A Poetic Phenomenology of Education
Eduardo M. Duarte
Hofstra University, New York, USA
“Education is not an art of putting sight into the eye that can already see, but one
of turning the eye towards the proper gaze of Being. That’s what must be managed!”
Plato insists. This claim is the take-off point for Eduardo Duarte’s meditations on
the metaphysics and ontology of teaching and learning. In Being and Learning he
offers an account of learning as an attunement with Being’s dynamic presencing and
unconcealment, which Duarte explores as the capacity to respond and attend to the
matter that stands before us, or, in Arendtian terms, to love the world, and to be with
others in this world. This book of ‘poetic thinking’ is a chronicle of Duarte’s ongoing
exploration of the question of Being, a philosophical journey that has been guided
primarily through a conversation with Heidegger, and which also includes the voices
of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, as well Lao Tzu and the Buddha, among
others. In Being and Learning, Duarte undertakes a ‘phenomenology of the original’:
a writing that consciously and conspicuously interrupts the discursive field of work
in philosophy of education. As the late Reiner Schurmann described this method:
“it recalls the ancient beginnings and it anticipates a new beginning, the possible
rise of a new economy among things, words and actions.” Being and Learning is a work
of parrhesia: a composition of free thought that disrupts the conventional practice
of philosophy of education, and thereby open up gaps and spaces of possibility in
the arrangement of words, concepts, and ideas in the field. With this work Eduardo
Duarte is initiating new pathways of thinking about education.
SensePublishers
DIVS
Eduardo M. Duarte
ISBN 978-94-6091-946-6
Being and Learning
Being and Learning
Spine
21.869 mm
Being and Learning
A Poetic Phenomenology
of Education
Eduardo M. Duarte
Being and Learning
Being
g and Learrning
A Poeetic Phenom
menology of
o Educatioon
Eduardo M. Duarte
Hofstra University
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author’s Foreword
vii
Preface: Retrieving Immortal Questions, Intiating Immortal Conversations
xi
Introduction
1
1. Evocative Questioning
11
2. The Calling of Socrates
29
3. The Way of Lao-Tzu
45
4. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
69
5. The Dwelling of Heraclitus
107
6. Aristotle’s Critique
129
7. The Saying of the Sage
145
8. Meditative Thinking
195
9. Zarathustra’s Descent
211
10. The Improvisational Art of Teaching/Learning
301
11. (Re) Turning to the Originary Question
383
Index of Names
393
Key Terms
395
v
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
In September, 2003, I began another academic year of teaching at Hofstra. Since I
was first hired in 1996 I have been teaching courses in educational theory,
primarily in philosophy and multiculturalism, in the School of Education. I have
taught a wide range of courses, and along the way edited a volume with my
colleague, Stacy Smith, entitled Foundational Perspectives in Multicultural
Education (Longman: 2000). After years of writing, presenting and publishing
papers for academic audiences, it became increasingly clear that my work had
gradually moved away from the set of questions that originally inspired me to take
up philosophy as a major field of study when I was an undergraduate at Fordham
University, and a graduate student at the New School for Social Research. Back
then, I was passionate about the Big Questions concerning the presence of Being,
freedom, and nature. I read philosophy for inspiration, and because I had a passion
for speculation. I spent hours in the library, and in dialogue with my fellow
students who shared a love of philosophy. It was fun and exciting, and it was a
principle source for meaning making in my life. When I took my position at
Hofstra it was with the hope that I would be able to communicate the inspiration I
had received in the study of philosophy, which, as I see it, takes us to the heart of
learning.
Two years after earning tenure at Hofstra I came to the realization that my
writing had become a bit too technical, and, moreover, the questions I was
pursuing seemed far removed from those that originally inspired me to take up
philosophy. I wondered what had happened to those Big Questions. Indeed, I
sincerely wondered what had happened to that passion, and took it up as a
philosophical ‘problem.’ When I say ‘took it up’ I mean that I identified the
‘passion for philosophy’ as a phenomenon of singular importance for my field,
philosophy of education. The underlying premise is simple: the love of wisdom
(the literal meaning of philo-sophia) is akin to the love of learning. Put differently,
to be a philosopher is to be the student par excellence, i.e., a lover of learning. That
premise, of course, begged the questions that got the whole project underway: How
is the love (passion) for learning stimulated? What is it that attracts someone to
take up those Big Questions? Does everyone have the ‘natural’ inclination to be a
learner? If so, what does that say about being human?
I took up these ‘fundamental’ questions, first, with a paper that ultimately
became the introduction to my manuscript. That paper, which I presented at New
College, Oxford University to the Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain, and in Madrid to the International Network of Philosophers of Education
(INPE), was well received, and was published in the INPE proceedings: “Tune In,
Turn On, Let Learning Happen,” Proceedings of the International Network of
Philosophers of Education (INPE) 9th Conference, University of Madrid, Spain. I
also presented a section of the project to the International Critical Pedagogy
vii
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Working Group, organized by the late Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, and published this as a
chapter in the group’s first book (“Learning as Freedom: The Letting Be of
Learning Together,” Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today. Ilan GurZe’ev, editor. Haifa: University of Haifa, 2005.) However, by the time I presented
that material, in April and August of 2004, I was already well underway with my
philosophical experiment, which is an implementation of a methodology I call
‘poetic phenomenology.’
When writing what was to become the introduction to my manuscript I
deliberately attempted to rekindle that old fire of passion that seemed a bit
dampened by the somewhat ‘conservative’ forms of writing that are demanded by
many academics. I sought inspiration from Heidegger, whose writing has always
intrigued me because it seemed to be moved by that spirit I experienced in reading
ancient philosophy when I was an undergraduate. Heidegger’s work has a
provocative quality to it, demanding that we engage in what he, and I too, believe
is the hallmark of philosophy: interpretation. One can not simply read Heidegger
and get ‘it,’ because the ‘it’ one is getting is not something in the text, but, rather,
what is produced in the encounter with the text. Heidegger, especially the so-called
‘later’ works, places the reader in a dialogic relation with his thinking. His texts
seem to constantly ask questions of the reader, with each sentence requiring one to
think. It seemed this approach to writing might be worth exploring, as it just may
be the kind of writing that can both express and also inspire a passion for
philosophy. But to do this, I thought, one must be uninhibited. The writing must be
authentic, and not simply another academic paper for another academic conference
or journal. So in February of 2004 I sat down to engage in a process of writing that
I had often thought might be an exciting, yet demanding project: a daily
phenomenological ‘meditation’ that would be expressed in ‘poetic’ writing.
My experiment: for one year, write every day for a minimum of one hour,
picking up where I had stopped the day before, yet starting ‘anew’ each day in the
spirit of phenomenology. I wrote, each and every day, and sought to maintain an
authentic relation with the material that, after a time, gathered upon itself like a
wave building to a crest. The experiment called for spontaneity and improvisation,
and leaned toward the poetic, rather than the prosaic. Thus form and content soon
became transposable, and this synthesis an existential expression of learning itself!
The meditations departed by the fundamental questions I had raised the initial
paper, which I presented at Oxford and Madrid, and drew inspiration from
Heidegger, who was my primary dialogic partner. Engaging Heidegger entailed
following his lead and engaging philosophers of the ancient days, both from the
East and West. Heidegger’s writings would lead me to focus on ideas coming from
the ancient thinkers from Greece, but soon I would discover that these thinkers,
specifically Heraclitus, shared a deep affinity with the Buddhist and Taoist
traditions. Many have seen ‘traces’ of these traditions in Heidegger, but I soon
discovered that these distinct traditions across time and space all shared a deep
appreciation for language as a creative tool for working out the Big Questions.
Within a few weeks my work became an ongoing meditation on language, that is,
an active engagement with words and the way we make meaning through these
viii
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
symbols. Underlying this entire work is the strong belief that human freedom is
linked to our capacity to be creative with language, to express ourselves in unique
ways, and this, to me, is what the ongoing process of learning is all about: the
active engagement in the dynamic process that is human freedom. The meditations
are, in the end, an attempt to enact, express and record that process.
At the end of my experiment on I had produced 365 poetic phenomenological
meditations. The result was a manuscript that took over six years to ‘organize’ and
‘arrange,’ and is published here as Being and Learning.
Eduardo M. Duarte,
Amityville, NY, USA
November, 2011
ix
“This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and
melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it a s a
separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite
of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and
kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to
it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing;
and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have
become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the
world than it and only it. But that is what happens to us not only in music. That
is how we have learned to love all things that we now love.”
Nietzsche, “One Must Learn to Love,” Aphorism 334, The Gay Science
x
PREFACE
Retrieving Immortal Questions, Initiating Immortal Conversations
“Thanks to the radicalism of his propositions and the acuteness of this
challenge, Parmenides was the great point of departure. Through him thought
achieved self-awareness as an independent power; compelling in its
conclusions, it unfolded its potentialities and so attained to the limits where
thought incurs failure – a failure which Parmenides did not discern, but
which he invited with the enormous demand he made upon thought.”1
“Language is also a place of struggle….For me this space of radical openness
is a margin – a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet
necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a
community of resistance.”2
BEGINNING
It, begins with Parmenides’ Poem.
It beings with Parmenides’ ‘Way of Truth’
This ‘it’ being the immortal
Conversation of philosophy.
This conversation that is the
Journey of our ‘becoming
Human together,’
to paraphrase the timeless message
we hear from Gilgamesh, that
oldest of epic tales.
Philosophy, the immortal conversation,
which recounts, like a
grand epic pilgrim’s tale,
the story of our
becoming human together.
This story, in which we all partake in,
has a beginning, or beginnings,
and one of these
beginnings occurs in 6th century BCE
Greece, at Elea, with Parmenides.
Most of you know the tale told
by Parmenides.
xi
PREFACE
For me it is one of the most
powerful allegories of philosophy,
the immortal conversation,
as initiated by a
transcendent moment,
a stepping back before
moving forward,
and of philosophy as
a journey of learning,
as education.
Parmenides poem, his Way of Truth,
Is a tale of a young man,
a ‘youth’ transported to the
heavens in a chariot
guided by Sun Maidens
to the gates of Night and Day
where Justice, holding
the keys to the gates
is persuaded by the
Sun Maidens
to let the youth, the
young Parmenides,
pass through and
arrive at the
center of all things
where he is greeted with
hospitality by the
Goddess (Thea)
who welcomes this
young stranger,
telling him he has arrived by no Ill Fate
but by the Path of Necessity.
Here, with her, she tells him,
he will learn of the
truth
of Being and Thinking
unified.
Of presencing,
existence and existing.
Of the Immortal Way of Truth,
and the path of mortals,
which he must avoid.
xii
PREFACE
The Way of Truth, she teaches him,
Is the path of unity.
Where all is perceived in its
Proper togetherness together.
To think and to be are
The Same,
She instructs him,
and you must think
this unity,
think the unity of Being,
or what I am calling ‘the becoming of human together.’
The way of mortals, she teaches
Him, is the way of opinion,
perishing thoughts,
words and deeds,
forgettable and forgotten.
The way of non-being.
The Goddess dwells at the center
of all things, steering the universe.
She is Eternal
Stands in eternity,
Guiding the immortal conversation of thoughts,
Words and deeds worth remembering, remembered.
OF RETURNING AND RETRIEVING
So this is the poem of Parmenides.
In this tale of transcendence, the
young Parmenides must return.
Return to the houses of the night
with the teaching he has
received of the two paths.
Taking up one, understanding
the other.
We might understand this return
as the life and travels of Parmenides,
taking up the immortal conversation
travelling through the world of Greek antiquity,
visiting mighty Athens with
his student Zeno, as we are
told by Plato in the dialogue
xiii
PREFACE
he wrote in tribute to Parmenides.
In the Parmenides, we see a
young Socrates engaging in
dialogue with an older Parmenides,
the teaching of his poem
at the center of
their conversation.
The sudden appearance of Socrates, here,
reminds us that the conversation
of philosophy begins, again, anew,
with the rejoining of the
teacher and student, and with the
latter posing the First question,
the basic question, regarding the
teaching, of the teacher:
Who are you? What are you telling me?
With this question, the conversation
begins again.
We hear this questioning at the
beginning of each school year,
each semester, and if we
listen attentively, at the
beginning, middle and end
of every lecture, every seminar.
Who are you?
What are you telling me?
The questions remain present.
I’m not so much interested
in the grammar of the question
as I am in its ontology:
What the question says about us,
and who the question is
that begins the conversation
of philosophy.
Who is this question that begins
again the conversation of
philosophy?
xiv
PREFACE
The Question is identified, recognized
as the speech of the stranger,
the one who arrives
from abroad.
Jacques Derrida in his seminar lecture
“Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/
From the Foreigner”
offers us an important context for this Question.
Derrida: “the question of the stranger is a question of the stranger, addressed to the
stranger…As though the stranger were being-in-question or being-in-question of
the question.”1
Derrida goes on to remind us
of the arrival of the
question-as-stranger,
making appearances, first and foremost,
in Plato’s dialogue
the Sophist.
Here the name give to this
Stranger by Plato is…stranger (xenos)
As stranger, he begins, again,
the conversation, by being
the question, by
questioning Parmenides
telling of the tale
of the first teaching
of the Way of Truth
i.e., overturning, deconstructing
the logos of Parmenides.
Derrida reminds us next of Socrates
Being the question
Identifying himself as
the stranger, the outsider
on that day he defended
himself, offering his
apologia in his own speech.
xv
PREFACE
Derrida: “Sometimes the [stranger] is Socrates himself, Socrates the disturbing
man of question and irony…the man of the midwifely question… In The Apology
of Socrates (17d), at the very beginning of his defense, Socrates addresses his
fellow citizens and Athenian judges. He defends himself against the accusation of
being a kind of sophist or skillful speaker. He announces that he is going to say
what is right and true, certainly, against the liars who are accusing him…He
declares that his is ‘foreign’ to the language of the courts, to the tribune of the
tribunals: he doesn’t know how to speak this courtroom language, this legal
rhetoric of accusation, defense, and pleading; he doesn’t have the skill, he is like a
[stranger].”3
What is significant here is that
Socrates request was based
on the cultural and social norm,
convention and practice of hospitality (xenia)
Here we recall this hospitality
as always present at the
beginning of the conversation,
we recall the Goddess
welcoming the young Parmenides.
Said Socrates to the Court:
Welcome me as stranger,
as outsider.
Listen to me as I
speak in my usual
strange way, that
way you have come
to know as mine, so you
are familiar with it,
although you have always
found it defamiliarizing
and disruptive.
Hence I have been
brought here today.
REMEMBERING AND RETRIEVING
Derrida does not, however, recall the
Strangeness of the young Parmenides,
the youth, changed, transformed and
altered, who returns to the
houses of the night, where we must imagine he
xvi
PREFACE
was welcomed back like Odysseus upon his return to
Ithaca, unrecognized yet familiar.
But unlike Odysseus, warrior, who
slays the suitors, and allows the
bard and messenger to go free,
for he holds the song of the
singer to be beyond human value.
Unlike Odysseus, the stranger returning
as the transformed youth
returns bearing the question,
as the question – who is this?
compelling the question –
who are you?
what are you saying?
The young Parmenides, the youth,
Returns, a stranger, one who
Bears the question by being
the stranger.
But his strangeness is of a
particular kind of onotology/modality
like Socrates later, the young Parmenides
has become a question
to himself, beginning a
conversation, with himself,
eme emauto, the silent
dialogue of the self,
thinking.
Herein we recall the strange identity
of the learner as philosopher, philosophy as
education. Here too we
find ourselves becoming
human together (on a path)
that always finds us
discovering and recognizing ourselves
both unknown to ourselves, yet familiar.
When we recall the initial
return of the young Parmenides
we recall the modality of
the stranger, of discovering
xvii
PREFACE
oneself to be the stranger,
no longer the one
who others recall.
A modality, so central to
the immortal conversation of
philosophy, recounted again
and again.
An important example of this
Discovery of the self as stranger
in the aftermath of receiving an
education is the persona
John Jones, in W.E.B. DuBois’
“On the Coming of John,” from
The Souls of Black Folk.
In this tale of a youth transported
away from his home
to receive a transformative education
about the “way things work,”
the hero, John Jones, returns
finally to his home town of
Altamaha, after one final
‘lesson,’ while attending a
performance of a Wagner Opera.
Crashing down to earth after
Transcending to the heights
with Wagner, Jones announces
his return.
Returning home, Jones discovers himself
to be a stranger to the community,
familiar but wholly changed, different.
Jones recognized himself to now be
capable of one and only one
practice, the vocation of teaching,
an educator, or one who
can alter the course of events,
disrupts the arrangements of
things.
Jones discovers himself, as
stranger to be the teacher.
xviii
PREFACE
But he quickly discovers what
Hannah Arendt will say later
about the difference between
education and politics:
one can not educate
adults.
Jones discovers this first when he
rises to speak to the gathered congregation
of his community, speaking
to them of what has been,
what is, and where they ought
to go, together, relinquishing
sectarian borders that
keep them apart. The
gathered congregation understands
nothing of what Jones has to
say, for he is now a deconstructed
son of the community, a stranger
to the adults.
But in this state of strangeness,
he is recognized by his young sister,
who asks him if
learning makes one sad,
and when Jones smiles and says it does,
she says would like to be sad too.
Thus he becomes aware that
as stranger, outsider, as one
capable of disrupting and altering
the arrangement of things,
Jones is positioned to
be a teacher, and this
implies working with
children.
TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ORIGINAL
So what might we call the deconstructed
self now ready to enter the
conversation of philosophy, to teach?
