PPM31 happens on the morning after the arrival of the rain in the desert, always a special event, indeed, an event, especially in a place that has experienced a draught for what I understand to be three years. The arrival of the water is most certainly coincidental with the content of Socrates' speech in the Symposium, which we have not begun listening to. Indeed, in a moment of philosophical prognostication, the rain followed the saying of Socrates, when he told us of Diotima's teaching of the philosophy of love, which occurs as a kind of revelation that draws one into state of contemplation: "And, turning his eyes toward the open sea of beauty, he will find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest thought, and reap a golden harvest of philosophy, until, confirmed and strengthened, he will come upon one single form of knowledge, the knowledge and beauty I am about to speak of." (Symposium, 210d) The focus of PPM31, and what I also emphasize in my post-reading commentary, is how the form and content of Socrates' speech, which in PPM30 commentary I described as the narrative form, collapses. Indeed, the form and collapse are joined together and synthesized through revelatus (to reveal, uveil), revelation. Diotima's is a revealed truth, is a teaching that unveils the philosophy of Love, and shows us that philosophy, as a practice, is itself an unveiling of Love by taking us to this ground. Using the terms of phenomenology, the reduction is to Love as the fundamental ground of the human condition, of human experience. And this is why Socrates insists this is all that he truly understands, because, after all, despite 'not knowing anything at all' he takes up the practice of philosophy, conversing and dialoguing with friends, and/or hoping to make friends out of his conversations. In fact, it is in the face of 'not knowing anything at all' that he takes up this practice, and this is why, as I said to my friends last night at dinner, that philosophy is the response to the disjointed sense of our experience. When Arendt says we undertake philosophy out of a love for the world, she adds that this care-taking is one that comes from a felt perception that the 'world is out of joint,' is and calling on us to repair and renew it.
World for Arendt is precisely the result of human hands and hearts, what we make that simultaneously brings us together and keeps us distinct, like a table where we gather and the bread that we break, together, and share, along with a cup, and talk. But is the world only the dwelling where humans dwell? And is this world making, cultivating and repairing our response to Being's presencing/becoming, and what we might call 'learning'? And if this is the case, then, our world or worlds are primary for us, but secondary in the order of things, so to speak. More primary and fundamental is Being. But is it the case the philosophical reduction to Love is only a reduction to what is primary for humans but not originary (originally from) Being? Can we ascribe Love to Being? This is something I am thinking a lot about these days, especially in the wake of the conversation I had last night with my colleagues and very good friends, Troy Richardson and Frank Margonis. I anticipate continuing these discussions over the course of our weekend together here in Albuquerque, and, I hope, will be able to capture some of that discussion as a video that will be posted on this blog.
World for Arendt is precisely the result of human hands and hearts, what we make that simultaneously brings us together and keeps us distinct, like a table where we gather and the bread that we break, together, and share, along with a cup, and talk. But is the world only the dwelling where humans dwell? And is this world making, cultivating and repairing our response to Being's presencing/becoming, and what we might call 'learning'? And if this is the case, then, our world or worlds are primary for us, but secondary in the order of things, so to speak. More primary and fundamental is Being. But is it the case the philosophical reduction to Love is only a reduction to what is primary for humans but not originary (originally from) Being? Can we ascribe Love to Being? This is something I am thinking a lot about these days, especially in the wake of the conversation I had last night with my colleagues and very good friends, Troy Richardson and Frank Margonis. I anticipate continuing these discussions over the course of our weekend together here in Albuquerque, and, I hope, will be able to capture some of that discussion as a video that will be posted on this blog.
3.0 - These musings on the Symposium Socrates has helped me understand a possible organizing pattern or map of the thinking I will expressing in the Routledge book I;ll be writing this summer and fall. I've been focusing intensely on the music-making Socrates as the exemplar of poetic practice, or, better an exemplar, and perhaps an original -- in all the senses of originality (origin, originary, originating). So intensely that I have lately paid little attention to the other Socrates personas or performances. Foucault's therapist Socrates, and parrhesiastic Socrates; Arendt's friendship making, aporetic itinerant, circular peripatetist. Much less the actual performances in Crito, Apology and the Symposium. The meditation and commentary from this day 10/20 years ago calls attention to the didactic speech making Socrates, and the original mediations that unfolded 20 years ago ruminate on the anomaly of this didactic Socrates, who, to be fair, and from a distance of 20 years and recent study of Heidegger, appears to be performing the role of the pointer. The pointer is Heidegger's figure who is draw into the event of withdrawal, the mystery of what arouses or provokes our concern, such that we respond with care, or caring about it. This event occurs within significant situations. And such significant situations can occur both when we anticipate them, like, for example when we are engaged with a passion, which in all cases can be described as a craft, because it involves some techne. Poiesis is the response to the originary arousal and provocation. In the case of Socrates, one could hear his speech in Symposium as precisely about the pathos of eros, phyllia, and agape.
ReplyDeleteFor Socrates, the pathos or passion is lived again and again through dialogue, his poetics of philosophy. His work is making music, and his techne is dialgoue. And during this past week's study of Heidegger in the transition from reading to writing, we read p 9 in lecture 1 from "What is Called Thinking?" and derived from the following passage that one could read "pointing" as writing, which I followed with the story of Thoth from Plato's Phaedrus, the god who gave us writing, and had the head of an Ibis, the bird with the long and narrow beak, which comes to a point, like that of any writing tool.
3.0.b - The passage from Heidegger: "what concerns and touches [us] -- touches us in the surely mysterious way of escaping us by withdrawing. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything real. What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal...Once we are drawn into the withdrawal we are drawing towards what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal...When we are drawn towards what withdraws, we ourselves are pointers pointing toward it...To the extent that we are drawing that way, we point toward what withdraws. As we are pointing that way, we are the pointer...Our essential nature lies in being such a pointer." There are seemingly innumerable ways to interpret the pointer as our essential nature. Because there are seemingly innumerable ways to point, which almost sound sublimely Seussian. But there it is! I hear many allusions to writing in that passage, and one could even feel the rhythm and motion of writing, the pointing and drawing of the pen, drafting, as it were, which is how he later on in the lecture describes what Socrates did that earned him the title from Heidegger as "the purest thinking in the West." And why is he the purest thinker in the West? Because he "wrote nothing." This certainly renders the song writer Socrates a caricature. But adds quality to the spoken word Socrates in all his guises. Heidegger writes: "Whenever we are properly drawing that way, we are thinking -- even though we may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever. All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. That is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives." This passage will intro part 3 of the book: Dialogue.
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