2.20.15 On Self-Overcoming and Thinking

When I was writing my Lapiz paper a year ago I remember discussing it with Tyson Lewis and telling him that I felt it was necessary to retrieve the ancient philosophical language of this hemisphere, but to do so in a way that was consistent with the New World reality of what I describe as the collision zone.  

Here's how I describe it in my Lapiz paper:

Without exaggeration I want to argue that the originary question of Latin American philosophy is the question arising at the origin of the Latin American reality, at the inceptual encounter on the island of Quisqueya between Tainos and Iberians.[i]  The question arises with the formation of the uma pacha (original time and place), an ontological ground thrown up as a new range of thinking when the cultural tectonic plates of previously co-existing ‘old worlds’ crashed into one another.  At the summits formed by this cultural collision zone appears the unresolvable, perennial existential question of the ones thrown into existence from that eruption.[ii]  The question of the indigena (indigenous philosophy) is thus the question of the nativo, the one who is born at that inceptual encounter, and who remains moving there in the heights of this convergent boundary, but also concealed in its caves (pacarinas), and drinking from its highland springs (puqyos).[iii]  What we discover through the reduction I am proposing is a phenomenology of originary thinking  arising from the originating huacaslogical question: ¿Dónde Estamos? (Where are we?). [‘Huacaslogical’ is a neologism that combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek word logos (philosophical account, wisdom)][iv]

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[i] Here I am departing from Mendieta’s assertion that “we need to begin by acknowledging that Latin American philosophy of education is older than 500 years, as it has its roots in the pre-Colonial, pre-conquest time.”  While I do not disagree that that fundamental sources of LAPE are located in indigenous philosophies, my claim is that these worldviews were uprooted from their ‘pre-Columbian’ ground with the formation of ‘Latin America.’ Consequently LAPE originates [is thrown up from] that ground-breaking collision.  I wholeheartedly concur with Mendieta that the work of Miguel León-Portilla is indispensable; especially for my project’s neologismatica, which relies on gathering the remnants of indigenous philosophy that remain after the collision.

[ii] As I was writing this piece and drawing inspiration from Andean/Incan fundamental ontology, specifically from their phenomenology of enqa or sami (the animating essence permeating all things) as being disclosed originally in the natural world, specifically in the mountains, I could not resist thinking in geological terms.  The conceptual mezcla I make between the two allows me to describe the originary ground of ladino ontology as a mountain range created by something akin in human history to plate tectonics: a convergent plate boundary formed by cultural tectonic plates crashing into one another.  This geological event is also called a collision zone, which is the term I am borrowing.

[iii] John E. Staller and Brian Stross, Lightning in the Andes and Mesoamerica.  (Oxford:  Oxford U, 2013), pp. 22-23.

[iv] ‘Huacaslogical’ is a neologism I have constructed for this project.  The category combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek word logos (philosophical account, wisdom).  I want to acknowledge and thank my colleague Tyson Lewis for a lively discussion that helped me find a way to phrase the cartographical turn I am making.  When I offered him an overview of this project, emphasizing how it is making a sharp departure from Heidegger’s project, Tyson recognized that the shift is one from Heidegger’s and existential question of Being, i.e., Who are we?, to my project’s question: Where are we?

It's late, and I probably should have waited to post on this tomorrow, but I felt compelled to write something in response to the prompt I read this morning when I reading Walter Mignolo's recent article "I Am Where I Think".   I find Mignolo's work clear and insightful, and he was a principal inspiration and source for my Lapiz paper.   Of course, so much of what I wrote in Being and Learning, and then in the commemorative 2.0 described the necessary relation between place and thinking.  However, in contrast to Mignolo, what I am calling 'thinking' can only ever happen in one place: the place of thinking, that is structured by the a kairological temporality that remains the 'same' for all thinkers.   What is different, then, and what differentiates, say, myself from Heraclitus, is the historical situation from which we arrive and return when we move in and out of the place of thinking; that is, when we are seized into that place.  

And here too I want to note that insofar as we are seized into the kairological place of thinking, we experience self-overcoming.  The implication is clear:  there is no I when I am thinking.   For me, the move to reduce thinking to a cultural event is intriguing but has shifted the discourse from first philosophy.    

Here is an excerpt from a commentary that describes self-overcoming OPM 292(293), December 5th: 

We need to read ‘height’ as the great distance one must achieve via self-overcoming, a theme I addressed in these pages when I was describing Thoreau’s epiphanic moments in the wilderness.  I turned to Nietzsche on July 28th (OPM 164): 

“Now I shall related the history of my Zarathustra.  The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and time’.  That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana: at a powerful pyramidal rock not from from Surlei I stopped.  It was then that this idea came to me…it invaded me…That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”  Schurmann adds: “In the discovery of the eternal recurrence, described here as the convergence between becoming and being, between flux and form, “meditation” – not theoria but thinking – culminates.” (pp. 48-49 RS: 1987)

It is appropriate to return to this citation at the conclusion of chapter in Being and Learning that is organized around Zarathustra.  It is appropriate to recall Nietzsche’s discovery of the eternal recurrence, “this highest formula of affirmation that is attainable...six thousand feet beyond man and time…the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”  And Schürmann discloses to me the signature of my project, the discovery of the eternal recurrence, what I call ceaseless nativity, is the convergence between becoming (learning) and being (Being)…and the project itself, here and now in this moment of writing is ‘meditation’ – not theoria but thinking.  

Another important citation, a closing benediction, from the young untimely Nietzsche who writes of the need to ascend to the great height of self-overcoming, and thereby transcend to the place where one can hear the higher harmony, the place of those Summits, which I announced in my Lapiz paper as described through the huacaslogical, the thinking/writing happening in the heights where we find the sacred places beyond ourselves, the wellspring of orignary thinking.  Nietzsche tell us:   “Your true nature lies not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be…Your true educators can only be your liberators.”

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/12/opm-292293-december-5th-2004-2014.html


And here are some Sentences on Self-Overcoming that I distilled from 2.0:

1.  As we are taught already in Birth of Tragedy, the will to power is Willed by the Primal Unity, and the self is diminished into the Primal Unity via self-overcoming. (12/8/14)

2.  Originary thinking emerges from the Primal Unity. (2/20/15)

3.  Self-overcoming is an over-coming of the desire for a unified familiar ‘self.’ (12/13/14)

4.  The movement across the threshold and into the Open is marked by a self-overcoming that is an overcoming of the self as a singular subject.(11/7/14)

4.  Through agape we experience self-overcoming. (11/11/14)

6.  My phenomenology of transcendence follows Nietzsche’s description of the artistic state as the self-overcoming that is a proper overcoming of the ‘self’, specifically, the will:  “Learning is a de-struktion of the anthropocentric…the seizure of the ‘self’ away from ‘it-self,’ from the ‘certainty’ of its unilateral projection…This initial and originary state of the aesthetic is called rapture (Rausch).(BL 315) (12/17/14)

7.  Thinking is always described as ‘self-overcoming’. (1/4/15)

8.  The event is the moment of ‘self-overcoming,’ the event of Being and learning when the self is ‘seized’ into the flow of becoming. (1/9/15)