Reiner Schurmann calls this modality of
thinking “the phenomenology of
xix
PREFACE
the original,” for it “lays
bare formations of presencing
that govern being in the world.”
Here today as we raise the question
concerning the presence of the immortal
conversation in and of philosophy of education,
we take up the formations that govern
our field, the being of a philosopher of education
in the world today.
Thus, we raise the questions concerning
the possibility of teaching this or that
but in doing so we remain
too close to what is familiar,
and thus too far from retrieving
thinking because we remain
too familiar to ourselves.
Thus, we must find a way
out, a poros, a way out of
our abode we call philosophy of
education – an academic discipline learning to speak, write in
strange new ways so as
to retrieve the ontology
of questioning that
initiates again the conversation.
The phenomenology of the original
proceeds by way of deconstruction
locating the right, the gap
the in-between, the way out
that will also serve as a way
back in.
Schurmann: the phenomenology of the original
by way of deconstruction raises
the question of the
origin ontologically
or
turns the condition of thinking back
upon the thinker so that this phenomenology,
that receives the same as other
xx
PREFACE
the familiar as unfamiliar
is a break in the perception
of the arrangement of things.
The old appears new,
And the thinker as newcomer,
learner,
the insider positioned momentarily
outside the formations
that govern the field
of knowledge.
Call this position one of transcendence,
And thereby retrieve the moment
of Parmenides poem, his
Way of Truth.
Transcendence: vertical, first,
Then, horizontal,
when the thinker returns
inevitably, to the horizon,
to the field to initiate
the conversation.
The vertical transcendence via
deconstruction, the outward as
upward, the return as a
retrieval and a forging ahead,
towards original thinking.
The vertical transcendence via
deconstruction, the outward as
upward, the return as a
retrieval and a forging ahead,
towards original thinking.
Schurmann: the phenomenology of the original
by way of deconstruction that
catapults us, a transporting transcendence
toward a “retrieval of the ‘original’
would require an occurrence,
a happening…” a reversal of our
history, tradition:
a turning around that moves
us towards a retrieval of the original.
xxi
PREFACE
RE-ARRANGING THE PRESENT
DuBois, in arranging The Souls of Black Folk
sought to disrupt the
formations that governed
the field of social knowledge
by initiating his thinking,
each chapter
with music and lyrics,
specifically the lyric and
music of ‘sorrow songs,’
spirituals, or what
we might call The Blues.
In disrupting the current and
thereby opening a space
for the future, the new,
DuBois retrieved what he called
the original gift of
African Americans to
the world.
The strange and unusual arrangement
of his writing moved towards
original thinking.
What remains, for us, here, in philosophy
of education, today, is a
thinking expressed or communicated
in a way that deconstructs
the order of things
and thereby locates a gap
or break, a portal that
will make way for a
departure and return.
I began with Parmenides, and so I
conclude by retrieving a
question posed by another persona
from ancient Elea, that stranger
from Plato’s Sophist who
wondered: “Are we today
even perplexed at our
xxii
PREFACE
inability to understand
the expression ‘to be’?
not at all.”
A question in the form of an assertion,
we retrieve a rhetorical set of questions:
Should we not be perplexed at our
question whether or not there
are immortal questions in
philosophy of education?
Should this not cause us to
step back and wonder at
the formations that govern
our field, arranging
what and how can be
said, where and when?
Should not the strangeness of what
is familiar cause us to think,
again, about what we are doing,
saying, teaching?
Should not the familiarity of it all not
compel us to move outside what we take
to be philosophy of education, so as
to renew and initiate, again, a thinking,
a questioning, which would evoke and inspire
learning?
And if we should heed that call
to deconstruct
so as to move beyond the
given,
will we not ‘experience the
perplexity’ and confess ignorance
at what we are
doing and why,
and
in doing so look not to the past
for recovery, or the present
for renewal, but to the future
for retrieval of the
xxiii
PREFACE
thinking that will
inspire learning.
We look to find that opening
to move toward original thinking
by experiencing the strangeness
of the familiar, the present.
As Schumann puts it: “Original thinking –
the thinking in which
the origin is understood as
inception – proceeds on
two fronts, retrospectively
as well as prospectively.
It recalls the ancient beginnings
and it anticipates a new
beginning, the possible
rise of a new economy
among things, words, and actions.”4
NOTES
1
2
3
4
Karl Jaspers, “Parmenides,” The Great Philosophers, Volume II. Edited by Hannah Arendt. HBJ:
1966, p. 27.
Bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Place of Radical Openness,” Yearning: race, gender and
cultural politics. South End Press: 1990, p. 145.
Jacques Derrida, “Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/from the Foreigner,” Of Hospitality.
Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 15.
Reiner Schurmann, Heidegger. On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 133.
xxiv
INTRODUCTION
Tune in, Turn on, Let Learning Happen
In what follows I offer an account of teaching as the art of turning on the desire to
behold Being. This account rests on a particular understanding of contemplation,
and, what’s more, an account of Being itself. I depart from the ‘traditional’ reading
of Being, as Plato’s Good existing in another heavenly realm, and (re)read Being
through a deconstruction of Aristotle, and describe it as the permanence
of presencing. Contemplation as a matter of attunement, of being in touch
with what appears before us. I understand contemplation as a existential and
phenomenological experience that realizes what Plato identifies as our ‘power of
learning,’ the capacity to respond and attend to the matter that stands before us, or,
in Arendtian terms, to love the world. The purpose of this introduction is to
describe teaching as a matter of activating this latent power. Here I rely on an
understanding of teaching, derived from Heidegger’s “letting learning happen,” as
the excitation of the passion to attend to what appears before us, namely the
‘excess’ of Being. I name this teaching poetic phenomenology, and the colaborative learning process that arises in response to it poetic dialogue.
“The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human
beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being.”
Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?
In the sixth book of the Republic Plato describes the philosopher as “the real lover
of learning.”(Rep., 485) In book seven, he argues that every human soul is capable
of learning how to contemplate Being. Thus, the real lover of learning is the
learner who desires to behold Being. In the seventh book he says, “Just as one
might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light
instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from the world of
becoming until it is able to endure the sight of being and the most brilliant light of
being; that supreme splendor which we have called the Good.”(Rep., 518–519)
Further along, in book seven, he identifies authentic education as an art of
circumturning or conversion, an art that turns us towards the Good. Education is
not an art of putting sight into the eye that can already see, but one of turning the
eye towards the proper gaze of Being. “That’s what must be managed!” Plato
insists.
What is evident for Plato, here in the Republic and throughout most of his
dialogues, is that the lover of learning is one who is drawn towards thinking; that
is, one who is attracted by and desires to contemplate Being. However, what is
turned on by teaching? If, as Plato suggests, the essence of learning is found in the
soul’s attraction to Being, then it would appear to follow that the essence of
teaching is found in a proposal, a proposition which awakens a desire to attend to
Being. Teaching arouses a circumturning towards Being.
1
INTRODUCTION
In what follows I will attempt to give an account of teaching as this art of
turning on the desire to behold Being. However, before I can engage the problem
at hand I need to unpack some of the claims I made in my opening statement. First
and foremost, I need to show what it means to describe learning as the desire to
contemplate Being. This showing requires an understanding of contemplation, of
this ‘proper’ relation to Being, and, what’s more, an account of Being itself. Here I
will depart from the ‘traditional’ reading of Plato’s Good as existing in another
heavenly realm, and re-read it as the permanence of presencing. Once established
as a matter of attunement, of being in touch with what appears before us,
contemplation can then be identified as the consummation of learning. The next
step will be to offer an account of teaching as facilitating the introduction of
learner and Being. Yet, in order to make this step I must first offer a reading of
what Plato identifies as our ‘power of learning’ as the capacity to respond to Being,
as our capacity to attend to the matter that stands before us, or, in Arendtian terms,
to love the world. Once I have shown why we are always already potential lovers
of learning, I can then describe teaching as a matter of activating this latent
passion. Thus, in my final section, I will attempt to synthesize these various
descriptive moments in order to offer an account of teaching as ‘letting learning
happen,’ as the excitation of the passion to attend to what appears before us,
namely the excess of Being.
When Aristotle concluded his analysis of the four causes in bk XII of
Metaphysics with the claim “the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and
best,” he was extending the tradition of thought he had inherited from Plato. His
extension was twofold. First, he embraced and thereby maintained the Platonic
version of nous as a power (faculty); indeed, as the defining characteristic of the
human soul. “Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine
element which thought seems to contain,” he tells us before adding that
contemplation is what is best and makes us happiest. Second, he clarified, and
thereby reified, eon as a Being, the Prime Mover. Aristotle’s extension, which
completed the sublation of pre-Socratic philosophical language initiated by Plato,
became the foundation of western philosophy until Heidegger attempted the
‘recovery’ of the originary understanding of these categories. Aristotle’s extension
and Heidegger’s subsequent deconstruction are the basis from which I offer my
account of learning as the desire to contemplate Being.
I begin my account by tracing Plato’s “real lover of learning” to Aristotle’s
“good and happy soul.” In Metaphysics, bk. XII, ch.7, Aristotle describes
contemplation as an activity, an act that is most pleasant and best. What he is
claiming, of course, is that the human is most alive or most attuned to life or
existence when involved in this activity. The human soul is activated or animated
in a unique way when it possesses the “divine element.” What is possessed here is
Life that should not be reduced to Thought, if the latter is understood as the
abstract thinking of the singular cogito. Misleading in this seventh chapter is the
claim that contemplation is underway when “thought thinks on itself.” It is this
important line in Aristotle that represents the errant path which leads us straight to
the Cartesian meditation, and, ultimately, to our own view of the matter as
2
INTRODUCTION
‘self-reflection’ or ‘meditation’, i.e., the reduction of contemplation to a cognitive
activity. The purely cognitive depiction of this special activity of contemplation
that we have inherited diminishes the phenomenonality of Being that is still present
in the Medieval mystical account of contemplation. For example, the medieval vita
contemplativa of Saint Francis of Assisi, which is given a philosophical account by
Bonaventure, preserves Aristotle’s view that contemplation represents those rare
moments when the soul is aware of its connection to the life force which animates
all living beings. Thus, contemplation is the highest and best activity because in it
the human participates most in the ground of its own existence, namely, Being
itself. “On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature.
And it is a life such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for
it is even in this state, which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure.”
(Meta., 1072b)
We have inherited a one-sided depiction of contemplation, one that has reduced
it to a special type of ‘thinking.’ We recover the existentiality of contemplation
when we link, with Aristotle, this special activity to the manifest existence of the
universe as it appears to us, specifically in the state of Nature. Again, the image of
Saint Francis communing with wild animals depicts well the activity Aristotle is
describing as contemplation. Rare, indeed, are the moments when we become so
intensely attuned and connected to Life, to Being. Yet, we are hard pressed to
argue with Aristotle and Plato when they describe these moments in terms of joy
and love.
I have offered a (re)description of contemplation, one which focuses on the
capacity of the human being to be with Being, that is, to place oneself in the
location (templum, a significant place for observation) to observe, ‘see’
(contemplare) the co-existence of oneself with the permanence of Existence.
Contemplation, described under these conditions, is thus read with an emphasis on
the parts con (with) and temp (time). The temporal quality of Being suggests that
permanence is not a static phenomenon. Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the Being of
beings, is the ground and wellspring that floods and ebbs. The animating Force:
Life. The activity of contemplation I am identifying is set within the dynamic
presencing of Being, which permeates all beings. Being’s permanence is the
remainder, what exceeds, as well as what lasts, or remains hidden, withdraws.
Contemplation is the attunement to, or recognition of this excess, which is always
already a condition of all finite and temporal beings, “the life force which animates
all living beings” (existents, i.e., the heavens and the world of nature). Heidegger
describes this temporal quality of Being as the event of with-drawal: “In fact, what
withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything
present that strikes and touches him – touches him in the surely mysterious way of
escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most
present in all our present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything
actual.”1 In Heideggerian terms, contemplation is our attunement to the event
(important occurrence) of Being manifesting as presencing-absencing, floodingebbing.
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INTRODUCTION
We move closer to the matter at hand, which is the question concerning teaching
as the turning on of the capacity to attune oneself to the event of Being. The
account of contemplation and Being I have offered allows me to better explain why
the “lover of learning” is the one who desires to be situated in that special
relationship with Being. As I have attempted to show, the ‘love’ that defines
Plato’s philosopher is the ‘happiness’ of Aristotle’s good soul. In both Plato and
Aristotle, however, there is an important emphasis placed on the power or capacity
of the human being to be situated in this relationship. The desire is latent, and as
Heidegger will say centuries later, it is always a matter of ‘heeding’ the call of
Being. In other words, the question is never, Can we heed?, but, How? Thus, if, as
I remarked at the onset, education/teaching is the art of turning the ‘eye’ towards
the proper gaze of Being, thereby activating ‘learning,’ or letting learning happen,
then we take for granted that we have the ‘eye’ to ‘see’ with. But the path I am
following does not allow us to “take for granted” what is central to the discussion.
What’s more, if the essence of teaching does indeed involve a ‘turning on’ of a
latent desire, then the teacher qua teacher will be required to understand what it is
that they are activating. Thus, a word or two on this ‘power’ to learn, this capacity
to respond to Being, to attend to the matter that stands before us.
To speak of ‘power’ in terms of ‘capacity’ is problematic because there is the
danger of falling back into the language of the cogito, of the mind and its faculties,
and this is a language I am attempting to dispense with, if not deconstruct. The
progress made was thus far initiated by the recovery of the existentiality of Being
through a (re)reading of the Aristotelian ‘animation.’ In turn, the ‘power’ is not to
be reduced to a faculty, to a ‘mind’s eye,’ but is identified as the animating Force
of Life itself. Thus we are always already located in a relationship with the excess
of Being in so far as we are animated. The question that follows is whether or not
we concur with Aristotle who asserts that we can “enjoy this but for a short time.”
Why is it the case that we are incapable of ‘enduring’ in our response to Being if
this relationship is the proper mode of our existence? In fact, if we are always
already situated in this relationship how couldn’t we endure in it?
The question of ‘enduring’ or remaining attuned turns on the reading one brings
to Aristotle’s “short time.” The “short time” we are able to enjoy could be read in
light of Plato who insists that the contemplation of the Good, the splendor of
Being, is something that one can only momentarily or fleetingly experience. But
here Plato is, of course, operating under a metaphysics that distinguishes sharply
between the Being of beings and the beings themselves. In turn, his distinction
does not allow for him to place the “lover” within the world of beings.
Contemplation of the Good takes one away from the world, to a transcendental
‘beyond’ or ‘behind.’ Again, in Plato the proper relation with Being occurs when
and only when we use our power for ‘perceiving’ the Good. This power to
‘perceive,’ nous, understood as the capacity to know, to understand the truth of
Being, is the defining characteristic of the human soul, according to Plato. But
within the Platonic metaphysics we can only gather a fleeting glimmer of the
splendor of Being because our bodies weigh us down. Thus, the lover’s desire is
never fully consummated until it is released by death. Perhaps the best summary of
4
INTRODUCTION
this is Plato’s Phaedo, which culminates in the claim that the embodied soul must
do her best to calm and direct the passions of the body. The “lover of learning” is
then the one whose life, guided by nous, anticipates death, “following reason and
keeping always in it, beholding the true and the divine and the certain, and
nourishing herself on this, the soul believes that she ought to live like this, as long
as she does live, and when she dies she joins what is akin and like herself, and be
rid of human evils.” (Phaedo, 84b) Plato’s “lover,” motivated by the desire to
behold the splendor of Being, which appears elsewhere, practices philosophy as the
preparation for death, and thereby heeds the Delphic oracle who instructed
philosophers to “take on the color of the dead.”2
Plato is, of course, correct in recognizing that our mortality is the defining limit
of our experience of Being as humans. This limit is itself the “short time” we
endure. We can enjoy our relationship with Being for only a short time because we
are mortal. Being is eternal, “it is ever in this state, which we cannot be.” Our
mortality is the defining limit of our experience of Being. Yet, if we follow
Aristotle, we would say it is a limit we enjoy. Thus, a different reading of
Aristotle’s “short time” would revise the existential terms of ‘endurance,’ away
from Plato’s negative assessment, away from the strict metaphysical demarcation
that is unable to redeem our human form. Our mortality is the very condition of our
power to endure Being, not an obstacle or fetter. The issue at hand is a matter of
urgency, of taking up the very condition of our Being while it stands before us as
something to be taken up.
The foregoing has indicated why the very condition of our being, mortality, sets
before us the challenge of attuning ourselves to Being. Yet the matter has distinct
implications for the art of teaching, of turning around, if we understand this
attunement through the upward/inward gaze of Plato’s “lover” or if we, rather,
have a contrasting image of attunement, perhaps one which conjures up the figure
of Raphael’s Aristotle whose outstretched arm informs all present in the school of
Athens that the matter at hand stands before us, not in a far off ‘heavenly’ realm.3
Aristotle’s “happy soul” depicted with this image retains something of the preSocratic sense of nous, and resonates with the reading of contemplation offered
here. Recovering the originary meaning of nous orients us towards teaching as the
art of ‘letting learning happen.’
In Raphael’s fresco School of Athens4 the dominant figures of Plato and
Aristotle offer a poignant contrast that can be identified as an important fork in the
road of Western philosophy. Here stand the two titans of Greek philosophy
regarding one another like two heavyweight boxers prior to a championship bout.
