OPM 207, September 9th Mediation (2004 & 2014)

I returned to Hofstra today full of confidence that I would find a copy of the Socrates legend I wrote and presented between 09/07-11/04 at the conference REASONS OF THE HEART: Myth, Meaning and Education, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.   The dates of the conference are September 9-12, 2004, but I’m sure I arrived a day early, or maybe two days early, and between 9/7-9/11 I wrote and presented the legend, which, as I described yesterday, was, first and foremost, my attempt to experiment with myth making in philosophy of education.  The premise, or conjecture, for writing the piece, as I explained before and after I read the piece – a performance one person in the audience described as ‘brave’, which I understood to mean ‘audacious’ --  was to experiment with the writing of a philosophical ‘myth’ as opposed to simply talking philosophically about the relation of myth and education.   To me, that would entail another philosophical undertaking that did not heed the call that was being issued by the conference organizers.  That is, the call that asked us to think the relationship between myth and education.  For me, such thinking could be undertaken via the writing of a kind of ‘myth’ or ‘legend’, something that was based on an important philosophical work, specifically, one that took up the very endeavor and thereby modeled it.   While not necessarily a myth, or even an allegory in the manner of Plato’s allegory of the cave, I take it that Socrates retelling of his encounter with Diotima, in the Symposium, has all the qualities of a legend, although clearly not at all qualifying for a myth in the sense that the Athenians would have understood mythos.   Yet, it is a narrative, and he is telling his friends at Agathon’s house a story about himself, and one that is no garden variety fish story, but one that is on par with the legend of the Delphic oracle naming him the ‘wisest’.   And what’s more, this is his telling, and he story, where he is one of the two central characters.  And, what’s even more, it is a story about the one and only teaching he ever received, or so we can gather.   It is the story of Socrates’ education from Diotima, which I took up in the chapter on Socrates.   For me, it is one of the most important moments in all of Plato’s writings, and if it Plato is to be taken seriously when he claimed in his second letter that he never wrote anything but only documented the thought of Socrates, then this only adds more significance to Socrates’ story of his education from Diotima.  All that to say, it inspired me to write my own narrative based on the Symposium Socrates, and imagined what he may have been up to when he withdrew to the darkness of the neighbor’s porch before entering the home of Agathon.  Even if is a belated posting, I haven’t given up hope that I’ll find a copy of the story.

As for the daily experiment, while I did write when I was there the trip to Scotland was an interruption of the writing because (a) I stopped writing the legend  of Zarathustra and picked it up on 9/12, and (b) I took a day off at some point during the trip, and if memory serves me, it was on the infamous September 11^th.  I recall feeling somewhat exhausted by the trip, and also feeling there was something unseemly about writing on 9./11.   In any event, it was during that trip that the project took on the name ‘363’, which was intended to signify a few degrees more than a 360 degree turn – a complete circle – but also two days less than a full calendar year, which was intended to represent the ‘imperfection’ of the project.  Here I was inspired by a building on the UCLA campus, Royce Hall, which I learned, when I was there, was modeled after I building designed in Milan by Leonardo, perhaps La Scala.   The building, like it’s original, has flawless lines, and is so impeccable that Leonardo placed a very slight window on one of the towers, so that this design would not offend God!  Now…I was under no delusions that my writing would offend God.   On the contrary, I was (and remain) fully cognizant of the imperfect and even messy quality of the writing.  But the design of the original experiment, like its version 2.0, is aiming for a ‘perfect’ record of writing each day for a full twelve months.  Here then the reasoning behind adopting Leonardo’s designed flaw.  So far, with 2.0, no ‘day off’, even if there is no ‘original’ material to revisit and commemorate…although that is precisely what I have done the past two days!

But I don’t want to leave today’s commentary there, because I have prompt that I encountered this morning on the train from Summit to Penn Sation.  And it is a excerpt, from Arendt, that picks up  on the excerpt from Heidegger that I cited yesterday:

“The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows.  The birch tree never oversteps its possibility.  The colony of bees dwells in its possibility…

…

It is one thing just to use the earth, another to receive the blessing of the earth and to become at home in the law of this reception in order to shepherd the mystery of Being and watch over the inviolability of the possible.”

