OPM 80 is one of the longest meditations and represents the end of a very long arc, as I go back all the way to the very first meditation when writing about Heraclitus' invitation as a calling forth of learning/thinking. In fact, the meditation is so long it takes me all of my allotted time (a little over 9 mins) to read. (nb: it seems that youtube is 'allotting' me a limited amount of time...because it consistently 'disconnects' at around 9' 22''). So no post-reading commentary, which is ok, because I think this meditation does all the work that's needed to emphasize the connection between evocation, invocation, and vocation, which is a way of underline that the Sage, as a figure, is one who has received the calling for learning/thinking 'earlier' than the ones he calls. And, hence, the Sage can become the messenger, the one who relays the message, and who transmits and translates the call to others. If teaching is properly described as a 'calling' then it is both a calling that is received and one that is made to others. In this sense, the Sage is a mediator, or one who stands in between the movement of the call to think/learn.
Here then, is a highlight of OPM 80: "To cross over and dwell with the Sage, the apprentice hears the poetic saying as an evocation, as a calling forth, a summoning, a citation. Citation, linked to citare, 'to put in movement, summon,' means both to officially give notice to a person to appear, but also the official or formal acknowledgement of some meritorious achievement. Heraclitus' invitation is thus both a recognition of the visitors as strangers, as those prepared to learn, and a summoning of the abode of learning. His invitation as an evocation is a calling forth to all who are present to appear together and in this gathering form the abode of learning. All who are present, including the gods, are summoned to appear together. What is summoned is the spirit of freedom."
And another highlight, which is the end of the big arc: "His invitation is thus an exemplar of evocative speech, that most originary calling that puts us on the way of learning. At the onset we named that kind of speaking, peculiar to the performance of teaching, as the saying that evokes interpretation and thereby exposes the possibility that lies as the matter before us: the excess of Being...Heraclitus' invitation points towards the 'excess'..."
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 - Going in circles, indeed! The ceaseless nativity as re-collection, revolution, incessant periagogē. I was reminded of what I now without question realize is my "method" after I shared one of my online course lectures on Nietzsche with a student was absent from class yesterday. I presumed it would help he catch up with what she missed, and I couldn't have been more accurate. The lecture originally recorded well over a decade ago more or less presents the same themes I was discussing yesterday. On the one hand, this may not appear unusual, and may even be a sign that I'm repeating myself without generating anything new. But that's definitely not the case. On the contrary, I'm going deeper, wider and higher with the same material, and, what's more, new connections are still being discovered. For example, just yesterday when I was meeting with my star student, Georgia, the jazz musician, we were reading a good essay on scholē and mousikē, which culminated with a discussion of the "jam," as the model for learning music, which is to say, the best way to learn how music moves, or as I would say, circulates. And then we read a companion piece that also took up scholē, and from that piece I learned a new term: diagogē. This term is exactly the one that denotes the "crossing over" that I write about in OPM80. Diagogē refers to whatever takes us into the location of scholē, and thus into the modality of theorein (theory, contemplation). The author compares diagogē to a ferry or a bridge, metaphorically speaking, what carries from one side to the other. But I wonder how diagogē and periagoge and scholē and mousikē work together and produce or make theorein. In other words, they don't carry us over into theorein, but, rather, theorein emerges in scholē, which is the time/space or place where mousikē is encountered. Diagogē denotes the crossing over into scholē. And periagogē denotes how we are turned around and thus taken over (diagogē) by mousikē. The aesthetic experience is a further encounter with periagogē, now experienced as the circulation of music. Again, that occurs within scholē. But all this is more closely aligned with the current moment of the project, which has moved away from the figure of the Sage as a philosophical educator, and towards the work of art, which can also be the work of performing artists, such as musicians. It is the work that carries us over the threshold. But that only begs the description of the Sage as poet/thinker, and the evocative calling as a music-making philosophy. "Socrates, make music, and work at it!" Indeed!
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