The composition of the fresco demands that the viewer regard them as singular
opponents who represent a choice, or two paths. However, if we regard them as a
duo, they represent an obstacle or impediment that one is forced to negotiate. The
awesome horizon, which Raphael places behind his principal figures, is significant.
A gigantic portal that rises behind the figures and signifies the ‘path’ taken into the
school, as well as the way out after one has dealt with the titanic duo frames the
horizon. Taken together the horizon and the portal supplant Plato and Aristotle,
and thereby represent the excess: what remains, the ‘not yet.’ In this ‘excess’ we
5
INTRODUCTION
locate the hermeneutic landscape, where philosophy (learning/teaching) unfolds
through the dialogic interpretation of the primary symbols that mediate our
experience. When we find ourselves in this location, this ‘current’ of past, present
and future, we encounter what is ‘beyond’ Plato and Aristotle: both what has been
offered before them as well as what will come now and later.
My discussion of Raphael’s masterpiece is offered as a way of drawing attention
to the historical life of the primary terms of Greek philosophy, what comes before
and after Plato and Aristotle, specifically, the terms Eon and Nous. Within the
parameters of the project I am laying out, the primary symbols to be (re)articulated
are these two. And this is precisely what has been offered in the identification of
contemplation as the attunement to Being. To speak of contemplation in this
manner is to recover the originary meaning of nous as noein, which “means to
‘heed’ the things gathered together in an order of presence.”5 This recovery of nous
as noein implies also the originary sense of eon (Being) as presencing, as what
appears or stands out. Together the two originary terms offer us the basis upon
which we can speak of learning as ‘heeding’ or ‘attending’ to what stands out, and
teaching as the direction of attention towards this excess or remainder manifesting
in the presencing which permeates all beings. Thus the fundamental matter of
teaching involves turning the soul towards Being, that is, enabling it to become in
touch with what appears before it. In this sense, learning is akin to the attentive
gaze of the lover. The lover of learning is now re-described as the learner as lover,
one who is enraptured, who maintains an attentive intensive gaze.
We choose, then, the path of Aristotle’s “happy soul” which we now understand
to be defined in large measure by characteristics it has retained from the originary
iterations. But the retention of these primary symbols implies retention of the
originary experiences, which are mediated by these linguistic symbols. And herein
we arrive, finally, to the matter at hand.
The exemplar of the lover of learning, as we are describing it, is Socrates. It is
Socrates, of course, whom Plato has in mind when he coined the phrase “lover of
learning” and, whom Aristotle must have been thinking of when he was describing
this most happy state of the human soul. This is the same Socrates whom
Heidegger called the “purest thinker of the West.”6 Heidegger’s ‘Socrates’ is our
exemplar of the learner who maintains the attentive intensive gaze towards Being;
towards the way things appear before him. Heidegger calls this attentive gaze
“learning,” and he describes our capacity to do this as a “gift.” As a way of
bringing together my account of the contemplation of Being with the question
concerning the turning, I want to explore Heidegger’s Socrates as the one who has
become a question to himself and, thereby, has become the “teacher/learner.” In
turn, with this move I believe I am now taking up the initial problem which was
posed, namely, how are we to “manage” this art of turning the eye towards the
proper gaze of Being?
To reiterate, we started with the question concerning the turning. What is not
entirely clear, we said, is how this lover gets introduced to or turned around (or
turned on) to learning, understood here as contemplation of Being If, as Plato
suggests, the essence of learning is found in the soul’s attraction to Being, then it
6
INTRODUCTION
would appear to follow that the essence of teaching is found in a proposal, a
proposition which awakens a desire to attend to Being. Teaching arouses a
circumturning towards Being. What I would now like to suggest is that this art of
turning contains both moments. Put another way, only the authentic ‘learner’ can
be the ‘teacher.’
When Heidegger describes Socrates as the “purest thinker” he is describing
‘thinking’ as noein as “receiving, heeding” (vernehmen).7 Heidegger’s Socrates is
not Kant’s, for whom noein is nous, or Vernunft, the faculty or ‘tribunal’ of reason,
which perceives the logic (Logos) behind the appearance of beings. Kant’s
Socrates ‘overcomes’ or transcends this appearance. But Kant’s Socrates is not the
perplexed Socrates, the one whom Heidegger imagined when he identified him as
the exemplar of learning, that is, of teach-ability. For Heidegger, Socrates was the
exemplar of learning because he placed himself ‘at the center’ or ‘in the midst’ of
things, in the ‘excess’ of Being. As such, he took “interest” (interesse) in the
appearance of beings. Placing himself in this “draft, this current” of beings as they
appear prevented Socrates from “writing,” from attempting to “put down” or
ensnare, trap and thereby make static that which is dynamic. In turn, the only way
to express being “caught up” in this current of Being was through the dynamism of
dialogue. He was thus a “pure” learner because he placed himself always in the
midst of Being’s presencing and thereby allowed himself to be drawn into the
condition of Being. Thus, when Heidegger says the “teacher must be capable of
being more teachable than the apprentices”8 he is referring to this Socratic position
of ‘nearness’ which we have come to identify as the aporetic quality of Socrates’
experience. He was confused and it was the mark of his learning/teaching that he
brought this confusion with him into every dialogue and thereby confused his
young friends. Socrates teach-ability is offered in the unstable logoi he sets in
motion.9 With this aporetic, or inclusive quality of his dialogic encounters,
Socrates reveals a form of logos (a way of communicating, practicing language),
which retains the Heraclitean quality of Being as the conflictual play [unity] of
opposites. His ‘nearness’ is expressed through dialogic practice. The classic
example of Socratic teach-ability, of letting learning happen through the aporetic
(‘poetic’) dialogue, is the exchange between Socrates and Meno (Meno, 80a-d):
Meno: Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are
a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity....If I may be
flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as
well you are exactly like the flat sting ray that one meets in the sea.
Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the
sort of thing that you seem to doing to me now. My mind and my lips are
literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you.
Socrates: As for myself, if the stingray paralyzes others only through being
paralyzed itself, then the comparison is just, but not otherwise. It isn’t that,
knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I
infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.
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INTRODUCTION
For Heidegger, it is precisely this confusion, this perplexity, this numbness that
marks Socrates as a teacher. He was ahead of his apprentices because he was more
teachable, which means he was not more learned (a dominant depiction of the
teacher) but more capable of learning. The teacher as teacher is capable of being
more teachable, Heidegger says, because “The teacher is far less assured of his
ground than those who learn are of theirs.” Thus, teaching calls for this: to let
learn. “The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than – learning.”10 The
teacher insofar as she is teaching is more properly identified as learner. Hence,
Socrates, Plato’s teacher, was the Lover of Learning (not teaching).
Heidegger’s Socrates read within the context of this exchange in the Meno
evokes the medieval description of contemplation as the experience of being
‘awestruck.’ It is the experience of Aquinas who abandons his Five Ways after
being struck dumb by the sublime character of Being which exceeded his rational
account of God’s existence. The great Scholastic was numbed and silenced. So the
legend goes, he neither wrote nor spoke another word of philosophy after that
moment late in his life when he, by his own account, encountered the sublime,
excessive nature of Being which, Aquinas recognized, could never be ‘held’ by
human intellect, nor expressed in language. Socrates, of course, was never at a lost
for words, and it was, in fact, the way he used language which ‘stung’ others. And
it is precisely this approach to language, that is potentially educative for us who
attempt to raise fundamental questions about the meaning of teaching and learning.
Indeed, it is in the mytho-poetical way we approach language that we turn on, tune
in (attune), and thereby let learning happen. When we have become teachable we
have placed ourselves in “the current,” the unstable ground where we play hide and
seek with truth and meaning, the dialogic game where the dynamic logoi never
stand still but always call out for more consideration, interpretation, redscription,
again and again. The teachable ones who are letting learning happen are Aristotle’s
“happy souls” who, like the Socrates depicted by Arendt, persist in “asking
questions to which he does not know the answers, sets them in motion, [and] once
the statements have come full circle...cheerfully proposes to start all over again.”11
What did it mean for Socrates to place himself always in the midst of
presencing? What is this Socratic position of “nearness”? What is crucial to
understand if we are to grasp Heidegger’s Socrates is that this noein is marked by
perplexity because that which we are placing ourselves in the midst of, namely
“presencing,” is not organized by the ordered logic of Logos as defined by Plato and
distilled as ‘reason’ by the tradition which followed him and culminated in Kant. As
I suggested above, Socrates reveals a form of logos that retains the Heraclitean
quality of Being as the conflictual play [unity] of opposites. Thus, the noein of
Heidegger’s Socrates is expressed in the perplexity wrought by the conjunction of
Eon (Being) and Aletheia. Aletheia designates the presencing/absencing of Being. It
is this affiliation of Being with presencing/absencing that characterizes the
condition of “nearness,” and thereby accounts for the aporetic logoi, which are an
expression of one’s position in the “current” or “draft” of Being. In turn, as Reiner
Schurmann has written, “it can be held that logos and aletheia ‘are the same’: logos
8
INTRODUCTION
bespeaks the emerging from absence and aletheia, the constellation or conflict of
presencing-absencing.”12
By placing himself into this draft Socrates encountered the very Being of his
being, which is the excess or possibility that one is. When one is placed before
oneself as possibility one becomes a question to oneself. In Socratic terms, this is
the proverbial “examined life that is worth living,” the life of inquiry that one
desires to live, to enjoy, if but for a short time, the life of the love of learning. But
we must be careful not to simplify the matter, and thereby to render this ‘life under
examination’ as something like ‘reflective practice.’ One must ‘risk’ placing
oneself in the draft, the unstable ground in order to become teachable. But one is
always already placed in possibility and, therefore, it is a matter of choosing the
‘risk’ of attuning oneself to this ‘fact’ by attending to the ways this possibility or
excess can manifest itself as the character of who we are as expressive and creative
beings. And thus we see why the lover of learning, the happy soul, is described as
animated: a giver of life or spirit; one who vivifies, inspires, and stirs up.
The human, Heidegger says, is a pointer, a sign. In our pointing we direct one
another toward what exceeds, to what withdraws. To become teachable, then, to let
learn, is to become this sign, which “points toward what draws away, it points, not
so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal.”13 In becoming teachable, by
attuning ourselves to Being’s presencing-absencing, we choose the ‘risk’ of
engaging in letting learning happen by placing ourselves in the ‘draft’ and drawing
others unto this unstable ground, the path of possibility on the hermeneutic
landscape, the horizon of interpretation. This possibility emerges as excess, as a
spilling over, and indicates our fundamentally poetic ‘nature,’ that is, the poetic
quality of Being. This is perhaps why Heidegger says that once we have attempted
to make ourselves teachable we begin to hear a word of poesy, “to get involved in
a dialogue with poesy.”14 It is in this dialogue with poesy that we are drawn out of
ourselves towards others. And we turn ourselves toward others and others toward
ourselves when we desire to learn. In sum, becoming teachable is letting learning
happen through poetic dialogue. The lover of learning is an animated teacher, the
mytho-poetic speaker, and the intensely attentive listener.
Thus, it is possible for us to talk about teaching/the turning as a particular way
of speaking or using language that attends to the presencing/absencing of Being.
Such teaching performs a speaking that evokes interpretation and thereby exposes
the possibility that lies as the matter before us: the excess of Being. This kind of
teaching, understood as an evocative poetic speaking, is an expression of our
condition as creative, interpretative and questioning beings. By heeding the call of
Being we become teachable, let learning happen, and do so by speaking poetically,
or with words which are pregnant with a meaning that exceeds even our own
intentionality. Thus, when we speak in this way we create a situation of
attentiveness that we call poetic phenomenology. Poetic phenomenology emerges
as an acute or intense attention to the word, to language. It is thus the lover’s gaze
or rapt attention. Thus phenomenology draws us attentively towards one another
and situates us in the proper relation to one another, to world, nature, to Being. In
other words, it creates the space for and indicates the way to dialogic learning.
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INTRODUCTION
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
10
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? translated by J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck (New York:
Harper and Row, 1968), p. 9.
See Arendt’s discussion of the relationship between philosophy and death in Hannah Arendt,
“Thinking,” Life of the Mind, volume I (HBJ: New York, 1978) p. 79ff.
Raphael, “The School of Athens,” 1510–1511, Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace,
Rome.
ibid
Schurmann, Heidegger. On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, p. 179.
Heidegger, Thinking?, p. 17.
Schurmann, Heidegger, p. 180.
Heidegger, Thinking?, p. 15.
See Arendt, “Thinking,” pp. 169–170.
Heidegger, Thinking?, p. 15.
Arendt, “Thinking,” pp. 169–170. We should not be surprised to know that in the so-called early
dialogues of Plato, written with a vivid memory of his teacher, we also encounter the ones defined
as aporetic and therefore more Socratic.
Schurmann, Heidegger, p. 175.
Heidegger, Thinking?, pp. 9–10.
ibid, p. 18.
CHAPTER 1
EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction
beforehand from what is sought...As an attitude adopted by a being, the
questioner, questioning has its own character of being.”1
At the end of the Introduction we arrived at the point where Learning, the
circumturning towards Being’s presencing, was understood to be enlisted or
brought about by a peculiar kind of communicative performance. Teaching, which
enlists this turning towards Being, (attentiveness, attunement), receives the
‘poetic’. In this section we must delve further into the meaning of this ‘turning
around,’ and try to understand precisely why ‘poetic’ is the proper name of the
communicative performance that enlists learning.
To begin, we look further at what is communicated in this turning around. First
and foremost we have said that the performance of teaching communicates teachability. Teach-ability is the capacity to learn. What is communicated is thus
possibility. To be teachable is to be situated before possibility. Too often so-called
‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ are fixated on what ‘is’ the allegedly important fact. We
might call this the preoccupation with the epistemic. What is forgotten with this
preoccupation is that this ‘fact’ we are to learn has been singled out as important
and uniquely worthy of our attention by political forces that exist in some distant
place, far from our experience. It is difficult to avoid cynicism under this
condition. However, whether or not the content of formulaic education is
appropriately deemed as necessary is besides the point. We call attention to this
condition, which is structured by a kind of rationalism and positivism that is
fixated on the ‘fact’ of what ‘is’, in order to highlight the situation where teaching
and learning have failed to be understood in their existential dimensions. Within
this situation we pass over these dimensions and proceed in a thoughtless manner.
Seeking to avoid the condition that is devoid of thinking requires that we take up a
second element of the turning. We shall call this ‘evocative inquiry’ because it is
characterized by an evocative speaking that is expressed through provocative
questioning. We will take up each of these in turn, but do so with the recognition
that they are two moments of the same event that initiates learning.
In learning we are turned away from that which 'is’ towards that which ‘is not’.
When we are placed within the situation of learning we are turned towards the
excess beyond beings, towards what is absent from presencing, and what is hidden
from us. In this situation we are positioned as learners. In the previous section we
named this position ‘attunement’, and we called that towards which we are attuned
‘Being’. To be turned around to Being’s presencing is to be positioned in the
modality of teach-ability. To be teachable is to be attuned to that which is not.
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In the essay What is Metaphysics?, we identify a provocative question, one that
begins a performance of teaching. Heidegger formulates this question as “How is it
with the nothing?” The question is an exemplar of evocative speech, that kind of
speaking, peculiar to this performance of teaching, that, as we said above, evokes
interpretation and thereby exposes the possibility that lies as the matter before us:
the excess of Being. The question ‘How is it with the nothing?’ points us towards
the “excess” of Being appearing as the ‘is not/ not yet’, beyond beings or that
which ‘is’. By pointing us towards Being, what “is not/not yet,” the question
evokes interpretation. When we say ‘evokes interpretation’ we recall the sense in
which interpretation describes a response to a calling or message. When we say
something is ‘evoked’ we mean something has been ‘called up’ or ‘summoned
forth’. Evoke: to call, to voice, vocalize, shares the same root – Vocare – as
vocation (a commonly expressed description of teaching). Vocare, to call in the
phonological sense, through word. Vocation (from the Latin vocationem): a call or
sense of fitness for and obligation to follow; a divine call or spiritual injunction or
guidance to undertake a duty. Evocative inquiry calls out or summons our attention
to what ‘is not/not yet’. Our response to this call is properly named interpretation
or hermeneutics.
Teaching is the performance that summons or brings forth interpretation, an
encounter with the ex-cess of Being. For Heidegger, interpretation or
‘phenomenology as hermeneutics’ is rooted in the Greek verb hermeneuein.
Through a “playful thinking that is more compelling than the rigor of science,”
Heidegger refers hermeneuein to the noun hermeneus and then to the god Hermes.
“Hermes is the divine messenger. He brings the message of destiny; hermeneuein
is that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message. Such
exposition becomes an interpretation of what has been said earlier by the poets
who, according to Socrates in Plato’s Ion (534e), hermenes eisin ton theon – ‘are
interpreters of the gods.’”2 Thus the performance of teaching, which communicates
teach-ability by delivering the message of possibility, the “not yet,” is carried forth
through evocative poetic speaking. To repeat what we said at the onset in the
introduction, when we respond, or heed, because we have heard, the call of Being,
we have become teachable. We now see further why becoming teachable, which is
part of the condition for the possibility of learning, involves an ongoing response
that can be likened to a mediating moment. One who properly teaches is a pointer,
i.e. who delivers a message, and thus brings forth what is heard turning towards
this ex-cess. And here we now can take up more fully what is meant when we say
the lover of learning is the animated teacher, the mythopoetic speaker, and the
intensely attentive listener.
