Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education [1 ed.] 1527591972, 9781527591974

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Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education

Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education By

James M. Magrini

Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education By James M. Magrini This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by James M. Magrini All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-9197-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-9197-4

To Laura, of course.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 Nietzsche on Pessimism and Nihilism The Tragic Greeks and the Dionysian Artist-Philosopher Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 44 Heidegger and the “Futural” Poet Rilke Poetizing the Truth of Being? Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 66 Jaspers on Philosophy and Self-Being The Loving Struggle for Truth and Existenz Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 100 The Enigmatic Figure of Socrates in Heidegger A Pure Vision of Education Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 126 Socrates is Not a Teacher But, Can We Learn From Him? Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 146 The “Failure” of Alcibiades’ Education The Difficulty of Socratic Self-Cultivation Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 167 The Decline of the Humanities and Philosophical Argumentation The Continuing Crisis in Contemporary Education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to my philosophy students; they asked probing and insightful questions that inspired my thinking and rethinking on the issues highlighted in this book–we learned together. I am grateful to Dr. Nicole Bonino and Dr. Ian Copestake for their invaluable editorial contributions; their enlightened suggestions have greatly improved the flow and readability of these essays. I thank Cambridge Scholars Publishers for generously granting me the creative freedom and license to publish this collection of essays. I thank my good friend and fellow scholar Prof. Elias Schwieler (Aporias of Translation: Literature, Philosophy, Education) for his support and Prof. Richard Capobianco (Heidegger and the Holy), world-renowned Heidegger scholar, for his input and assistance.

INTRODUCTION

For the most part, this collection of recently penned essays deals with themes emerging from what might be generally, and perhaps cautiously, labeled “existentialism” or “existence philosophy” (Exstenzphilosophie), along with issues related to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and New Platonic Studies. With reference to Platonic scholarship, I identify recent scholarly interpretations of Plato that are both hermeneutic and phenomenological, and collectively argue against the traditionally held view that Plato is a systematic or doctrinal philosopher. It is possible, without too much of a stretch, to envision Nietzsche as a protoexistentialist, while Jaspers, however, is a self-proclaimed philosopher of Existenz. Although Heidegger goes to great lengths in “Letter on Humanism”1 to distance himself from Sartre’s understanding of existentialism, much like Camus, Marcel, Jaspers, and Sartre, Heidegger explores themes common to existentialism such as alienation, ontological forgetfulness, Angst, freedom, and ultimately human potential in light of the limits imposed by facticity and finitude. We also note that Jaspers credits Heidegger as the originator of Existenzphilosophie. I was inspired to write these essays during my final year of teaching at the College of Dupage (Glen Ellyn, IL USA), where I was employed for over 15 years as an adjunct professor of Western philosophy and ethics. Motivated by classroom discussions, looking for ways to further my research, I sought to provide enlightened and extended rejoinders to the many informed and insightful questions posed by students, most particularly the questions and concerns raised by the adult students that I had the pleasure of teaching during the final years of my tenure. If there is an underlying theme uniting these studies it is the view of philosophy that Jaspers, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Plato’s Socrates share, namely, philosophy as an active and ever-renewed practice, and beyond, a life-task or vocation. Concomitant with this vision of philosophy is the view of truth as something other than a possession or acquisition that stands at the culmination of the so-called philosophical method, and once 1

M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in: ed., W. McNeill. Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 233-277.

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Introduction

truth is procured, the method can be jettisoned, for in this view the philosophical method, call it dialectic along with Plato or philosophieren (the “operation of philosophy”) as in Jaspers, becomes disposable.2 Here, philosophy is wrongly conceived as producing definitive results, and beyond, there is a disingenuous sense of instrumentality bound up with philosophical activity. For according to the philosophers we encounter in this book, philosophy produces no explicit, tangible results. Jaspers is emphatic that philosophy intimates, gestures, and points, but does not give us anything definitive, instead it “moves with illuminating beams of light, but produces nothing.”3 Heidegger agrees with the great Bertrand Russell, who recognizes that philosophy “bakes no bread,”4 but as Heidegger opines, with a rare hint of optimism, “granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy,” if we concern ourselves with it and dedicate ourselves to it in the manner of Socrates, “do something with us.”5 Jaspers assures us that philosophy “seeks but does not possess the meaning and substance of the one truth,”6 for it is the case that “truth is not static and unchanging, but endless movement into the infinite.”7 All the thinkers we explore envision truth as a living revelation and insight, albeit obscure and limited, into the ontological condition that serves as the origin or fundamental ground of our Being-in-the-world. This has crucial implications for the understanding of human subjectivity or self-hood, for self-hood as we describe it defies reduction to the mind, ego, or any hypostatic substrate, entity, or being, and is instead conceived, or better, enacted in the ontological mode of the infinitival. Speaking on philosophy 2

F. Gonzalez. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 9. This is an erroneous assumption that Gonzalez addresses in his critique of analytic interpretations of Plato’s philosophy, namely, the assumption that “philosophical method is subordinate to, and terminates in, some final result…The process of questioning and investigating has a terminus that ultimately renders the process no longer necessary.” 3 K. Jaspers. Philosophy of Existenz, trans., R. F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 61. 4 B. Russell. The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 91. 5 M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans., G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 13. 6 K. Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman; A Short Course in Philosophical Thinking, trans., R. F. C. Hull and G. Wels (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 118. 7 Ibid.

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as the pursuit of self-knowledge, Michael Gelven recognizes that such inquiry seeks enlightenment that further deepens our understanding of what it means to be a self, but “does not seek to render a terminal and final answer to the question,”8 this is because such an achievement is unattainable, considering both the depth and complexity of the human being and the limitations restricting full-knowledge of philosophical issues. In all of these essays we encounter human subjectivity as representing a self-in-transition, where we freely work and struggle for a sense of selfhood, which is always in the process of becoming other in and through internal dialogue, or meditative solitude, and perhaps most importantly, within the context of the critical inter-personal dialogue or philosophical (existential) communication we engage in with others. Thinking relating to Nietzsche arose in classroom discussions about the so-called tragic sense of life and the pressing concern that with the death of God, human meaning loses its objective, transcendental ground, and our nomological, systematic views of traditional objectivist morality evaporate. Questions of human self-hood emerge in connection with values, for with the condition of nihilism, as Nietzsche contends, values can no longer be uncovered or discovered, but rather must be created and sanctified by the autonomous human subject. Nietzsche’s response to the human subject stands in stark contrast to the postmodern idea of the socially constructed subject, which harbors an undeniable determinism and even fatalism in relation to human autonomy that is absent from Nietzsche’s philosophy. The students considered various philosophical responses to nihilism and found Nietzsche’s aestheticphilosophical response, although not without problems, to be quite satisfying and potentially uplifting. The essay, “Nietzsche on Pessimism and Nihilism: The Tragic Greeks and the Persona of Dionysus” (Chapter 1), deals with many familiar themes and argues for a unique vision of “Dionysian Pessimism,” which in Nietzsche’s later philosophy represents a dynamic life modeled on an aesthetic understanding of composition, style, form, and content. The essay analyzes Nietzsche’s early treatment of Dionysus in relation to Greek tragedy and then moves from a metaphysical portrayal of the ancient god, as a primordial force of nature (physis), to consider Dionysus in Nietzsche’s later writings, in terms of an idealized persona. It is there argued, when stripped of metaphysical pretension, that Dionysus becomes an ideal that we emulate and from which we draw inspiration when adopting the “grand style” in an ascending life (active 8

M. Gelven. Winter, Friendship, and Guilt: The Sources of Self-Inquiry (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 9.

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Introduction

nihilism), a life that transcends nihilistic despair (passive nihilism) in the search for and establishment of new values. Ultimately, it responds in the affirmative to Nietzsche’s pressing query regarding his life-task and legacy, appearing as the last entry in his strange and wonderful autobiography Ecce Homo, “Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the Crucified…”9 When exploring the philosophy of art or aesthetics, the class considered two issues: First, the crucial difference between the analytic focus on the artist and the philosophical concern with the work of art itself. We encounter the former concern in Nietzsche, with his focus on the psychology of the artist and her ability to efficaciously discharge the will to power in the creation of great works. The latter concern we find in Heidegger’s view of art and the experience thereof; for Heidegger, great works of art hold the potential to open and establish new worlds, for art lives as a founding and grounding historical force or phenomenon. Second, we explored the issue of whether or not art, e.g., literature, poetry, or cinema holds the power to serve as a legitimate medium for philosophizing, and not merely an aesthetic vehicle for conveying or symbolizing potential philosophical themes. The essay, “Heidegger on the ‘Futural’ Poet Rilke: Poetizing the Essential Truth of Being?” (Chapter 2), is based on close readings of Heidegger’s Parmenides lecture (1941-42) and the 1946 essay, “What Are Poet’s For?” It poses and responds to the following questions: Does Rilke’s poetry poetize the event of Being for Dasein? Does Rilke indicate that the human being can achieve this authentic mode of “historical” existence in relation to the Earth or the holy? Heidegger responds to the first query in the affirmative; Rilke does poetize this event, albeit through a “tempered” and somewhat traditional view of Western metaphysics. To the second query, Heidegger responds cryptically, and to clarify this response, I explore Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s “Angel” as a prophetic figure of futural hope. I am concerned with what type of poets Heidegger believes, other than and in addition to Hölderlin, might be up to the supreme task of poetizing Dasein’s historical transcendence beyond the metaphysics of presence. What Heidegger seeks is the poet for destitute times and what is necessary is the presence and intervention of those poets who “attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods,”10 those who poetize the truth of Being, which stands beyond the

9

F. Nietzsche. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans., R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 104. 10 M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 93.

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metaphysics of presence, for the potential appropriation and enactment of the type of authentic historical dwelling Heidegger philosophizes. I trace the inspiration for the exegetical essay, “Jaspers on Philosophy and Self-Being: The ‘Loving Struggle’ for Truth and Existenz” (Chapter 3) to classroom discussions focused on the essence, or more appropriately, the origin (archƝ) of the drive to philosophize. After exploring Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics, that it is by way of nature (physis) that the human shelters the exigent drive to know self and world, we turned to Jaspers’ philosophy in order to consider the notion that humans are innate philosophers, and we discussed Jaspers’ observation, no doubt born of his vast psychological training, that the seemingly innocent questions children ask are already philosophical in nature, albeit in a non-systematic, incipient form. As Jaspers observes: “A marvelous indication of man’s innate disposition to philosophy, is to be found in the questions asked by children.”11 Such questions, Jaspers stresses, are thus anything but the mere fanciful, naïve musings of youngsters that can be dismissed out of hand. This essay is focused on elucidating what Kurt Salamun terms Jaspers’ “period of existential philosophizing – from 1919 until 1936.”12 It was during this period, in 1935, when Jaspers presented a series of five lectures on Reason and Existenz (Vernunft und Existenz), that he expanded his philosophy of 1931 by introducing the concept of the Encompassing (das Umgreifende) into his philosophy of Existenz, Transcendence, and World.13 The essay seeks to provide a coherent view of Jaspers’ thoughts where the Encompassing, as Being itself, permeates and pervades every aspect of the human being’s existence and makes human Transcendence a possibility, occurring only, however, in and through the practice of existential communication with others, the “loving struggle” for authentic self-Being and progressive ecumenical intellectual and spiritual growth. When discussing Plato’s Socrates, the following question repeatedly arose: How is it possible to label Socrates a “teacher” when he is a radically different kind of philosophical thinker than professors teaching philosophy in institutions of higher learning? This led to a discussion regarding the manner in which education determines success or 11

K. Jaspers. The Way to Wisdom, trans., R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 9. 12 K. Salamun, “Karl Jaspers’ Conceptions of the Meaning of Life,” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Vol. 1(2), 2006, 1. 13 A. E. Wildermuth, “Karl Jaspers and the Concept of Philosophical Faith,” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Vol. 1(2), 2007, 11.

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Introduction

achievement in learning, and the fact that the type of knowledge or insight that Socrates appears to elicit is a form of enlightenment that can’t necessarily be measured, especially when applying the typical quantitative standards of contemporary education. Indeed, one particularly insightful student proposed the analogy linking Socratic wisdom (sophia) with what we understand as “wherewithal,” a general affective intuition that provided Socrates the insight to align his life with the virtues in a way that pushed him to philosophically question, interrogate, and examine them, all the while understanding the crucial role they play, and how they should be ordered within a life directed toward human flourishing (eudaimonia). Three essays focus directly on Plato’s Socrates, “The Enigma of Socrates in Heidegger: A Pure Vision of Education” (Chapter 4), “Socrates is Not a Teacher: But Can We Learn From Him?” (Chapter 5) and “The ‘Failure’ of Alcibiades’ Education: The Difficulty of Socratic Self-Cultivation” (Chapter 6), all deal, in one way or another, with the idea that Socrates is a unique and clever sort of educator, who, when claiming ignorance of the virtues and many other things, is not employing a philosophical trope for dramatic or ironic effect, and this claim is defended within the analysis of Plato’s nuanced characterization of Socrates in the dialogues we explore. One of the intriguing notions underpinning the essays on Plato’s Socrates is Heidegger’s powerful claim that Socrates is the purest thinker of the West, and as Socrates is situated in the context of dialectic, he breaks open and then holds open the questioning by facilitating the draft or essential sway of Being, which is the dynamic counter-striving of lighting (un-concealment) and primordial concealing, and thus Socrates, according to Heidegger, did “nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it.”14 When reading Plato’s dialogues, we are confronted over and over with Socrates’ adamant insistence that he is a co-learner in dialectic (elenchus), because he also requires an education, for example, as evident in his discussion about politics with the young Alcibiades, where Socrates admits that he too is seeking the truth of the virtues, self-knowledge, and cultivation of the soul (Alcibiades I, 124c). This is also the case in the Meno (80d), when Socrates is interrogating the nature of virtue and inquiring into whether or not it can be taught like other subjects without dissembling, he asserts in a straightforward manner, “I do not know what virtue is,” but nevertheless, “I want to examine and seek together with you what it may be.”15 This constitutes the notion of 14 M. Heidegger. What is Called Thinking? trans., F. D. Wick and J. G. Gray (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), 17. 15 Plato. Plato: The Complete Works, ed., J. M. Cooper (Bloomington: Indiana State University Press, 1997).

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“seeking-together” (synerchomai) in Socratic dialectic. This crucial notion of Socrates as co-learner raises concerns about the effectiveness of Socratic philosophy, especially when considering the problem of the young Socratic upstarts highlighted in the Apology, who practice dialectic with little knowledge of the expertise required. Beyond these “imitators” of Socrates there are also the infamous “rouges,”16 who, for a time also practiced philosophy with Socrates, such as Charmides, Critias, Phaedrus, and perhaps the most well-known and infamous of the Socratic ne’er-do-wells, Alcibiades. We analyze Alcibiades’ philosophical education, the selfcultivation of his soul (psychƝ) or disposition (hƝxis), offering a close reading of Alcibiades I and the Symposium, to determine whether or not Socrates is culpable and hence must assume responsibility for the abject failure of Alcibiades’ education. Ultimately this judgment hinges on whether or not we can truly identify, and further, classify Socrates as a “didaskalos,” that is to say, in terms of a traditional and formal educator. The closing essay, “The Decline of the Humanities and Philosophical Argumentation: The Continuing Crisis on Contemporary Education” (Chapter 7), draws on elements of Mark Slouka’s, “DeHumanized: On the Selling (OUT) of American Education, and What it Costs Us” (published in the collection, Essays From the Nick of Time). Slouka offers one of the most compelling and powerful critical essays exposing the insidious influence of the rise of science, math, and engineering (STEM Programs) in institutions of higher learning, which often times comes at the expense of the humanities in the curriculum. Slouka makes the unsettling observation that the humanities have been marginalized for so long that educators have inadvertently “acceded to that marginalization,”17 and he argues strenuously for the necessity of defending and fighting for the retention of the humanities in the curriculum, for when done right, they are “the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be.”18 The marginalization of the humanities is a troubling and continuing trend in education, and buttressing this claim we consider the recent move to dissolve the classics department at Howard University (Washington, DC) in the US. My critical commentary includes the thoughts of many contemporary philosophers writing extensively on the moribund state of contemporary democratic education, such as Martha Nussbaum. The types 16

G. A. Scott. Socrates as Educator (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 37. M. Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 161. 18 Ibid. 17

