Thinking/Writing in the stream of
[“When you stop to think how many groups could get any of us
out January second there would be very few of them. There’s only one that can do it for me, and I
hope for you: the Grateful Dead.” (Bill Graham introducing the show on 1/2/72,
Winterland Arena, San Francisco). Works
for me today 43 years later! Repeating
“Truckin’” 2-3 times, then “Playing In the Band”]
“Sometime the
light's all shinin' on me.
Other times I
can barely see.
Lately it
occurs to me,
What a long
strange trip it’s been.”
While my commentary on 1/1/15 announced Socrates the
exemplar, and progenitor of music-making philosopher, the meditation on 1/1/05 denounced
Plato as the unfaithful student. Here
I’m influenced by Arendt who reads Plato’s Republic
as a dark eulogy for Socrates, a dystopian anti-political political
philosophy. To call Plato’s work a
betrayal would be too strong, and I don’t go that far on 1/1/05. What I insisted then, and what I continue to
conjecture ten years and a day later, is that Plato was “perhaps unwilling to
accept the ‘fate’ of the philosophical performance as dis-ruptive and
dis-orderly, [and]…rejects the ‘truth’ of uncertainty rendered by the dialectic
of dialogue.”(BL 332) Faith in the Socratic enterprise entails the
enactment of “the ceaseless spinning of learning (perigoge) that is expressed with the poetic, with the making of
music…”(BL 332) A lack of faith in
that project demonstrates the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, ‘self-fulfilling’
rather than self-overcoming. In turn, it
is self-preservation, and the running for “’shelter’ from the storm of chaos
unleashed by dialectical questioning.”(BL
332)
The end of the meditation on 1/1/05 sets up the critique of
Plato as one who seeks shelter in the “practice of didactic writing.”(BL 332)
The didactic, then and now, also describes the paradigmatic form of
‘education’ happening via instrumental rationality. It is a perverse form of analytic logic that
imposes a form of domination upon thinking.
“Didaktikos refers to that
kind of instruction that reduces complexity and uncertainty….Didaktikos (from didaskein, to teach) is derived from didaktos, or the capacity to be taught, which is the root of docile.
Docere, to teach, is linked to
decree, to be fitting.”(BL 332)
To write from the ‘shelter’ (modality) of the didactic is to render
oneself docile. What force propels the
autodidact?
Plato, and later Kant, identified education to begin with
instruction. This is the classic formula
of heteronomy leading to autonomy. But
for this formula to work the instruction must demonstrate the rigor of analysis
that renders conclusive understanding.
In the end, one must possess knowledge,
and to acquire such possessions demands that one learn how to master the tool
of the master narrative. This mastery
is itself a form of technē, and some might argue that it is the
highest form of technē
because it is the mastery over the force of necessity. An instruction that can reproduce mastery of
the tool that makes the master narrative is one that is presumably emancipated
from the force that propels the practice of mastery. That is, the didact (one who instructs)
presumes to be the master who is not mastered.
Perhaps this is where we can locate Plato’s lack of fidelity to
Socrates’ enterprise, which is depicted in the fantastic painting by the
medieval Silvestri that I shared above, the one that imagines Socrates writing
and Plato dictating. This can only be
the fantasy of Plato.
Plato is shrewd in his depiction of the one whom he abandons
after his death. An example of his
shrewdness is found in Plato’s Phaedo,
when he has himself identified as ‘absent’ from that last dialogue in Socrates’
jail cell. By informing us, his readers,
that he was absent, he is shrewdly indicating that his account is, in the end,
a speculative work, but not, of course, a poetic work, which is a mistake my
Hellenist colleagues make each time they lecture on Plato. Oh that he were the artist that they so
desire him to be! Alas, Nietzsche was
right, despite missing the target, when he declared in Birth of Tragedy that tragedy was mortally wounded by philosophy. Nietzsche’s poisoned dart was aimed at
Socrates when it should have been aimed at Plato, for who else is to blame for
making the system that is portrayed as the work of ‘Socrates’? The original of those masks denounced by
Nietzsche is that ‘Socrates’ worn by Plato after the full-blooded thinker has
been executed.
Plato
is that original mask-maker who runs from the originary, seeking shelter. Wearing the mask of Socrates, that original mask, he offers the exemplar of
what today I call the ‘hermit’, those in academia that I described in my
12/5/14 commentary:
But who are
these hermits? Where do they abide and
what work do they do in academia? I say
the hermit is identified not entirely by his resentment, but by something that
is hidden by his resentment, which turns out to be a mask, a horrible, awful
mask that has the power of rendering others impotent. The hermit dwells in fear behind his awful
mask of resentment. What is the source
of his fear? “The fear of contradiction
comes from the fact that each of us, ‘being one,’ can at the same time talk
with himself (eme emauto) as though
he were two.”(Arendt cited BL 297)
This fear is overcome when this ‘self’ realizes his other is not actually an
other who will contra-dict him, but, in fact, another just like him! Another hermit with whom he can share his
fear of contradiction, his xenophobia, his fear of difference. And why does he
fear this difference? This is difficult,
complex, and daunting question, but it seems to rest in the uncertainty and unpredictability
that is disclosed by what is always exceeding the grasp of veritas. Would that he could
ascend to the heights of the higher harmony via meditation! Oh, but theory prevents him. Or does it?