We seem to have turned the table, or, at least, to have added an element to
evocative speech: intensely attentive listening. But this added element has already
shown itself to be part of attunement, specifically the hermeneutic character of
teaching. If “language determines the hermeneutic situation”3 it is only so when
language appears in a dialogue, which is defined by participants who have given
themselves over to the exchange. It has been clear from the beginning that the issue
we are taking up is rooted in the phenomenon of relationality. Our initial question
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EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
concerning the turning was already bound to a relation. We “took for granted” the
existence of a relationship and made this the matter to be taken up. We take for
granted that the human being is thrown into or born into a relational condition, and
lives their life always moving within a complex nest of relations. That we are
always situated within relations is unquestionable. The matter which has stood
before us from the beginning is rather the quality or character of these relations.
How it is with these relations? This motivates us.
Evocative speech is always already understood to be performed within a relation
that we identify as dialogic. This is the speech that calls, and thereby brings forth a
“gathering”. Evocative speech gathers. It can therefore be called an “injunction”
because it performs the act of enjoining. And by enjoining it directs, prescribes,
indeed, even imposes an act or conduct. But here we have captured something
essential about the turning. It enjoins us towards Being, but in doing so it directs us
towards one another as speakers and listeners. Evocative speech gathers us
together and in dialogue we mutually draw our attention to what ‘is not/not yet’.
Thus the hermeneutic relation is dialogic. And “that is why we may confidently
entrust ourselves to the hidden drift of our dialogue...[J]...as long as we remain
inquirers. [I] You do not mean that we are pumping each other, out of curiosity,
but...[J]...but rather that we go right on releasing into the open whatever might be
said.”4
But in what sense is evocative speech ‘poetic’? Why is teach-ability
communicated through a message of possibility? What is this message? Where
does it come from? What is the [original] source of the enjoining injunction? As a
way of responding to these questions let’s return to the exemplary of evocative
speech, the question “How is it with the nothing?”
These questions are significant and can likened to so many paths that ultimately
may bring us to that space from whence came the originary injunction that enjoins
us in poetic dialogue. They lead into that place, called a ‘clearing,’ where the
proper mode of attunement is understood to be the ‘letting be’ of beings. In the
opening section attunement stood for this ‘letting be’. Here we continue to revisit
the turning so that we might ultimately engage the phenomenon itself that turns us
around. Recognizing that this might appear hasty or presumptuous, we qualify this
last statement by cautioning against the anticipation that we aim for some climatic
moment where the Being beyond beings will be ‘revealed’. This is not promised,
nor can it be. For it is not a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ we may encounter, unless we
understand the ‘this’ or ‘that’ as a specific kind of posture or comportment or mode
or ‘bearing’ (as in direction). The clearing we anticipate is a situation, a context
that establishes certain conditions for the possibility of what we have been calling
evocative speech. The clearing is the location of learning, where ‘letting learning
happen’ is directed. Above we spoke of Socrates as the exemplar of learning
because he placed himself ‘at the center’ or ‘in the midst’ of the ‘excess’ of Being.
By placing himself in this ‘draft, this current’, we said, he allowed himself to be
drawn into the condition of Being. Here we sense the opportunity to begin to place
even more emphasis on the ‘draft’ that Socrates placed himself in, and, in doing so,
shift the emphasis from Socrates’ apparent willing, so that his placing is not so
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much a matter of his decision, but a matter of a decisive directive that located him,
caught him in the way a current tows and even throws us.
The clearing is a powerful tide that captures us and compels us to ‘let go’ and
‘let be’. It releases us into learning, which is identified as the reaching out through
speech (communication, expression) to the other. Socrates, as we will explore in a
moment, was not so much unlike the poets with whom he was often characterized
by Plato as being in opposition, that is, if we understand this opposition to be
placed before us as a choice of models. Even if we understand the ‘opposition’ of
Socrates and the Poets as a dialectical tension, a kind of contradiction that we must
overcome in order to discover a ‘philo-poetic’ synthesis, we still miss the essential
meaning of their encounter, because their contrast has been achieved through the
placing into relief the unique responses that each, philosopher and poet, has made
to the injunction that has been issued to them. What distinguishes Socrates from
the Poet, e.g., Ion, is his doubt that the injunction was specifically intended for
him. So, where both recognized they were being called, Socrates response cast
doubt upon both the message and the messenger and in doing so placed him and
those he encountered on the unstable ground where only dialogue can capture the
uncertainty, unpredictability and openness that characterizes the ‘clearing’ of
learning. Thus, we discover that while the injunction is an enjoining directive, it
does not predetermine or over determine how one will respond. It cannot guarantee
Learning. And this is precisely why it is authentically unstable, uncertain and
unpredictable. Herein appears the excessive presencing of Being with the evocative
questioning that directs the turning to Being and integrates Learning.
‘How is it with the nothing?’ What is this decisive directive that catches and
throws us into Learning? Again, we are cautious to address the matter as a
phenomenon of mediation and, as such, we will turn our attention to Socrates and
Ion as ‘mediators’. However, we must first complete our initial discussion of
evocative speech and dwell with the question ‘How is it with the nothing?’
Although we will have the opportunity to revisit it again, for the matter is hardly
‘settled’, this question requires some attention because in attending to it we will
have a better sense of the directive that Socrates and Ion are responding to.
Heidegger raises this question in a ‘tactical’ move that exemplifies the kind of
evocative speech that invokes what we have been calling the turning i.e. the
questioning enjoins a turning away from metaphysics to Learning . We are
interested in understanding what is involved in Learning and have proceeded by
focusing on how the desire for Learning is activated and maintained by evocative
speech. Our aim here is not unlike Heidegger and others who have identified
language, specifically communication, that is, symbolic interaction, as the
phenomenon to be addressed in the re-posing/re-positioning (in terms of our
relation with it) of a phenomenon that has become stale, worn, devoid of novelty,
spontaneity, possibility. When matters have become ‘settled’, questioning is
demanded and we are turned around toward Learning. Questioning draws our
attention to and seeks to open up the meaning of the terms we use in naming our
world. Questioning enables our relation with the phenomenon to be relocated or
repositioned. And questioning proceeds from and supports an attitude of openness.
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EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
When we pose the question we have already been ‘opened’ by that which has
addressed us, has stood out and drawn our attention. That which draws our
attention has turned us. The question is both what draws our attention and our
response when we our addressed. Questioning is thus a mode of being. For
Heidegger, the question ‘How is it with the nothing?’ takes us directly to Being,
that is, to the question concerning our relation to Being. ‘How is it with the
nothing?’ is thus a re-posing of the question of Being. Specifically, the question
enables him to draw a distinction between ‘philosophy’ and ‘thinking’, and thereby
to forward his agenda to overcome the former, if the former, ‘philosophy’, is
identified with the tradition of metaphysics which was fixated on mapping Being
in terms of the domain of ‘beings’. Metaphysics offers a static formulation of
Being, reducing it to the manifestation of what ‘is’. As such, metaphysics
represents the same logic that dominates the contemporary discourses on
‘education’.
As we discussed above, the error in philosophy has been twofold. First, to
render ‘truth’ as a permanent, eternal and, thereby, static phenomenon that is
located in a transhistorical sphere. Second, philosophy identified in humans a
faculty or capacity, which was likewise unchanging and ‘essential’, that enabled
the human being to acquire ‘knowledge’ of a ‘truth’. The important emphasis must
be placed on the traditional way in which ‘knowledge’ denoted a kind of
‘possession’. Thus to ‘know’ was to obtain, acquire, appropriate, or to have. The
‘knower’ within this schema stands outside the domain of inquiry, or the field of
the knowledgeable or what is potentially known.
As we have seen, however, learning can be differently understood as way of
being-in-the-world. In this sense it becomes a matter of ‘comportment’ (verhalten),
which identifies learning as a certain kind relation one maintains that is more
passive than ‘active,’ if by the latter we mean the activity of acquisition,
appropriation, taking in, acquiring. Learning as ‘comportment’ is a passive
modality. But it is only ‘passive’ to the extent that we understand the implications
of a questioning that seizes us. When we have understood this we are able to be
opened up by a form of communicating that directs us because it evokes in us a
sense of wonder. Questioning evokes wonder. When we are seized by wonder the
question has addressed us in our openness. When we have been addressed in our
openness we have been enjoined to Being as a process and as that which is beyond
beings. The question, ‘How is it with the nothing?’ is an attempt to evoke a wonder
about the fact that there ‘is’ something rather than ‘nothing’ and, simultaneously,
that there ‘will be’ and there is ‘not yet’.
Heidegger’s emphasis on the historicity or temporality of human experience
attempts to offer a new ontology, or doctrine of Being; one that is capable of
expressing Being as a processural unfolding. The ‘new’ task of philosophy, if it is
to overcome its tradition, metaphysics, is to think this process. But ‘thinking’ here
must not be understood in cognitive terms, but, rather, as a matter of
‘comportment’, as an existential posture, as a way of being-in-the-world. We have
called the comportment that is placed or directed towards Being attunement.
Posing the question ‘How is it with the nothing?’ is an example of this attempt to
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draw our attention turning us around towards Being as a process of unfolding. But
how does this question as an expression of evocative speech seek to seize us with
wonder? What does this question intend/attempt to ‘say’? Why is it evocative?
Why does it enjoin us in poetic dialogue, that is, compel us to respond with
inquiry, with questions? Why does this question address us in our openness, which
is another way of asking how this question enjoins us with Being as a process
turning us around and gathering us into learning?
These questions take our inquiry into the heart of evocative speech where we
take up ‘saying’. We initiated this inquiry by suggesting that evocative speaking is
expressed through provocative questioning. The provocative is one side of the
twofold nature of evocative speech. The provocative instigates. It is a call that
irritates, annoys, disturbs, excites and thereby rouses to action. In the next section
we will return to our exemplar Socrates and look further at the way he was able to
draw others into the ground of uncertainty through a provocative kind of
estranging questioning. Here, we look further at the provocative as a character of
evocative speech in order to understand why the saying of the question is the
coupling of two elements: the form and the content. Together, these two elements
represent the how and what of the question: the saying and said, the questioning
and question.
The question ‘How is it with the nothing?’ provokes because it deliberately
irritates our common sense understanding of inquiry, which, as we have suggested,
is guided by metaphysics of realism that focuses exclusively on what ‘is’. To ask,
‘How is it with the nothing?’ is a confounding question that disrupts what we have
come to recognize as acceptable and proper questioning. To ask about ‘nothing’ is
to move against cultural habits of ‘knowledge’. The question, as a question,
performs questioning, so there is no doubt that it about something. Yet, this
something is ‘no-thing’, and the very posing of a question about such a
phenomenon already annoys and irritates those who have privileged the
empirically based constructs of ‘verifiability’ and ‘reliability’. How can one
reliably verify no-thing? An empiricist with the spirit of generosity, however, will
allow their irritation to give way to intrigue or wonder. ‘Perhaps this question, as a
question, is saying something worth responding to?’, they might wonder. After all,
as Socrates would say, those who pose questions already know something about
that which they are asking. So our generous empiricist will address their irritation
as something to be examined as opposed to simply itched. Those who simply itch,
as we know, will go on itching until what was initially a small irritant and, at first,
something easily ignored, becomes an inflamed sore that requires serious attention.
We recognize the generosity of our colleague is an expression of her openness.
She has extended herself, made herself available, has responded to provocation
with interest. She has been displaced, for the moment, but recognizes this
repositioning this turning as an opportunity for inquiry. She is a seeker, one who
has a passion for the search, the search for meaning, to explain, perhaps to a fault,
the worlds that appear before her. The question, ‘How is it with the nothing?’
strikes her as perhaps another world to be examined.
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EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
“With a studied indifference science abandons this question pointing to as what
‘there is not.’” But our generous scientist, in being opened the turning, can no
longer be described as ‘indifferent’. She is enjoined in questioning. The question
addresses her, rouses her, and turns her towards the location of Learning. We have
called this location ‘the clearing’. By being enjoined in questioning our generous
scientist has been turned around, away from the static and sterile domain of
‘beings’, of ‘what is’, to the possibility appearing in/with ‘no-thing’. The nothing is
conceded. This is a decisive moment, for it leads us to the unpacking of the
question. In this unpacking one begins to take up what is said in the question. The
saying has provoked interest, but it is the said that directs poetic dialogue. In
dialogue we respond to what is stated. This dialogue might be called “the
elaboration of the question of the nothing [that will] bring us to the point where an
answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The
nothing is conceded.’”5
The decisive unpacking of the question is carried forward by the initial
provocation, which lingers on as one side of evocative speech. Wonder was roused
by the initial frustration brought on by the question’s inability to satisfy the
‘knower’s’ need to ‘know’ a something. “For thinking, which is always essentially
thinking about something, must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it
thinks of the nothing.”6 We must recall that ‘thinking’ is not to be understood as a
special cognitive activity. Precisely because of the hold that this depiction has upon
us, we have renamed ‘thinking’ as ‘contemplation’. Here we must identify the
crucial differences between a scientific and philosophical mode of existence. We
initiated this entire inquiry by taking up this persona called ‘philosopher,’ and
suggested that this person might aptly be called ‘lover of learning’. Here we add a
further description of the philosophical way of existence by drawing a contrast
with the scientific mode that “would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave
of the hand. But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become
manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out
into the nothing. The presumed soberness of mind and superiority of science
become laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously. Only because the
nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of inquiry.”7 The
scientist is roused to recognize the nothing as the ‘ground’ of their work. The
nothing is conceded, but what is involved in the unpacking of the question?
The decisive unpacking of the question directs us towards one another and
towards ourselves. By arousing wonder the question directs us towards the ‘draft’,
the unstable ground of possibility, the horizon of interpretation. The question
delivers a message to us and in doing so places us in a relation, “and the relation is
called hermeneutical because it brings the tidings of that message.” What are the
tidings that turns, that ‘catch’ and ‘throw’ us into learning? But what does it say?
The unpacking of the question is an attempt to respond to the message. What is it
that we hear?
When we respond to the question ‘How is it with the nothing?’ or any First
Question, that is, a question which strikes us at the core of our being, takes us to
the ground of our being and, as such, shakes this ground, and opens this originary
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source for inquiry, we are hearing the tidings of a message from that source, Being,
which makes possible our being-in-the-word, and which, by its address, situates us
in our questioning as questioners when we are turned toward learning we are
revealed to ourselves as questions appearing as strangers. The appearance of
learning is an event of estrangement. First Questions, in their address to us,
(re)locate us on the unstable ground of questioning. This ground is unstable
precisely because it is an ever shifting movement. Being is a process, an unfolding.
When we respond to the address of this movement we heed the tidings of the
message which is delivered in the provocative saying of the First Question. The
tidings of Being express the temporality of our being. When we are caught in the
flood and ebb of Being’s tidings we have become attuned to our historicity, to
the course and tendency of events. When we heed the call of the First Question we
find ourselves caught in the Tide of Being. The tidings of Being draw us into the
Tide. Tide means Time, season, hour, a regular period of time. But it also
designates the rise and fall of the sea due to the attraction of the sun and moon, and
a rush of water, a flood, a torrent, a stream. Tide also means ‘the course of
tendency of events.’ All these signify the condition we find ourselves in as earthly,
mortal beings. Regularity coupled with unpredictably powerful surges which
exceed our expectations and make strange what we have anticipated. The First
Questions take us to the ground of our existence as earthly beings who are caught
in this Tide, who have been thrown into the seasons, the tidal movement of events,
history. The tidings deliver the message of the Tide. Hearing is the event of being
caught in this essential sway.
“Everything depends on our paying heed to the claim arising out of the
thoughtful word. Only in this way, paying heed to the claim (Anspruch), do
we come to know the dictum (Spruch). What man heeds, what respect he
gives to the heeded, how original and how constant he is in his heedfulness,
that is what is decisive as regards the dignity allotted to man out of history.”8
In being turned to learning we hear the tidings of the Tide. What is said in the First
Question’s saying is a word that addresses us, provokes us, and evokes wonder,
catches us, pulls us, directs us. We are enjoined in questioning by a claim. A claim
is made upon us. A claim that offers a promise in the form of an assertion, a
dictum. The word ‘nothing’ addresses us in this way. ‘Nothing’ makes a claim on
us. How does it make a claim? In what way does it ‘claim’ us?
The word ‘nothing’ claims us because its address irritates the expectation of our
‘thinking’. We see or hear this word as part of a question, a question that relates us
to this phenomenon and asks us about this relation, and we are immediately
thrown. The question throws us because it presumes that we ‘know’ something of
this relationship with the ‘nothing’. Yet, the question, in throwing us, does not
push us back into ourselves, into the subjectivism of ‘reflection’ or even
‘recollection’. The question supposes we are in an ongoing and active relation with
the ‘nothing’, and it is, first and foremost, this supposition that throws us. For how
can we respond to a question when we know not about what is being asked? We
know not about this relationship with the ‘nothing’. But herein lies the first aspect
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EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
of the claim that this question makes on us. The claim, as a message, delivers the
tidings, as in ‘the news’, that we located in a relationship with that which we have
no ‘knowledge’. This news is confounding because we sense ourselves to have
forgotten something. How could we overlook such a relationship? A natural
reaction to such a claim is one of annoyance, irritation. This question, we feel, is
presumptuous and outrageous. It takes on the manner of a cross-examination. We
are annoyed by this question because it doesn’t sit well with our expectations. This
news we are receiving cuts against what we have looked forward to, have always
looked forward to; what we, in our ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ regard as certain or
likely to happen. We have been taught to anticipate ‘progress’ as the ever growing,
ever expanding harvest of our existence. Forward ‘positive’ movement guaranteed
by a ‘system’ of ‘knowledge’ that can decide the merits of the saying and the said
of any question by simply asking “What difference will it make in the world?” But
this ‘system’ can not handle a question that calls into question the very world upon
which the system itself believes itself to be rooted. The question ‘How is it with
the nothing?’ floods over that world and uproots the system from its ground. We
have certain expectations, and anticipate to build upon what we ‘know’ and have
‘known’ to be the case. This continuity is due to us, and we recoil from the
discontinuity or rupture that comes about when we are held in abeyance by a claim
that contradicts the ‘direct evidence’ of our experience. The question, in making a
claim about who we are, ruptures the continuity of our experience and holds us in a
state of abeyance. As such, we are held back, suspended. The question claims us in
claiming we have a relationship with the ‘nothing’. What does it claim with this
claim? By holding us in abeyance, it claims our judgment, it silences the juridical
voice, it renders pacific that incessant chatter of adjudication and measure. We are
silenced by the tidings from the Tide, which we have forgotten. The news silences
us, and we find ourselves quiescent: at rest, still, inert, dormant; tranquil, calm, free
from anxiety, agitation, or emotion. When we heed the saying of the said,
‘Nothing,’ we find ourselves caught and released by the tidings from the Tide.
