hearing)
the call, the one that Arendt described as the message conveyed by Socrates
when he confronted others and told them to ‘Stop and Think!’ First, to receive the call...but the call is always a
gathering, a seizure, hence, why Arendt depicts it as a command, and Foucault,
for his part, describes Socrates as living under
a command, like a soldier, remaining steadfast.
Heidegger offers a similiar description of Socrates when he describes
him as the one who doesn’t run for cover, but remains steadfast in the draft,
or what I would call the flow, of thinking.
First, then, the call, the seizure, being caught by the flow, and, next,
remaining steadfast, disciplined, like a soldier.
Just now I was searching for that line in Arendt, where she quotes
Augustine, and I found the citation in multiple pieces I have written, the
first one being my essay ‘Learning By Jammin’:
Here, my exploration
of jamming is an extension of my project that has slowly but steadily moved
along under the influence of Arendt’s depiction of the human capacity to
initiate or originate. Indeed, my
project of originary thinking
(Duarte, 2012a, 2012c) continues to draw inspiration from the Arendt’s
Augustinian inflected aphorism: “Because
he is a beginning man can begin, to be human and to be free are one and the
same.”(Arendt, 1993 167) I want to expand
my earlier work here, in this chapter, by re-placing thinking into its
congregational setting where it appears and dwells in the movement of philosophical dialogue, which I now want to place under
the category of jamming.
There is no other
epigram for the project of originary thinking than the Augustinian inflected
aphorism: “Because he is a beginning man can begin, to be human and to
be free are one and the same.”(Arendt, 1993 167)
To be human and to be free are
one and the same. Yes! But ‘to be’ human? That, to crudely paraphrase Hamlet, is the question; the question that
confronts us and is placed before when we encounter the call that arrives from
Being.
That is the primary question, the
original question. What remains a second
or secondary question is the one regarding the form or shape of first
philosophy as the response to the question, or even the medium (or media) through
which the call is conveyed. First
philosophy is a category, and gets its name from the same αρχειν that Arendt is
referring to when she describes the human as a beginner. We are
a beginning, which is not to say we are
αρχειν (beginning)
but a beginning. ‘We are
begun,’ is the way I would phrase it, in order to describe what is happening with becoming, with learning as the thinking occurring when we are
seized into becoming. This is precisely why when I speak of
learning I am speaking of first philosophy.
First philosophy is
learning. And first philosophy is the
enactment of our capacity to begin. ‘We are begun,’ and are with (thinking) this beginning when we doing (making) first philosophy.
But this all returns me back to the question, the essential question for
this project: what are the forms that first philosophy can
take? This is where the matter turns
away from what Heidegger calls the ‘problems’ of philosophy that have frozen
thinking and eclipsed fundamental questioning.
When the question concerning form emerges we can work under the maxim of
«more poetry, less prose», and we shift the focus from knowledge επιστεμε (epistemē) to τέχνη (technē),
from knowledge to making, specifically, from the question of ‘what’ (the
question of metaphysics) to the question of ‘how’ (the question of
poetics). Both questions arise out of
the fundamental question of ‘why’: Why is there something rather than nothing?,
which is a form of the question that we are confronted with when we experience
the effacement with Being. When we take
up this question as the question of ‘how’ then we find ourselves placed within
the movement of Being’s becoming, and from within that flow we take up ‘how’
things that are come into being. This
is, for me, the importance of phenomenology as I undertake that practice via
the hermeneutical (the exegetical and eisegetical):
it is neither concerned with ‘what’ things ‘are’ (as if things were
frozen), nor ‘how’ we ‘know’ such things.
Rather, it unfolds in the midst of the phenomenal appearance of things (in media res), with/in presencing.
1.
Learning
is the thinking of presencing.
2.
Learning
is the poetical actuality of Being.
But, again, this leaves
wide open the ways of thinking
presencing.
There
were two other citations that I found when searching through my work for
Arendt’s Augustinian aphorism. I want to
share both before moving on to the writing form 2/7/05. The first is from a paper I wrote for special
issue on Heidegger that remains not yet published, Heidegger’s
Prognostic:
Originary Thinking at the End of Philosophy of Education
In that paper, which I completed about two
years ago, I describe the project of originary thinking via Arendt
We
might describe originary thinking as originating
philosophy of education. We are
beginners, Arendt say, so we can begin things.
In this sense, the ‘other’ beginning describes the ontology of education
itself as that event, or set of experiences, where the human condition of
natality, our revolutionary potential to begin and initiate, is cultivated in
the highest and deepest and widest ways.
This is the place surveyed by Heidegger’s prognostic: the ‘end’ as the
location of radical beginning.
Originary thinking works under the survey of Heidegger’s prognostic, writing its way from the
near future, the end, which is an
exit, the location on the edge of the threshold of the present.
I’m glad I recovered
this excerpt on the first day of the last full week of 2.0, as it captures so
well the circularity of originary thinking, a circularity that is not caught in
the proverbial ‘viscous cycle’ because, like Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, it
is the nexus of Being and Becoming, with the latter always insisting us back to
the beginning. Thinking remains
saturated, and we might say ‘pregnant,’ with natality, such that the beginning
is not simply the retrospective return, the past that we are running ahead to,
but the initiative that breaks from past and present via improvisation and
spontaneity. Something is begun, we are begun, and we thinking this beginning
when we find ourselves abiding with ceaseless nativity.
And this brings me to
the third of the three citations I encountered when I searched for Arendt’s
Augustinian aphorism. Not surprising,
it is the epigram from day one of the original experiment, the citation of
Heidegger from 2/13/04:
“Every questioning is a seeking.
Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought...As an
attitude adopted by a being, the questioner, questioning has its own character
of being.” (Being and Time, pp. 3-4)
I would place this
citation alongside Arendt’s Augustinian aphorism, as a way of recalling the
project as always prompted by and working out a questioning of the beginning,
which is to say, always working out that ‘we are begun,’ which is to say, a working out of this beginning, our
being begun. That is the task at hand
for originary thinking as the educational project of Being and learning.
Sentences distilled from
2/7/05:
1.
“teaching
remains steadfast in conveying the presencing of be-coming, the ceaseless
nativity of be-ing, the existence of each human as free.” (BL 377)
2.
“what
unfolds with the learning community and the collectivity of artwork is the
c-laboration that produces the em-bodiment of freedom, history as the event of liberation… the bringing forth of the
Eternal Body, and the realization of
the Imagination, Being itself.”
[-- I’m struck here by
this move to ascribe (to ‘write onto’
the description) Imagination as the actualization of Being. This is a deft move when it is placed within
the challenge of breaking through the ‘problems’ and thereby returning to
fundamental questioning, because the tradition that has made these ‘problems’
for thinking is the one that, since Plato, and before him, Pythagoras, has
presumed, as Einstein put it, that the universe is written in the language of
mathematics. And this would make the
Maker (the original Scriber/Speaker aka Logos)
a mathematician, and the working out of this universal language a matter
organized by the power of veritas. But…if the original Scriber/Speaker aka Logos spoke/wrote otherwise, for
example, in the universal language of poetry, or better, music, then the working out of this universal
language is a matter organized by the power of ποεισισ (poeisis). Hence, I follow
Blake and ascribe the anthropomorphic Imagination
onto Being. --]
3.
“Life,
the Eternal Body, and the realization
of the Imagination, Being itself is delivered
forth in the bringing forth of novelty…”(BL
378)
4.
“This
is how the learning community unfolds as the festival of friendship…performed
as a celebration of Life, a bringing forth in/with the Open, the original.”(BL 378)
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