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Introduction

of issues addressed in this essay are all too familiar to me as a life-long educator, for in addition to teaching at institutions of higher learning, I taught for many years at both the primary and secondary level, when standardization first came to prominence amid the push to administer the Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP) to elementary students. Now, as a retired educator, having the time and distance to reflect on these issues, I feel it is necessary to include this critical reflection on and refutation of the continuing crisis in contemporary education. It is my hope that philosophical Sojourns will contribute to the ongoing discussions in texts and academic journals by providing new insights into these thinkers as they are currently debated in philosophical circles. The collection is novel in that it offers these insights across broad but related fields of study, for although essentially a philosophy text, it provides scholarly inroads to the academic fields of literary critique, classical studies, psychology, and educational theory. For example, the essays described above, focused on Socratic philosophy, arguing for dialectic as a unique mode of teaching and learning (paideia), hold the potential to inspire re-conceptualized approaches to both the theory and practice of education that cuts hard against strains of contemporary standardization evident at all levels of pedagogy. The text could be employed in an effective manner as a secondary avenue of study for classrooms in institutions of higher learning, supplementing primary philosophical sources in the curriculum. In addition to programs offering advanced degrees, the book also serves as a challenging introductory text for students at the undergraduate level studying or even interested in philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE NIETZSCHE ON PESSIMISM AND NIHILISM THE TRAGIC GREEKS AND THE DIONYSIAN ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER

This essay explores nihilism and pessimism in Nietzsche while developing an understanding of the self-in-transition (becoming who you are), a view to self-hood that stands opposed to the traditional nucleated metaphysical self as indelible, hypostatized, or transcendental mind or soul. Moving from The Birth of Tragedy through the later writings, such as The Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols, we analyze the evolving view of Dionysus - from primordial metaphysical principle to idealized persona. It is argued that in Nietzsche’s later writings Dionysus is brought down from the soaring metaphysical heights to serve as an inspirational symbolization of the Hellenic-inspired view of an ascending life, which is enacted through the artist-philosopher’s attuned discharge of will to power. In working toward the interpretive end of elucidating the dangers of hope and philosophical optimism, we turn to the compilation of his voluminous notes ultimately published as The Will to Power, to offer a detailed reading of Nietzsche’s understanding of Passive Nihilism/Pessimism of Decline and Active Nihilism/Pessimism of Strength. The latter, it is shown, manifests in what Nietzsche calls “Dionysian Pessimism” and it is linked with the persona of Dionysus and the type of aesthetic response to nihilism this idealized persona inspires. For in his later corpus, Dionysus assumes something of an all-encompassing, all-consuming presence, now in the foreground of Nietzsche’s thought, while the Apollonian form of aesthetic attunement (Rausch) appears to recede into the background, playing a distant secondary role in Nietzsche’s view of aesthetics. In writing this essay, our thoughts were guided by the ever-present question of what it is that Nietzsche might be able to teach us with all of his inspired poetic thinking on the tragic Greeks and the god of wine and tragedy. In the end, we entertain the following possibility: despite inhabiting a world devoid of intrinsic meanings and established values, it is not an existence without

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Chapter One

imminent potential for inspiring human self-overcoming and secular transcendence. Therefore, by emulating Nietzsche’s Dionysus, it is certainly possible to live in a productive and rewarding manner.

Nietzsche and Hesiod Hope and Optimism as Harbingers of Pessimism In Works and Days Hesiod introduces the now-familiar story of Pandora and the jar (pithos) full of evils and, in doing so, establishes a view of the human condition - a non-systematic metaphysics and ontology - that is bleak, depressive, and consistent with a pessimistic view in which all things bend toward destruction and all humans are continually and relentlessly exposed to seemingly senseless, profuse, and unending instances of suffering. Pandora’s story is set within the overarching narrative of Zeus’s anger at the wily Prometheus who smuggled fire in the tube of a fennel and delivered it as a gift to humanity. As Hesiod tells us, Zeus, devising grim care for mankind, vows to make human life miserable, and so intends to deliver to them, and in an important sense, infect them with, an “affliction in which they will all delight as they embrace their own misfortune.”1 Thus, to carry out his nefarious scheme, Zeus tasks Hephaestus with crafting a beautiful maiden assuming the outward form of a goddess in stature and beauty, to which other denizens of Olympia contribute various and sundry “gifts” to the maiden made from water and earth, named Pandora - “all gifts” (pan-dǀron). Athena teaches Pandora the skill to craft and dresses and adorns her in a flowing white gown. Aphrodite bestows the gift of charm and the insidious power to arouse painful and obsessive yearnings in men. The Graces and lady Temptation supply Pandora with her shining golden necklaces. This notion of “gift” assumes a duplicitous meaning as, in one sense, Pandora is a gift from all of the Olympians to humans, while, in another far more ominous and nefarious sense, Pandora is a gift given with the explicit purpose of doing harm and inflicting pain on the recipients. We are perhaps most familiar with the ominous connotation of gift from Homer’s telling of how the Greeks gained entrance to Troy by hiding inside the Trojan Horse–a gift bringing destruction and death. We note that it is Hermes, the “dog-

1 Hesiod, Theogony/Works and Days, trans., M. L. West. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 38.

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killer,” who gives Pandora “a bitch’s mind and knavish nature,”2 so that she has the skill to fashion deceptive and malevolent lies. When Pandora is sent to earth, she carries with her a sealed jar the gift that bears the gift - she presents herself to Epimetheus, who has been explicitly instructed by his brother Prometheus to flatly refuse any offerings from Zeus and the Olympians. Epimetheus, of course, ignores his brother’s sound advice and foolishly accepts Zeus’s gift; Epimetheus welcomes Pandora who, thereafter, unseals the lid of the earthenware jar to release evil, malevolent forces, or, as Hesiod contends, afflictions upon the human condition. However, unbeknownst to Pandora, one of the “evils” remained - Hope did not fly out, for it was clinging to the inside of the jar’s rim. As Hesiod recounts, Pandora quickly “put the lid back in time [trapping hope inside] by the providence of Zeus.”3 So, just as Zeus had cleverly planned, Pandora trapped hope within the jar after releasing all the other evils. Thus, because of Pandora, humanity has no escape from the conditions of suffering and death, nor is it possible to transcend the vicious cycle of desire, which always ends in disappointment and, in the extreme, destruction.4 Indeed, this is how, after the brief but crucial mention of hope inside Pandora’s jar, Hesiod abruptly ends the myth prior to moving on to present another myth concerned with Humanity’s downfall, that of the descending chronological stages or epochs of metal. Readers are left with an undeniably pessimistic vision of life; a dark and gloomy vision of the human condition, where all things eventually end in disaster and destruction. Readers are well aware of the role that the issue of illness and its subsequent overcoming play in Nietzsche’s philosophy, so it is interesting to note that Hesiod describes the “evils” released by Pandora in terms of afflictions, diseases, and illnesses, a topic that we discuss later.

2

Hesiod, Theogony/Works and Days, 38. When reading Hesiod, we must put out of our mind the innocent and naïve portrayal of Pandora that we encounter in certain retellings of the myth, where she is depicted as a sympathetic character, a young maiden who simply falls victim to her obsessive curiosity (See reference to Guerber’s text: The Myths of Greece and Rome). Rather, we should imagine Pandora in terms consistent with the way the cursed prophetess Cassandra describes the cunning and wicked Clytemnestra, wife of the ill-fated Agamemnon. Aeschylus portrays Clytemnestra as the incarnate of a “female dog,” a stark and derisive characterization indicating that she is less than human, namely, an evil and inhuman aberration. See: W. Jennings Oates. The Complete Greek Drama. (New York: Random House, 1938). 3 Ibid., 40. 4 Ibid., 75.

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Chapter One

Hesiod does not provide a detailed narrative concerning the role of hope in the Pandora myth, and hence does not consider the issue of hope’s role as a potential value, and beyond, salvific force, as it is often the case within retellings of the myth. For example, M. L. Lewis offers an interpretation of hope’s role in the Pandora myth stating that “although Hesiod has not given his jar a consistent symbolic meaning, he means that Hope remains among men as the one antidote to suffering.”5 Here, based on Hesiod’s explicit description of the “evils” emerging from the jar sicknesses infecting the human condition - Lewis suggests that hope might be said to play the role of pharmakon, a drug or remedy to counteract the injurious effects of one or another poison.6 To continue and deepen this understanding of hope as a potential salvific force, if we turn to H. A. Guerber’s retelling of the myth, we encounter a reading that in no uncertain terms lauds the saving power of hope, its potential to deliver humanity from the thralls of a dark, bleak, and even fatalistic existence. Guerber, extending Hesiod’s original version of the myth, provides an epilogue missing from the original telling, and informs us that, prior to sending off Pandora and the jar, the “gods, with a sudden impulse of compassion, concealed among the evil spirits one kindly creature, Hope, whose mission was to heal the wounds inflicted by her fellow prisoners.”7 Hope, in this optimistic reinterpretation of Hesiod’s myth, acts as a palliative against the pain and suffering of existence, and Guerber goes on to add that in the ancient Greek culture it was believed that “evil entered into the world, bringing untold misery; but Hope followed closely in its footsteps, to aid struggling humanity, and point to a happier future.”8 This reading offers an understanding of the ancient Greeks, most specifically the pre-Socratic and Tragic Greeks, at odds with Nietzsche’s Dionysian and “tragic” vision of the Hellenic culture, which Nietzsche views as a superior culture that heroically and aesthetically confronted and transformed a decidedly pessimistic view and experience of life, without succumbing to the temptation of optimism. 5

Hesiod, Works and Days, 75. R. Scholes. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 7. This duplicitous understanding and function of “gift” is related to Derrida’s notion of the pharmakon, e.g., in Scholes’ reading of deconstruction he defines pharmakon as follows: A Pharmakon can be both a “healing medicine and a dangerous drug, depending on the amount of it that we imbibe and what other agents we mix with it.” 7 H. A. Gueber. The Myths of the Greeks and Romans. (New York: Dover Press, 1995), 21. 8 Ibid. 6

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However, if we remain true to the myth as presented by Hesiod and consider Pandora’s jar and the evils unleashed (vice, jealousy, avarice, labor, old age, insanity, sickness, suffering, and death), it is clear that Hesiod holds a far more bleak and destitute view of the human condition, where chance and happenstance rule since humans can never predict what fate might befall them. The strong, he tells us, can at any moment be rendered impotent, the rich can easily lose their fortunes and become destitute in the flash of an eye, while the healthy can suddenly be stricken with a fatal, terminal illness. In short, one’s life can be turned upside down in an instant for no justifiable or even understandable reason; life unfolds, as it were, on a shifting, dangerous, and unpredictably treacherous foundation.9 Unlike Guerber, Nietzsche remains true to the tone and timbre of Hesiod’s original telling of the myth, expressing what is intimated in Works and Days, namely, that the appearance of hope in the myth is slightly more complex and far more ominous than typically interpreted. For as we see, in relation to what was originally stated about the duplicitous nature of dǀron for the Greeks, hope must be rethought and re-conceptualized in light of its double meaning as introduced above. Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human provides a unique reading that, in line with what Hesiod might be said to intimate, reveals the sinister as opposed to the salvific nature of hope, the last of the gifts to humankind trapped forever in the Jar of Pandora. Nietzsche’s reading of the myth helps us to understand the terrible metaphysical and ontological truism that lies behind Zeus’s nefarious plan and inspires, as we explore in the next section, the Greeks of the tragic age to transform their existence in and through the participation in the uplifting aesthetic experience of tragedy. Nietzsche labels hope, and here we link hope with optimism, “the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment,”10 it is the “actual malignant evil”11 that gives us the false illusion that, through it, we are able to fully transcend and hence outstrip the ontological condition of suffering and torment, e.g., as related to eschatological religions, where there is faith, belief, and hope that a better world beyond this one exists; there is hope for a morally just universe that is “value-laden” because it is “given” by God. Hope, in this instance, Nietzsche would say, facilitates a false consciousness, “a definite false psychology, a certain kind of

9

Hesiod, Works and Days, 27. F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans., M. Faber (Lincoln: Bison Books, 1996), 58. 11 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans., R. J. Hollingdale. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 145. 10

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fantasy,”12 regarding our cold and valueless existence. Nietzsche extends the line of thought intimated within Hesiod’s original telling of the myth, accepting that Zeus, in order to exact revenge against humanity, intends to make the punishment unending, for he views this as the most effective manner of torture. This is an idea and motif we encounter in various myths, as in Prometheus on the rock secured in chains of adamantine, or Sisyphus ceaselessly rolling and re-rolling the boulder to the top of the mineral flaked mountain. The gift of hope is inherently nefarious and malevolent, but is misinterpreted, per Zeus’s plan, as a salvific force of redemption, i.e., humans mistake “the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good, [and] man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of this treasure, [and it is always] at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it.”13 This is a gift, as Nietzsche recognizes, that keeps on giving, since Zeus wanted humanity blind to hope’s acutely malevolent nature in order to employ this gift in the mistaken assumption that it is a trusted and effective palliative for the ills of existence. Although hope temporarily assuages the pain of wounds inflicted by the many other evils unleashed by Pandora, according to Nietzsche, it eventually traps and secures us within the ever-renewed vicious cycle of recurring torment. This is because Zeus “did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew,” and, as stated, “to that end, [Zeus] gives man hope.”14 We will see, that, depending on the form hope assumes, based on the way in which it manifests, it holds the malevolent potential to blind us to Hesiod’s extremely bleak metaphysical view of human existence, which in Nietzsche’s later thought is related to the condition or state of nihilism within his sustained discussion and critique of modernity. Hope, we might say, distracts from Nietzsche’s overall philosophical pursuit that obsessively consumed his life, namely, his ongoing and ever-renewed endeavor to find secular justification for human existence by providing a legitimate “philosophical” and “aesthetic” response to the following question: Once we reveal and grasp the oppressive, radically abysmal metaphysical constitution of the universe, how might life be made bearable, and more so, transformed into an ascending and flourishing heroic endeavor?

12

Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, 135. Ibid. 14 Ibid. 13

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One hopes, in an optimistic manner, that things will be better, life will be rendered understandable, pain and suffering will be alleviated or at the very least justified. This view stands antithetical to pessimism, for as Joshua Foa Deinstag reveals, “the pessimist is particularly opposed to…the optimistic view that suffering is to be eliminated by ‘history,’ ‘nature,’ or ‘reason’.”15 Dienstag clarifies the view of optimism that Nietzsche vehemently rejects, stating, “The optimistic account of the human condition is both linear and progressive” – but can also be, as we later show, vertical (religious) or horizontal (historical) – it is grounded in the notion that when reason is applied to faltering or troubled political or social structures, this “will ultimately result in the melioration of these conditions,”16 and for Nietzsche, such optimism manifests in many forms, e.g., the declining form of optimism expressed through religion, morality, and philosophy.17 Hence, we are in error and indeed devalue our higher potential when we are optimistic about establishing an ideal and finalized state of worldly affairs through teleological projection. For example, when believing that we might arrive at a perfected and utopian state, which is achieved through the trajectory of ever-developing modes of scientific and technological progress, which is what Nietzsche identifies as the misguided faith in science or scientism.18 We note, along with Aaron Ridley, that as “Western culture becomes more secular…it doesn’t thereby become less transcendentalized: For God is simultaneously abolished and replaced by reason (for its own sake), by truth (for its own sake).”19 The optimism linked to Socratic reason (theoretical man) manifests in the belief in human progress that we encounter in contemporary secular humanism. Here, as Nietzsche contends, similar to Christianity, the drive for rational and complete explanations inspires and perpetuates decadent and life-negating modes of comportment that devalue the terrestrial, embodied world of becoming. An example of this is the world as it appears to us, as we are immersed in all of its flux and flow, and upon which the notion of a real world, a superior 15

J. Foa Dienstag. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2006), 186. 16 Ibid. 18. 17 F. Nietzsche. Will to Power, trans., W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 794. 18 F. Nietzsche. Ecce Homo, trans., R. J. Hollingdale (UK: Penguin Books, 1992), 4. 19 A. Ridley. Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy.” (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1998), 9.