Here, then, a second aspect of the claim we receive from the news of our
relationship with the Nothing: it catches and release us. It claims us in a still more
direct way. Here the claim is not simply a message, but an assertion that reveals an
affirmation of this relationship. Our silence reveals our tacit recognition of this
relationship. Tacit, from the Latin tacitus, silent, from tacere, to be silent. This
silence says we have recognized the claiming of the claim, that it has been
understood as existing. This silence also signifies that annoyance and irritation
have given way to a calm yet steadfast openness. We have become teachable in
this openness, and thus the result of the tidings is a tacit-turning. The evocative
saying of the question in catching our attention has turned us away from what ‘is’
to what ‘is not/not yet’, the Nothing, possibility. We have been drawn into the
condition of Learning, openness, by the question, and thereby released from
judging, which is always a presumptuous modality that prevents our hearing of the
other, the question. In judging we speak with the interrogative voice. We ask not
questions as questions, but issue ordinances, decrees, assertions. We submerge
inquiry with judgment, which stands at the ‘conclusion’ of our interrogation. With
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judgment we foreclose dialogic seeking and find ourselves ‘beyond’ discovery.
With learning, by contrast, we have been released from the linear road which leads
inevitably to judgment. We have been forced to turn off this well traveled road and
compelled onto paths that take us into the heart of the forest primeval where we are
inundated by possibilities. Learning is the tacit-turning of judgment that draws us
into the clearing en-opened by questioning.
The saying of the First Question with the said, ‘Nothing’, releases us to the
freedom of discovery. Learning is discovery that comes with the adventure of
inquiry, the seeking that is propelled by steadfast openness. This steadfast openness,
expressed through the tacit acknowledgment of the relationship with the Nothing,
which has claimed us, is called ‘Hsu’ in the Taoist tradition. Translated at times as
‘vacuous’ it denotes not an emptiness but a releasement from obstructions, thus an
emptying of distractions. As a comportment, or way of being, Hsu describes
“absolute peacefulness...and freedom from worry and selfish desires.”9 We stress
here that hsu denotes vacuity, an emptiness, unfilled, a void. The tacit-turning
brought about by the saying of the said ‘Nothing’ is akin to the emptiness of hsu.
Evocative speech is a calling (vocare) which enjoins us in emptiness, the condition of
learning where we are addressed in our steadfast openness. In heeding the saying of
‘Nothing’ we are made vacant (vacare). The call (vocare) of the First Question
enjoins us in hsu (vacare). It claims us in our relationship with the ‘Nothing’.
Our rejoinder to the enjoinment of the First Question is a mood. Our response to
the call of Being is a silence that is described as a calm and peacefulness. This
silence is an expression of the mood of attunement (der Stimmung). But how can a
mood be a rejoinder? In what sense is silence a rejoinder, a reply to the question,
‘How is it with the nothing?’ Again, it is crucial to underline why the attunement we
describe is called contemplation and thereby an expression of a kind of ‘thinking’
that is a matter of comportment, attitude, conduct and bearing. The essence of the
comportment of attunement is steadfast openness, and we have thus described this
comportment as teach-ability. The bearing of teach-ability is expressed in the silence
of attunement, which Heidegger calls the will-not-to-will or Gelassenheit
(releasement), the serenity of letting-be. This mood here is not adequately captured if
we mean the emotional “moodiness” as when we say someone is “in a bad mood,” or
more generally we say that a person is “moody”. With these expressions we are
usually describing temperament, and specifically, a manner of being that is erratic,
unpredictable, and even uncontrollable. However, these expressions are not entirely
outside the domain of our present discussion, because they denote a kind of
flexibility, and the capacity to be moved by circumstances, an openness to the
turning that we described as teach-ability. If mood is understood to be the capacity of
flexibility, then it relates to the meaning of the term as it is used in the lexicon of
musical performance. Here temperament refers to the adjustment of tones of an
instrument to fit the scale in any key, especially with those instruments that have a
fixed intonation, like a piano. Similarly, mood in music describes the mode, or the
possible ways of arranging the octave, or the form of the scale. The key here is that
mood, as mode and temperament, is a way of describing the result of an adjustment
or, to push the point, a tuning. Thus, in this sense, the rejoinder of silence is the result
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EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
of the adjustment of our desire to know. And this adjustment is brought about by the
encounter with the First Questions which are received in the form of evocative
speech.
What is the mood of silence? Where are we when we are enjoined in this
relationship with the Nothing and why is this relationship akin to the hermeneutical
relationship? We have indicated that questioning is a mode of being and that First
Questions, in particular, take us directly to Being, draw us toward our relation with
presencing. Thus, the questioning of the First Questions in their saying of the said,
terms like ‘Nothing’, tune or adjust us, they direct us and in doing so we take on a
bearing, a comportment, a conduct. Further we have said that when we are drawn
into this relationship we ‘bear up’ for seeking, for a learning that is like a sailing
before the wind. The tidings of this relationship catch us in the Tide, and we bear
up, endure cheerfully in this relationship and sail into the wind.10
We find our juridical voice silenced by the news of the relationship with Being,
a relationship which opens us to Learning, understood as the possibility or freedom
of discovery. The mood of silence is a ‘positive’ or constructive response to this
releasement from the overbearing perspective of the willing subject who seeks to
dominate, control, and render all beings instruments of his endeavors. All beings,
including, if not particularly, his fellow travelers or shipmates are subjected to his
subjectivity. The unlikely overbearing subject stands apart, alone and isolated from
all beings who are rendered ‘objects’ up and against his ‘subjectivity’. From this
perspective the subject has forgotten the relational ground of his own being.
Instead of bearing up with the wind, he fights the Wind, which he ‘understands’ as
conspiring with the Tide to capture and control him. This solo pilot is overbearing
or uberwinden in seeking to dominate the Wind, which means breeze, but also
emptiness, so importantly related back to the Nothing, Hsu. So this response is not
surprising, for the vacuity of hsu can be related to the emptiness of k’ung, or to
what the Zen master Hui-neng11 called wu-i-wu (nothingness). The encounter of
the Nothing which we identify as the (re) turn to Being and the en-opening of
learning, Suzuki warns “may push one down into a bottomless abyss, which will
no doubt create a feeling of utter forlornness.”12 When Hui-neng delivered forth
the news of Being and “declared, ‘From the first not a thing is,’ the keynote of his
Zen thought was stuck...This keynote was never so clearly struck before.”13 Huineng’s saying of wu-i-wu struck a keynote and thereby defined the basic relation
between Being and being of human. As a keynote wu-i-wu is like that fundamental
note or tone that relates all others and is the principal element of the musical mode,
expressing the basic tone or spirit of the piece to be performed. The saying of wu-iwu is akin to the question ‘How is it with the Nothing?’, where both have the result
of tuning the ‘hearers’ bearing, releasing them to the letting-be, to the flow and
movement of the Tide and Wind. As such the subject hears a ‘threat’ to his
‘subjectivity’ in this saying, hears the sinking of his vessel to the bottomless abyss.
Against this threat the overbearing subject, this isolated ‘man of choice’, struggles
to overcome the Tide and runs against the Wind, the Nothing, possibility. The
news conveyed by the saying of the Tide and Wind is denied, ignored, rejected by
the subject, who alone, desperately attempts to control these Elements14 . This
21
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subject, isolated and standing against all, seeks to bear down upon the Tide and the
Wind, as in ‘overwhelm,’ or ‘crush’ or ‘subdue’. To bear down is to sail in the
direction of the Wind and Tide, to sail against them. To bear up is to ‘endure
cheerfully’ the way, flow, movements of Tide and Wind. To learn is to be moved
by the sounding of the keynote heard in the (at)tunement to Being’s presencing.
The message brought to us by the evocative speech of the First Questions draws
us into the location of discovery and thereby positions us in an authentic relation to
presencing. In learning we have been turned, tuned, and in becoming teachable we
are attuned to Being’s excess, which we take up as the matter at hand and in doing
so have embarked on a seeking that is essentially interpretive. This is another way
of saying that we have been enjoined in the hermeneutical relationship that reveals
the possibility of all that appears in the horizon of beings. We see one another as
this possibility, and thus the relationship of learning is undertaken in the give and
take of poetic dialogue. Without this dialogue we are incapable of speaking with
the mythopoetic voice.
There is no question that the ‘hearing’ that receives the first question as an
evocative invocation to Learning is more than a response to sound waves, although
the sound waves generated by musical instruments, bells, drums, etc., can certainly
be called ‘evocative’ in the way we are using this term. So too can singing and
chanting be understood as examples of evocative speech. After all, when we
describe Learning as a dialogic event, we are calling attention to a particular kind
of communicative action where people are engaged in what we might call,
following Arendt, the art of freedom, where the dramatic performance of speaking
and listening creates a condition of plurality where all can see and be seen, hear
and be heard. This kind of performance is the essence of action as freedom. Drama,
action, describes an event which is vivid and emotional, stirring, moving. When we
stress the ‘physicality’ of evocative speech and poetic dialogue we recover the
earliest denotation of the term (phyusis) as the horizon of appearance, that through
which Being emerges or shines forth. With this emphasis, then, we are suggesting
that the tidings of Being are delivered through the dramatic performance of
evocative speech, which can be identified within the wide range of communicative
action. In other words, we should not reduce the discursive event of Learning to
something like ‘deliberation’ or even ‘dialectic’, if by these terms we mean a rule
governed interaction that is formalized in a set of procedures that, in effect, limit
the range of possibility and, thereby, undercut the entire thrust of Learning as a
inquiry, seeking, search. In saying this, however, we are reminded that our
exemplar, Socrates, himself appears to have often proceeded “dialectically,’ by
short question and answer, so that we can see precisely on what assumptions and
inferential steps a given conclusion rests, instead of being carried away by the
magic of a speech.”15
There is no denying the existence of this ‘Socrates’ who appeared to be
impatient with the ‘un-thoughtful’ performance of poets like Ion, and downright
hostile to the oration of sophists like Protagoras. But what does it mean to contrast
rule governed discourse with ‘magical’ speech? For Plato, and the tradition of
philosophy that evolved in his powerful wake, the contrast does not serve to simply
22
EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
make a distinction and thereby fix the parameters of what will be deemed
‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ forms of philosophical practice, and it certainly does
this. It further serves to privilege a kind of communication that is ‘rule bound’ or
archaic, i.e., principal speech. Plato’s hostility and impatience with the poets,
which we have discussed in an introduction, is in fact the basis of the blueprint he
offers for formal education, specifically the early childhood schooling. For Plato,
poets and sophists are said to be “reckless” and “denigrating” of the “great things”
(the gods, the divine ideas) and have ‘taught’ people to know not the truth of these
things. What is necessary is then a “dialectical poetry” that provides an antidote to
the spreading virus of opinion (doxa). Because ‘opinion’ is merely an expression of
the way things ‘appear’, as opposed to how they actually ‘are’, Plato believed it
was necessary to develop and formalize a manner of discursive engagement that
enabled us to feel certain that we were on the right path to truth. Because, as
discussed above, Plato believed that we, as humans, were incapable of adequately
expressing the truth of the great things, his main concern was to insure that develop
to the fullest extent this faculty, reasoning, that appeared most capable of
discerning the difference between organized and structured assertions, the kind,
like a well built temple, that could withstand and endure the tests wrought by the
storms of time, and passionate speech, the kind, like Ion’s rhapsodies, that were
moving, stirring, but appeared as if transmitted from an unknowable ‘beyond’.
Ironically, the frustration with ‘magical speech’ or the ‘magic’ of speech seems
born from the same frustration with the limits of humanity. If only Ion could
‘know’ why it is that he does what he does, i.e., perform the most stirring
rhapsodies, then he would show his art of poetry to be worthy of the title ‘art’,
because then it would be something he could ‘instruct’ others in. Alas, he is but an
interpreter of interpretation, a conduit of the message from the gods. But was not
Socrates too a messenger of the gods, and could it be that Plato’s depiction of him,
especially in his middle and later dialogues, is simply a distortion of Socrates
stirring performances, when he drew his interlocutors, like Meno, and those who
heard him into a state of perplexity where he himself claimed to dwell? When
Socrates doubted the message from the gods, the tidings that “You are wisest,” was
not the effect of his response a delivering of the message that wisdom is the very
recognition of our limits, our limits as humans? Perhaps it is then the Platonic
privileging of ‘dialectics’, or rule bound ‘deliberation’ that must be questioned
insofar as it seeks to limit our limitations, rather than celebrate them as the opening
of possibility, the freedom of play and discovery, which he correctly identifies as
being at the core of education. The Platonic path to judgment appears then as a
kind of ‘highway of despair’ that unlike Hegel’s, which is a despair brought about
by the apparent existence of an invisible hand of Reason (Absolute Spirit) moving
behind the backs of humans to achieve its own end, Plato’s despair is born from a
recognition and rejection of the primordial relation with Being. It is a despair with
hearing of wu-i-wu, perhaps uttered in the words of Heraclitus ‘Things keep their
secrets.” (frag 10), which opened up for Plato not as a horizon of possibility, but as
a chaotic abyss which seems to follow from open-ended, aporetic and seemingly
an-archic communicative action. When human communication is moved by
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CHAPTER 1
ongoing reinterpretation, then it suggests the temples of certainty that we have
erected are indeed deconstructable, and not fixed and eternal, as we supposed the
realm of the gods to be. In Learning we embrace the mystery of the emptiness, and
watch with dignified calm as our temples of certainty are deconstructed.
“Hermeneutics is Destruction!”16
The drama of evocative speech evinces Learning as the appearance of the ‘not
yet’. It shows clearly why the condition of Learning enables the overcoming, or the
turning around of one’s place in relation to what has been, i.e., tradition. Learning is
the possibility of ‘leaping beyond’ tradition, beyond the fixity of the social script’s
narration that assigns us ‘roles’. The drama of evocative speech opens up the play of
possibility. Learning is the drawing out or emergence of our inclination to create, to
seek, to inquire, to ‘go beyond’. We are inclined or disposed toward the performance
of free play, to the play of freedom. This free play appears when we are enjoined by
evocative speech. With our judgment held in abeyance, we are released to the
condition of discovery. In the hearing of evocative speech we are drawn into the
‘magic’ of dramatic performance. Dramatic in the sense of being vivid, stirring, and
thereby catching and throwing us beyond ourselves. The ‘magic’ of evocative speech
is identified in what occurs after the moment of provocation has given way to
wonder. To be struck with wonder is to be enchanted. Evocative speech is an enchantment. It is thus a kind of celebratory song, a singing or intoning. The saying of
evocative speech in-tones, strikes the keynote with the said, (‘Nothing’, wu-i-wu,
‘from the first not a thing is’) the words that transport us beyond what ‘is’ to that
which ‘is not/not yet’. Herein is the converging of the hermeneutic horizon of
possibility through the turning that releases into, the condition of Learning, the
location where ‘not a thing is’, hsu, emptiness.
The free play of Learning into which we are released by evocative speech is
opened up for us by an enchanting in-tonement that is an expression of a conjuring
art. Evocative speech in-tones through invocation. But invoke is a particular kind of
calling (vocare). To invoke is both to ‘call out’ as in make supplication, to ‘call on’,
but it also means to declare something, a relation, to be binding or in effect. Further,
invoke is to appeal for a confirmation. In every sense, invoke designates the relation
we maintain with Learning, but this range of meaning indicates the range of our
responses to this relation, specifically the uncertainty that comes forth from the
mystery which prevails throughout this relationship. It is a game of hide and seek
that can overwhelm. We appeal for a confirmation, but we can only wait, repose
ourselves in the releasement of our will and judgment. When we are reposed we find
ourselves at rest, composed, with a “dignified calmness”. But to repose is also to
place confidence or trust in something, a person or thing, a phenomenon. The
releasement of the will, the silencing of the juridical voice is the Leap of trust we
make into the mystery of our relation with Being. Learning unfolds in this Leap. The
Leap is our response to the tidings we receive from the First Questions.