I prepping for this morning’s Intro to Philosophy of Ed class, that was asked to read Arendt’s “Crisis in Education” essay, and, because I’d read that essay so many times before, I decided to warm up by reading some pages from the complementary essay “Crisis in Culture,” which like other essays collected in Between Past and Future, are reductions of The Human Condition.  In the 23 years that I’ve owned the book  -- and that book is as worn out a book  I own [damaged by water during the cross-country move from Los Angeles in 1996, and ink stained at some point]  but I continue to read and be inspired by it.  [the other book with comparable wear and tear in my library that has remained in the regular rotation of material that is both read and taught is Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?, which I named as one of the two five most important resources for me.  The others would be Arendt’s Between Past and Future, and Thinking, book 7 of Plato’s Republic, and Irigaray’s “Listening, Thinking, Teaching.”  Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy could replace Thinking if I were asked to choose one book by Arendt.]  

At any rate, the excerpt from Arendt’s “Crisis in Culture,” which I will share in a moment, and thereby bring this commentary to a close, caused me to reflect upon the assumptions I was working with earlier this year, in March, when I was – in light of the dialogue I recorded with Tyson --  working through the ‘ontic’ v. the ‘ontological’, and focusing lots of attention on learning as an enactment of freedom, or what we do after the event of appropriation.   In light of distinction Heidegger makes in the Heraclitus seminar, I would now call that making techne physis, or those ‘things’ made by humans in contrast to those things appearing from nature.   Moreover, Arendt reveals, with her etymology of ‘culture’. The word ‘culture’ I knew emerged from ‘cultivation,’ so that all culture was first and foremost a way of relating to the land, the earth – within the proper boundary that Heidegger describes when he speaks of accepting the offering from the earth.  But Arendt disclosed to me something that I had not heard before: that those same Romans who coined the term cultura maintained it within the agricultural precinct.   With the Romans it did not yet indicate something ‘beyond’ the proper work with the earth, a ‘beyond’ that is expressed in with the ‘things formed by human hands’ (techne physis), specifically, the arts.  On the contrary, according to Arendt, that ‘beyond’ was indeed a beyond in the sense of exceeding or transgressing the boundaries that organize the field [pun intended] of the proper reception of the gifts of the earth, “the blessing of the earth.”   As Heidegger puts it, there is a law governing us in the blessing we receive from the earth.   In the commentaries that emerged from my reading of Thoreau I write of the force of Nature’s law, which I understand as analogous to what Heidegger is referring to when he writes of becoming “at home in the law of this reception in order to shepherd the mystery of Being and watch over the inviolability of the possible.”   What I would never have anticipated, because of his Grecophilia, is how much Heidegger seems to be expressing a Roman idea.  Arendt’s excerpt indicates this when she writes of the Roman meaning of the word ‘culture’, which, she is quick to add, hardly exhausts the meaning of the term.  Nevertheless, she writes:

“Culture, word and concept, is Roman in origin.  The word ‘culture’ derives from colere – to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend, to preserve – and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation.  As such, it indicates an attitude of loving care, and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subjugate nature to the domination of man.  Hence it does not only apply to tilling the soil but can also designate the ‘cult’ of the gods, the taking care of what properly belongs to them…For as far as Roman usage is concerned, the chief point always was the connection of culture with nature; culture originally meant agriculture, which was held in very high regard in Rome in opposition to the poetic and fabricating arts. Even Cicero’s cultura animi, the result of training in philosophy and therefore perhaps coined, as has been suggested, to translate the Greek paideia, meant the very opposite of being a fabricator or creator of art works.  It was in the midst of a primarily agricultural people that the concept of culture first appeared, and the artistic connotations which might have been connected with this culture concerned the incomparably close relationship of the Latin people to nature; and the spring of all poetry was seen in ‘the song which the leaves sing to themselves in the green solitude of the woods.’ [Werner Jaeger, Antike]”  (p. 211-212, my emphasis)

Aside from this working with nature “until it becomes fit for human habitation,” which takes me a bit far from my interest in dwelling in the wilderness…if only for awhile…I find much to like in the Roman cultura. In the same essay Arendt tells us that in contrast to the Romans, the Athenian statesman were often suspicious of the artisans, who ‘private’ work viewed in contrast to the ‘public’ work of the citizen.   Reading that comment alongside the one indicating the Roman opposition of the arts from agriculture, and I’m more or less turned upside down; that is, the connections I have been making!  Consider this from 8/5/14: “Commentary/editorial response ten years later:  Improvisation is the mimetic poiesis that imitates Creation.  Humans don’t create.  We make. -- A ‘vestige’ is a fragment (of course!), a remnant, relic, echo, sign, trace, mark, legacy and a reminder.   Take anyone of these words and place them in the following sentence, and you will understand what I mean by learning:  Learning is a poiesis (poetic work) that is a [     ] of Nature’s law aka Creation.”

The work, the project continues!