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world, has been erroneously imposed; whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant, this is a symptom of “decadence,” a sign of “declining life.”20 Nietzsche warns us that optimism is “just as décadent as pessimism, and perhaps more harmful,”21 and here Nietzsche is referencing the one form of pessimism we later link with a worldview expressed through passive nihilism, which leads to the negation of and retreat from life, which is devoid of intrinsic meaning and values, it is a “weary nihilism that no longer attacks, [it is] a sign of weakness.”22 Optimistic men, Nietzsche observes, those men who are also welded to the good, “never tell the truth [and they teach] you false shores and false securities…Everything [is] distorted and twisted down to its very bottom through [optimism].”23

The Dangerous Temptation of Hope and Optimism The Inauthentic Response to Pessimism in Christianity and Socratic Optimism As we develop the view of pessimism and the pessimism of strength as related to an understanding of Dionysian Pessimism, we consider two ways in which optimism manifests in a nefarious and malevolent form, of both of which Nietzsche is exceedingly critical: Christianity and “Socratic optimism” in the superior power of human reason. Here, we examine two questionable and problematic forms of human transcendence: one religious in nature, and the other a secular view harboring a religiously inspired onto-theological view of metaphysics. In this section, we relate these issues to our forthcoming discussion of art in The Birth of Tragedy. So, let us return to the notion of hope and optimism as invoked in our reading of the Pandora myth and Hesiod and recall that hope is the most heinous of the evils sent to punish humans because it prolongs human pain and torment, in that it is an inauthentic palliative to suffering, and when embraced in certain forms, as Nietzsche indicates, it actually prolongs human suffering. Hope blinds humans to the undeniable impossibility of ever fully grasping and mastering the world in knowledge, and hence establishing human superiority and dominance over nature.24 This for Nietzsche would require the impossible, namely, that human existence has 20

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 49. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 98. 22 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 23. 23 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 99. 24 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 58. 21

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a goal and that beneath or behind all becoming there is a grand unity; the world, in this view, is fully explainable and it would be possible to discover and reveal authentic values.25 However, we are certainly not indicating that adopting a philosophy embracing the pessimism of strength/active nihilism precludes holding out hope for a better and more improved existence. For indeed, the ancient Greeks’ active pursuit of a better life, which instantiates the pessimism of strength, is grounded in the hope that, through the creation and participation in art, the dark, malevolent forces and manifold ills and evils oppressing their ephemeral existence could be transformed and sublimated. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, represents the inspiration for pursuing the supreme activity of engendering an ascending life, which is always in the process of developing, changing, and evolving. What Nietzsche is critical of, however, is the type and form of hopeful optimism bound up with delusion, blindness, and weakness, all signs of decadence and decline, leading to the pursuit of various philosophical and theological endeavors that serve as ineffective exercises in escapism, which amount to ignoring and fleeing in the face of the human’s responsibility to acknowledge and respond to the pessimistic conditions we have laid out and related to the ancient Greek’s experience. According to Nietzsche, such escapism, through hope and optimism, only serves to compound the problems plaguing the human’s terrestrial existence, e.g., when hope, the supposed cure for the sickness associated with a pessimistic worldview, manifests its true nature as the deadliest of illnesses. To further clarify these points, Nietzsche is critical of the type of optimism common to philosophies and world-views seeking permanent transcendence of either a vertical or horizontal nature, born of sickness and illness, as encountered in Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Wagner’s Romanticism, Socratic Rationalism, Christianity, and the religious metaphysics found in Platonism. Nietzsche launched countless vitriolic attacks against religion - particularly Christianity - as a theological Weltanschauung and lifestyle grounded in the faith, the belief, and the hope for another superior, spiritual (supra-sensual) world that transcends 25

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 13. For example, although Kant stresses the limits of human reason, his deontological system, related to reason and the categorical imperative, depends on an overarching and inherent sense of justice in the universe. This is because, since the moral knowledge we have comes by means of rational intuition, we glean a sense of universal justice anytime we behave morally or perform our duty to the categorical imperative. See: Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans., H. J. Paton. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

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the so-called terrestrial world as expressed through vertical transcendence. Because of Christianity, it is possible for us to speak of the illness of existence, for as Nietzsche contends, Christianity is responsible for initially espousing and perpetuating the idea of a truly diseased world. Christianity, he contends, “first brought sin into the world,” and although Christianity as a systematic religion has been “shaken to its deepest roots,” its shadow, so to speak, or the “belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist”.26 Christianity has its origins in the insidious and festering resentment (ressentiment) that passes “sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and [seeks] to invent a world beyond it, a true world.”27 The exigency to posit God as the apex of a given and universal truth, demonstrates a weakness of will that requires values given “from the outside - by some superhuman authority.”28 The belief that Christianity harbors hope for a new and better world, within a promised transcendent realm of Heaven, requiring the belief in another life, the afterlife, is for Nietzsche one of the greatest dangers - in the form of a hopeful promise - that Christianity sells to its converts and adherents. Christianity perpetuates the harmful belief that our terrestrial existence is of little or no value, and worse, it serves as the training ground, reducible to a dress rehearsal in preparation for the main production that is the next true and eternal life, which is promised to be better. This view devalues the only world we know and inhabit, and it does so by measuring and judging it against categories and standards that have been established in relation to a non-existent world.29 Instead of cherishing and living life to the fullest in the pursuit of making and remaking the world for ourselves, we squander and so defile this world in hopes that another world will be superior. In addition, by denigrating the material world in advantage of a transcendent and immaterial one, Christianity also devalues the body.30 Nietzsche contends that Christianity is perhaps the most harmful form of escapism in hope, providing an ineffective palliative against the real and true dangers of existence, the frightful uncertainty that confronts us when inhabiting a valueless world, which requires the heroic activity of creating as opposed to discovering or uncovering values. But, as Nietzsche stresses, and here we are reminded of the ancient Greeks, 26

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 78. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 143. For a detailed phenomenological analysis of the “body” in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see: D. Vallega-Neu. The Bodily Dimension in Thinking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 21-37. 27

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“the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas.”31 Christianity is the paradigmatic instantiation of vertical transcendence, but Nietzsche also makes reference to and is critical of horizontal forms of transcendence, for Nietzsche observes that when we attempt to resist against succumbing to pessimism/nihilism, more often than not, we erroneously choose that “which hastens exhaustion; Christianity is an example (to name the greatest example of such an aberration of the instincts); [and the unfettered believe in] ‘progress’ is another.”32 Thus, we now address the second form of transcendence labeled horizontal transcendence, an idea that is found in philosophers such as Hegel and Marx, where we encounter prophesizing on the perfected, utopian end to the processes of history, the former through philosophical idealism, the latter through dialectic materialism.33 This form of transcendence, as stated, is also prevalent within contemporary secular humanism, which Nietzsche would deem analogous to “Socratic Optimism,” where it is possible to state without much exaggeration that human reason is elevated to the point of deification and optimism thrives. Here, to reiterate, through the superior faculty of human reason, the world in-itself will eventually be known and mastered to serve humanity’s

31 F. Nietzsche. The Gay Science, trans., Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books: New York, 1974), 228. 32 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 27. 33 A. Camus. The Rebel, trans., A. Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 140142. Readers are encouraged to seek out Camus’s reading and critique what he terms failed instances of “metaphysical rebellion” - failed philosophies of “hope” to which Nietzsche’s philosophy is included. On Hegel, Camus states the following: “Hegel’s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence,” identifying the rational with the Real. “Values are thus only to be found at the end of history,” and just as Christianity denigrates the “here and now” in favor of a perceived and hoped for future world, Hegel claims that we “must act and live in terms of the future,” in terms of the divination of history with a promised salvation in its prophesized culmination. On Marx, Camus observes that Marx’s philosophy of the dialectic development and culmination of history “materializes” religion and Hegel’s idealism, however, “Marx’s atheism is absolute. Nevertheless, it does reinstate the supreme being at the level of humanity,” and so Marx’s thought is an “enterprise for the deification of man” in a way that holds on the hope of a utopian end to human history that is akin to “traditional religions.”

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purposes, and this appears as the fulfillment of a futural secular prophecy.34 As stated, we might relate this view to “Socratic Optimism,” or Socratic rationalism, as discussed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and Twilight of the Idols, which characterizes Socrates as the archetype of theoretical optimism, who believes the world is explainable and attributes the power of omniscience to human knowledge and judges errors to be the equivalent of evil. Nietzsche is highly critical of the Socratic drive to link theoretical knowledge with virtue and morality, which is expressed in the Socratic dictum that Nietzsche never tires of lampooning: Knowledge = Virtue. This illusion, idealized in Socrates, not only demonstrates the “unshakable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, [it also holds the erroneous belief that reason is] capable not only of knowing but even correcting being.”35 Thus human reason not only knows the world, beyond this, it extends itself to render a binding moral adjudication against it. Nietzsche claims that the theoretical optimism of Socrates gives rise to modernity’s unbounded faith and hope in the healing, and indeed saving, power of democracy, systematic ethics, and science. What we take from Nietzsche’s reading of Socratic optimism, related to Nietzsche’s theory regarding Socrates ushering in the death of tragedy,36 is the philosophical thought that “outgrows art and forces it to cling tightly to the bough of the dialectic.”37 Nietzsche insists that we must remain highly suspect of claims to know the world in its entirety, skeptical of clinging in a desperate manner to the irrational optimism in the power, depth, and breadth of human understanding, believing in the unbounded reach and superiority of the human intellect, which might one day exhibit the power to solve and eradicate life’s problems and explain away its 34

J. Gray. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 35 Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, trans., S. Whiteside. Penguin Books: UK, 1993, 71. 36 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 75. Socrates, as Nietzsche claims, caused the degeneration of the Greeks’ instinct and emotion through his rationalism, and this infected tragedy, specifically Euripides, who “became the poet of aesthetic Socratism…the phenomenon of aesthetic Socratism, the chief law of which is, more or less: ‘to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible – a parallel to the Socratic dictum: only one who knows is virtuous.” Nietzsche’s radical argument attempts to establish that after Sophocles, the “Euripidean prologue may serve as an example of the productivity of this [Socratic] rationalist method,” an offshoot of the Socratic need to work things out purely through the use of reason and the dialectic, therefore through explanation. 37 Ibid., 69

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inherent and most perplexing mysteries. For Nietzsche, the world can never be brought under the control of knowledge, for it is a violent and powerful monster of energy, a tumultuous chaotic maelstrom, i.e., the will to power and nothing besides. It defies and is recalcitrant to all human efforts to fully understand it and permanently bring it to stand in our fragile and ephemeral works of art, which includes our social, governmental, political, and educational systems and institutions.

Heroic and Tragic Pessimism The Art of the Homeric and Tragic Greeks We now turn our focus to the manner in which the Homeric Greeks and Tragic Greeks responded to the bleak and oppressive conditions of existence as expressed through both Nietzsche’s reading of Hesiod’s Pandora myth and the so-called “wisdom of Silenus.” In his sustained analysis of Greek tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche reveals how the ancient Greeks demonstrated heroism in mounting an aesthetic cultural response to the condition of existence because they displayed the “intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, [and because of their superior psychological] well-being, overflowing health, and abundance of existence.”38 In the penultimate instance of art as a transformative, life-enhancing force, Nietzsche references the expression of what he identifies as Apolline art, which he links to the Homeric Greeks’ aesthetic, poetic, and mythological creation of the Olympian pantheon and the many heroes that populated their stories and religion. As related directly to what we have introduced above regarding the counter-striving movement between illness-recovery in relation to the manifestation of our recognition and acceptance of the pessimistic condition of the universe, which for later Nietzsche includes nihilism, Nietzsche traces the origins underlying the aesthetic creation of the great Olympian gods and goddesses. Ultimately, he observes that the Homeric Greeks overcame the horrors of existence that had previously caused the historical downfall of the Etruscans. Based on Nietzsche’s analysis we might imagine the Homeric Greeks’ motivation for creating and populating the poetic-mythological realm of Olympus as follows: “The Apolline impulse to beauty led, in gradual stages, from the original Titanic order of the gods of fear [illness] to the Olympian order of the gods of joy, just as roses sprout on thorn bushes [recovery].”39 Apolline art, 38 39

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 3. Ibid., 23.

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instantiates a drive for clarity in presentation with a penchant for appearances in the form of fictional illusions, without the dissembling effect that would broach the realm of complete delusion, which would instantiate a form of escapism and produce the unhealthy condition of the soul’s narcotization. The portrayal of the Olympians served an aesthetic idealization of the Greeks’ battle-torn lives, an oppressive, and at times, unbearable existence, however, their aesthetic idealization did not blind the Greeks to the oppressive and terrible truths of existence, from which they drew aesthetic inspiration. Hence their art never sought to achieve the complete detachment from the pessimistic conditions they experienced, idealized, and ultimately glorified in art, and indeed, as Nietzsche observes, the reality of their pessimistic conditions inspired and, in many ways, served as the content of their aesthetic creativity.40 Thus, they created an aesthetic illusion wherein the participant is fully aware that the experience is illusory. The Homeric Greeks fully knew and experienced the horrors and fears of living, but in order to pursue a flourishing life, drawing inspiration for their continued growth and development, “they had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and these horrors,”41 which allowed them to portray and live a “rich and triumphant existence, in which everything [was] deified, whether it be good or evil.”42 It was this Apolline drive for illusory appearances, fictitious visions of the gods and heroes, that allowed the Apolline culture to “overthrow a realm of Titans and slay monsters [and emerge] triumphant over a terrible abyss in its contemplation of the world and its most intense capacity for suffering, by resorting to the most powerful and pleasurable illusions.”43 Their art transformed and transfigured the suffering they endured, and through employing art as a clarifying and perfecting mirror to their existence, they were able to contemplate, raise, amplify, and transform themselves to a degree that allowed them to arrive at an exalted state of aesthetic self-glorification. And to assure them that the re-creation of their lives in Apolline art was “worthy of glorification,” they had to “see 40 Nietzsche will again speak of idealizing in aesthetics in Twilight of the Idol, but will now relate it to Dionysian art and temper the talk of its relation to Apollonian aesthetics. For in the later writings, the technique of idealizing is a tool employed by the tragic artist-philosopher, the Dionysian pessimist, and we explore this notion later in the essay within our discussion of aesthetic self-overcoming and the Dionysian man’s active response to nihilism. 41 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy 23. 42 Ibid., 22. 43 Ibid., 24.

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themselves in a higher sphere, without contemplation seeming either a command or reproach.”44 We see that the Homeric Greeks heroically avoided the two forms of escapism discussed, which we associated with attempts to transcend the pessimistic worldview, namely, the drive for a complete escape from the terrible truths of existence, e.g., in terms of the hope for vertical transcendence common to eschatological religious traditions and the error of the “authoritative will” to render an objectivist moral judgment against the pessimistic conditions of existence, and hence seek an escape in theoretical philosophy or haughty moralizing.45 According to Nietzsche’s analysis, the Homeric Greeks and those of the tragic age achieved what might be labeled terrestrial-transcendence, or perhaps more accurately, finite aesthetic-transcendence. However, despite the transformative, productive, and prophylactic effect of the Apolline art of the Archaic-Homeric culture, aesthetically mediating the space between spectator/participant and the horrors of existence, Nietzsche is clear that the apotheosis of art for the Greeks is not found in Homer’s divine, poetized pantheon, but rather in Attic tragedy, specifically in Aeschylus and to a lesser degree Sophocles, at the critical exclusion of Euripides. Nietzsche’s reasoning is that Apolline art, though holding the potential to liberate the Greeks in the important sense of transfiguring their world through aesthetic creation, is expressive of and lies in servitude to the “principle of individuation” (principium individuationis). This notion, drawn directly from Schopenhauer, exacts an influence on and gives structure to the manner in which the human being experiences the world and others. Apolline art precludes human beings from authentically experiencing what we might understand as the universal nature of human life and suffering, which lies beyond the individual’s subjectivity. Nietzsche’s claim is that we are not as it first appears, namely, closed-off and interiorized subjects cut off from the world and others, as in Descartes and Leibniz. Rather, when properly motivated through our participation in tragic-art we are inspired, attuned, and predisposed to experience a trans-subjective reality, through communion with the Primal Oneness of things.46 44

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 24. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 10-24. 46 Homer. The Odyssey, trans., W. H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1937), 134. When speaking about a transcendent after-life, we must keep in mind that, unlike a Christian worldview, the Greeks viewed Hades (underworld-afterlife) as an eternal subterranean place of dwelling populated by ghosts or the anemic shadows of once vibrant, living humans; a nether-realm where Odysseus encounters the “dead without sense or feeling, phantoms of mortals whose weary days are done.” When 45

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Having discussed the penultimate Hellenic expression of the aesthetic drive by examining the Homeric Greeks, we now take a closer look at Nietzsche’s claim that the Greeks of the Tragic Age most successfully harnessed and discharged the artistic-tragic power to transform their world through the tragic-experience of the Greek theatre, which was given birth and facilitated by the merging and commingling of the counter-striving aesthetic forces of the Apolline and Dionysiac. We must note that although Nietzsche references these artistic forces as psychological, when he goes on to claim that the Apolline and its opposite, the Dionysiac, are “artistic powers which spring from nature itself, without the mediation of the artist, and in which nature’s artistic urges are immediately and directly satisfied,”47 it is obvious that Nietzsche understands these forces in terms that are undeniably metaphysical. Therefore, since these forces play a pivotal role in influencing and giving shape to the ancient Greek culture, their way-of-life and being-in-the world, we are also dealing with ontology (What is Being qua Being?), which subtends metaphysics. We now focus on the second aesthetic principle of art in Nietzsche’s reading of tragedy, namely, the Dionysiac or Dionysian, which Nietzsche associates with unbounded sexuality, orgiastic overflow, intoxication, and joy in violent cruelty and destruction. In Attic tragedy, the Apolline facilitates, by providing a mediating narrative structure to the drama, the emergence of the Dionysiac, the world in all of its rawness, as a maelstrom of competing and destructive forces in a state of perpetual change and Heraclitean flux (the world as will to power). Based on this foregoing claim, it is necessary to highlight the fact that although Nietzsche speaks of two counter-striving aesthetic-psychological drives, the Dionysiac, in essence, serves as the metaphysical grounding principle (Urgrund/Ur-ground) for existence. This directly mirrors Schopenhauer’s claim that the “world-will” (Weltwille) underlies and gives form and structure to the entirety of our lives, for recall, Nietzsche’s was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism. In Julian Young’s brief but enlightening analysis of The Birth of Tragedy, the similarities and differences in both philosophers’ view of metaphysics and tragedy is Odysseus glorifies the death of Achilles, he is corrected because, despite Achilles’s timƝ (honor) and klƝos (emblematic immortality through communal stories), the fact that he is now residing in Hades makes him miserable, a mere shadow of his former larger-than-life self: “I would rather be plowman to a yeoman farmer on a small holding,” laments Achilles, “than lord Paramount in the kingdom of the dead.” 47 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 18.