The turning around, the adjustment (tuning) toward attunement, toward the
condition of Learning, constitutes a relocation, or repositioning. Our repose is the
result of our being re-posed. In this sense we are re-posed by the tidings of our
relation with Being. But to be ‘re-posed’ is to be ‘posed again’. And here we
24
EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
encounter again how the news of this relationship turns us and, in re-locating our
interest and attention, re-forms us. The First Questions have the effect of re-posing
us, as in making us questions. To be re-posed, then, is to be ‘posed again’, to be
questioned, or examined. Our posture, or pose, our comportment or attitude in
Learning is one of being ‘under examination’. We become the question in Learning,
and we place our confidence in the relationship in which we are questioned. This is
the why the comportment of Learning as gelassenheit is described as the “willing of
non-willing”. In the way that we ‘pose’ for a photograph and are placed in the ‘right’
position to be ‘captured’, Learning is the ‘letting-be of unconcealment’. Being
‘shines’ through the First Questions which capture us in the way the photograph
captures us in the ‘right’ posture. Later when the image has been ‘developed’ we
examine the photo-graph. What does this image say? How do we ‘appear’? What
shines forth with this photo? (‘Photo’ borrowed from the Greek ‘phos’ or ‘light’.)
The First Questions capture us and throw us back on ourselves, but not in the manner
of introspection. In throwing us back on ourselves we are turned toward our being-inthe-world, our fundamental relational existence, as beings existing in relations with
others. The will-not-to-will is the repose of being in relation with other beings.
In being captured by the Tide we are caught within the inflow and outflow of
Being’s processural unfolding in appearing/withholding, presencing/absencing,
unconcealment/concealment. The absence, concealment, is heard in the tidings. But
how do we ‘hear’ that which is absent or concealed? Exploring this question returns
us again to the saying of “Nothing”, wu-i-wu, and our encounter with no-thing,
emptiness, hsu. We have said that Learning is a Leap into that mystery of hsu, a
cheerful enduring of this re-posing where we are moved, tossed about, and abide
within an unstable location. We repose in the releasement of judgment and will and,
like Socrates, place ourselves in the draft, the current. But now we want to explore
further why the appearance of the mystery in the said ‘Nothing’, wu-i-wu is heard as
‘possibility’. If we return to Heidegger’s essay, “What is Metaphysics?” we take
notice when he writes: “Dasein means: being held out into the nothing. Holding itself
out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This
being beyond beings we call ‘transcendence.’ If in the ground of its essence Dasein
were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out
into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without
the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.”17
The human condition of Learning is a situation of Destruktion that is, first and
foremost, a response to the need to deconstruct or dismantle (Abbau) the past as a
petrified ‘tradition’ that stifles, restrains growth. Being shines forth as an ongoing
presencing with an excess that signifies the ‘not yet’. In Learning we become
authentically related to this ‘not yet’. In Learning we are attuned to this ‘not yet’
which we discover in our seeking. Our inquiry emerges in this relationship, in our
repose, where we are ‘held out’ into the nothing. The ‘nothing’ re-poses us in our
relational standing with beings, with the world and nature (all living things). We
‘transcend’ in Learning, but this does not entail a retreat or the flight within of
introspection. Our ‘gaze’ (specere) is outer, it is alter. Our attention and interest is
thus not on us but on the other (autre). We encounter the autre with the ‘nothing’.
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CHAPTER 1
The other with whom we are always in relation with, and with whom we encounter
in a vivid and stirring manner, with a heightened sense, appears to us as
‘emptiness’ because this appearance exceeds us, happens beyond us, beyond what
we commonly call the ‘subject’. Transcendence is the appearance of the Autre in
its alterity, in its otherwise than we name with our own juridical voice. Learning is
the situation of Beings shining forth, appearing as the alterity of the Autre. In the
Learning situation this willing and judging ‘subject’ is caught and thrown outside
of himself. The address of evocative speech delivers the tidings of Being in the
First Question, and this saying silences the voice that already presumes to ‘know’.
Learning is the response to the conjuring call of evocative speech which intones us
in the mode of possibility, and provokes because it presents what appears as
impossible. The Conjuring ‘magic’ of evocative speech is contra-judicare, against
judgment, the ‘thinking’ that has arrived at a conclusion, has stopped. Learning is
the thinking which ‘is not/not yet’. “Most thought-provoking is that we are not yet
thinking,” says Heidegger in one his most provocative sayings. The saying of wu-iwu strikes as the appearance of the impossible, impracticable, not feasible, what
cannot be done, thought, endured. Possibility appears as the impossible, for it
provokes the self-certainty of the willing and judging ‘subject’. In creating the
condition for the possibility of Learning, the provocative tidings must dismantle
the ‘certainty’ of the juridical ‘subject’. When this subject is subjected to the
alterity of the autre he is addressed by what ‘is not/not yet’. In this encounter, the
subject is taunted and in this moment his judgment is abandoned, for his ground
has been shaken, and he has been deprived of foundation. This confrontation is
recognized as destruktion, and this is why an abyss appears in the saying of wu-iwu. Abysuss, Abussos (a, without, bussos, depth), bottomless, profound and
unfathomable, “primeval chaos”. This strikes the subject as impossible, for one
cannot endure in a relation with ‘no-thing’, one must always be in relation with
‘some-thing’, over which one can have mastery, can control, and dominate. To ‘be
with’ is a situation that has not yet confronted the willing judging subject. The
certainty, confidence, the ‘ability’ to control, master, dominate is faced with
Destruktion when confronted by the profundity of Being. The First Questions bring
tidings of an originary relationship with a phenomenon which appears and hides,
reveals and conceals, hides from us in our seeking. Our response is decisive.
Learning is the Leap into this unforeseen, mystery, this primeval chaos, the
impossible, the ‘letting-go’ of judgment, the will not to will, the repose of the reposed, gelassenheit, the “hermeneutical situation (itself research!) –
questionableness.”18
We have said that in becoming teachable we are attuned to Being’s excess, and
the matter at hand of Learning is thus an interpretive seeking within the horizon of
beings. Being’s excess spills over and thereby makes it possible for this horizon to
be more than it is or appears to be. And as members of this horizon, this existential
situation, we too find ourselves to be more than we appear. We have also said that
when have entered the situation of Learning we appear to one another as this
possibility, and now we have recognized that the appearance of this possibility
emerges with the manifestation of alterity, of the autre. The situation of Learning,
26
EVOCATIVE QUESTIONING
then, is an event that begins with and is sustained by evocative speech, the saying
that dismantles the edifice upon and within which we stand outside and against the
horizon of beings. When we are no longer capable of withdrawing into and away
from the world, when the path to subjectivity is blocked), we find ourselves among
the world and nature, the congregation of beings and the shining forth of Being.
The event of Learning unfolds in the bright light of publicity where all can be seen
and see, heard and hear. Learning is the circulation of Being’s excess, carried out
in the ebb and flood of the Tide and the drafting of the Wind. Teach-ability is the
attunement to this circulation, and to the congregation upon and within which is
unfolds.
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 3–4.
Heidegger “A Dialogue On Language,” On the Way to Language. Harper and Row, 1971. p. 29.
ibid, p. 30.
Heidegger “A Dialogue on Language,” is an attempt to capture the meeting that took place between
Heidegger and Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University, Tokyo, in 1953. The published dialogue
is subtitled “between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” with Tezuka identified as “J” and Heidegger
as “I”.
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, p. 96.
ibid, p. 97.
ibid, p. 109.
Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 3.
Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, p. 788.
Being is now described as Tide and Wind, and it is in the relationship between these two elements
that we might imagine why the saying of the First Question is said to release us to the freedom of
discovery by pulling us off that well worn highway. We first likened the region of the clearing, that
space of learning, to the forest primeval, but perhaps we can go further if we describe Learning is a
akin to sailing.
Hui-neng (638–713). See Chan, Sourcebook, p. 426.
D.T. Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, p. 24.
ibid.
With this name ‘Elements’ I am seeking to recall what Heidegger called the first inceptions or
Anfang, which denotes the initial revelation of Being. Specifically I am attempting to link the
linguistic attitude of the pre-Socratic philosophers who sought to identify primary elements as the
primary matter of Being. For example, for Heraclitus ‘fire’ was the essential element.
Michael Frede, “Introduction to Plato’s Protagoras,” p. xv.
Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 81. cf. Inwood’s entry for ‘hermeneutics
and circularity”, pp. 87–90, Heidegger Dictionary. Heidegger’s reworking of hermeneutics takes us
from the hermeneuein of the poets, those ‘interpreters’ (hermenes) of the gods to interpretation as
“dismantling [Abbau] of tradition.”
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, p. 103.
Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 81.
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CHAPTER 2
THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
Responding to the call of Being with openness is to endure cheerfully being ‘held
out’ for questioning. This enduring identifies our ‘bearing up’ for the wandering
that we now understand as a ‘giving in to’ the clearing of Learning. In this ‘giving
in’ we have wandered into the Teaching of Being, and offer our openness as the
gift of teach-ability. If Teaching ‘calls’ to ‘let learn’, it is a calling for ‘learning’,
an appeal for teach-ability. Teaching beckons, invokes by evoking/en-opening.
This is why we have said from the onset that evocative speech turns us towards
teach-ability, this calls evokes in us the (re)turning to the primordial starting point
of thinking, wonder (thaumazein).
Heidegger says that “the teacher must be capable of being more teachable than
the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of this ground that those who
learn are of theirs.”1 In the introduction we emphasized this point with the
exploration of Socrates as the one who draws others onto the unstable ground
upon which he walks by calling out to them and setting the chaotic and
perplexing logoi into motion. But Socrates, we found, was drawing others onto
this unstable ground and into that ‘draft’ (Wind) from whence he originally and
continually stood perplexed. Socrates called out to others from a location where
he was ‘already’ confused, uncertain, teachable. He remained in this draft
because the truth was constantly ‘not yet’, an un-fulfilled promise which he
continually anticipated. He remained in/with the movement of Being’s
presencing. His comportment, his bearing up cheerfully with his perplexing
logoi, represents his giving, freely and authentically, of teach-ability. By his
evocative speech he called out to and drew others onto an unstable ground,
where others could be held out for questioning. But Socrates himself was
responding to a call, the call from the gods who claimed ‘You are wisest’. He
responded to the tidings from those who appeared to be claiming that a human
was possessed by a wisdom more profound than the gods themselves. This is a
perplexing claim, and appears to arise from a confusion about the order of things,
an inversion of the cosmological hierarchy. This news confounded Socrates who
understood or interpreted it as a call to questioning, as a gift.
The message from the gods was a gift, interpreted by Socrates as the message
that he was wisest in that he knew ‘nothing’. He was made questionable by being
held to the nothing, the possibility coming forth of Being’s presencing. Socrates’
thinking of no-thing situated him in wisdom. In this wisdom he was wiser than the
gods who required, but did not ask for, the gift of teach-ability in return. Socrates
offered this gift in interpreting this message as a sign of the gods’ confusion. He
heard in this message that the gods were teaching him because they were far less
29
CHAPTER 2
assured of their ground than he was of his. They put Socrates on his wandering
Way by letting him learn from others. In letting learning, and nothing else than
learning happen, the gods held out wisdom as the thinking of no-thing. But in their
tidings they revealed themselves to be in relation with that Beyond for which they
did not have a name. In calling out to Socrates, the gods emptied themselves of
their godliness, of their omniscience. The gods were capable of Teaching Socrates
because they were more teachable than Socrates. “If the relation between the
teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the
authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.”2
This relationship of Learning and Teaching, between being-in-the-world and
Being, is thus a ‘give and take’. In giving in to questioning, learning offers the gift
of teach-ability. And in Learning the learner receives the Teaching from the
teacher who lets learning happen by emptying herself of her authority as the
official adjudicator of knowledge and truth. The teacher lets learning happen, the
apprentice lets teaching happen. Thus the relationship between the human being
and Being is one of Learning and Teaching, as a mutual give and take of teachability. To assign this relationship as a ‘give and take’ is to describe the process as
a “mutual concession” or “forbearance”. To ‘forbear’ is to refrain or abstain from;
to bear with, to treat with patience, to abstain. In the Learning/Teaching
relationship, we abstain from the authoritative sway, we hear the silence of the
willing-judging voice. In this relationship we see the bearing up is a forbearance, a
mutual concession, a trading or exchange of gifts. Here we see how in being ‘held
out’ to the nothing is the condition of our being as learners, if Learning emerges
from the comportment of gelassenheit, of letting be, of enduring in
questionableness, in bearing up with the Wind and Tide. But this concession, if it is
unfolding in the ‘already/not yet’, is mutual, because it essentially relational. The
reception of the gift of teach-ability of Being is received in the giving of
questionableness, in the re-posing which is letting be of learning. Being ‘lets
learning happen’ in the processural unfolding of presencing/absencing, when
hiding in the mystery of the Beyond. When we ask, Where does Being go when
hiding?, we understand this Beyond to be a most profound mystery, a primeval
chaos, the vacuity of Hsu, the emptiness of k’ung, which locates Being on a ground
that is far less ‘assured’ than any we shall wander upon. This Beyond suggests that
Being, as Teacher, is more teachable than the apprentices, beings.
The mutual exchange of the gift of teach-ability is the foundation of the
Teaching/Learning relationship. We can with some confidence call this
relationship one of friendship, and characterize the exchange as an expression of
what might be called the philosophy of Love. Socrates alludes to this when, at the
end of his great speech in Plato’s Symposium he synthesizes the lessons he was
once given by a Mantinean woman called Diotima, one who was deeply versed in
the truth, which we “find unanswerable”, and “who taught [Socrates] the
philosophy of Love.”3 It is from his reception of her teaching that Socrates bases
his own work as teacher as the cultivation of friendship. His speech culminates
with the declaration that those who have had their eyes opened to a beauty which
penetrates and exceeds all life forms, will have found themselves in a Learning
30
THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
beyond all learning. In finding themselves in this Learning, an apprentice will have
encountered “the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself.”
(Symposium, 211d) This special lore reduces all learning to the play between
unconcealment and concealment. The beautiful is the appearing, the shining forth,
the excess of Being that floods through the horizon of beings. It also pertains to the
nameless place from whence presencing appears. This ‘nothing’ is now a gap that
stands between Being and the horizon of beings, which makes possible the passing
of gifts, the saying of the said, the tidings and hearing of evocative speech.
Socrates’ great speech, moreover, shows us why this giving is a sharing, and
handing on of what one has received. What is offered is ‘already’, it is a special
lore. As ‘lore’ it is the always already available to be learned. Lore is an offering of
what can be learned. The cognate of ‘lore’ is learn (in Old English leornian), and
we see that at the core of Learning is an exchange of gifts. Lore is what is offered,
and at its core it represents the relational ground of Learning/Teaching.
Is our offering then a ‘lending’? We said above that in giving we have made an
offer without concession. To reiterate: “To ‘give’ is to present without expecting
anything in return. This is the essence of gelassenheit as the ‘willing of nonwilling’. The gift gives without desiring compensation, without desiring to be
‘sated’. To ‘sate’ is to satisfy, but denotes an over-stuffing, an attempt to be filled
beyond capacity, as in ‘glut’. In giving we bestow, we offer, we relinquish. Our
attention and interest is fully engaged with the other, autre. In the giving we have
emptied our-self. Thus giving is the ful-fillment of the dismantled ego, the
destruktion of the willing-judging subject, the ‘one/’I’ who stands against the
other, which is seen as an object to be taken up. If the giving of the gift is
accomplished, the reception produces ‘non-willing’. The reception is complete in
itself.” In giving the gift of teach-ability, our listening is an act of freedom, where
we have made an offer without seeking reward. To be free is to be released from
the desire to be compensated, from the need to be acknowledged as ‘valuable’
through a formula that measures and weighs our worth, the worth of our gift. We
seek not rewards with the offering, the gift. Our wandering as a seeking is not a
quest for a holy grail, or lost treasure at the end of the rainbow. Our wandering is
the ‘lost treasure’ we plunder each moment we find ourselves attuned to Being.
Thus, when we say that we ‘lend’ an ear (or two), we mean both that we are
offering our capacity to listen to the other for the moment, and thereby grant “the
use of something with the understanding that its equivalent will be returned,” and
in the sense that we contribute obligingly or helpfully. This is the crucially
important dialogic character of this give and take. Teaching/Learning, as a mutual
exchange is dialogic, the giving and receiving of evocative speech. We ‘lend’ our
self to the other in lending an ear. And in this sense we are ‘adapting’ our self to
the other. In being reposed we are lending ourselves to listening. Learning is thus a
lending, which is possible because we are in excess, wandering in the horizon of
Being, attuned to presencing.
To listen is to be full of wonder. In Learning we are said to be ‘wonder-lent’,
full of wonder. This is the outcome of the ful-fillment of the emptying subject. In
lending ourselves we are flowing over into the other, we are giving ourselves to the
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other, our intense attentive listening is the sign of our wonder-lent, our being ‘full
of’ wonder. The give and take of Teaching/Learning is akin to the overflowing of
the Grail, which is passed along and shared, and in this passing on forms a
community or congregation of friends. Teaching/Learning is the process by which
community emerges, the community of friends, the community amongst all living
beings in the horizon. The excess of Being’s presence is the overflowing of this
cup. Teaching/Learning is the passing on, the exchange of this cup.
Arendt tells us that Socrates’ famous ‘mission’, which he describes most
passionately in Plato’s Apology, was one of trying to make friends out of the
Athenian citizenry. Socrates, she says, carried out his mission, practicing
philosophy and exhorting and arousing others to do the same, under the belief that
his purpose as thinker was to help establish a “common world, built on the
understanding of friendship, in which no rulership is need.”4 This is an insightful
way of understanding Socrates, specifically when we place this depiction alongside
Heidegger’s ‘Socrates,’ who we discussed in our introduction. If Heidegger offers
us a way of understanding the ontological location of Socrates’ mission, or the
location where he drew others when he questioned them and, as Meno described
put them under his spell, the spell of perplexity, then Arendt points us toward a
way of understanding the implication of Socrates’ ‘magic’ speech. This speech, if
we follow Arendt, was offered in the belief that he could turn others away from the
them-self and toward others.
