PPM28 is read from the verranda (the threshold?!) at the Hotel Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where I have come for the annual Philosophy of Education (PES) conference. In my post-reading commentary I note that it is deeply coincidental that I should find myself on this porch (stoa) when reading the following lines from the Symposium, which I cite in this meditation: I write "when they finally arrived at the party Socrates, much to Agathon's surprise, remained outside where 'he retreated in the next door neighbor's porch...This is very odd, said Agathon. You must speak to him again, and insist. But here I broke in [recalled Aristodemos]. I shouldn't do that, I said. You'd much better leave him to himself. It's quite a habit of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is. I've no doubt he'll be with us before long, so I really don't think you need to worry him."(Symposium, 175b) This is the end of my meditation, which picked from the prior day's jam on Socrates' pathos by returning to Plato's Symposium, but only just the beginning. That is, I spend some time musing on the relationship between memory and friendship, building a bit on Arendt's claim that Socrates' practice demonstrated that philosophy emerges from the conversations between friends, the intimacy that leads to community. In PPM28 I discuss the link between memory and friendship, by musing on re-collection, which is a way of identifying the way we come together, or bring one another together, thus building community from friendship, bringing the past into the present. The Symposium, which is the famous dialogue on Love, which I discussed in an earlier meditation (PPM26), is literally constructed through friendship and memory, as it is a recollection of a recollection, a chain of memories forged one conversation at a time between friends. I cite Rouse who reminds that the story we read in the Symposium, was originally "told by Aristodemos, who attended [the dinner at Agathon's] with Socrates, is here retold by Apollodoros to a friend while they were walking together fifteen years after. Apollodoros is described in [the dialogue] Phaedo as being present weeping at Socrates death about a year later." That is, a year after the Symposium would have taken place. This is all quite striking because it bring to life these events, and pushes us to feel the embodied experience of these 'characters' who were in fact real life people. And this would be one of the implications of focusing on the relationship between philosophy and friendship. Philosophy, understood to be a practice happening between friends, is quite worldly, or, in Arendt's way of putting the matter, is a practice that demonstrates our worldly caring, our care for one another and the world we share together. This is, of course, quite different than a depiction of philosophy as having only other worldly or transcendental concerns (of the vertical kind...indeed, that philosophy emerges between friends is a demonstration of horizontal transcendence). This all underlines the worldly character of the relationship between Being and learning, which, I have insisted, draws us into a heightened state of awareness and perception towards others and the world.
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3.0. - I'm just coming in under the wire with this commentay 20/10 years later. Listening to the video from yesterday, and then seeing my shaded self sit on the porch, reminds of the whirlwind that has been the past two weeks. It just concluded tonight, more or less, with last leg Penn Station to Lyons. I returne from PES Salt Lake City on a red eye into Boston at 4:45 am, and 24 hours later was going through TSA at PWM en route to JFK. I've been up since 3:50 this morning. I watched the entire video from yesterday's 2.0 reading, and it is wonderful. I'm recording the DZ, my spring into Spring who, which always features the GD from March 3, 1981, Cleveland Music Hall. It's the first bootleg cassette I traded for, back at old camp Skoglund (Readfield, Maine) in the summer after I graduated from Summit HS. And then original meditation from the day was, of course, the fragment, "Socrates, make music and work at it." The video begins with "Feel Like a Stranger," and concludes with the "China Cat" extended jam that I first really listened to in March, 2007, and I'm convinced that jam propelled me into a new chapter in my life. That's a bit autobiographical, but family and friends know what I'm referring to. And there it is, the possibility of cultivating bonds with loved ones, friends, family, students, even strangers. Listening is a priori existential condition for the possibility of dialogue, of open, honest and inquisitive conversation. When we listen to the other, we transcend toward them and away from ourselves. But we never quite arrive to them. Nor do we return back to ourselves. In dialogue, we mutually inhabit the open region, the third space, the threshold we share in-between one another. Arendt names this the public realm. Heidegger, the open region. In my project, I currently describe it as the (w)hole. Today I had an excellent second class. The first was pathetic, with much suffering in relationship to a hermeneutics of the Irigaray/Heideggerian "dwelling." During the pathos brought on by the anxiety toward the possible "misunderstanding" of the category, I was able to introduce a distinction thinking as "introspection" (the spectacle of clear and distinct Ideas, contemplation of the Forms, etc.) and "eme emauto" (dialogue with myself, but also the sense of rhythm and harmony). But the pathos revealed that tension, anxiety, frustration can distract and disrupt the flow of the dialogue. The pathos calls out for resolution, and this is heard in the call back to the concepts, which have been momentarily silenced. With a return to the hermeneutics of the concepts, voices can again be heard asking questions of the concepts, and trading interpretations. Learning is again underway.
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