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expressed succinctly: “The Nietzschean hero…identifies with the [Dionysiac] world-will, the primal source of the world phenomenon, [however], the Schopenhauerian stance is unable to stomach such an identification.”48 Whereas Apolline art transfigures surface phenomena and transforms the way things appear, Dionysiac tragic-art does not seek delight in phenomena themselves, but rather that which lives beyond or behind the phenomena. For Nietzsche, what lies behind the phenomena attunes and transforms us, for we are brought, momentarily, through our participation in the tragic performance, into the presence of the overwhelming and sublime manifestation of nature, the rising Dionysiac force, which “addresses us with its true, undisguised voice.”49 Below we work to clarify this phenomenon, which is expressive of and unique to Nietzsche’s interpretation of Attic tragedy. According to Nietzsche, since the Apolline consciousness, “like a veil, hid the Dionysiac world from…view,”50 it was the presentation of and participation in tragedy that serves as what might be understood as the phenomenological means by which to wrest or coax the Dionysiac from concealment, to bring it to presence, i.e., bring to the light of revelation what had previously remained cloaked and hidden. In communion with the Apolline-mediated rising Dionysian force, the tragic spectators were momentarily transported beyond the confines of individuated subjectivity, for as participants in the tragic hero’s downfall and destruction, they were attuned by and transformed within the frenzied psychological state of Rausch. One manner in which to explain this phenomenon of aesthetic transfiguration in tragedy would be to say that in the destruction of the tragic hero - the destruction of a higher type in the tragic reversal of fate (peripeteia) - the participants symbolically took on and assumed the emotional suffering of the hero. As a consequence of this experience, a collective brethren of worldly pain was born and a condition of universal sufferance was achieved. However, this explanation does not go far enough in a metaphysical direction to do justice to what Nietzsche is actually philosophizing. Nietzsche’s meaning is actually more incredible and far stranger, and as stated, draws heavily on Schopenhauer’s view of the world will. Beyond merely identifying with the hero’s suffering, taking it on collectively as their own, the Greeks momentarily transcended individuality and were brought before the essence of the Primal Oneness of the world or nature. This is to say that the tragic experience released the 48 J. Young. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993), 54. 49 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 80. 50 Ibid.

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maelstrom that is nature’s (physis) essential force, in all of its raging flux and flow, its awe-inspiring sublimity, and its dark and mysterious depths. The spectators of the tragedy, or better, the participants, commune with and become indistinguishable from the chaotic, ontological ground of existence. They experienced the life-force of existence as a whole, in all of its naked and chaotic force, and took great pleasure and orgiastic delight in it, which included affirming all of the “struggles, the torments, and destruction of phenomena”51 necessary to life, and this for Nietzsche represents the growth and unfolding of the fertility of the world, which is eternally repeated and renewed. The Greeks were “pierced by the raging goad of [these] torments just as [they became] one with the vast and primal delight in existence and [sensed] the eternity of that delight in Dionysiac ecstasy,”52 at a reified and elevated height, more alive than ever, they instantiated “the single living thing, merged with its creative delight,”53 they were no longer individuals, but instead a tragic collective To reiterate, the mediating contribution of the Apolline provides the necessary form and creates the illusion that ultimately entices and draws participants into the drama, who were protected and sheltered from being overwhelmed and destroyed by the rising and surging of the pure, unadulterated power of the original Dionysiac. This is the force, that in times of the ancient festivals of Bacchus (the rights of spring), unleashed the most savage beasts nature produced and contained, creating an experience that was a “repellent mixture of lust and cruelty, [a proverbial] “witches brew.”54 This tragic effect of being overwhelmed by the Dionysiac, produces the opposite effect in those inferior in character to the Greeks. For in those with a waning or descending spirit, as opposed to inspiring a return to the world within a transfigured and invigorated conscious spirit and lust for life, the tragic experience would induce the resignation of the world and will, which Nietzsche would later, in The Will to Power, directly link with “a weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism, a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness.”55 When rejecting a life of action, overtaken by an oppressive sense of depression and resignation, we slip silently and lifelessly into a pessimism of decline-passive nihilism that paralyzes all comportment, and Nietzsche found this repulsive and expressed his discontent in the critical reassessment of Schopenhauer written many years after The Birth of 51

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 80. Ibid. 53 Ibid., 80-81. 54 Ibid., 19. 55 Ibid., 18. 52

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Tragedy in his “Attempt at Self-Criticism.” The Greeks responded actively through art, not to escape life, but rather to temporarily transfigure it and further, to engage it and affirm it as valuable despite the bleak and dismal conditions structuring the world.56 This view is expressed by Nietzsche in what might serve as the grounding tenet of The Birth of Tragedy: “[O]ur highest dignity lies in the meaning of works of art - for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”57 Ultimately, in The Birth of Tragedy, hope for a transfigured and flourishing existence takes the form of aesthetics – tragic-art as a form of attunement through creative illusion – which avoids devolving into pessimistic escapism. The Greeks did not hold out hope or display faith in an afterlife of an otherworldly nature. Neither did the tragic-Greeks overestimate the power of human knowledge and potential, for they knew and understood their radical limitations as mere mortals, and then heroically celebrated those limits – affirming human fragility and finitude – in works of life-transforming art.58

Pessimism in Relation to Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Later Philosophy In this transitionary section, we explore the manner in which Nietzsche relates the issue of pessimism as it appears in his early philosophy to his later thinking on nihilism. This will enhance our reading because the problems Nietzsche identifies with both Christianity and “Socratic Optimism” in The Birth of Tragedy relate directly to modernity’s nihilistic 56 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 121. It is clear from this reading that Nietzsche’s theory stands in contention to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy grounded in katharsis and the purging of violent emotions. Instead, for Nietzsche, tragedy is an aesthetic experience that overwhelms the participant with orgiastic emotion in the moment of Rausch, who is overrun and overwhelmed by the rising Dionysian life-force. 57 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 32. 58 J-P. Vernant. The Greeks. trans., C. Lambert and T. L. Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16. Indeed, as Jean-Pierre Vernant recognizes, “the oracle, ‘Know Thyself’ meant: learn your limits, know you are a mortal man, and do not attempt to be the gods’ equal.” It is important to underline that Vernant’s anthropology of the ancient Greek psyche indicates that this concept cannot be understood in terms of the modern phenomenon - traceable to Cartesian philosophy - of the “principle of individuation” that Nietzsche philosophizes by drawing inspiration from Schopenhauer. Vernant’s reading, therefore, differs from Nietzsche’s more creative interpretation.

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experience of the world. For with the death of God, “the categories ‘aim,’ ‘unity,’ ‘being’ which we use to project some value into the world – we pull out again; as the world looks valueless.”59 It is this encounter with nihilism that will form the ground of our reading of the persona of Dionysus, a persona that Nietzsche adopts and instantiates as the tragic artist-philosopher; indeed Nietzsche and Dionysus eventually become indistinguishable, for in the end (Ecce Homo), it is Dionysus against the Crucified. As we have seen, Nietzsche believes that in response to the bleak existential conditions pervading their lives, the Greeks demonstrated courage and aesthetic creativity, a “pessimism of strength,” in the face of adversity, sublimating and overcoming pain as they transformed their lives through art – hence avoiding the slide into a fatalistic form of pessimism. The view of ancient Greek pessimism related to Hesiod, however, and we are careful to point this out, is not to be equated with what Nietzsche later identifies as nihilism, this despite Nietzsche drawing a definitive connection between the two existential conditions and subsequent forms of human responses. Nihilism for Nietzsche is inseparable from the fall of the onto-theological metaphysical world-view of absolute values grounded in the omni-presence of a divine, monotheistic creator-God, such as embraced in Christianity. Nihilism is a condition that indicates that humanity is truly beyond traditional religious notions of good and evil and rationalistic ideas regarding objective and absolute truth. As Nietzsche moves beyond the early philosophy of The Birth of Tragedy, he becomes highly critical of Schopenhauer’s pessimism of resignation, and it is this view of philosophical pessimism, which adopts a gloomy and dismal picture of the world wherein evil outweighs good, that is linked in Nietzsche’s later philosophy (e.g., Will to Power) with nihilism: “Pessimism,” of the type we find in Schopenhauer, is for Nietzsche already a “preliminary form of nihilism.”60 Here, we pause to briefly examine Nietzsche’s understanding of pessimism in its relation to nihilism. According to Nietzsche, “Pessimism is not a problem but a symptom, the name should be replaced with ‘nihilism’.”61 Pessimism is a symptom - a worldview that is facilitated and engendered by the condition of nihilism - when “the highest values devalue themselves. The aim [of existence] is lacking; ‘Why?’ finds no answer.”62 According to Nietzsche, the condition of nihilism gives rise to the exigent concern of whether or not to continue on living, whether or not 59

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 12 (A) Ibid., 9. 61 Ibid., 24. 62 Ibid., 9. 60

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life is worth our trouble. When Nietzsche employs the term “nihilism,”63 he is indicating an existence which is at once grounded in the metaphysical conditions of the world as well as the human’s authentic relation and response to it, in terms of being attuned to the world and subsequently comporting to it. The world lives beyond any intrinsic value or teleological purposes, goals, or ends. In this sense, providence becomes the will-o’-thewisp of Christianity. Thus, the ultimate consequence of nihilism is the unyielding belief and manner of earthly comportment consistent with a valueless universe, only if, however, an awakening occurs, such as we find in the attuned philosopher strong enough to create, value, and revalue the world. This potentially occurs only when the human arrives at the point where there is mistrust in all forms of objective and categorical explanations for life’s unfolding. As Dienstag stresses, to deny the metaphysical distinction and hierarchy between the two-world dichotomy and to expose the notion of the one true world as a lie is to, at once, open oneself to the “pessimism that leads to nihilism; [this is a state that is] “pessimistic in the sense that it rejects the optimism inherent in the idea of an ordered universe,”64 which is also inherently valuable. It is possible, in a unique way that remains true to Nietzsche’s philosophy, to view pessimism in terms of a mood, attitude, disposition, or psychological state, engendered by nihilism, which informs the way we choose to respond to the conditions within which we find ourselves in the world, philosophical or otherwise. This is similar to the manner in which Nietzsche understands the emotional state of Rausch as an aesthetic-psychological mode of attunement, highlighted by sexual ecstasy and orgiastic intoxication, which is inspired by participation in what Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols refers to as “Dionysian art.” The attunement of Rausch is inspired by “the psychology of the orgy as an over-flowing feeling of life and energy within which even pain acts as a stimulus, [and this is the road into] the concept of the tragic feeling.”65

63

In Will to Power, Kaufman and Hollingdale translate “nihilism” from the German (Nihilismus) in a manner that appears to convey to English readers the idea of the adjectival, “nihilistic.” Nihilism often appears to be used in a duplicitous manner: (1) To indicate the metaphysical condition of the universe, and (2) In reference to a response(s) to this condition, i.e., indicating that one adopts a nihilistic philosophy in response to a “valueless” universe (the condition of nihilism). Our response to the first kind of nihilism determines the form(s) of pessimism or nihilism, as philosophical response(s) that we embrace and enact. 64 Dienstag, Pessimism, 176. 65 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 121

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Throughout Nietzsche’s writings, we encounter a sustained and virulent critique of many responses to nihilism, which includes two main forms and grades of pessimism as expressed explicitly in Nietzsche’s later thought: (1) The Pessimism of Strength, which we have explored in relation to the tragic Greeks and that we will now evaluate in terms of Dionysian Pessimism (DP). Nietzsche claims this expression of pessimism has an energy to its logic and manifests in terms of anarchism and nihilism. (2) The Pessimism as Decline, which manifests in terms of a weak and ineffective response to nihilism, “as growing effeteness,”66 both of which respectively relate to (1a) Active Nihilism, a “sign of increased power of the spirit,” and (2a) Passive Nihilism, an expression of the “decline and recession of the power of the spirit.”67 Related directly to this discussion of pessimism and nihilism, we must consider two forms of suffering and, concomitant to this, two distinct types of sufferers. This issue of suffering-suffers is bound up inextricably with our responses to nihilism as expressions of philosophy, art, and morality, for these endeavors and pursuits, according to Nietzsche, manifest in lower and higher forms. The question for Nietzsche is always: When one suffers, in what manner does that individual ultimately respond to that suffering, how does one cope with it, and beyond, how does one transform it into a cause for celebration? Indeed, the value the these pursuits acquire in praxis is linked intimately to the issue of whether the exercise of one’s will to power contributes to or detracts from the overall expansion of the feeling of power. Nietzsche distinguishes between humans that “suffer from an overfullness of life,”68 those who desire Dionysian art and embrace a tragic view of life, i.e., tragic insight into the general and insurmountable questionable nature of the universe (Pessimism of Strength (DP)/Active Nihilism) and humans that “suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from their lives through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness [Pessimism as Decline/Passive Nihilism],”69 namely, through forms of escapism, modes of self-narcotization, to which Nietzsche links with optimistic forms of philosophy, art, and morality. All attempts to overcome metaphysical traditions necessarily entail the revaluation of old values. This involves replacement of the old value system with new values that are representative of the movement of the spirit in ways that facilitate an ascending and heroic life of continued 66

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 11. Ibid., 17 68 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 328. 69 Ibid. 67

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self-overcoming. This task does not shy away from and indeed strives to confront the debilitating forces that hold the potential to engender a retreat from life as in pessimism as decline/passive nihilism. Nietzsche is adamant that any attempt to confront and transcend a pessimistic worldview, “to escape [it] without revaluating our values,” produces the opposite effect of amplifying the situation, making “the problem more acute.”70 According to Nietzsche, pessimism of strength/active nihilism ultimately inspires the “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems [which is] the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility.”71 This form of selfovercoming and remaking of the world earns the distinguished moniker in his later writings, “Dionysian” - a superior psychological hybrid composed of the philosopher-artist-saint, let us call this Nietzsche’s tragic triumvirate. In the move from Nietzsche’s early view of pessimism to his later view, which is consistent with his view of heroic self-overcoming and the self-in-transition, ideas traceable through The Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche abandons the “philosophical pessimism” that he once embraced, believing erroneously that at one time it was “a symptom of a superior force of thought, of a more triumphant fullness of life than had characterized…Hume, Condillac, and the sensualists.”72 Philosophical pessimism, here is identified with romanticism, and where we have talked previously about the two types of sufferers, the romantics are representative of the sufferers that life makes weak, leading to the impoverishment of the spirt, e.g., Schopenhauer as well as Wagner, two of the more famous philosophical pessimists that Nietzsche claimed to have drastically misunderstood early in his career. Opposing this view of romantic pessimism, Nietzsche contemplates another, far superior version of pessimism, a classical type that he claims to be the pessimism of the future, which is nothing other than Dionysian pessimism. Walter Kaufman claims that The Gay Science marks the origin and starting point for understanding Nietzsche’s later interpretation of Dionysus, and it captures the style, tone, and temperament in Nietzsche’s writings that will highlight our analysis in the forthcoming and concluding section. In the end, it is blatantly clear that Nietzsche lived as the one true disciple of Dionysus and preferred that role above any other.

