PPM59 read back at home in Portland, Maine, on what has been a glorious spring day. PPM59 (Being and Learning, pp. 93-95)continues the exploration of the 'truth of concealment,' specifically, taking up Arendt who helps me to make the move to conjecture that the ones staging the cave, the theater of deception, represent the Sophists, or that school of traveling teachers of rhetoric. If the cave represents the dwelling where the truth of concealment is disclosed, and this truth of concealment is preparatory for our enactment of freedom, then perhaps this dwelling is the proper domain of those who would instruct us in the art of communication, especially in become highly attuned to the nuances of speech? In order to support this speculation I turn to Arendt's Life of the Mind where she writes, "As for thinking, the question of where we are when we think seems to have been raised only by Plato, in the Sophist; there after having determined the sophist's locality, he promised to determine the philosopher's proper locality as well -- the topos noetos he had mentioned in the earlier dialogues -- but he never kept his promise. It may have been that he simply failed to complete the trilogy of Sophist-Statesman-Philosopher or that he had come to believe that they answer was implicitly given in the Sophist, where he pictures the sophist as 'at home in the darkness of Not-being,' which 'makes him so hard to perceive,' 'whereas the philosopher...is difficult to see because his region is so bright; for the eye of the many cannot endure to keep its gaze fixed on the divine.' (Sophist, 254 a-b) That answer could indeed be expected from the author of the Republic and the Cave parable." My extension of this in PPM59: "Arendt is particularly insightful here. But we might want to take her analysis a step or two further, and consider how, with the context of the allegory (Cave parable), this conflict between 'sophist' and 'philosopher' could be resolved, or better, the contradiction held together as the moments of the twofold play." That is, the twofold play of Being's presencing/absencing, appearance/concealment that is revealed to us as the offering of freedom absent any direction.
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.
3.0a - for me the point of emphasis in PPM59 is the category of modality: an existential situation that is in part characterized by place (time and space). Modality denotes the "who" someone "is" within a particular circumstance. Hence we describe the modality of the Sage, the teacher, the learner, the student, etc. Arendt reminds us that Plato delineated the sophist (the one who speaks without concern for authenticity, for truth-talking, for keeping it real) from the philosopher by describing their respective appearances, or where the modality of sophist and philosopher appear or occur. She writes, "in the Sophist, where he [Plato] pictures the sophist as 'at home in the darkness of Not-being,' which 'makes him so hard to perceive,' 'whereas the philosopher...is difficult to see because his region is so bright; for the eye of the many cannot endure to keep its gaze fixed on the divine.' (Sophist, 254 a-b)". Of course, Heidegger turns this around, and flips the apparent values associated with these two modalities, and I picked up that reversal in my Nancy paper through Glissant and Ellison. The last example I explore in that paper is Ellison's invisible man, the one who lives in darkness, underground and who experiences the lightness of his darkness. The hero of the novel is "invisible," which is to say, "not seen" by others, and in this sense is "at home in the darkness of Not-being,'" as Plato describes the sophist. In my Nancy paper I write, "With this staging Ellison reverses the Platonic order whereby ‘enlightenment’ occurs through an arduous climb that takes one out from a dark cave of ‘ignorance.’ Whereas Plato’s liberated cave dweller ultimately ‘sees’ true reality in the world outside of the cave, Ellison’s Invisible Man perceives it in the “hole in the ground” where he lives. And in contrast to the shadowy darkness of Plato’s cave where people are kept shackled, the Invisible Man’s “hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light.” The Invisible Man “loves light.” “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.” And whereas Plato’s cave dweller reaches ‘enlightenment’ when he discovers ‘the sun’ (sign of the ‘Good,’ the source of ‘Truth’) to be that which makes all ‘real’ things visible, Ellison’s Invisible Man perceives the truth in “the darkness of lightness.” This reversal of ‘enlightenment’ - the absence of ‘shining,’ truth offered in the gap (threshold in-between) opened by the withdrawal of presencing, in the abyss (void) where one is ‘kept in the dark’ - is offered when acknowledging the circulation of the tragic loss of origin. The original violent upheaval returns, incessantly, via the negative dialectic or law of contradiction, for that “is how the world moves…(by contradiction, I mean).” Ellison offers a striking example of the reversal that Heidegger offers when he focuses attention on the xenos (the stranger) who interrupts the dialogue unfolding in the Sophist by reversing Parmenides' formula, wondering about the being of non-being.
ReplyDelete3.0b - Although this textual moment did not appear in the original 1.0 writing, it is this question, posed by the xenos, that is reiterated by Heidegger when he asks, How is it with the Nothing?, the question that propelled this project. That question is the primary example of an Evocative Question, is a way of exploring the challenge of turning around the student to the modality of philosophical learner, which is a particular modality or positionality, the one that is captivated by freedom, held out by freedom, held out by the possibility of possibility. The Nothing denotes this possibility of possibility the absence that presents the open region. While the settler logic of perceiving "emptiness" as the place of possible settlement resonates here it does not settle the matter. And this is because in the modality of the philosophical learning, the open presents the possibility of poetic praxis, of making something, first and foremost, of making an interpretation, of writing, of speaking in response to the invitation offered by this gap, abyss, and yes hole that appears at the center of things.
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