OPM 318(319), January 5th (2015) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 336-337

 The Matins writing I was compelled to do yesterday inspired me to wake early on this day – not quite so early as yesterday – and write as soon as I secured my morning cup of black magic.  The wake and write has its own unique advantages.  One is that I’ve more or less gone straight from the dreamscape to my writing desk.  I mention this because in what seems like moments ago I was dreaming that I was at some kind of professional training workshop on, of all things, henology.  A mediocre chamber orchestra opened the proceedings, but, as dreams go, I wandered away from the auditorium in the hallway where Somali immigrants were discussing the new child care policy at their place of employment.   After eavesdropping a bit, I started writing down notes on the meaning of henology, which, I presumed, no one in the audience but me would know: “the study of the One,”  “handed down to us from Heraclitus as a combination of the One (hen) and Logos.  ‘Logy’ is derived from Logos and denotes ‘study’, which is not so far from the organizing or gathering force denoted by Logos.   When we ‘study’ or think, we are gathering or unifying, which doesn’t mean to ‘hold’.   That’s apprehension, and even perception, although the latter is closer to the way thinking gathers without holding.”  The music of the orchestra and the writing of the notes were the most vivid moments in the dream, even though the music was just ok, and the writing was a bit messy, which is probably a reminder that dreams are reflections we receive through a cloudy mirror. 

 The writing on 1/6/05, marked on the calendars in my kitchen as Epiphany, and EPIFANIA del Signore, continues the debate with Plato on language, thinking, and music. [nb: about an hour later, when I was at the gym, I realized the date is 1/5/15.  So I arrived too early to the Feast of the Epiphany…I suppose I’ll have to help prepare! At any rate, I misread the calendar, but the date of the meditation I am commenting on is indeed 1/5/05]

“Plato’s purging of the poets and their instruments is rooted in two presumptions.  First, that truth is simple, unchanging, and seen by those who are able to apprehend the one, singular meaning that ‘hides’ behind the many.  The second that virtue, or proper and good action, follows from the discernment that apprehends the simple ‘truth’ behind multitude of falsehoods.”(BL 336)

And it is exactly on this matter of harmony that I depart company from Plato, who, so it seems to me, justifies his purging of the poets by charging them with making absurd music; that is, music that is disorderly; music that does not properly train the young soul, which is to say, does not properly order the young soul.  Any readers of Plato are familiar with his repeated references to ‘training’.  There are any number of analogies drawn by Plato between the proper form of thinking and the training of horses.   The horse is a prominent figure of thought in Plato.  Perhaps the most well known example is the one from his Phaedrus, the battle between the disciplined (civilized ‘white horse’) and the undisciplined (wild ‘dark horse’).   Proper μουσική (mousike) trains a disciplined and civilized soul, because it reveals the good order of cosmos.  We are all part of the same harmonious order, and the goal of education is to gather the young soul into that good order.  Is this what Heraclitus had in mind when he wrote of the ‘hidden harmony’?  Again, I have in the pages of this blog rehearsed a response to that question.  Suffice it here to say my response is a resounding No!   I hear Heraclitus’ ‘hidden harmony’ as the ‘higher harmony’ inclusive of the consonant and dissonant, and I suspect that writers of tragedy (from whom the original Greek Theater was built), Aeschylus in particular, were writing their musicals as way of expressing this most inclusive ‘higher harmony.’ And if we follow Nietzsche we know that this came to an end with Plato’s purging of the poets.

 It strikes me that the open amphitheater where the tragedy is performed out in the open can be thought as a (re)presentation of the Open.  And the μουσική (mousike) performed there is the one capable of mediating the complex pathos rendered by the struggle between the two steeds.   The academy (academia) is the closed, the place of closure, the place of ‘good’ and ‘proper’ order. [nb:  my description is rendering problematic the koinōnia of the congregation gathered in the Upper Room, and the one moving in the time and space of prayer.  But this is precisely why in October the epiphany came to me via the Pentecostal sound of Beale Street and that balcony of the Lorraine Motel.  For it is on street, and out in the open, where we hear the blues and suffer the passion.]

To the streets! Again, Socrates, the one who gathered the congregation of learning in the agora, is our exemplar, the original figure of thought.  But he struggled with the poets, and it was a ‘poet’ who lead the charge against him, the charges of impiety and corruption of the youth.  But who is this Meletus?  What kind of poet is he?   I am deeply suspicious of Plato this morning, and my paranoia toward him is increasing.  I am sensing his betrayal of Socrates goes deeper than I might have suspected.  Plato is not the John that so many of us have been taught.  But is he the Judas?  That seems to be taking matters too far! 

Who is the one that he is attacking in the Republic when he identifies the poets as those whose “falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul.”(Rep, 382b, cited in BL 336)  My response is to read this critique as embedded in Plato’s political philosophy, which, for Arendt, is exactly where politics suffers the mortal wound. “Plato’s concern is to curtail the power of a practice that he recognizes as potentially disruptive, and capable of leveling hierarchy.  Indeed, the poetic, in offering an ex-cess of meaning, take language beyond ‘true’ and ‘false,’ where it resides in/with the multitude, the ‘crowd’….This ‘giving over’ of meaning to the many is precisely what occurs in the public performance of music, of lyric [and tragic] poetry, where the gods are brought down to earth…”(BL 336)