70

Nietzsche, Gay Science, 328. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 110. 72 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 270. 71

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Dionysian Pessimism and the Persona of Dionysus The Ascending Self-in-Transition When invoking the persona of Dionysus, we neither link it to a psychological archetype nor a transcendent metaphysical principle. Rather, we are focused on what Dionysus represents, instantiates, and displays in Nietzsche’s inspired interpretation of this orgiastic man-god. Our task is to re-conceptualize the importance and understanding of Dionysus for Nietzsche in his later philosophy while bringing Dionysus down from the lofty Hellenic heights to place him firmly on terrestrial ground,73 and, at the same time, embracing the potential for a secular form of spiritual transcendence in terms of self-overcoming. For Dionysian Pessimism, as Dienstag contends, “properly leads to spirited activity” bound to a transformative artistic pathos (attunement),74 which is inseparable from the process of continued self-overcoming when artistically ordering one’s character or soul with style. For Nietzsche, this is a rare and great art, which is practiced only by those individuals who are strong and discerning enough to honestly “survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”75 It is the case that the Apollonian-Dionysian distinction is still present in Nietzsche’s later work as “antithetical concepts,”76 and as Young recognizes, the distinction is not to be conceived as a difference in kind, but rather of species, and, in Will to Power, Nietzsche indeed claims that the distinction between the two is grounded in the difference in their respective tempos. Nevertheless, we shall focus on this distinction in terms of depth and intensity, with the Dionysian clearly performing the bulk of the heavy lifting in Nietzsche’s later conception of the artist-philosopher. 73

Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art, 118. Young agrees with this assessment, stating, “The ‘Dionysian’ attitude to life, regarded in The Gay Science as beyond the power of ordinary mortals, is viewed in 1888 as achievable, indeed achieved, by at least the artist.” Young also states that the Apollonian is reserved for those in convalescence, while the Dionysian is only for those of a healthy spirit. In addition, he argues that the Dionysian solution abandons Apollonian “falsification” of the image of life. However, Young’s reading of Nietzsche’s later view of Dionysus from Twilight of the Idols, still remains at an undeniable metaphysical level. As we argue, Dionysian pessimism, drawing inspiration from the Greek god, can be understood otherwise. 74 Dienstag, Pessimism, 166. 75 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 290. 76 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 84.

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The Dionysian state exhibits and inspires a heightened and intensified feeling of power in the artist-philosopher, which is expressive of and analogous to voluptuous sexual ecstasy. Both Apollonian and Dionysian states are attuned by and within the frenzied, intoxicated, and erotic state of Rausch. Nevertheless, as Nietzsche stresses, “Apollonian intoxication alerts above all the eye, so that is acquires the power of [keen] vision,”77 while, on the other hand, by penetrating the inner recesses of the psyche, the Dionysian goes far deeper than the mere surface level, for it attunes “the entire emotional system” in preparation to discharge its will to power and simultaneously, “all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation.”78 In short, this erotic state attunes the Dionysian artist-philosopher’s conscience in the quest for continued, sustained, and ascending self-overcoming. Nietzsche asks the following pressing question and offers a brief and difficult rejoinder: “What does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person you are.”79 We now examine the concept of “conscience” in Nietzsche as it relates to our view of Dionysian Pessimism. It is against the modern philosophical notion of consciousness as the prominent cite for mind (ego) or selfhood, which Nietzsche reduces to a mere surface phenomenon, the shadowy residue of powerful drives and affects, that he seeks a re-conceptualization of conscience, stripped of its religious or Christian baggage. The original content of our conscience is what might be described as our heritage, including the belief in the power of authority, more specifically, conscience is not “the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.”80 Conscience inspires compulsion to obey what society demands that we do in terms of rigidly prescribed and proscribed actions and behaviors. Nevertheless, our conscience does not typically, as understood in terms of the herd animal, query in a critical manner as to why such activities must be done and why certain rules must be followed. This way it fails to enliven and inspire the will to action and the drive to rise up and against these accepted, unquestioned beliefs and traditions. Pushing back and against these societal norms, however, is exceedingly difficult because when this traditional value system is destructured and destroyed - the condition of nihilism - all revaluation and subsequent judgment occur in the absence of any pre-determined value system against which we would be able to measure ourselves. 77

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 84. Ibid. 79 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 270. 80 Nietzsche. The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. P. V. Cohn (UK: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018), 52. 78

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Aaron Ridley offers a helpful definition of conscience in Nietzsche as it relates to our concern, in terms of the “commitment to truthful ‘self-surveillance’ – to a ceaseless vigilance over and questioning of one’s own motives,”81 which importantly includes asking why one has fallen to the temptation to embrace and cling to what the tradition has passed along. For Nietzsche’s “revolution of conscience” is reflective of a two-fold movement that is simultaneously directed internally and externally. Conscience, Ridley argues, is the “crucial site of contact between a distinctive human capacity (reflexive consciousness) and a distinctive human possibility (self-transformation).”82 This duplicitous activity drives self-transformation in Nietzsche, the process of becoming that the self-in-transition instantiates and embodies. Nietzsche conceives human conscience in artistic terms as analogous to dance when reflecting on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and in this activity he states that the concept of the “superman” (Übermensch) emerges as “the greatest reality, [and is also inseparable from] the concept of Dionysos himself.”83 Here we follow Nietzsche’s poetizing of this event: When the Dionysian tragic artistphilosopher exercises and discharges the will to power, this creative phenomenon reveals a “soul which possesses the longest ladder and can descend the deepest/ the most spacious soul, which can run and stray and roam the farthest into itself/ the most necessary soul which plunges into becoming, the possessing soul which wants to partake in desire and longing.”84 Dienstag, talking of “Dionysian pessimism as a quest,”85 Leslie Paul Thiele, writing on the “well-ordered soul,”86 and Paul Franco, exploring “self-creation”87 in Nietzsche, all reference what we have identified as the self-in-transition. Nietzsche is adamantly opposed to embracing, adopting, and establishing a new, fixed and nomological value system, rather he seeks to offer us a new way-of-life, an aesthetic and revalued mode of Being-in-the-world, which instantiates a pessimistic ethos, that, as Dienstag states, reveals and “sheds some light on what it might be like to live a good life following the death of God – it is, in short, an art of 81

Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience, 116. Ibid., 15. 83 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 77. 84 Ibid. 85 Dienstag, Pessimism, 187. 86 L. Paul Thiele. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Soul: A Study in Heroic Individualism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 51. 87 P. Franco. “Becoming Who You Are: Nietzsche on Self-Creation,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 49(1) (2018), pp. 52-77. 82

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living.”88 However, it is a life-style that is not meant for the faint of heart, for it is devoid of the optimism placed in and directed toward the realization of either complete self-knowledge or the security provided by grand narratives. It is the case that Nietzsche puts more emphasis on the artist and his character than the artwork itself, and he states unequivocally that the masterpiece, the work of art, always reveals the artist’s conscience, for the “phenomenon ‘artist’ is still the most transparent – to see through…to the basic instinct of power, nature, etc.!”89 The artist’s direct proximity to the work he has brought into existence, reinforce and heighten the feeling of intoxication (Rausch), and indeed the primary “effect of works of art is to excite the state that creates art – intoxication.”90 An artist’s conscience can be determined by the manner in which he lives his life in the face of nihilism, indicating what type of sufferer he is and how it is he chooses to confront the original ressentiment that lies at the heart of human conscience, which inevitably festers and grows simply due to the fact humans are socialized and embedded in custom. Indeed, Nietzsche’s infamous distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified is grounded in the understanding of power and the manner in which each responds to suffering, “the god on the cross [is a] signpost to seek redemption from life, [whereas] Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.”91 We reference the activity of the Dionysian artist-philosopher as an artistry of the soul,92 which is focused on the continued and renewed 88

Dienstag, Pessimism, 188. Dienstag importantly recognizes that Nietzsche “never provides a new set of values to replace the old,” but we can gain insight into these values intimated by Nietzsche, for we “are not left simply with the imperiously vague injunction to ‘create new values’.” By surveying Dionysian pessimism, we are provided a vista into the types of virtues that Nietzsche lauds and embraces. 89 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 797. 90 Ibid., 821. 91 Ibid., 1052. 92 Franco, “Becoming Who You Are,” 53. Franco is critical of relating the artistic process of creation and recreation in Nietzsche to a model consistent with literature, for as Franco observes, such a reading, “does not take sufficient account of Nietzsche’s denials of a ‘subject’ behind our actions or above our drives who does the ordering, unifying, and interpreting that the [literary] model of the self requires.” With this in mind, it is possible to state that based on Franco’s critique it is more probable that Nietzsche’s notion of self-in-transition shares a family resemblance with Hume’s Bundle Theory of Mind. Indeed, the manner in which Nietzsche views free will and human autonomy in relation to drives does resemble Hume’s notion of “soft determinism”. According to this concept, all drives

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process of self-overcoming, becoming a self, which involves the ranking and ordering of the drives and passions, requiring a keen sense of discernment and self-honesty in service of the pursuit of an ascending and ultimately meaningful life. Like an artist, Nietzsche indicates that we should determine which drives will be highlighted in the foreground and which will be relegated to the background, with the artist’s insight to know that the entire composition is always open to formal and stylistic rearrangement as the artistic process continues to evolve in all of its rich diversity. Nietzsche is clear that we cannot rid ourselves of drives, but we can temper or extenuate, transform, and discharge them, for example, by means of sublimation. Nietzsche is generally skeptical of artists in the sense that they are primarily concerned with wielding their tools and techniques for the purpose of producing a finished artistic product - plastic art, literary art, etc. - without considering that an artistic approach, an artful technique, can also be, with greater benefit, applied to one’s life as work-of-art. What Nietzsche suggests we learn from artists is the process of aesthetic transfiguration, i.e., how to “make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not, [while remaining] wiser than [artists] in other matters, [for their] power usually comes to an end where their art ends and life begins.”93 We should rather turn our skill as artists back on ourselves, for Nietzsche wants us to become the artist-cumartwork, divining potential in nihilism so as to transform the emptiness and even the horrors of a groundless existence into a cause for aesthetic celebration, for the Dionysian artist-philosopher “takes delight in a world disorder without God, a world of chance, to whose essence belong the terrible, the ambiguous, the seductive.”94 Crucial elements of the Dionysian artist-philosopher’s lifecreation include, but are not limited to, demonstrating the necessity for and the understanding of artistic distance and the technique of idealizing. There is a two-fold sense of distance in Nietzsche’s philosophy that we discuss: The artistic distance required in the process of surveying and organizing the soul, and the distance created between the artist-philosopher and others who possess neither the insight nor the courage and good nature to turn their life into a work of art. From out of the surging energy of the contribute to determining our actions and, being the origin of our actions, there is no way of outstripping them. However, we can render judgments about them and act accordingly, i.e., act on what nature has given us. It is determined that our drives motivate behavior, but judgement can be freely marshalled to act as a mediating force. 93 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 299. 94 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1019.

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artist, “seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome,”95 he is attuned to command and compel things to show up in ways that contribute to an ascending life, and this Nietzsche names idealizing. This is not merely the common artistic practice of subtracting what is inconsequential and abstracting what is most beautiful, as is the case with a work of art like the Venus de Milo, instead Nietzsche conceives this phenomenon in terms of a process of heightened transfiguration, which “enriches everything out of one’s own abundance,” transforming, amplifying, and intensifying them until they mirror the artist-philosopher’s power, and “until they are reflections of his perfection”96 – art is the exigent compulsion to transform our existence and world into perfected states. When establishing aesthetic distance for our developing creation, we temporarily remove ourselves, looking out and down, as it were, from all things serious and grave and instead reveal ourselves as “simplified and transfigured,”97 in order to achieve a temporary respite from the artisticphilosophical quest. Once at a distance, Nietzsche claims we find companionship with our faults and failings, we are in a position and mindset to take pleasure in and amusement at the fool dancing within our wisdom, for if we cannot experience happiness when recognizing and acknowledging our follies and foolishness, Nietzsche assures us that we will be unable to “continue to find pleasure in our wisdom.”98 The second sense of distance we stress, which is not often mentioned in the literature, is the necessary distance that the Dionysian project establishes between itself and the herd instinct, which functions to stifle artistic individuality and creativity. This because “the valuations and orders of rank of human impulses and actions [that society imposes] trains the individual to be a function of the herd;”99 we are taught to ascribe value only as an instrumental function of and benefit to society. Instead of embracing and putting to use the “great sources of strength, those impetuous torrents of the soul that are so often dangerous and overwhelming,”100 society and herd morality seeks to either control and suppress them or extinguish them outright. The art of giving style to the ordering of the soul is essential for Nietzsche, and here recall our discussion of conscience in conjunction with the intellectual elements of pessimism that Nietzsche embraces, for 95

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1019. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 83. 97 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 78. 98 Ibid., 107. 99 Ibid., 116. 100 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 383. 96

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he contends that the artist-philosopher surveys and gauges his strengths and weaknesses and fits them all, virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, into an artistic plan, which unfolds as a dialogue between self-and-world, “through long practice and daily work at it.”101 Ordering the soul in style requires the ranking and ordering of drives in relation to the ascending creative whole, e.g., one does not do away with either pity or cruelty, but comes to understand when and to what degree these emotions should be prioritized and discharged, in such a way where, for example, pity is not allowed to dominate and hence debilitate and weaken the entire character. Weakness and illness, if they are to be overcome, need to be “reinterpreted and made sublime, and indeed, with an eye to the future, [need to be] exploited for distant views [in order to] beckon toward the far and immeasurable.”102 Nietzsche relates his vision of style to a revival of classical style (classicism), which stands opposed to the emotional style of romanticism, which is concerned far more with feeling over form. The romantics, observes Nietzsche, display “weak characters without power over themselves, [and as a consequence] hate the constraints of [a rigorous] style, [and so are always] continually ready for revenge,”103 discharging their ressentiment against others who become their victims. In the “grand” style, balance, harmony, and rigor are stressed, and Michael Tanner is helpful in comparing the grand style in Nietzsche to the classical style in music, where the rigorous constraints actually contribute to the greatness and individuality of such composers as Mozart, allowing their genius to emerge and flourish.104 The grand style wills chaos into form, and demands that the artist works to become, to whatever degree this is possible, a master of chaos.105 To this style we might also attach the moniker “Dionysian” style, for it is driven and carried out within the attunement of intoxication or frenzy (Rausch), which Nietzsche links directly to the Dionysian mysteries and ancient Hellenic “psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life.”106 Nietzsche tells us that the essence of the psychology of the artist, of the “Dionysian state,” properly speaking, is the origin (Ursprung) and beginning of art, and it is the orgiastic attunement of Rausch that initially inspires the artist, while at the same time - and this is crucial to understand – continuing to enhance the 101

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 383. Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 M. Tanner. Nietzsche. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39-40. 105 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 842. 106 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 120. 102

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excitability and ascending power of the artist-creator. For in the act of the production of art, the artist’s power is also enhanced within the process of creation. Here, we imagine the artist-philosopher harnessing the potential to perpetually draw newfound strength and inspiration for further creation, renewed self-overcoming. In describing this phenomenon of attunement, Nietzsche contends that when the artist’s will to power is made more powerful, the aesthetic process embodies the fertilization of new “energies that can turn any desert into lush farmland,” leading to the production and reinvigoration of an “overflowing energy that is [ever] pregnant with future.”107 Thus, Rausch is not merely origin of art, but perhaps better understood as representing the archƝ of art, as this ancient Greek term is understood by Heidegger. For the Greeks, archƝ indicates “that from which something has its origin, [and] as this origin…likewise keeps reign over…dominates, something else that emerges from it.”108 Nussbaum rightly observes that Nietzsche’s “mature account of Dionysian intoxication is developed with particular clarity and beauty.”109 Nietzsche’s descriptions are undeniably exhilarating to read, harkening, but in a far more maturely developed manner, to The Birth of Tragedy, a work that we saw returns us to the dark and mysterious age of the tragic Greeks, always pregnant with potential. However, it is Twilight of the Idols that serves as an encomium to all that Nietzsche believes he owes to the ancient Hellenes. Nietzsche reiterates that in the experience of the orgy (Rausch), there is an overflowing of energy, a way of being where “even pain acts as a stimulus, engendering the essential concept and experience of the tragic feeling.”110 In this mood, inspired by the participation in the Dionysian rites and mysteries, the potential empowerment to affirm life to the highest degree arises, despite at times demanding the “sacrifice of [our] highest types.”111 Nietzsche is clear that Dionysian pessimism, in the quest for becoming a self-in-transition, revealing and gaining insight into who we might become, requires the destruction of certain parts of ourselves, demands the critical destruction of traditional moral codes, the tombs and sepulchers of God, and the hollow idols, whose clay legs must 107

Nietzsche, Gay Science, 370. M. Heidegger. “On the Essence of the Concept Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B,” in: W. McNeill, ed., Pathmarks. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189. 109 M. Nussbaum, “Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dionysus,” in: C. Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 370. 110 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 121. 111 Ibid., 121. 108

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ultimately be smashed with the philosopher’s hammer. In light of these difficult and unavoidable aspects of artistically creating a self, the Dionysian inspired artist-philosopher finds joy in this difficult but necessary activity, and therefore confronts this activity in a heroic manner. Indeed, Dionysian pessimism, ultimately requires the destruction of the self we have been in anticipation of who we might eventually become. Dionysian pessimism is attuned to such a heightened degree, that even the strangest and most difficult problems we face, which are ineluctable bound up with the project to overcome all that will weaken and kill us, all that will drive us into the depths of hate, revenge, and ressentiment, are transformed through aesthetic affirmation. Nietzsche’s unique claim that Dionysian pessimism is an “intellectual pessimism” and includes the critique of morality (transvaluation of values), radically separates his view from Schopenhauer and the naïve pessimism of Hartman. This bespeaks the critical and deconstructive aspect of Dionysian pessimism, which reveals and seeks to critically transform all signs and indications of the weakness and decay of the human spirit. However, despite the awe-inspiring nature of these thoughts, no matter the insight that is derived from this view into the ancient Hellenic psyche, we must keep in mind that in Nietzsche’s later philosophy all that is contained in the word “Dionysus” is a symbolism relating to and drawing inspiration from the Greeks, i.e., “the symbolism of the Dionysian.”112 It is possible, taking Nietzsche at his word, to conceive all of this grand eloquent poetizing on the tragic Greeks as symbolically relating to Dionysian Pessimism, or as we have introduced, active nihilism as a way-of-life, a practice that defines and is instantiated by the tragic artist-philosopher as he works tirelessly and relentlessly to give structure and order to his soul through style – as he draws inspiration from the aesthetic process of idealizing Dionysus.113 Dionysian Pessimism is an active response to a world devoid of inherent meanings or transcendent, intrinsic values, and so the task Nietzsche sets for us is the creation of new values and the revaluation of our lives without the hope or optimism that seeks, as Dienstag argues, the utopian and final “goal of happiness, [declaring it] the ultimate aim of a 112

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 121. Franco, “Becoming Who You Are,” 56-57. Franco relates the notion of the emulation of great individuals to Nietzsche’s early view of self-hood as understood and presented in Schopenhauer as Educator, where the individual “discovers” a self by aligning oneself with admirable, noble types. This view is analyzed by Franco as he traces the development of Nietzsche’s notion of becoming a self as this idea changes and evolves in his later thought.

