The Arrhythmic Blues: The Rhythm of Learning and How Humanity’s Natural Propensity for Arrhythmia May Doom Civilization

Abstract

IntroductIon In this essay, I explore the imbroglios of human activity. Two concepts will be critical for this inquiry: rhythm and timing. Both concepts have broad implications for human life and demarcate the zone in which process ontologies are built and affirmed. Drawing on Henri Bergson, Martha Russell, and, to a lesser extent, John Dewey, I explore rhythm as an aspect of any educative experience, and I explore how it creates a particular duration,1 successfully timed through a series of bodily contractions (repetitions, complete circuits, or beats). The very intellectual process of recognizing rhythm, however, can lead to the arrhythmia of being(s) in process. An imbroglio happens when elan vital, in any of its manifestations, loses rhythmic timing by its overutilization or underutilization of the spatializing function of symbolic activity, which then leads to discoordination and exponential arrhythmic “build up.” Bergson reveals how the human animal (unfortunately) has a natural propensity to become arrhythmic and thus find itself in an imbroglio. Imbroglios can have disastrous consequences on the individual, cultural, and (especially) civilizational, level.