PPM23 returns to Socrates and reads his 'mission' in light of the newly articulated relationship of Being and learning. The trading of gifts, which I describe as the 'give and take' of teachability, is used as a framework for understanding Socrates response to the message from the gods, conveyed through the Oracle of Delphi, 'Socrates you are wisest.' I write, "This news confounded Socrates who understood it...as a call to questioning, as a gift...They put Socrates on his wandering Way by letting him learn from others." In my commentary I jam on Socrates reception of this 'news' from the gods as a perplexing. If the 'news' perplexes him, and in this perplexity he is put underway into learning, then the authority of the gods is put into question, which, I say, is the gift Socrates offered to the gods. How could this be a 'gift'? This is precisely what I discuss in my commentary, explaining that it is a gift because the interruption of their authority is symbolic of philosophy [now understood in the widest sense to include music, painting, etc.] as a practice that opens the space for the regeneration of tradition by interrupting its entropic flow. If tradition is always in danger of degenerating from its originary source of inspiration, philosophy comes on the scene to enliven it, which sometimes appears as if it is being overturned. In my commentary, I speak of the gods being 'replaced' by the Platonic Ideas. The gods may have flown away, to paraphrase Heidegger, but they haven't gone very far. Indeed, they have been elevated to a higher status. If all this is metaphor it is meant, again, to enlarge the conversation on Being and learning and to recognize its relationship to culture, which is, in a sense, the concrete manifestation of the relationship, especially if we are emphasizing the material or made quality of philosophy. Philosophy is the concrete realization of learning as a taking up of Being's gift (possibility/excess) and making something unique with it, which can be understood as the making of a person (forming and inhabiting an ethos), and/or the expression of that ethos (forming works of art).
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.
(20/10 yrs later) - the 3.0 commentary on this day, two days before presenting at PES 2024 Salt Lake City, the project's latest work -- my paper on Nancy, and "being all ears" -- there is yet another moment of continuity. Socrates remains the patron saint of the project, but today, the gift I am emphasizing is not the one he received from the Oracle, but the one he received from his muse, the dream figure who appeared to him again and again. The muse commanded "Socrates, make music, and work at it." And Socrates recounts from his jail cell where he awaits his day of reckoning that he always believed that "making music" was practicing philosophy. And then as the day of reckoning approached doubt set in and wondering why the Muse would visit him yet again while he was in jail in decided he might have been wrong all along, and perhaps she meant he should in fact make music. So he composed lyrics in honor of the god Apollo, his patron saint, as it were, the god of light, of wisdom, and of music! As I hear it, those songs Socrates composed were elegies, death songs for the philosopher, the persona he had left behind before the Athenian state could execute him as a philosopher. Perhaps that's the "secret" meaning of the discussion of the philosopher's suicide, which is taken up in Plato's "Phaedo," where we learn of Socrates writing songs.
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