113

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human life.”114 And, as related directly to the character of the Dionysian man, what is crucial is the extent to which through sheer “strength of will [he] can do without meaning in things, to what extent [he] can endure to live in a meaningless world.”115 In fact, the goal is to organize the soul in the process of self-overcoming, creating and living a self-in-transition, and to ultimately organize a small portion of the world within ourselves. This demands a “fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable,”116 a fearlessness in the confrontation with the groundless chaotic unfolding of a world in flux, flow, and relentless change, a world indifferent to our sufferings. Dionysian pessimism demonstrates bravery and composure when confronting and struggling to overcome the great hardships we face, but in the midst of the agonistic struggle there is also the imminent potential for growth and ascension, self-transformation, self-transcendence beyond what we have been in anticipation what we might yet still become, the possibility for willing a “victorious condition, which is fit to be glorified by the artist-philosopher.”117 Recall the manner in which Nietzsche describes conscience, and the counter-striving movement between the reflexive moment and the transformative moment, for the Dionysian artist demonstrates the “instinct for understanding and divining”118 what is necessary for self-overcoming, and is therefore equipped, empowered, and attuned in way where thought-and-action merge and gather meaning in unison throughout the renewed process of self-overcoming. To order the soul, the artist-philosopher faces inevitable resistance and is often forced to take risks that threaten the health of both his psychological and physiological constitution, and indeed his pessimistic project instantiates, as we have stated, “destruction, decomposition, and negation.”119 There is undeniable and unavoidable pain bound up with this Dionysian project, and yet the human of the higher spirit is strong and joyous enough to declare “Yes to life beyond death and change,”120 or more directly, cry “Yes” to life in the face of the inevitability of death and change, and our pain can become sanctified, taken up and given a necessary place within the struggle for good health, for pain is integral aspect of creation – or “procreation.” For according to Nietzsche, if the 114

Dienstag, Pessimism, 190. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 318. 116 Ibid. 117 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 93. 118 Ibid., 84. 119 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 370. 120 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 120-121. 115

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“will to life” is to eternally or perpetually affirm and reaffirm itself, then the “‘torment of childbirth’ must also exist eternally.”121 It is possible to understand Nietzsche’s innumerable references to procreation in terms of new beginnings,122 and this is nothing other than the process of continually opening up the potential for the experience of secular over-coming and transcendence of the self in anticipation of what is on the approach, in terms of a potential and ever-renewed beginning. Hence, in an essential sense, Dionysian pessimism amounts to emulating and drawing inspiration from the god’s psyche, through what we have introduced as idealizing in art, the highlighting, the bringing into focus, and the magnification of the most essential traits of the Dionysian that prove beneficial to the difficult philosophical quest of becoming a self. Thus, it is possible to conclude that “Dionysus” in Nietzsche’s later writing no longer resides at the dizzying heights of the metaphysical, but rather is a symbolic representation, to use Nietzsche’s term, a creative poetizing of the idea of the erotic desire for the future and becoming, the “desire for destruction, change, and becoming, an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future.”123 As Nietzsche declares, the name for this process of aestheticphilosophical self-overcoming, as described in this section, is “Dionysian.” Nietzsche’s Dionysus, in relation to our understanding of persona, refers to the inspirational aspects of the Dionysian character that the artistphilosopher idealizes, internalizes, and then displays when, in a transparent manner, he discharges his attuned will to power in the service of self-overcoming. In Nietzsche’s later writings, we no longer view selfovercoming and growth as necessitating the destruction or dissolution of human subjectivity in its metaphysical communion with the plenary essence of the world, the Primal Oneness. Rather, we embrace it in the 121

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 120-121. Dienstag, Pessimism, 190. To my knowledge, Dienstag is the only interpreter to have made the novel observation that when Nietzsche speaks of the Hellenic will to procreation, his reference to childbirth certainly represents “the emergence into the world of a new individual,” but it also, and perhaps more importantly, symbolically gestures toward the philosophical “enlargement and transfiguration of the self…that pessimism enables in people over the course of their lives.” This encompasses the process of self-overcoming, in terms we have discussed as selftranscendence, as the process of bringing a new version of the self into existence (birthing) with the future potential for re-birth. Interestingly, this concept of “new beginnings” or “re-birth” can be linked to the important notion of natality in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy, which references our ontological predisposition to make and remake our lives anew. See: H. Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 123 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 121. 122

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sense that Nietzsche’s Dionysus, the persona of the god, inspires us to confront existence in an active, artistic manner, with the tragic understanding and knowledge that despite inhabiting a world devoid of intrinsic meanings and pre-established values, it is not an existence without imminent potential for inspiring human self-overcoming and secular transcendence. Thus, when emulating Nietzsche’s Dionysus, it is certainly possible to adopt and display his persona, and to live in a productive and rewarding manner, if we are insightful and courageous enough.

CHAPTER TWO HEIDEGGER ON THE “FUTURAL” POET RILKE POETIZING THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF BEING?

This essay poses and responds to the following critical questions: Does Rilke’s poetry poetize the event of Being for Dasein? Does Rilke indicate that the human being can achieve such a mode of authentic “historical” existence in relation to the Earth or the holy? Heidegger responds to the first query in the affirmative; Rilke does poetize this event, albeit through a tempered and somewhat traditional view of Western metaphysics. To the second query, it appears that Heidegger responds in a cryptic and ambiguous manner, and to clarify this response, I turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s “Angel” as a prophetic figure of futural hope. I am concerned with what type of poets Heidegger believes, other than and in addition to Hölderlin, might be up to the supreme task of poetizing Dasein’s historical transcendence beyond the metaphysics of presence. What Heidegger seeks is the poet for destitute times, and what is necessary is the presence and intervention of those poets who “attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods,”1 those who poetize the truth of Being, as this truth stands beyond the metaphysics of presence, for the potential appropriation and enactment of the type of authentic historical dwelling Heidegger discusses. Although Heidegger engages the poetic works of Trakl, George, Meyer, Celan, I am focused on Heidegger’s readings of Rilke, specifically readings that appear in the Parmenides lecture (194142) and the 1946 essay, “What Are Poet’s For?” Although Heidegger is critical of Rilke in the Parmenides and The “Ister,” in the later, aforementioned essay of 1946, Heidegger finds greater value in Rilke’s poetry. Importantly, it is crucial to be aware of Heidegger’s ongoing concern with language, for the way in which humanity responds to language determines its new historical beginning 1

M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans., A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 93.

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and dwelling, which is dependent on the way Dasein is attuned and open for receiving the appeal of language as it emerges and “speaks in the element of poetry.”2 As Heidegger provides the criteria required for great poetry to attune those who would listen to the poetizing, it is clear that Heidegger’s understanding of poetry and the great poets, those futural poets who might hold hope for inaugurating “another beginning,” stands beyond the register of aesthetic criticism, and thus beyond any reading anchored and weighed down by metaphysics. In order to consider Rilke a poet of substantial ontological value, there must be an attuned stance taken with respect to the divine, to the holy, to all that is enigmatic at the heart of the Being event, and his poetic language must address in a reverential manner what is given as a “gift” and, as Heidegger stresses, the “more poetic a poet is–the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying–the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an even more painstaking listening.”3 Already, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), referencing Rilke, Heidegger understands the power of poetry to reveal the world of Dasein as Being-in-the-world.4 However, in the Parmenides 2

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 216. Ibid. 4 M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans., A. Hofstader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 172-173. Indeed, turning to Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Heidegger quotes a passage that vividly describes walls and rooms that remain within a decaying house, the façade of which is crumbled to expose the desolate interior of the building that once teemed with life. However, Heidegger observes that the “tenacious life of those rooms refused to let itself be trampled down,” and from out of this the “breath of this life stood out, the tough, sluggish, musty breath which no wind had yet dispersed.” In his analysis, Heidegger focuses on the phenomenological description of the revelation of the system of relations that make up the world of the tenants that once occupied the flat, for through the poet’s description, “the world, being-in-the-world …leaps towards us from the things,” which are revealed through our “natural comportmental relationship” to the rooms of the house. The poet sees and communicates the original world of Dasein in terms that are beyond normal/everyday descriptive terms, for the “lived space” poetized by Rilke is an experience that lives beyond the dimensions of Cartesian space. J. Phillips states that in Basic Problems, Heidegger, “prior to the commentaries of the mid-1930s, delineating a new beginning in the ontological mission of Hölderlin’s so-called hymns, the poet [Rilke] is already in advance of the philosopher. Philosophy has to catch up.” I extend this observation by claiming that in Rilke’s poetic description of the crumbling building and Heidegger subsequent interpretation thereof, the understanding of art as a mode of “truth-happening” is already prefigured. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, through the poetic word truth happens in 3

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(1941-42) and “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger considers whether or not Rilke is a poet for destitute times, a concern that guides and directs this essay. Although Heidegger reconsiders the power of Rilke’s poetry in 1946, when he returns to interpret and reassess Rilke (“What Are Poets For?”), in the Parmenides course, Heidegger concludes that because Rilke’s thought and poetry (Eighth Duino Elegy) remains locked in the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics, Rilke remains blind or oblivious to the deep “mystery of the historical being [and so his] poetic words never attain the mountain height of a historically foundational decision,”5 and it is the “historical decision” (Ereignis), or epoch grounding rejoinder to the call of Being, which inspires a peoples’ attuned appropriation of their destiny, ushering in and making possible another beginning. Although Rilke “relates to contemporary man with much seriousness and care, [there remains a certain] confusion, thoughtlessness, and flight”6 associated with his work, and so Rilke, according to Heidegger’s reading in the Parmenides (§8e), is not a poet for destitute times because he fails to think and hence poetize the truth of the Being event, or as Heidegger refers to it in the Parmenides, the originary and historical phenomenon of “DOKTHLD” (alƝtheia). Instead, Rilke’s poetry reveals the endless or unrestrained progression of beings, which for Rilke is associated with Being and also encompasses the phenomenon of the “Open,” a concept that emerges from Heidegger’s reading of the Eighth Duino Elegy. The Open is the vista, the long narrow opening into a transcendent realm of metaphysical truths that defy human reason. In addition, in the opening lines of the elegy, Rilke also sets up the crucial distinction and irreconcilable opposition between the human being and the animal, between what is rational and irrational, between what is grounded in consciousness, and what emerges through the unconscious, associated with instinct and the emotions as opposed to reason (ratio).7 For the most originary manner due to the “revelatory power” of language as essential Dichtung, which grants art the ability to bring Dasein into the truth disclosed by the work, and in doing so, allows it to take a legitimate stand in the midst (and truth) of beings, and it is the case that building and all forms of plastic creation, occur only in the open and disclosed region of poetic saying. See: J. Phillips, “Restoring Place to Aesthetic Experience: Heidegger’s Critique of Rilke,” Critical Horizons, 11, no. 3, (2010), 347. 5 M. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans., A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 162. 6 Ibid., 161. 7 Ibid., 153. As related to the Parmenides reading, in the 1942 lecture course The Ister, Heidegger remarks that the Open in Rilke differs radically from his own notion despite, as Heidegger laments, the thoughtless conflating of his thought

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Rilke, it is the animal and not the human being that sees and experiences the Open, and so the animal is in this sense privileged over the human with regard to its freedom toward the Open, for Rilke’s prioritizing of “the unconscious over consciousness corresponds to the priority of the free animal over the imprisoned essence of man.”8 Thus, as opposed to elevating the human being’s power of reason above the “a-rational creature,” Rilke “inverts the relationship of the power of man and of ‘creatures’ (i.e., animals and plants),”9 and indeed, as Heidegger contends, this hierarchical “inversion is what is precisely expressed by the elegy.”10 Despite the appearance of rejecting the view of scientific naturalism in the move to grant the animal and not the human privileged access to the Open, Rilke smuggles in a traditional metaphysical understanding of both animals and human beings. Importantly, Heidegger’s critical claim is that Rilke retains the metaphysical definition of the human as the animal rationale–rational “subject” set off and against “objects” (an endless progression of beings)–that “calculates, plans, turns to beings as objects, [and] represents what is objective and orders it,”11 and in doing so the human comports itself by means of machination “everywhere to objects and in that way secures them…as something mastered, as his possession.”12 Taking this definition of the human as rational animal as the starting point, it follows that “animality,” as stated above, is understood in and through the with Rilke’s, as if they were interchangeable. This is a view that is supported by W. Graff in his reading of Heidegger and Rilke: “[I]t would be easy to show that Heideggerian terminology can be applied to Rilke only by a transference of meaning from one universe of discourse in which it is genuine to another where it is out of focus. It cannot be done without doing injustice to Heidegger or to Rilke or to both. Rilke must be understood and interpreted in which are in tune with the vibrations of his own poetical symbols. There is no other way of protecting these from contamination, and of safeguarding their truth.” It is possible, because he adopts a literary, and hence metaphorical and symbolic approach to interpretation – or as Heidegger would say, “metaphysical” – that Graff’s reading fails to understand Heidegger’s later project. In addition, Graff’s entire analysis is carried out from the perspective of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time, a move I argue that is inconsistent with approaching Heidegger during the “Turn,” especially considering the most fecund encounters with Rilke’s poetry were occurring in the 1940s. See: W. Graff, “Rilke in Light of Heidegger,” Lavai theologique et philosophique, 17, no. 2 (1961), 172. 8 Heidegger, Parmenides, 158. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 159. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 156.