There are several competing versions of the Socrates’ mission that emerge from
Plato’s dialogues, that is if we are interested in identifying the source that inspired
him, the messenger that put him on his way, on his wandering in search of friends.
In the Apology Socrates recounts the most popular version of the story, which
identifies the Oracle at the temple of Delphi, the temple in honor of Apollo, as the
messenger who delivered the tidings from the gods that put him underway. This
message, “Socrates you are wisest”, perplexed Socrates and drew him into the
clearing of questioning. The message turned him around, so that he became a
question for himself, “I know that I know nothing at all, so how could it be that I
am deemed ‘wisest’ by the gods?’ And the message turned him toward others,
poets, politician, artisans, any and all who were willing to lend an ear to Socrates’
questioning; questioning, which Euthyphro understood well, went around and
around but seemed to lead ‘no-where’. For Arendt, “It is obvious that this kind of
dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most
appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends. Friendship to a large extent,
indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that friends have in
common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common
to them.”5
If we follow Arendt, then we understand why the dismantling of the self-certain
subject, which happens when we are held out to the nothing, implies the possibility
of intersubjectivity or the possibility of being-together-in-and-with-the-world. This
being-in-and-with means that we are always already participating in an organic
process, that our being caught and thrown by Being is but our awareness or
attunement to the congregation we are part of. As Arendt says elsewhere, “we are
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THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
of the world and not merely in it.”6 The relationship between Being and beings
forms a community, but a community where all are “equal partners in a common
world – that they together constitute a community. Community is what friendship
achieves...”7 Socrates is ‘wisest’, in part, because he recognizes that friendship and
community are “already/not yet”. He understood and was thereby perplexed by this
fact that we are fundamentally relational beings, interconnected by Being, yet
likewise different in our being. For Socrates, this differentiation, i.e., our unique
ways of appearing in the world, and our distinct ways of seeing the world, was a
source of wonder and perplexity. This community formed through difference was
what gave rise to the most fundamental questions, “How does it appear from where
you stand?” This question is the philosophical version of the common, everyday
question, “How are you? How is it going?” To ask these questions in an authentic
way is both to wonder about the plurality that appears with all who appear, and to
establish a bond or connection. Wondering about the plurality is to acknowledge
and recognize the differentiation that maintains the horizon of beings as horizon of
beings, rather than the horizon of Being. But wondering aloud about the source of
the questioning is also the attempt to identify this horizon as a horizon, as a
boundary that draws together Earth and Sky, Tide and Wind, being and being,
Being and beings. To wonder is to seek to make meaningful this realization that we
are already situated in this relationship with Being and beings. To make
meaningful is to realize what is real. This attempt follows from the awareness that
the horizon as ‘already/not yet’ does not of itself guarantee that we will respond to
one another with openness, that we will non-willing, and thereby ‘cultivate’ this
relationship. Again, we can endure cheerfully, but we might also become forlorn
and despair. Our bearing can be one of ‘letting go’ and ‘going with’, but it can also
be one of ‘bearing down’ and withholding. We can offer our-self as a gift to the
other, and remain steadfast in our openness to receive their saying, but we might
also remain withdrawn, and closed within our-self, detached from the other. This is
the dilemma Socrates faced as he sought to build a community through the
cultivation of friendship.
The version of Socrates’ mission that we receive in Apology is consistent with
the story we receive in Crito and Phaedo, where Socrates speaks of a dream figure
appearing to him to bid him news. This tidings offered by the dream figure is not
unlike the message he receives from the Delphic Oracle, that is, insofar as it is a
message from the wholly other world, from what Arendt calls the ‘invisible’ realm,
for Plato the ‘divine’ or ‘heavenly realm’. This realm is not the Beyond, but should
be understood as a intermediate location, a ‘base camp’ below the summit that
rises beyond the horizon. When we raise the question, “How is it with the
Nothing?’, this question takes us further on to the question, “Where does Being
hide when concealing?” The appearance of this location, what Lao-Tzu has called
nameless draws us into questioning because the tidings we receive from this place
are confounding. When we wander up and to this summit we enter a ‘cloud of
unknowing’. For Socrates, the draft where he found himself located and where he
sought to bring others, these ‘clouds’ that the poet Aristophanes saw as the source
for ridiculing this ‘good for no-thing’ philosopher was indeed the source of
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perplexity.8 He remained perplexed, even on his last day, the day he was to drink
the cup of poisonous hemlock, which is recounted for us by Plato in the Phaedo,
Socrates tells his friends who come to be with him in his last hours that he has
spent his time composing songs, writing poetry. His friend Cebes begins their final
conversation by asking Socrates about the lyrics he had been reported to have been
writing. Cebes asks on behalf of their friend, the poet Evenus, who wants to know
about Socrates’ adaptation of Aesop’s fables and ‘The Prelude’ to Apollo. Evenus,
Cebes tells Socrates, “wanted to know what induced [you] to write them now after
you had gone to prison, when you had never done anything of the kind before. If
you would like me to be able to answer Evenus when he asks me again – as I am
sure he will – tell me what I am to say.” (Phaedo, 60d) There is much for us to
explore here, for it is truly astounding for us, who have listened to Plato’s account
of Socrates’ journey, to learn that he has spent his time in prison composing,
writing, attempting to ‘put down’ and hold what he had always understood to be
fluid, in play, moving, appearing, disappearing and reappearing again. Not
surprising is that in writing, presumably for the first time, he chose to write lyrics,
compose poetry which, despite his ambivalence toward his ‘poetic’ friends like
Ion, he must have understood as offering the most authentic way of reporting the
tidings he received from the gods. His impatience with Ion, champion Homeric
rhapsode, was precisely that Ion did not compose, but merely performed Homer’s
songs, songs which were ‘divinely inspired’, and so the work of one who is
‘possessed’ by the gods. In speaking with Ion, Socrates says “the poets are nothing
but the gods’ interpreters, possessed each by whatever god it may be.” (Ion, 534e)
In turn, as a rhapsode, Ion is ‘merely’ an “interpreter of interpreters”. (Ion, 535a)
Here we encounter the line that Heidegger found so insightful.
Socrates’ too must have finally released himself to the understanding that his
own journey, his wandering, was no so unlike Ion’s performances. Socrates must
have made peace with this realization that he too was “possessed” by the saying of
the gods, for his wandering was, after all, put underway by the message from
Apollo that he received from his lifelong friend Chaerephon, who had visited the
temple at Delphi and asked the Oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates. His good
friend Chaerephon, who Socrates reminds the jury during his trial was also “a
friend of your people’s party – a good democrat who played his part with the rest
of you in the recent expulsion and restoration,” (Apology, 21a), brought Socrates
this news and it was Socrates’ response, his ongoing interpretation of this message,
that represented his wandering, and his questioning. The message evoked the
wonder . “When I heard about the oracle’s answer, I said to myself, What does the
god mean? Why does he not use plain language? I am only too conscious that I
have no claim to wisdom, great or small. So what can he mean by asserting that I
am the wisest man in the world? He cannot be telling a lie; that would not be right
for him. After puzzling about it for some time, I set myself at last with
considerable reluctance to check the truth of it in the following way. I went to
interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here if
anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine
authority, You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser
34
THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
than I am.”(Apology, 21b-c) Of course, Socrates continued to be puzzled by the
message from Apollo, for everyone he encountered was incapable of ‘disproving’
the claim made by the god. For those he ‘interviewed’ were not willing to be ‘held
out’ for questioning. They remained steadfast in their position as ‘knowers’,
prominent intellectuals who were angered by Socrates desire to see them enter into
a relationship of questioning with him. Those he sought out were not interested in
the gift he offered them, until, finally, Socrates arrived at the realization that the
tidings of the gods were meant to draw him and others out of the self-certainty of
the intellect, of what we now call cognition or knowledge of ‘facts’, and once out
of this self-enclosed space into the congregation of thinkers. Thinking begins,
Socrates came to understand in his encounters with reluctant strangers, when we
come face to face with the limits of knowledge, when we stand out before the
Nothing and withstand the dismantling of human knowledge. Thus Socrates came
to realize after his attempt to form a fellowship with those ‘wise men’ he
encountered that “the truth of the matter, gentlemen, is pretty certainly this, that
real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that
human wisdom has little or no value. It seem to me that he is not referring literally
to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us,
The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of
wisdom he is really worthless.”(Apology, 23b)
The full force of this reckoning, perhaps, did not reveal itself fully to Socrates
until he was removed from the comings and goings of everyday life, and was in
prison, passing the time away with family, friends and himself. It is from within
this location that Socrates tried his hand at composing songs, writing poetry, like
one who is reposed in ‘possession’. Thus, in response to Cebes’ question, Socrates
tell him to inform Evenus that he needn’t worry if he is concerned that Socrates’
songs will compete with his own. No, his lyrics were a ‘final’ attempt to respond to
the tidings he received from the gods in his dreams. “I did it in the attempt to
discover the meaning of certain dreams, and to clear my conscience, in case this
was the art which I had been told to practice. It is like this, you see. In the course
of my life I have often had the same dream, appearing in different forms at
different times, but always saying the same thing, ‘Socrates, practice and cultivate
the arts.’ In the past I used to think that it was impelling and exhorting me to do
what I was actually doing; I mean that the dream, like a spectator encouraging a
runner in a race, was urging me on to do what I was doing already, that is,
practicing the arts, because philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and I was
practicing it. But ever since my trial, while the festival of the god has been
delaying my execution, I have felt that perhaps it might be this popular form of art
that the dream intended me to practice, in which case I ought to practice it and not
disobey. I thought it would be safe not to take my departure before I had cleared
my conscience by writing poetry and so obeying the dream. I began with some
verses in honor of the god whose festival it was. When I finished my hymn, I
reflected that a poet, if he is to be worthy of the name, ought to work on
imaginative themes, not descriptive ones, and I was not good at inventing stories.
So I availed myself of some of Aesop’s fables which were ready to hand and
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CHAPTER 2
familiar to me, and I versified the first of them that suggested themselves. You can
tell Evenus this, Cebes, and bid him farewell from me, and tell him, if he is wise,
to follow me as quickly as he can. I shall be going today, it seems; as those are my
country’s orders.”(Phaedo, 60e-61c)
We have said that Socrates’ was put underway by the message he received from
the oracle. The saying of the god’s message, “Socrates you are wisest,” held him
out for questioning, and drew him into questionability. He received the gift of
teach-ability and thereby became teachable. And in being teachable he was capable
of learning. He passed on the gift he received in drawing others into the draft of
inquiry that had caught him. He was less sure of his ground as he endured and
remained steadfast in the wonder that was evoked with the tidings. Socrates’
pathos, his passion for questioning, was his response to these tidings. His pathos
also made him ‘beautiful’, especially to young people who were energized by his
openness and authentic engagement with others. Drawing others into the location
of questioning, he compelled them to think along with him. In the dialogues he set
thinking in motion, and turned others toward an attunement to Being’s processural
unfolding. The dialogues expressed this process, this motion, and hence reflected
the peripatetic quality of Learning.
In dialogue we wander, our talking is a walking, a movement, a seeking
together. Friendship and community emerge from this thinking that is a wandering
together. And this is why we say our relationship with Being is Learning, for
Learning is another way of describing our attunement or awareness of our beingwith-Being, of being reposed in Being’s processural unfolding. Learning is the
wandering thinking evoked by wonder (thaumadzein), the dialogue where silence
and attentive intense listening predominate.
What is heard by this attentive listening is evocative speech, the saying of First
Questions, or what Arendt, drawing on Kant, calls ‘ultimate questions’, those
questions (“of God, freedom, and immortality”) which remain unanswerable, yet
urgent and necessary. These questions emerge out of a passion and need that are
inspired by “the quest for meaning.”9
In receiving the tidings our juridical voice is silenced, as we endure the wonder
of possibility that appears before us as we are held out to the nothing, the
profoundity of possibility, of the ‘not yet’. This wonder is the beginning of
thinking, “it begins with thaumadzein and ends with speechlessness,” the
dismantling of the self-certain subject, which crumbles when compelled to endure
the shaking ground of questioning. Unsettled by the seismic motion of Being, the
intellect, along with its cognitive quest for ‘reliable’ and ‘verifiable’ ‘truth, are
submerged by the flood of possibility that emerges when the shaking ground
evokes a tidal wave of meaning which exceeds the capacity of ‘certainty’ and
‘evidence’. The silencing of the juridical voice is filled with the song of poetic
thinking. These unanswerable and ultimate questions (re)establish us as teachers
and learners, as question-asking beings. For Arendt, this poetic thinking, which she
calls “philosophy,” is the ground or the condition for the possibility for science and
cognition. Poetic thinking is a re-membering of the question-asking being. In this
re-membering we are re-minded of our pathos to know. Without this pathos,
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THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
knowledge, science, are meaningless, and no better (or worse) than the artificial
‘intelligence’ of machines, which are still, ultimately, the products of human
hands. “In asking the ultimate, unanswerable questions, man establishes himself as
a question-asking being. This is the reason that science, which asks answerable
questions, owes its origins to philosophy, an origin that remains its ever-present
source throughout the generations. Were man ever to lose his faculty of asking
ultimate questions, he would by the same token lose his faculty of asking
answerable questions. He would cease to be a question-asking being, which would
be the end, not only of philosophy, but of science as well.”10 So long as we have
gift givers, those who are capable of hearing the saying of the other as autre, we
are not in the grave danger Arendt alerts us to, as the always already/not yet
dismantling of the question asking being that occurs when the human condition of
plurality, spontaneity, natality, freedom, and action are threatened by faceless,
nameless institutional machinations. Faced with the specter of ‘thoughtlessness’,
we seek teachers, those who are capable of nothing else than this: letting learning
happen. Such teachers are gift givers, those whose offering of ‘teach-ability’
cultivates friendship.
We know from the Apology, Phaedo, and other Platonic dialogues that Socrates
remained steadfast in the location where he could receive the tidings from the gods
and, in turn, pass along his pathos of wonder to others and, in making this offering,
cultivate friendship. In Plato’s Symposium, we encounter another version of the
legend, one where Socrates recounts how his wandering was guided or moved
along by a different set of tidings.
The context for Symposium is a drinking party hosted by Agathon,11 a tragic
poet. The guests for the occasion included Phaedrus, for whom Plato named
another important dialogue, Aristophanes, the same poet which ridiculed Socrates
who had written the satire The Clouds, who comes down with a serious bout of
hiccups during the party that render him incapable of delivering a speech, perhaps
a moment of irony for Plato, and Alcibiades, a prominent statesman who bursts
into the scene already quite inebriated but proceeds to sing high praises to Socrates
who he declares has above all others compelled him to step outside of himself and
acknowledge the trivial life he has been living, to the point where his shame is
unendurable. The fact that he is drunk when delivering his praise is, of course,
another moment of deep irony. Another attendee, who accompanied Socrates to the
party, was Aristodemos, described as “a little man who never wore shoes.” Aside
from the important fact that this party is honoring Agathon’s first prize ‘victory’ at
the festival that had recently taken place at the enormous Theater of Dionysius in
Athens, we must emphasize the occasion as a gathering of friends for an evening of
celebration.
The theme of friendship is set at the onset by Plato, who structures the dialogue
as a recollection of a recollection, as a chain of memories, held fast by friends,
specifically friends who are wandering together. As Rouse summarizes, “The story
of the banquet, as told by Aristodemos, who attended it with Socrates, is here
retold by Apollodoros to a friend while they were walking together about fifteen
years after. Apollodors is described in the dialogue Phaidon (Phaedo) as being
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present weeping at Socrates’ death about a year later.”12 The importance of beingwith-others and learning together with friends is established in the opening of
Synposium, when Apollodorus tells his friend as they walk along that he heard the
account of the evening from Aristodemos, “a lover of Socrates as much as anyone
else in those days.” Apollodorus is himself happy to retell the story, which he says
he confirmed with Socrates sometime later. He cheerfully offers that there isn’t a
better way to move along the road toward the city than “for us to talk and listen as
we go,” adding “For that matter I don’t know anything that gives me greater
pleasure, or profit either, than talking or listening to philosophy. But when it comes
to ordinary conversation, such as the stuff you talk about financiers and the money
market, well, I find it pretty tiresome personally, and I feel sorry that my friends
should think they’re being very busy when they’re doing absolutely nothing. Of
course, I know your idea of me; you think I’m just a poor unfortunate, and I
shouldn’t wonder if you’re right. But then I don’t think that you’re unfortunate – I
know you are.” (Symposium, 173c-d)
The link between memory and friendship is central to this dialogue, and it is the
framework in which Socrates offers us an alternative account of his ‘mission’, his
purposeful wandering. The central philosophical point of the dialogue we are
recalling occurs when Socrates takes his turn in friendly game of speechmaking on
the theme of Love. Here is where we encounter an alternative version of the
Socrates legend, where we learn that Socrates, who we have learned was put
underway by the message from the gods, had his wandering guided by the doctrine
(Doctrina, Learning) of another teacher, Diotima. However, before we recall some
elements of Socrates’ speech, we should note that like Alcibiades, who bursts into
the scene inebriated, Socrates too joins the company in an altered state. That is, as
he enters it is evident that he arrives ‘possessed’ by wonder, in the altered state of
perplexity, and it is from this ‘habitual location’ that he will engage his friends in
conversation and address them with his speech. Thus, it is crucially important for
the reader to pay close attention when Aristodemos recalls, first, how he had
crossed paths with Socrates who was on route to Agathon’s party and invited the
uninvited Aristdemos to join him. Extending his hand to his friend, Socrates recalls
the Homeric proverb, “Unbidden do the good frequent the tables of the good.”
