Once again, from the veranda (stoa, threshold) at the Hotel Albuquerque, I read PPM30, which continues, following the counsel of Bonaventure, the slow and steady pace of moving through a consideration of Socrates at the home of Agathon, better known as Plato's Symposium. At this point we have now followed the story of the re-collection of the event, through Socrates withdrawal in the 'shadowy' porch (threshold, stoa), and finally his entrance into Agathon's. Today we take up Socrates' speech on Love. I note that, first, it appears quite out of character for Socrates to be giving a speech, because, after all, he has insisted that philosophy is a dialogic practice, or what Arendt calls the conversation between friends that builds community. And, as I cite from Plato's Protagoras, the young Socrates had no patience for the art of rhetoric, and upon hearing the great sophist's speech on virtue "gazed at him spellbound, eager to catch any further word that he might utter...Then said, I'm a forgetful sort of man, Protagoras, and if someone speaks at length, I lose the thread of the argument."(Protagoras., 328d & 334d) What then are we to make of Socrates giving a speech? I suggest the following: first, that it is not a speech at all, but, again, with the force of memory put into play, the recollection of a story, specifically, the story of his encounter with Diotima, which was, not surprisingly, a kind of dialogue; second, because it is a story, the so-called 'speech' doesn't offer an 'argument' but a more inclusive narrative that allows those who listen to participate insofar as they can make it 'their own,' in the way that when we hear a story, or read a story (e.g., novel), we are constantly relating it back to our own experience either by way of connecting or not with the people, places and events of the story. The narrative is a talking-with as opposed to talking-at because the listener is drawn in. However, there are limits to this interpretation of Socrates' 'speech', which is a re-telling of a doctrine, or a teaching, the one and only he ever received, about the philosophy of Love. And the teaching offered by Diotima has a kind of didactic quality to it, but only if we hear in that way, which is to say, if we make the choice to hear it as doctrine as opposed to a narrative in the tradition of myth or allegory that would take us back to the time of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and even further back. Indeed, the original telling of the story takes us back to the 'pre-Socratic' epoch, and links that time with the emergence of Socrates' practice. In other words, we must understand Diotima as a figure from the past who is at the same time the initiator or originator of that same practice: Diotima put Socrates underway! Another important consideration of PPM30 is the citation from Socrates speech, where he names the medium through which the philosophy of Love is communicated as "the medium of the prophetic arts...for the divine will not mingle directly with the human...And the man who is well versed in such matters is said to have spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in the more mundane arts."(Symposium, 203a) And, finally, that Love is a kind of spirit, indeed, the very one that empowers the one who practices the 'prophetic art' of philosophy. In my post-reading commentary I make a connection between this moment in the Symposium with that important moment in the Phaedo, which I have identified as the most significant for this project; that moment where Socrates offers us up a music-making philosophy. For me, this yet another important example of what I call Socrates 3.0, the progenitor of the practice of originary thinking that makes music-making philosophy.
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
3.0 - on this day 20/10 years later what jumps out and calls me from the 10 year commentary is the description of "the one who practices the 'prophetic art' of philosophy. Just today in my second section we explored the prophetic as contrast to the imaginative relation to the future. The context of the discussion is the second part of this semester, which is devoted to Reading. Part 1 was more or less an introduction to close textual analysis, hermeneutics of a sort, annotation of thick passages. The transition to part 2 happened through Heidegger, and the claim that the withdrawal from the 'actuality of the actual' may enable us to encounter the mysterious hidden that just might be the most essential (significant) of our present. We explored this hidden mystery as the open future, possibility. The encounter with that mysterious open possibility is one side of education from an Arendtian perspective: conserving the natality of the student. And with the turn towards writing, or in Heideggerian terms, "pointing" (with allusions to Thoth, progenitor of writing, the one with the pointed beak!), the other side of the Arendtian educational imperative is met, namely the relationship to the world. How so? Writing as a way of simultaneously engaging in care for self (Foucault), and care for world from a distance, the distance of both time and space, which Arendt insists on. So now recalling my work on the place of education as a "conservatory of learning," a place where students can imagine an alternative future and take up the possibility of possibility. Writing, pointing to the essential, the mysterious open, the future, the not yet from which the student can (re)imagine, poetically, the world. Renewing and repairing the world -- Arendt -- demands (re)imagining the world, poeticially, perceiving beyond the present, or what Roberto Unger calls "the dictatorship" of no alternatives, beyond fatalism, but also resisting the prophetic. If the prophetic is tied to accuracy, to "correctly" predicting the future, then the poetic repair and renewal of the world, coinciding with care for self, occurs in the mysterious open region that resists the strictures of veritas (certainty). Through that resistance, poetic praxis might be the discursive work happening in that place Heidegger maps as the location where Logos and Mythos intersect. Poetic praxis is undertaken via imagination but stops short of producing fiction. Imagining an alternative future appears to be speculative philosophical work, based on conjecture rather than knowledge. It is a suggestion. It is also described as a reconstruction, as the reconstruction after deconstruction, after taking up the fragments, reconstituting in a new way the remains of the past. In a way, this is what Socrates is up to in recalling Diotima's teaching, in delivering his speech on Love. And this appears also to be how the Arendtian practice of forgiveness/promise repairs the past and thus points to the open: recollecting the broken past and with its reconstitution laying the paths that take us into the future.
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