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comparison with rationality, and it is understood as that which is irrational and without reason, and beyond this, there is a “hominization of the animal, by which the animal, with respect to the original experience of beings as a whole [the Open], is even raised above man and becomes in a certain way a ‘super-man’.”13 This, as Veronique Foti recognizes, is Rilke’s failure, for “as opposed to rebellion against metaphysical hierarchy,”14 which would be indicative of Heidegger’s project, Rilke “privileges the figure of the animal and of unreflective ‘creation’ over human subjectivity by granting it immediate and perhaps exclusive access to the Open.”15 Thus, Rilke’s poetry retains the binary and hierarchical model of the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics, inverting and now privileging the irrational (the unconscious) above the rational (consciousness), and so Rilke still poetizes from out of a view that is attuned by and hence fails to overcome the metaphysics of presence. In relation to the binary oppositional linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics introduced above, I draw attention to two crucial elements of Heidegger’s critique of traditional Western philosophy in the Parmenides; one is offered through intimations and the other remains “unsaid.” First, Heidegger, in his analysis of the human as “WR ]ZRQ ORJRQ HFRQ,” points out that in relation to rationality and the power of speech, as bound to the revelation of truth (WR DSRMDLQHVTDL), which is expressed by Plato and Aristotle as “WR GKORXQ,” or the revealing of the open, it is only the human being “that looks into the open and sees the open in the sense of DOKTH9.”16 It is from the time of the first beginning that humans have assumed a privileged access to Being because of the power of reason, which, as Heidegger’s critique runs, has in the history of Western philosophy led humans to hypostatize Being, to turn it into an abstract principle or object of the subject’s intellectual thematization. Second, as Heidegger argues, for Rilke to even invoke the notions of consciousness and the unconscious in his poetry, is to already poetize in the “spirit of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, mediated by Nietzsche and the doctrines of psychoanalysis.”17 This is problematic for Heidegger (although he does not explicitly formulate the following critique in the Parmenides, as stated, it remains “unsaid”) because conscious/unconscious states, emotional states, psychological states, do not

13

Heidegger, Parmenides, 160-161. V. Foti. Heidegger and the Poets: PoiƝsis, Sophia, TechnƝ (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), 30. 15 Ibid. 16 Heidegger, Parmenides, 152. 17 Ibid., 158. 14

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represent for Heidegger the most primordial modes of world dis-closure because they are derived from and dependent on states of deep attunement achieved through the transformative power of moods (Stimmungen). Thus, whereas Hölderlin is poetically aware of the essential necessity and ek-static potential of moods for transfiguring Dasein’s understanding of the world and others (e.g., the poietic attunement of das Festliche),18 Rilke, in the Eighth Duino Elegy, appears oblivious to the phenomenon of human attunement, and so, as a shortcoming, his poetry and thought remain grounded in the understanding of the world and human being espoused, as Heidegger observes, by modern psychology. As related to Rilke’s understanding of the animal’s privileged access to the Open, I bring attention to the fact that in the 1929-30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger provides an analysis of animals that is radically at odds with the modern understanding of animals found in and inherited from Descartes. Although refusing to reduce animals to mere “machines,” Heidegger claims that as opposed to humans, because they are world-forming, animals experience life in terms of “worldlessness, of poverty of world,”19 for animals are unable to open and project a world in the same manner as the attuned Dasein. On Heidegger’s reading, Rilke clearly links the Open with the animal’s ability to see its environment and life in a way that frees the animal from the fear of its impending death, and it is in this blindness-toward-death, as I name it, that the animal finds a freedom that the human lacks. The animal’s freedom for Being, or the Open, is indeed granted because death is not and cannot be an issue, ontological or otherwise, for the animal. To call the animal world-poor, or Dasein poor, in an important way, indicates that on Heidegger’s reading the deep concern for its life in relation to death separates Dasein from the animal.20 Death must be an issue for Dasein in order to project its authentic freedom in the first instance, and for Heidegger this is because the animal cannot “care” (Sorge) about its death and the implication of it for its existence, i.e., its Being cannot be an issue for concern, for the animal does not “possess the possibility of attending either to that being that itself is or to beings other than itself.”21 This is because the animal’s life is 18 W. McNeill. The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ɯthos (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). 150-152. 19 M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans., W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 178. 20 Heidegger, Parmenides, 158. 21 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 248.

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structured by a highly restrictive and myopic scope of concern that Heidegger calls “captivation.” The animal is “directed in its manifold instinctual activities on the basis of its captivation and of the totality of its capacities.”22 Heidegger, in terms relatable to both the Parmenides and The Ister, observes that animals do not “stand within a manifestation [the Open] of beings.”23 According to Heidegger, the animal does not see or experience the Open, and as emerges from his analysis of Rilke’s poetry, the animal does not participate in because it remains excluded from the essential unfolding of and strife between unconcealment and concealment (the truth of Being). The primary reason for the animal’s exclusion from this realm is that it does not have language, it is DORJR9 (a-logos), and thus cannot say or name Being and henceforth appropriate its life or world in a historical manner. To conclude these thoughts on the Parmenides, providing a brief summation, I consider why and how it is that Heidegger comes to identify Rilke’s conception of the Open with the endless procession or unfolding of beings. For it is certainly puzzling to say that Rilke poetizes the Open in terms of the “constant progression by beings themselves from beings to beings within beings.”24 As stated, Rilke’s poetry is attuned by the metaphysics of presence, and as a consequence of Rilke’s estrangement from truth as “DOKTHLD,” Heidegger insists that Being “flows away from [Rilke] into the indeterminate totality of beings.”25 The Open, then, is limited to the realm where what moves into it does so strictly in terms of its status as an object, entity, or being, brought to stand within a technical or even calculative mode of dis-closure as that which is present-at-hand. To understand the implications of this analysis, it is necessary to also be aware of Heidegger’s critique of technology and take into account the mode of “seeing” that is attuned by the metaphysics of presence, through which all things show up as what is present before us as they are located in Cartesian space. Thus, much like the tradition in Western metaphysics, there is the concern for beings over Being, on that which is present as opposed to the primal mystery of how what is present manifests or comesto-presence in the first instance, and so the concern for the truth of Being and primordial unconcealment are ignored, thus the Being event remains in oblivion. On this reading, Rilke’s poetry cannot gesture or point beyond the metaphysics of presence and so it perpetuates the destitution of the age.

22

Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 248. Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Heidegger, Parmenides, 151. 23

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To the point, Rilke, in relation to the truth of Being, according to Heidegger, “talks thoughtlessly about the ‘open’ and does not question what the significance might be for the openness of the open.”26 However, the oblivion of Being is not the fatalistic end of the story for Dasein, for according to Heidegger, despite this state of destitution, the hidden relationship to Being, from whose bestowal man cannot withdraw, persists and is waiting to be revealed and re-discovered by great poets. As Heidegger’s critical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Rilke evolves in the later essay, “What Are Poets For?”, Heidegger reassesses Rilke’s potential value as a great poet, and Heidegger concludes that Rilke’s poetry is “valid,” although remaining cloaked “in the shadow of a tempered Nietzschean metaphysics.”27 J. Phillips, in overly optimistic terms, erroneously claims that in 1946, “Heidegger ranks Rilke alongside Hölderlin as a poet who heeds the task of poetry in the time of the indigence of nihilism.”28 Foti argues, in terms more consistent with my 26

Heidegger, Parmenides, 161. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 108. 28 J. Phillips, “Restoring Place to Aesthetic Experience: Heidegger’s Critique of Rilke,” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, Vol. 11(3), (2011), 347-354. Phillips offers a critique of Heidegger’s reading of Rilke in the Parmenides, elements of which are inconsistent with Heidegger’s renewed project during the “Turn.” For example, there are concerns relating to the presentation of Heidegger’s view of language of the 1930s, and, especially the 1940s, because it is during this time that Heidegger engages Rilke’s poetry with two distinct interpretations emerging regarding the potential benefit of Rilke for challenging the reign of technology and the metaphysics of presence. Phillips acknowledges the difference between the language of Being and Time and that of the “Turn”- despite the “Turn” not being explicitly named - but views it in a critical and pejorative light, e.g., labeling the writings of the “Turn” “protracted, impenetrable and lumbering reflections on the coming of the gods.” Yet, when approaching Heidegger’s essential problem with Rilke’s poetry in the Parmenides, Phillips’ reading is grounded in the transcendental analysis (fundamental ontology) of Being in Time. Phillips is correct to point out the problem with Rilke’s naturalism and the poetizing of the “open,” for Heidegger argues that as the metaphysics grounding the biologism of the nineteenth century of psychoanalysis, which he indelibly links with metaphysics and the oblivion of Being. However, when Phillips identifies Rilke’s “mistake,” the poetry’s “deficiency,” he points to the poet’s failure to articulate “the ontological difference.” Phillips plainly states that Rilke’s poetry, emerging from Heidegger’s critique in the Parmenides, conveys the “fleshless intellectualism of modern metaphysics, with which Heidegger’s analysis of Beingin-the-world is in conflict in Being and Time.” Even if Rilke’s poetry intimates the difference between the realms of the ontic and ontological, considering his explicit concern with finding Being in beings, he would have still fallen short of 27

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reading, that in the Parmenides Rilke fails to intimate the Open in terms that relate to Heidegger’s understanding of Being, in that Rilke poetizes the hierarchy of polar oppositions consistent with the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics. In Foti’s reading of “What Are Poets For?”, a “labored and difficult essay,”29 it is concluded that Rilke achieves a “partial overcoming” of the metaphysics of presence, and yet despite this poetic accomplishment, “the later essay achieves resolution neither concerning Rilke’s role as a poet in a destitute time [nor on the issue concerning Rilke’s relationship with what] one can call Hölderlin’s ‘unsurpassable prescript’.”30 Turning to Heidegger, it is possible to conclude that although deeming Rilke’s poetry “valid,” it does not in Heidegger’s estimation rise to “Hölderlin’s in its rank and position in the course of the history of Being.”31 Rilke is thus a poet with undeniably impressive powers, but they are unequal when compared to those of Hölderlin; Rilke’s poetry is inadequate for the task required to found and ground a new beginning for historical Dasein in destitute times. Pursuing this issue, my reading serves to cut a middle path between Phillips and Foti, defending the claim that it is possible, when remaining true to an interpretation of Heideggerian concepts, themes, and language developed in relation to poetry, authentic destiny, and the Being event, to envision Rilke in a positive light, in contrast to Heidegger’s conclusion, or lack thereof, as intimating, by providing a fleeting glimpse into, a view of Being and Dasein that transcends the linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics. In essence, with Rilke’s thought of the Open, as a vast expanse or region of Being, he gestures toward a non-objective and hence non-metaphysical view of Being, and thus Rilke might be said, although in no way equaling Heidegger’s understanding of great and historical founding poetry in “destitute times.” As I attempt to demonstrate, it is not the understanding or poetizing of the ontological difference that separates great art and poetry from their opposite, i.e., separating Hölderlin and Rilke from other lesser poets. Rather, as Heidegger makes clear, it is the fact that Rilke makes reference to “personal lived experiences and impressions, which is implied in the appeal to the poet himself as the ultimate source of the validity of his word,” and this for Heidegger, “is too little,” for what is required for poets in desperate or “needy times,” is nothing less than the appeal to the experience and understanding of DOKTHLD, the “essence and the truth of being and nonbeing themselves.” Beyond the ontological difference as understood metaphysically, it is the poet failing to “open,” and thus found and ground the truth of Being in the word that is at stake. See: Heidegger, Parmenides, 159. 29 Foti, Heidegger and the Poets, 32. 30 Ibid. 31 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 26.

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Hölderlin, to rise to the level of a potential “futural poet” for destitute times. I now turn to elucidate and defend this claim. Since there are many ways to approach “What Are Poets For?”, my focus is on developing several key concepts that set this reading apart from Heidegger’s critique of Rilke in the Parmenides: The Open, as the vast expanse of Being and Dasein as the one who “ventures” forth from out of the primordial essence of Being–the Abgrund–for these two concerns relate to authentic dwelling, Being-toward-death, and the attunement (conversion) of Dasein’s world beyond the metaphysics of presence. To poetize in destitute times, the poet must have both the courage and insight to locate, reach into, and abide by standing firm within the “abyss,” or Abgrund, in order to poetize the origin of the Being event. Ground for Heidegger, is not merely related to the earth’s soil beneath our feet, it is also, in connection with the work of art and Hölderlin’s poetry, the founding and “holy” ground upon which, in relation to the rising of “holy” Earth, a historical people open a new world and time in order to appropriate their destiny and establish their dwelling in a poetic manner (Ereignis). Indeed, the authentic potential for Dasein’s unique and singular response and appropriation of its destiny “hangs in the abyss.”32 The abyss, or absence of ground (Abgrund), harbors the potential for Dasein’s destiny, which is held and sent forth, and it is the abyss, the ground-less ground of Being, which “holds and remarks everything.”33 To reiterate, “absence” or the “nothing” in this instance is never no-thing-ness, rather it is the hidden plentitude of Being. Here, we note that DOKTHLD as referenced in Heidegger’s reading of Rilke in the Parmenides can now be understood in this later essay of 1946 in terms that point to Rilke’s nonmetaphysical understanding of truth, i.e., not in terms of what is purely present - the endless procession of beings before us - but instead an intimated concern for primordial “hiddenness” (lethƝ), the original concealment that lies behind all instances of “truth-happening.”34 Rilke’s “improvised verses” open and invite us into the potential encounter with a non-metaphysical understanding of Dasein’s attuned relation to world and Earth, which gestures beyond the explicit embrace of the ontological difference: Reading Rilke, Heidegger elucidates the concepts of Nature, Venture, and the Open. Nature and the Venture in Rilke might be linked to Being or the Open (Lichtung des Seins), or the essential truth of Being in the event of its unfolding. With the concept of 32

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 96. Ibid., 93. 34 Ibid. 33

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Nature, Rilke is no longer concerned with the division between the human and animal, and rather, as Heidegger observes, Nature is the ground of beings, and as poetized by Rilke, Nature is not to be equated with the subject studied by the natural sciences, instead it is “the ground for history and art and nature in the narrower sense.”35 Nature, for Rilke, is the vis primitiva active, the most primitive active force, which holds the originary power of what the Greeks experienced and reverentially termed physis, which should be understood in the mode of the infinitival, in terms of the event or active process of the revealing and unaided “bringing forth” of of the unfolding of phenomena, facilitating their emergence through the movement into the Open. Nature in Rilke is best grasped in terms that are different than and beyond Heidegger’s description of nature in Being and Time, as a phenomenon that “‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape,”36 and instead understand Nature in terms of Heidegger’s more mature interpretation of the Earth in the “Origin of the Work of Art” and Hölderlin lectures, the presence of which the poet’s word holds the power to elicit and call forth. For Rilke, Nature is the “Urgrund,” the originary ground of beings determining the manner in which they come-to-presence. Heidegger states that humans, animals, and plants all share the ground of Nature. Yet there is a crucial difference with respect to the relationship that each shares with Nature as originary ground, and here I ask readers to consider Heidegger’s differentiation between animal and Dasein in the face of Being, which can be understood in terms of the manner in which “Being each time ‘gives’ particular beings ‘over to venture’,”37 i.e., when Being frees Dasein for the precarious, unpredictable, and dangerous pursuit of its destiny, which is bold and daring in nature. However, as Heidegger points out, “man reaches more deeply into the ground of beings than do other beings,”38 and this pertains to Dasein’s unique relationship to the truth of Being. The idea of Venturing in this reading is relatable to a process or event of release and return, or as Heidegger names it, a “flinging loose” or letting “beings loose into the daring venture”39 in anticipation of their return, which might be understood in terms of Being releasing Dasein into the Open realm of unconcealment while at once drawing it back into the essential nature (Abgrund) from which it arises, i.e., the abyssal ground, 35

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 101. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 100. 37 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 101. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 36

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primordial concealment or finitude. This is consistent with Heidegger’s philosophy in Contributions to Philosophy, wherein he describes the movement and process of the Being event in terms of Entrückung and Berückung, where the former is associated with the recess of Being into finitude and the latter refers to what comes-to-presence in the withdrawal of Being as Entrückung. This is the two-fold counter-striving movement at the center, or Abgrund, of Being, and what is generated through this counter-striving activity is the draft (the pulling-force) amidst the sway of Being’s unfolding. Drawing from a late poem by Rilke, “The Force of Gravity,” Heidegger finds this concept poetized: “The venture,” Heidegger observes, is “the drawing and all-mediating center of beings–is the power that lends weight, a gravity to the ventured beings.”40 To lend weight and gravity indicates that as beings are released or flung into “the venture” of unconcealment, they are at once drawn back into the center, they are held fast in the sway of Being, this Heidegger calls the “balance,” and Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings toward itself–toward itself as the center. Being, as the venture, holds all beings, as being ventured, in this draft. But this center [Abgrund] of the attracting drawing withdraws at the same time from all beings.41

Although Heidegger does not make this comparison with respect to this movement, the event itself, in relation to beings and unconcealment/concealment, the Being event unfolding through the moments/movements of Entrückung and Berückung, might be related to his reading of the Greek understanding of arche, as it appears in the 1939 essay, “On the Essence of the Concept of )XVL9 in Aristotle’s Physics B, I.” From Heidegger’s unique etymology of archƝ we get the sense of the movement out from and return to a sheltering center, where what is released or “let loose” is under a controlling power, which in addition to serving as a guiding force also serves as the origin of that which emerges from it. It is common to translate archƝ in terms of beginning or original principle of order, but on Heidegger’s reading, as should be no surprise, archƝ is a bit more nuanced On the one hand archƝ means that from which something has its origin and beginning; on the other hand it means that which, as this origin and beginning, like-wise keeps reign over, i.e., restrains and therefore 40 41

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 101. Ibid.

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Heidegger is clear that what comes-to-presence, although emerging from and so connected to that source, is not sheltered in such a way as to be kept wholly safe from potential danger, which is why Heidegger refers to the venture as the “daring venture.” Indeed, as Heidegger observes, “If that which has been flung were to remain out of danger, it would not have been ventured.”43 Yet within this danger, or “unshieldedness,” there is a sense of safety linked with Dasein’s relationship to the Open, or what might be understood as the truth of the Being event, which I address below in relation to the Open and the concept of Beingtoward-death. Although plant, animal, and Dasein are “ventured,” because of the differences in the way their existence unfolds, there is a difference in both the level of danger they face and the protection they are afforded. Because Dasein is the being that is spoken by language, with the potential to open and found a historical world, it is opened to the danger of nonBeing, and since Dasein is the only being that cares for its Being and death (mortality), there is a more intense and radical sense of unprotectedness or vulnerability that haunts its Being-in-the-world. There is also the danger, as Julian Young observes, to which Rilke himself fell victim on Heidegger’s reading in the Parmenides, that humans will “become completely insensible to the ‘Open’ and its ‘pull,’ cut off,’ by the metaphysics of naturalism.”44 I note that a running theme within Heidegger is his persistent warnings that technology, through the attunement of das Ge-stell, intensifies and “extends the realm of danger that man will lose his selfhood to unconditional production,”45 and through the continued objectification of the world, Dasein closes off its path into the Open, which is already obscured as a result of the oblivion of Being. When interpreting the Open in Rilke, Heidegger states emphatically that it is not to be confused with “openness in the sense of the unconcealedness of beings that lets beings as such be present,”46 for 42 M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed., W. McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189. 43 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 102. 44 J. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144. 45 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 116-117. 46 Ibid., 106.