(Symposium, 174b) But we must listen closely when Aristodemos recalls how
shortly after they began their walk together to Agathon’s place, “Socrates fell into
a first of abstraction and began to lag behind.” When they finally arrived at the
party Socrates, much to Agathon’s surprise, remained outside where “he retreated
in the next-door neighbor’s porch.... This is very odd, said Agathon. You must
speak to him again, and insist. But here I broke in [recalled Aristodemos]. I
shouldn’t do that, I said. You’d much better leave him to himself. It’s quite a habit
of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is. I’ve no
doubt he’ll be with us before long, so I really don’t think you need to worry him.”
(Symposium, 175b)
The dinner wasn’t “more than halfway through” when Socrates enters the scene,
much to Agathon’s relief, who bids Socrates come sit next him. “I want to share
this great thought that’s just struck you in the porch next door. I’m sure you must
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THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
have mastered it, or you’d still be standing there,”(Symposium, 175c) says Agathon
to Socrates. Agathon, although a good friend of Socrates, has not yet come to
recognize the location that Socrates has arrived from is not a sphere where the
‘truth’ reveals itself. He suspects Socrates has some clear and distinct idea that he
will now share with his friends. For why else would he have taken so long to join
them? Of course, it is the case that Socrates has something to share with them, and
his offering will, in the end, come across in an unusually didactic or doctrinaire
form. “My dear Agathon, Socrates replied as he took his seat beside him, I only
wish that wisdom were the kind of thing one could share by sitting next to
someone – if it flowed, for instance, from the one that was full to the one that was
empty, like the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of worsted. If
that were how it worked, I’m sure I’d congratulate myself on sitting next to you,
for you’d soon have me brimming over with the most exquisite kind of wisdom.
My own understanding is a shadowy thing at best, as equivocal as a dream, but
yours, Agathon, glitters and dilates – as which of us can forget that saw you the
other day, resplendent in your youth, visibly kindled before the eyes of more than
thirty thousand of your fellow Greeks.”(Symposium, 175d-e) Agathon’s response
to Socrates’ compliment is to measure it as both a friendly jibe at the ‘champion’s’
success in the Theater of Dionysius, and as an invitation to take up a dialogue on
the matter of wisdom, specifically how it comes to us, how it appears, and whether
or not it is a matter that can, indeed, be so easily shared between friends. Socrates
has re-minded Agathon and his guests, and Plato his readers, that Socrates has
arrived from a ‘shadowy’ location, where, quite ‘alone’, he has endured the
appearance of the sur-real. Estranged, he emerges as if from a dream, not certain of
what has appeared to him. Equivocal, peculiar, shadowy, this is the hide and seek
of Being, which disrupted Socrates direct path to Agathon’s, have forced him off
the road and pulled him back away from the ‘glitter’ that shines on us in everyday
life. Agathon was right to recognize that Socrates had been struck by something,
but off the mark when describing this as a ‘great thought’. On the contrary,
Socrates has been ‘struck dumb’ and, as a result, enters the party ‘emptied’ and
open, not full of the kind of wisdom that can be poured into the cups of his friends.
Yet, as we see, it turns out that Socrates is quite full of wonder and seized by
memory, questions persisting throughout his lifelong encounter with this Tide that
has been catching, pulling and throwing him off the well beaten paths.
All of these moments at the beginning of the dialogue prepare us for the famous
recollection Socrates offers at the party when his turn arrives to give his account of
Love. As the dinner gets into full swing, the guests who had on the previous
evening celebrated Agathon’s victory concur that they are still “much soaked” and
would prefer to “spend a very pleasant evening in discussion,” as Eryximachus
puts it. He adds, “I suppose the best way would be for each in turn from left to
right to address the company and speak to the best of his ability in praise of Love.”
Socrates notes that all have made a unanimous consent to the suggestion and says,
moreover, that “Speaking for myself, I couldn’t well dissent when I claim that love
is the one thing in the world I understand.”(Symposium, 177d-e) For those who
have listened to Plato’s account of the legend of Socrates’ ‘mission’, his wandering
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in wonder that was characterized by his mantra, “All I know is that I know nothing
at all,” we are struck by the affirmative statement made by Socrates here at
Agathon’s banquet. Socrates’ saying he actually knows something is indeed
evocative, and situates us in a position to receive more. By the time it is his turn to
speak we have grown impatient and anxious to hear, finally, what he has to say on
a matter, the one and only phenomenon, he has seen clearly in this world: love.
There are two aspects of Socrates’ speech that are striking. First is the fact that
he is delivering a speech and thereby departing from his usual inquisitive style of
dialogue. The intimate gathering may have influenced a softening of Socrates
sometimes harsh dismissal of speech making, which he derided, for example, when
he met with Protagoras, the great sophist and upon hearing his speech on virtue
“gazed at him spellbound, eager to catch any further word that he might
utter...Then said Socrates, I’m a forgetful sort of man, Protagoras, and if someone
speaks at length, I lose the thread of the argument.”(Protagoras, 328d & 334d) On
the occasion of Agathon’s banquet, Socrates seems to have embraced the ‘magical’
character of speech and spurned the dialectical. Although, if truth be told, the
speech is hardly a monologue, but a recollection of a dialogue Socrates had years
before. And this relates to the second unusual aspect, that the speech is not so
much an original piece of oration, but a recollection of a teaching. What Socrates
offers is to share a gift he had received years before from “a woman called
Diotima – a woman who was deeply versed in this and many other fields of
knowledge...it was she who taught me the philosophy of Love. And now I am
going to try to connect her teaching – as I can without her help.”(Symposium,
201d) Taken together these two aspects present us with a unique portrait of
Socrates and a distinct version of the legend of his mission. Through his
recollection of his encounter with Diotima we learn that Socrates was put on his
way by a certain clarity concerning Love, a spirit that is neither human nor mortal,
but exists somewhere in between wisdom and ignorance, and is a messenger, one
who delivers tidings. Love is one of “the envoys and interpreters that ply between
heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending
with the heavenly answers and commandments... They form the medium of the
prophetic arts...of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery,
for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the
mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or
sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have
spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in
the more mundane arts. There are many spirits, and many kinds of spirits, too, and
Love is one of them.”(Symposium, 203a)
Those who receive Love’s teaching, receive the message from the messenger,
the tidings that connect the human and immortal, the ignorant and the wise.
Diotima reveals to Socrates that these tidings offer a promise to those who receive
them openly. To receive them openly one must be already be turned away from the
comings and goings of everyday life, the idle chatter of commerce, and released to
the Way of the Tide. “And, turning his eyes toward the open sea of beauty, he will
find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest
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THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
thought, and reap a golden harvest of philosophy, until, confirmed and
strengthened, he will come upon one single form of knowledge, the knowledge of
the beauty I am about to speak of.”(Symposium, 210d)
By the time Socrates enters Agathon’s house he had long since been ‘awakened’
by the tidings, which, already Diotima says, arrive in the form of a revelation.
Socrates had already received this revelation in the form of the saying of the
message from the gods. This is the most essential meaning of ‘revelatio’ or
revelatus, to reveal, unveil. Perhaps the most ancient of all ‘sayings’ is the one
denoted by revelatio. With this word we speak of the unveiling, showing and
disclosure of the divine tidings, the gift, the promise, the covenant. With
‘revelation’ we speak of “an act of revealing or communicating divine truth; esp
God’s disclosure or manifestation of himself or his will to man.” Revelation is the
most primordial of sayings, for in this saying Being unfolds and discloses the
shining of appearance, filling the emptiness. Revelation is the radical confirmation
of Being within the horizon of beings. This confirmation comes in the form of a
communion that is communicated in the connection that discloses the
interconnection of all that is. The togetherness of the horizon of being is
understood against the backdrop of the apartness with Being. For Being always
already exceeds this horizon in standing out in the saying, in ‘speaking’ or shining
forth. Revelation is the excess of Being that draws our attention to the
interconnection of all beings. In receiving this revelation we are held out to the
presencing of the Present. This Present is disclosed to us as a gift. This is the
message as a gift from the gods. The Present is the affirmation of Life. Diotima
relates this doctrina, or learning, to Socrates as an initiation to “the mysteries of
Love,” that arrives to all who have been re-posed and have been offered “a golden
harvest of philosophy.” The cornucopia of this harvest ‘strengthens’ and ‘confirms’
upon the one who receives it “one single form of knowledge, the knowledge of the
beauty” of the ideal of friendship, which evokes the passion and desire to cultivate
the connectedness between beings appearing in this horizon of existences. This
vision of beauty marks the reception of what we might call an ‘awakening’ of the
congregation between Earth, Sky, Wind, and Water. Thus, the ultimate revelation
arrives as a “wondrous vision” that does not “take the form of a face, or of hands,
or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a
something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or
the heavens, or anything that is – but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal
oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the
parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same
inviolable whole.”(Symposium, 211a-b) According to Diotima, this revelation
arrives from the Beyond, from the nameless, the Nothing that subsists and remains
beyond Being and beings, the one that encompasses all that is, and is the condition
for the possibility of Being’s processural unfolding the reception of this revelation
renders us ‘speechless’ and thereby capable of thinking.
As the location for both Being’s appearing and disappearing, the Beyond is the
ultimate context, location, clearing or topos. The disclosure that arrives with the
disclosure of the Beyond is received in the message that turns, tunes and attunes.
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The message, like Hui-neng’s declaration, “from the first not a thing is,” is
received as the dismantling of intellectualizing subject, whose ego cogito has
objectified the other as that which stands against. The gift of this saying [Sage]
“that was once spoken and is so far still unspoken”13 is received by the one who is
reposed, who has been released to hearing the saying of the gods. This one we call
Sage, the one who hears and, in turn, gives or passes on what has been heard. The
Sage is the hearer of the saying [Sage]. The Sage emerges when the saying floods
over and ‘drowns’ the juridical voice. As Suzuki puts it, “When the [saying] ‘from
the first no a thing is’ is substituted from the ‘self-nature of the Mind is pure and
undefiled’, all the logical and psychological pedestals which have been given to
one are now swept from underneath one’s feet and one has nowhere to stand. And
this is precisely what is needed for every sincere Buddhist to experience before he
can come to the realization of the Mind. The seeing is the result of his having
nothing to stand upon.”14 For the Buddhist and for the Philosopher, the evocative
saying draws one into the unstable, shifting and shaking ground of Learning. What
surfaces or shoots up from this ground, from the roots, is the Teacher or Sage, the
giver, who, like Socrates, arrives at the conviction that “I try to bring others to the
same creed, and to convince them that, if we are to make this gift our own, Love
will help our mortal nature more than all the world. And this is why I say that
every [person] should worship the god of love, and this is why I cultivate and
worship all the elements of Love myself, and bid others do the same. And all my
life I shall pay the power and the might of Love such homage as I can.”
(Symposium, 212b) We learn from Socrates that worship of Love has been the
central motivation force of his wandering, Diotima’s teaching framed his
awakening. . He has been captured, as in captivated in wonder, by the message
received from the gods, the revelation that communicates “divine truth”. But in
being turned around, away from himself and towards the autre as a subject who
addresses him, the Sage hears and passes on the saying of the other and, as a
sounding-board, responds by offering his own revelatio, as “an act of revealing or
opening to view... or discovering to others of what was before unknown to them.”15
In receiving and passing on the revelation of beauty and Love, the Sage re-poses
the other in questionableness and, through evocative speech, estranges the other
and allows her to see herself anew, as the ‘already/not yet’. and at-tuned to the
Love of Learning. And through the exchange of evocative sayings, friendship, as a
wandering together, a purposeful sojourn with others (peregrinatio), is cultivated
through a poetic thinking together, the giving and receiving of teach-ability, the
letting be of the other, which reaps a golden harvest of community and fellowship.
We have learned from the legends of Socrates, that he was the teacher who let
no-thing else but learning happen, and was put underway by the recurring
messages he received from the gods. These recurring messages were received as if
from within a dream, as Socrates suggests in Symposium, but many arrived in the
form of dreams. He recounts the various forms of his messages in Phaedo, “It is
like this, you see. In the course of my life I have often had the same dream,
appearing in different forms at different times, but always saying the same thing,
‘Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts.” Regardless of the forms these messages
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THE CALLING OF SOCRATES
took, Socrates seems to have deciphered them within the framework of learning,
the doctrina he received from Diotima. Her teaching left him with the one and only
truth he confesses to have known, and from this a tentative conviction about how
he might undertake his wandering. This tentative conviction, undertaken always
under the influence of questionableness was more than a ‘fool’s motivation’ to get
going, but far less than a ‘commander’s determination’ to move ‘forward’ with full
speed.
It is the very tentativity of his conviction that gives birth to the various legends
and to Socrates’ own changes of heart in how he should proceed. Regardless of the
different paths he took, he was certain that he should never wander alone. Even the
approaching moment of his departure in the Phaedo is endured cheerfully, with
tranquility and calm, for “a man who has devoted his life to philosophy should be
cheerful in the face of death, and confident of finding the greatest blessing in the
next world when his life [on earth] is finished.” (Phaedo, 64a). His bearing up to
death is endured with the promise that he will continue in his journey with others
who have gone on before him. “How much would one of you give to meet Orpheus
and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die ten times over if this account
is true. It would be a specially interesting experience for me to joining them
their...” (Apology, 41a) Thus, the certainty of the Way he wandered was rooted in
his understanding that the message “practice and cultivate the arts” meant, for him,
to practice the art of friendship. This art might also be called the art of Teaching, or
letting learning happen. Through this art we are held out together for questioning,
and in this way, make meaning together. The essence of thinking is dialogic
precisely because it is the practice of giving and receiving. Thinking is the passing
of the cup, the offering of one’s fullest attention to others so as to receive their
saying, their voice as the ‘already/not yet’. To be released from one’s own voice is
to become reposed in the hearing of the other. To hear is not simply to listen, as in
the reception of meaningless sounds. To hear is to receive meaning from the other.
But this meaning is offered and received over the profound gap that opens up
between beings and makes possible their being together. This profound gap both
draws beings together and separates them. It is the condition for the possibility of
the horizon which joins them as a congregation. This gap is the Nameless Beyond,
the ultimate context. This gap appears to us in the practice of this art of friendship
in our wandering, in the exchange of words. As we said above: an abyss appears in
the saying of wu-i-wu. Abysuss, Abussos (a, without, bussos, depth), bottomless,
profound and unfathomable, “primeval chaos”. Thinking appears from in/with this
gap. The giving and receiving of sayings is exchanged over this abyss. In passing
over the abyss the saying takes on the character of the question. The saying is held
out to the nothing, and becomes questionable. In becoming questionable, the
saying appears as possibility, is interpretable. We receive the message and become
interpreters of interpreters. The saying is received as a gift. The saying is offered
and received as possibility, as questionable, as poetic. The exchanging of sayings is
the giving and receiving of poetic thinking. Evocative speech is the sharing and
passing of poetic thinking. We fill and empty the cup of meaning by offering and
receiving one another’s words, expressions, ways of being in the world. “As the
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destiny that sends truth, Being remains concealed. But the world’s destiny is
heralded in poetry...”16
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
44
Heidegger, Thinking, p. 15.
ibid.
Plato, Symposium, 201d.
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” p. 84.
Ibid, p. 82.
Arendt, “Thinking,” p. 22.
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” p. 83.
See The Clouds by Aristophanes. Socrates refers to this play during his trial when he is responding
to the charge of impiety. With a rather sarcastic tone, Socrates depicts the popular version of him as
a philosopher, and speaking in the third person says, “Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that
he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the
stronger, and teaches others to follow his example. It runs like that. You have seen it for yourselves
in the play by Aristophanes, where Socrates goes whirling round, proclaiming that he is walking on
air, and uttering a great deal of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing whatsoever. I
mean no disrespect of such knowledge, if anyone really is versed in it – (Apology, 19c).
Arendt, “Thinking,” p. 14–15.
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” p. 99.
Rouse’s introductory note to his translation is worth sharing. Rouse writes: “The banquet took place
in Agathon’s house in 416 B.C.; a few days previously Agathon, the handsome young tragic poet the
aged about thirty-one, had won the prize for, his first ‘victory,’ when one of his tragedies was first
performed at a dramatic festival in the Theatre of Dionysus, the theatre at the foot of the Acropolis
in Athens, which accommodated about 30,000 spectators; [at 19b] Socrates refers to Agathon’s
courage in facing such a huge audience. Agathon appears to have been the first to insert into his
tragedies choral odes unconnected with the plot of the drama. He gave this banquet to his friends on
the next evening after he and his chorus had offered their sacrifice of thanksgiving for his victory.”
Rouse, “Symposium (The Banquet),” Great Dialogues of Plato, p. 69.
Rouse, Great Dialogues of Plato, p. 70.
Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, p. 87. Definition for “hearing” with a direct citation from
Heidegger, On the Way to Language.
Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, p. 26. Suzuki concludes this except “Hui-neng is thus in one
way looked upon as the father of Chinese Zen.”
Noah Webster’s third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. G. & C.,
p. 1942.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, p. 242.