Is it rather that he prevents theory from granting him the strength to
practice meditative thinking?
Indeed! So it is the fear of
experimentation, of the necessity of practice, of humility and of accepting in
advance his project is always flawed and partial. But he perceives not the beauty of fallibility,
of the freedom granted by ineffable. “
‘Truth’ overwhelms ‘Beauty’ when the self-certainty of [the] juridical voice
emerges from the anxiety of the self who fears the ‘chaotic’ uncertainty and
unpredictability that unfolds as…difference.
Against the ‘other’ as otro
the ‘self’ asserts the ‘unity’ of the ‘mind’ and the ‘agreement’ of ‘I’ and
‘me’. (BL 297)
The hermit is the one who wears a mask. He fears the force of the originary and
risks involved in submitting oneself to its force. Socrates feared no man, and no jury of
men. Yet he submitted himself the
calling he received from the gods who spoke through the temple at Delphi. He was not so much unlike Ion, the
rhapsode, whom Plato portrays as the exemplar of the intoxicated artist, the
poet inebriated on the elixir of the divine that possesses his soul. The artist, especially the performance
artist, is one who remains under the control of a power he can not himself name
or know; he is mastered by a hidden master.
Plato’s ‘Socrates’ is, of course, portrayed as the master of the tool
that can reveal the ignorant state of the performance artist. The artist is bound by the realm of
necessity, controlled, and his servitude is demonstrated by his ignorance. Ion, like all performance artists, does not know why he can perform so well; he only ‘knows’ that he can perform. In turn, for
Plato, and later Aristotle (as I described in chapter six of Being and Learning), the performance
artist like Ion can not be entrusted with the solemn duty of teaching the
young. Indeed, they are unfit to teach
because they remain in the modality of being-taught. The performance artists are learners. Learners can
not be teachers: “instruction must be clear and distinct…that is, in a state of
clarity with regard to itself, self-certain [persisting in a state of self
mastery]. Poets, especially rhapsodes
like Ion, are dismissed on this account, for they do not ‘see’ with
clarity…they do not ‘apprehend’ or ‘grasp’ the truth of what they say, for they
speak not from their own minds…they are possessed by a Muse, enraptured by the
presencing of a mysterious other whose very presencing is…transmitted by the
poetic performance.”(BLI 333)
“We recall here one of Plato’s most passionate
diatribes…against the ‘altered’ state of poetic be-ing…: ‘whence they launch
into harmony and rhythm, they are seized with Bacchic transport, and are
possessed – as the bachants, when possessed, draw milk and honey from rivers….So
the spirit of the lyric poets….For the poets tell us, don’t they, that the
melodies they bring us are gathered from rivers that run with honey, out of
glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as the bees do honey,
flying like bees? And what they say is
true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to
compose until he has become inspired, and beside himself, and reason is no
longer in him. So long as he has this in
his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.’(Ion, 534 a-b)”(BL 333)
Plato is convinced that unlike Ion he is the true artist because he is fully in
control of his technē.
But one only needs to read ‘Plato’ against Plato, that is, wear the mask
of Plato and thereby rehearse the fundamental ontological claim regarding the
Ideas. The song and dance of the
Platonic metaphysician doesn’t simply sing of a realm of Ideas that are
disclosed through philosophy. This is
the standard routine. The more
compelling performance reminds us the philosophy is the technē that
discloses thinking, that reveals thinking.
Philosophy is itself a performance (written, oral) that is subordinate
to thinking. And thinking is subordinate
to the question, to what is propelling thought.
And the question? This too is
subordinate to that which is thought-provoking, to that which compels the question. The Ideas do not settle the matter. On the contrary, they unsettle the matter at
hand: why is there something rather than nothing? And, what’s to be done in the time that is
given to us with this something that is offered? Indeed, the matter is further complicated
and unsettled if we suppose with Plato that our souls once upon a time
circulated in the realm of Ideas before descended to earth. We remain always under the influence and
control of the desire to ‘re-collect’ that time; to dwell in that time. Hence we remain subordinate to that desire,
even if that desire is one that remains, for many, dormant.
In the end, the diatribe that Plato offers against the
performance artist, is one that must include all artists so long as we
recognize that the poetic and the philosophical are simply distinct ways of
making music.
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