OPM 149, July 13th Meditation (commemoration)

Today marks the beginning of the sixth month of this yearlong commemoration of the daily writing experiment: one hundred and forty nine consecutive days of Being and Learning 2.0!

The prompt for today’s commemorative post comes from the most recent addition to my summer reading list, Maurice Blanchot’s The Book to Come.  In the past week I’ve written a good bit on what Heidegger calls the event of appropriation as a way to think further about the gathering of the self that happens when meditative thinking takes us beyond willing to dwelling.   In yesterday’s post (OPM 148) I asked if meditative thinking prepares us to be relocated in the bridge that links Nature and Spirit, and wondered if we made move unto the bridge via the heart?   Stepping back, however, I want to address the anticipatory attitude of meditative thinking, which is another way of describing the preparatory work of meditative thinking.  There is a turning away from the mind (ego cogito) and toward the heart that happens with meditative thinking, which is contrasted with calculative and analytic reasoning.  When the turn happens it does so because we can anticipate the shift from the cognitive to the emotive.  

To write of an anticipatory attitude is to address that I have identified as the prophetic, and this is where the prompt for today’s commemoration is located.  The prompt was encountered in an endnote to Blanchot’s essay titled “Prophetic Speech,” from the book titled The Book to Come.   [There is only a remote connection between the title of Blanchot’s book and what I often call my “writing to come.”  The category I have assigned for this future work is derived from some things I have read in Derrida.  But the moment I came across Blanchot’s title I requested the book from the UMaine library system.]   In the endnote Blanchot refers us to two sources that compare Greek prophecy and Biblical prophecy: Max Weber and Martin Buber.  And Blanchot points us to Plato, specifically his Timaeus, where we encounter one of the instances when he mentions the bacchant state of ecstatic who is captured by the gods and whose babble, which are hardly more than fragmentary utterances, must be interpreted by prophets who are charged with “elevating  [the utterances] to human language….That is because Greek divination is not yet a language; it is an original sound tha only someone not possessed by it, someone capable of understanding and moderation, can form into speech and rhythm.”(p. 256)

Blanchot is quite generous here in a way that Plato is not, especially when the latter dismisses both the ecstatic speaker and the one who interprets his mystical speech and translates it into something understandable.   At least that is my reading of his criticism of the poets in his dialogue Ion.  But I could also envision Plato reserving for the philosopher the role of interpreting and then communicating ecstatic speech.  And I’d like to imagine that it’s possible that he is anticipated the writing of the contemplative tradition, the mystics, such as Plotinus (considered, after all, a neoPlatonist).   What’s more, I’d like to imagine that the lyrical writing that Plato depicts Socrates as completing at the beginning of Phaedo is the precisely this kind of writing, and that Socrates was making a kind of hermeneutic disclosure of the contemplation he was experiencing in the time when he was alone in his jail cell awaiting his execution.  For me, as I’ve written in a paper that is scheduled to be published at some point  it is precisely here that we encounter the prophetic Socrates, the one who is a philosophical prognosticator, basileus or King Socrates, as he is named by Bernard Silvester in his drawing, which I discovered when writing a paper on Derrida’s Postcard (‘discovered’ that the famous  Matthew Paris drawing postcard Derrida  encountered at the Bodleian was not the original drawing of Socrates writing.  For more on this, check out my paper and the corresponding slide show at Duarte Paper Presentations].

 Of course, all we can do is imagine what Socrates’ lyrical writing sounded like. But I have to believe it was an example of music-making philosophy, which still remains unwritten, and which remains only a prophesized project, a project still to come.

Here is the fragment distilled from the writing made this day, July13th, ten years ago:

There is a project that remains incomplete.  This project is the writing to come.  When and if we take up this project we will have engaged the work of renewing philosophy, and by doing so we will have heard and responded to an urgent call that is resounds like the horn of the freight train in the dark of the night.   What is arriving with such urgency?  Is the call a warning to make way or a supplication to make ready?   The project of renewing philosophy will get underway when are able to make a response to such questions and hear the call both in its complexity and simplicity, so that we are neither satisfied in our work, nor undeterred in undertaking it.