Another late night reading, after a long day that including teaching two classes, and recording a 78 mins session of "Musings" with Sam Rocha (see blog post below this one). I had intended to read this earlier in the day, but I mistakenly left the 4.24 pages in NJ.
OPM 70 makes an attempt to link the revelation experienced by the emancipated cave dweller to the revelation experienced by Socrates when he heard Diotima's doctrine of Love. The latter was taken up in meditations that were recorded in Albuquerque, March 12-17. Today, well over a month later, I make the connection to show how the force that compels the return to the cave is the desire to connect with others, specifically, the desire to connect with friends and to form community. This is a form of love we can call phyllia (to borrow, appropriately, the Greek word), but there is also the force of eros at work here insofar as the the force of phyllia motivates a desire. However, this desire remains powerless, as we saw yesterday, and in an almost tragic way because it returns the cave dweller back to the cave, but can not take him all the way back. Again, he is powerless to return to his former place alongside his friends, who perceive him as 'damaged,' and he is powerless to emancipate them. In turn, he is left with a longing for something he can not have, can not experience. This may be the very condition we are left in after the paideia that has turned us around, turned us away from the attachments that are fleeting and has turned us on to purposeful wandering, to the practice of mindfulness. That is, we are turned on but remain far away and always at a distance from the fulfillment of our desire to be whole, and, paradoxically, to not desire, or to overcome desire, and remain at peace with ourselves. But we are combative beings (existing in the midst of a moral battlefield, as Stacy Smith recalled today with reference to Arguna's struggle in the Gita), and it is precisely this struggle that is at the heart of what I am calling learning, which is out destiny (in the multiple connotations of that word): we are 'destined' to continue moving, and to wander, existentially. This is the fate our of being free, of being in the state of becoming; the ongoing dynamic of Being and learning.
OPM 70 makes an attempt to link the revelation experienced by the emancipated cave dweller to the revelation experienced by Socrates when he heard Diotima's doctrine of Love. The latter was taken up in meditations that were recorded in Albuquerque, March 12-17. Today, well over a month later, I make the connection to show how the force that compels the return to the cave is the desire to connect with others, specifically, the desire to connect with friends and to form community. This is a form of love we can call phyllia (to borrow, appropriately, the Greek word), but there is also the force of eros at work here insofar as the the force of phyllia motivates a desire. However, this desire remains powerless, as we saw yesterday, and in an almost tragic way because it returns the cave dweller back to the cave, but can not take him all the way back. Again, he is powerless to return to his former place alongside his friends, who perceive him as 'damaged,' and he is powerless to emancipate them. In turn, he is left with a longing for something he can not have, can not experience. This may be the very condition we are left in after the paideia that has turned us around, turned us away from the attachments that are fleeting and has turned us on to purposeful wandering, to the practice of mindfulness. That is, we are turned on but remain far away and always at a distance from the fulfillment of our desire to be whole, and, paradoxically, to not desire, or to overcome desire, and remain at peace with ourselves. But we are combative beings (existing in the midst of a moral battlefield, as Stacy Smith recalled today with reference to Arguna's struggle in the Gita), and it is precisely this struggle that is at the heart of what I am calling learning, which is out destiny (in the multiple connotations of that word): we are 'destined' to continue moving, and to wander, existentially. This is the fate our of being free, of being in the state of becoming; the ongoing dynamic of Being and learning.
3.0 - First of all, kudos to me 10 years ago on this day when after a long day of teaching and commuting I recording the video of reading the original meditation and making commentary! If one thing remains consistent over the 20 years of this project, it's my energy and stamina. Although this time around I have certainly lowered my expectations, and released any pressure and stress related to this daily writing. This third time around it truly is a labor of love, and more akin to a daily morning exercise that not only gets me going for the day, but puts me back into contact with the original flow of the project and thus situates the original with the project's current location.
ReplyDeleteAnd on that note, there is yet another coincidence between then and now, especially with respect to the move of connecting what this past two weeks in my course I have been describing as the "epiphany" experienced by the freed cave-dweller with Socrates' recounting of Diotima's ladder of love, which culminates in contemplation of Eros. The coincidence is located in Arendt's essay "Philosophy and Politics," where she makes the exact connection between those two moments in Plato. And reading the 2.0 commentary from this day reinforces a thought/feeling I was having after teaching yesterday: how much of what I've been thinking/feeling/writing since the beginning of this project is the result of re-collection/memory of what I have read before? That possibility first arrived after class yesterday when I wondered if after all these years, going back to my first two years at Fordham, if I was still a "Platonist"? I recall identifying myself in this way back then and speaking to Ewert Cousins about what that entailed for me. And then making a point of visiting my sister Carmen in Boston, where she lived, so that I could attend a meeting of a group of Platonists at Boston College. I want to say that meeting happened on my birthday in 1985. All that to say, I was really into Plato and the Platonists, especially Plotinus, and through Ewert Cousins, was making connections with other spiritual/mystical traditions. "Being and Learning" is very much a legacy project, in that regard. But yesterday when we were working through part 3 of the Allegory, and the culminating epiphany with the Sun and linking that to the aesthetic experience (a point I made in yesterday's 3.0 writing), it occurred to me that I am remain very much under the influence of Plato, who, by the way, is the one who influenced this project from the beginning. It is Plato, after all, who poses the question that initiates this project: How do we turn on our students' desire to think? Thesis: by pointing them to significant objects of study and hoping they will be attracted by the magnetism. This was a point I emphasized in class yesterday: the sheer magnetism of the significant object of study, it's iconic power to both attract and inspire study. And this is how I read the Allegory, and also how I hear Diotima's teaching: the magnetic force of the Idea (principle) draws us if and only if we are ready to receive it. And that is another aspect of teaching -- preparing the student to be ready and to anticipate the possibility of that attraction.