Being and Learning

A Poetic Phenomenology of Education

Eduardo M. Duarte

Being and Learning

Being g and Lear rning A Poe etic Phenom menology of o Educatio on

Eduardo M. Duarte Hofstra University

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6091-946-6 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-947-3 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-948-0 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved 2012 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Authors Foreword Preface: Retrieving Immortal Questions, Intiating Immortal Conversations Introduction 1. Evocative Questioning 2. The Calling of Socrates 3. The Way of Lao-Tzu 4. Platos Allegory of the Cave 5. The Dwelling of Heraclitus 6. Aristotles Critique 7. The Saying of the Sage 8. Meditative Thinking 9. Zarathustras Descent 10. The Improvisational Art of Teaching/Learning 11. (Re) Turning to the Originary Question Index of Names Key Terms

vii xi 1 11 29 45 69 107 129 145 195 211 301 383 393 395

AUTHORS 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

AUTHORS FOREWORD

Working Group, organized by the late Ilan Gur-Zeev, and published this as a chapter in the groups first book (Learning as Freedom: The Letting Be of Learning Together, Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today. Ilan GurZeev, 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. Heideggers 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. Heideggers 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

AUTHORS 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

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 pilgrims 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. Im 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 strangerAs 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 Platos dialogue the Sophist. Here the name give to this Stranger by Plato isstranger (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 ironythe 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 himHe declares that his is foreign to the language of the courts, to the tribune of the tribunals: he doesnt know how to speak this courtroom language, this legal rhetoric of accusation, defense, and pleading; he doesnt 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 Platos 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

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, whats more, an account of Being itself. I depart from the traditional reading of Being, as Platos 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 Heideggers 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., 518519) 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. Thats 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 souls 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, whats more, an account of Being itself. Here I will depart from the traditional reading of Platos 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. Aristotles 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. Aristotles extension and Heideggers 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 Platos real lover of learning to Aristotles 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 Aristotles 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. Aristotles 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. Beings 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.

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 Platos philosopher is the happiness of Aristotles 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. Whats 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 minds 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 couldnt we endure in it? The question of enduring or remaining attuned turns on the reading one brings to Aristotles 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 lovers desire is never fully consummated until it is released by death. Perhaps the best summary of
4

INTRODUCTION

this is Platos 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) Platos 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 Aristotles short time would revise the existential terms of endurance, away from Platos 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 Platos lover or if we, rather, have a contrasting image of attunement, perhaps one which conjures up the figure of Raphaels 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 Aristotles 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 Raphaels 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 Raphaels 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 Aristotles 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 souls 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 Heideggers Socrates is not Kants, for whom noein is nous, or Vernunft, the faculty or tribunal of reason, which perceives the logic (Logos) behind the appearance of beings. Kants Socrates overcomes or transcends this appearance. But Kants 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 Beings 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 apprentices8 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 isnt that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.

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, Platos teacher, was the Lover of Learning (not teaching). Heideggers 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 Gods 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 Aristotles 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 ones 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

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 Beings 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 lovers 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.
9

INTRODUCTION

NOTES
1

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? translated by J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 9. See Arendts 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, 15101511, 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. 169170. Heidegger, Thinking?, p. 15. Arendt, Thinking, pp. 169170. 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. 910. ibid, p. 18.

10

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 Beings 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 Beings presencing is to be positioned in the modality of teach-ability. To be teachable is to be attuned to that which is not.
11

CHAPTER 1

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 Platos 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 situation3 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
12

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 lets 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
13

CHAPTER 1

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.
14

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. Heideggers 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
15

CHAPTER 1

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.

16

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 questions inability to satisfy the knowers 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
17

CHAPTER 1

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 Beings 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 Questions 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
18

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 doesnt 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
19

CHAPTER 1

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
20

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 kung, 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 Huinengs 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

CHAPTER 1

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 Beings 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 Beings 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. Platos 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 Ions 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 Platos 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 Hegels, 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, Platos 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
23

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 ones place in relation to what has been, i.e., tradition. Learning is the possibility of leaping beyond tradition, beyond the fixity of the social scripts 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 Beings 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 Heideggers 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.
25

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 Beings excess, and the matter at hand of Learning is thus an interpretive seeking within the horizon of beings. Beings 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 Beings 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. 34. 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 (638713). 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 Platos Protagoras, p. xv. Heidegger, Ontology The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 81. cf. Inwoods entry for hermeneutics and circularity, pp. 8790, Heidegger Dictionary. Heideggers 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.

27

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 Beings 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 Beings 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 kung, 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 Platos 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
31

CHAPTER 2

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 Beings 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 Platos 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 Heideggers 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 Platos 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 doesnt 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
32

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
33

CHAPTER 2

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 Aesops 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 Platos 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 Homers 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 Ions 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 peoples 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 oracles 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 neednt 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 Aesops fables which were ready to hand and
35

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 countrys orders.(Phaedo, 60e-61c) We have said that Socrates was put underway by the message he received from the oracle. The saying of the gods 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 Beings 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 Beings 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,
36

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 Platos 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 Agathons 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
37

CHAPTER 2

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 isnt 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 dont 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 theyre being very busy when theyre doing absolutely nothing. Of course, I know your idea of me; you think Im just a poor unfortunate, and I shouldnt wonder if youre right. But then I dont think that youre 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 Agathons 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 Agathons place, Socrates fell into a first of abstraction and began to lag behind. When they finally arrived at the party Socrates, much to Agathons surprise, remained outside where he retreated in the next-door neighbors porch.... This is very odd, said Agathon. You must speak to him again, and insist. But here I broke in [recalled Aristodemos]. I shouldnt do that, I said. Youd much better leave him to himself. Its quite a habit of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is. Ive no doubt hell be with us before long, so I really dont think you need to worry him. (Symposium, 175b) The dinner wasnt more than halfway through when Socrates enters the scene, much to Agathons relief, who bids Socrates come sit next him. I want to share this great thought thats just struck you in the porch next door. Im sure you must
38

THE CALLING OF SOCRATES

have mastered it, or youd 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, Im sure Id congratulate myself on sitting next to you, for youd 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) Agathons response to Socrates compliment is to measure it as both a friendly jibe at the champions 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 Agathons, 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 Agathons 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 couldnt 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 Platos account of the legend of Socrates mission, his wandering
39

CHAPTER 2

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 Agathons 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, Im 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 Agathons 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 Loves 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
40

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 Agathons 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 Gods 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 Beings processural unfolding the reception of this revelation renders us speechless and thereby capable of thinking. As the location for both Beings 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.
41

CHAPTER 2

The message, like Hui-nengs 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 unspoken13 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 ones 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, Diotimas 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
42

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 fools motivation to get going, but far less than a commanders 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 ones fullest attention to others so as to receive their saying, their voice as the already/not yet. To be released from ones 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 anothers words, expressions, ways of being in the world. As the
43

CHAPTER 2

destiny that sends truth, Being remains concealed. But the worlds destiny is heralded in poetry...16

NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16

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. 1415. Arendt, Philosophy and Politics, p. 99. Rouses introductory note to his translation is worth sharing. Rouse writes: The banquet took place in Agathons 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 Agathons 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 Websters third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. G. & C., p. 1942. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, Basic Writings, p. 242.

44