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such a reading places emphasis on both “unconcealment” and that which manifests in the light of Being in terms of its present-at-hand reality, its standing forth. To adopt such a view, a view that is similar to Rilke’s understanding of the Open as the endless progression of beings, would be much like focusing on the “globe of Being,” or a celestial body such as the moon, and taking the lighted side, the side present to our view, for the complete picture. Thus, obscuring both the “sphericity” of the moon and all that is hidden from view, and this limited view is at odds with Rilke’s poetizing in Heidegger’s later essay of 1946, which he labels the “thought of the Open in the sense of essentially more primal lightening of Being,”47 i.e., in terms already discussed, Rilke intimates a concern for the primordial force, or Being’s essential recession into finitude, which makes possible and facilitates the phenomenon of unconcealment in the first instance. This might be said to demonstrate the richness of Rilke’s thinking and poetizing. The Open is equitable with the whole draft of the unbounded unfolding of the Being event that holds within it the potential lighting and concealing of beings as a whole. Dasein’s authentic relationship to the Open is instantiated in the ever-renewed process of “venturing” out from and subsequently being returned to or pulled back in order to “fit into the unlightened whole of the drawings of the pure draft,”48 for the Open, much like Heidegger’s rendering of the truth of Being in Contributions, has the “character of including attraction [the “draft”],”49 in the manner reminiscent of a surging gravitational force. One of the crucial aspects of Rilke’s poetizing of the Open is that it remains non-objectified, it resists the reduction to a hypostatized entity or essence (as substance – substantia), and so Rilke’s poetizing gestures beyond a view of Being constrained and distorted by the “object-character of technological dominion.”50 As stated, bound up with the revelation of the relatedness of Dasein to Being is Dasein’s potential for the appropriation of its destiny, and although Heidegger neither mentions historicality or Geschick with respect to the Open, and in addition, although incorporating strange and arcane terms, what he draws from Rilke poetry is expressive of the opening of a world, a founding and beginning, a new time and historical age, i.e., the birth and establishment of an originary community. Here, as related to the work of art and the Hölderlin lectures, this communal gathering of Dasein is beholden to that which exceeds them, and because 47

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, thought, 108. Ibid. 49 Ibid., 107. 50 Ibid., 114. 48

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of this they are united, for the Open, “lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn, so that they draw on one another and draw together [and] they fuse with the boundless, the infinite,”51 or the groundless Abgrund of Being, and yet they do not “dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.”52 It is to the boundless and infinite, the Open in all of its expanse, that Dasein’s authentic Being-in-the-world, with its Being-toward-death, belongs, which relates to the “danger” of venturing forth, which is expressive of Dasein’s “unshieldedness,” as discussed above. I’ve discussed earlier the sense of safety and protection that Dasein’s unshieldedness harbors, which is known only to Dasein when attuned (converted) to the Open, for the safety, the shelter, lies in the seeing that facilitates a turning back toward an originary relationship to the Open, which is the precise relationship to the Open that has been covered over, forgotten in the age of destitution, for as stated, it is the metaphysics of presence that “threatens our nature with the loss of belonging to the Open.”53 This turning occurs as a conversion or reattunement that Heidegger calls an event of having seen that which was previously lost. It might be understood in terms of the thinking-andpoetizing that begins in the return (“turns”) to the experience of the oblivion of Being, as Heidegger writes in “Letter on Humanism.” The manner in which Dasein takes on the burden of its unshieldedness is crucial to determining its relationship to the Being event, the manner in which it responds to the address of Being, and this includes, importantly, how Dasein relates to death. The fear of death leads to the “negation of death [through] technical objectification,”54 where death is viewed as something negative, and so there is a fleeing-in-the-face of its impending certainty. Although never overcoming or outstripping death, when attuned in and through the poet’s images and words, we understand death as belonging to Being and so it is something we share collectively with all Dasein in terms of a belonging to the Open. Heidegger states, “Death is what touches mortals in their nature,”55 and just as in Contributions, Heidegger embraces Being-toward-death as essential to Dasein’s nature, and it connects or sets Dasein on its “way to the other side of life,”56 i.e., beyond the realm and mode of pure presence and into the concealed nature 51

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 114. Ibid., 106. 53 Ibid., 122. 54 Ibid., 125. 55 Ibid., 126. 56 Ibid. 52

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and the plentitude of the mystery, “into the whole of the pure draft,”57 into the truth and sway of Being’s primordial unfolding. In “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger claims that death is a gathering force, and it is the Law that establishes the “place within the widest orbit into which we can admit the converted unshieldedness positively into the whole of what is.”58 To find shelter, safety, and resolve in unshieldedness as related to the Open, is to be-at-home in terms of “what is,” i.e., to dwell within the authentic understanding that Dasein ultimately resides, as one who is ventured, existing beyond all protection and sense of security that might come by means of the forces of human machination or technical mastery; death cannot be outstripped by any form of scientific or technical intervention. To find this authentic shelter in the safety of unshieldedness, in terms of the nature of Dasein, might be understood as a form of “homeliness” (Heimische) within the more primordial mode of not-being-at-home (Unheimische) in the world, a theme developed in considerable detail by Heidegger in The Ister lecture course (1942). The authentic Being-toward-death comes by way of a conversion (attunement-Stimmung), which Heidegger identifies as a turning within/to the “heart’s space,” the turn toward “what is inward and invisible.”59 This movement or turning from outer to inner should not be conceived as the subjective closing off or interiorizing of Dasein, a retreat into the inner, impenetrable sanctuary of the mind. It is also not to be thought of in terms of the metaphysical understanding Dasein’s “existential solipsism” (solus ipse) of Being and Time. Rather the turning from modes of dis-closure that objectify the world and Dasein’s existence to a more reflective (meditative) and poetic “saying” of existence assumes the form of a “singing,” which “converts that [technological] nature of ours which merely wills to impose, together with its objects, into the innermost invisible region of the heart’s space.”60 To be attuned to the invisible region of the heart, to the primal 57

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. 125. Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 130. In the “Appendix” (1964) to the lecture, “Phenomenology and Theology” (1927/28), Heidegger warns that if objectifying thought is left unchecked, this “scientific-technical manner of thinking will spread to all realms of life.” So, when exploring the Holy in relation to the loss or fleeing of the gods, Heidegger seeks a form of thought and speech that is non-objective in nature. Heidegger finds in Rilke, and to a far greater extent, Hölderlin, a form of nonobjectifying thinking and saying that is “poietic,” related to Dichtung, which Heidegger views as a revelatory form of “singing,” which is not a way of speaking and thinking “about” things, but rather an attuned manner of dwelling in their 58

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mysteries of existence, is indicative of a renewed relation to Being, which might be understood in terms of returning to and allowing ourselves to dwell in close proximity to the Abgrund of Being. To reiterate, despite its invisibility, despite its ineffable nature, is not to be equated with “nothing,” because it is the center or seat of Dasein’s futural potential, located within the great expanse (the Open), from which Dasein is pushed (thrown) out and pulled back by the gravitational force generated by the unfolding, or in terms of Dasein’s authentic historical “enowning” (Ereignis), the destining of Being in the truth of its oscillating swaying or unfolding. With this in mind, we return to the crucial questions posed at the outset of this essay: Does Rilke’s poetry poetize the event of Being for Dasein? Does he indicate that the human being is equipped to achieve such a mode of historical existence in relation to the Earth or the holy? As indicated, to the first query, Heidegger responds in the affirmative; Rilke does poetize this event, albeit through a tempered view of Western metaphysics. To the second query, Heidegger responds in a somewhat ambiguous manner, and to clarify this response I turn to consider Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s “Angel” as a prophetic and potential “post-metaphysical” figure of futural hope. Citing a letter that Rilke wrote (November 13, 1925), Heidegger quotes, “The Angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transmutation of the visible into the invisible”61 occurs, i.e., the necessary fundamental turning in attunement, which we might hope to achieve in the midst of destitute times, “seems already accomplished”62 by the Angel. The Angel appears as the paradigmatic being (or “bodiless” presence) that has reached the state of conversion in advance of the human, and Heidegger makes the observation that the Angel, “despite all difference in content, is metaphysically the same as the figure of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.”63 This statement by Heidegger requires some explanation and clarification, since my claim is that although presence. “The singing saying of the poet,” insists Heidegger, does not covet or solicit that which “is ultimately accomplished by humans as an effect,” it does not “posit and represent anything as standing over and against us or as an object,” for non-objectifying thinking and saying instantiates the “simple willingness that wills nothing, counts on no successful outcome,” and as we learn, it holds the unique potential to facilitate the emergence of the Holy, which is essential if we are to once again dwell and prosper in the presence of the divine gods. See: Heidegger, Pathmarks, 60-61. 61 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 151. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 134.

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Zarathustra is compared to Rilke’s Angel, it is the case that Rilke’s poetry, unlike Nietzsche’s philosophy, is not merely symbolizing the way and move beyond the metaphysics of presence, but is instead the poetizing of a radically transformative event, a conversion, that has already occurred, and the Angel’s presence heralds this accomplishment. To compare Rilke’s Angel to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra from a metaphysical perspective relates to Heidegger’s reading(s) of Nietzsche during the 1930s. Zarathustra the prophet stands at the end of metaphysics and foresees a future human being (Übermensch) who will be superior to the “herd animal” as well as the “last man,” and so, much like Rilke’s Angel, Zarathustra gestures toward a futural transcendence that is beyond Platonism (Western metaphysics). The Angel in Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke has already experienced the authentic relationship to Being that is foreign and unknown to Dasein of the destitute age, and serves, in a prophetic manner, as an inspiration for the overcoming of the metaphysics of presence. The notion of venturing forth and returning, finding safety in the human’s lot as the most unshielded of beings, amidst the unfolding of Being (as belonging to the Open), resembles thematically Heidegger’s analysis and interpretation of Zarathustra’s relationship to Being and the “Overman.” If this superior species of philosophical-artist is to appear on the scene, the Overman’s authentic creative activity will emerge from out of the fundamental attunement (the not-at-home) elicited by the most burdensome thought of the Eternal Return. Attuned fundamentally in the mood of das Unheimlichkeit, according to Heidegger, the Overman is driven by the urge to be at home everywhere, and at all times, and this concept reflects Zarathustra’s existential movement, which is indeed what Heidegger reads as the authentic way in which the Overman shall inherit, appropriate, and enact his existence through “down-going” (der Untergang) and “transition” (der Ubergang). With these terms and concepts, Heidegger emphasizes the oscillation and movement of human existence (“becoming finite”), which is always either in the process of being directed out from its solitude toward beings as a whole (world), or in the process of returning to its solitude, which Heidegger calls the “resting in a gravity that drives us downward.”64 It must be noted, however, that in Heidegger’s reading, what Nietzsche actually philosophizes through the figure of Zarathustra begins and ends as a metaphysical inquiry into the truth of beings and so fails to ask the grounding question (Grundfrage) and instead poses and responds 64 M. Heidegger. Basic Writings, ed., D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1993), 198.

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only to the guiding question, “What is the being?” This question concerns the Being of what is, namely, beings, and Nietzsche’s answer retains the venerable metaphysical distinction between essence (essentia) and existence (existentia), the what of beings and the how of beings, i.e., the way in which beings exist in their essence. Will to power, the basic constitution of beings (the Being of beings), is equated with “becoming,” and the will to power only is in its essence as authentic “becoming” when it retains its essence, i.e., the potential to “become” more, and “becoming” can only be as becoming when grounded in the certainty and stability of Being. Such metaphysical thinking reveals the intimate relationship between will to power and the doctrine of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche envisions their belonging-together and mutual unfolding as the highest metaphysical phenomenon, which Heidegger labels the “recoining” of Being, the moment in which the will to power prevails “most purely in its essence as Eternal Return of the Same.”65 Thus, Nietzsche’s philosophy, on Heidegger’s reading, never succeeds in transcending metaphysics, and much like Zarathustra, Nietzsche stands at the culmination of metaphysics, and so as Heidegger contends, although prophesized in the futural figure of the Overman, Nietzsche’s thought, as radical as it is, fails to usher in the “other beginning,” which for Nietzsche relates to the overturning of Platonism and the trans-valuation of values.66 This, however, is not the case with Rilke’s poetizing of the Angel, for the Angel has a vision and experience of Being that inspires because it harbors the grounding question, which breaks open a context for seeing and thinking beyond the ontic-ontological distinction, beyond the metaphysical concern with existentia and essentia, and so this experience transcends Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. There are several lines of reasoning I could follow to address this issue, but space does not allow for a response that is broad in scope, so I focus on language, and more specifically, on Rilke’s poetic saying as “Dichtung”. For Heidegger, philosophy might be thought of as a mode of thinking-saying, whereas the type of essential poetic saying, or the poet’s singing-saying, is essential Dichtung in the form of a revelatory projective-saying, which is “the saying of the unconcealment of beings,”67 and in “preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings [or illuminates] the 65

M. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes one and two, ed., D. Krell (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1979), 202. 66 J. M. Magrini, “The Overman in Heidegger’s Metaphysical Reading of Nietzsche: Portrait of the Supreme Life-Affirming Artist,” Existentia, Vol. 25(1), (2015), 347-371. 67 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 199.

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unsayable as such into a world,”68 and this indicates that poetry holds the potential to “poetize” the original lighting and concealment of Being as this primordial relationship has been occluded and subsequently forgotten within the metaphysical tradition. This is what Heidegger means when contending that the essence of Dichtung is the revelation and founding of truth. With this in mind, the Angel is separated from the human being in that it lives “the stilled repose of the balanced oneness of the two realms within the world’s inner space,”69 whereas the human continually remains blind to the truth of the Open, and “the balance of danger is in essence unstilled.”70 It is possible to imagine the attunement of Rilke’s poetry, as essential Dichtung, as first initiating the conversion of Dasein, in light of the Angel’s presencing as related to the “holy,” or beyond this, as a manifestation of the “holy” itself as poetized by Rilke, and not merely a symbolic or imaginatively poetic (metaphysical) re-presentation of the holy. The presence of the Angel is for Rilke, the event or accomplishment of the transmutation of the visible into the invisible, offering the hope for the potential historical transformation of Dasein’s metaphysical seeing and thinking into to an authentic poetic dwelling on the Earth in relation to the holy. Indeed, Heidegger’s words suggest such a reading, for it is in the “invisible of the world’s inner space” revealed by the poet that the Angel first appears, and at this attuned time or moment, “the haleness of worldly beings becomes visible,”71 i.e., they are revealed, transformed, and transfigured (converted-attuned) in the light and presence of the holy, the ground is once again consecrated, the gods that have fled are preparing their return. Just as the holy ground must be prepared and readied for the gods, Rilke’s poetry must attune and transform Dasein in readiness for the appearance of the Angel, the presence of the “holy” necessary for the gods’ return. Since the Angel is revealed in and through the poet’s “song,” poets are needed who are courageous enough to fearlessly venture forth, those who are most venturesome who do not merely say, that is speak about Being, but rather those who “venture Being itself” in poetic language, and poets such as Rilke dare to encounter or experience Being and poetically speak of it and communicate it to others. The most daring poets hold the power to attune us because they “convert the parting against the Open and inwardly recall its unholiness into a sound whole, [they] sing 68

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 155. Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 141. 69

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the healing when in the midst of the unholy.”72 This occurs as they poetize from out of the oblivion of Being in the age of the loss of the holy, and they do so in order to catch sight of what has been lost and what might potentially be recaptured and returned, and it is their song that turns our “unprotected being into the Open,”73 returning us in a transformed manner to confront our lost relationship with the truth of Being. The poet’s singing, inspiring our conversion, is grounded in the attunement to the unholy as unholy (the condition of the absence or privation of the holy) and the holy as holy, and when the poet’s song “beckons to the holy, calling it, [it] binds the divine [and] draws the god near.”74 In order for the poet’s song to hail the “integrity of the globe of Being,”75 or the truth of Being in all of its mystery and fullness, inspiring the manifestation of the holy and the imminent return of the gods in times of destitution, the poet must in the most extreme and insightful manner take on–as an attuned and visceral experience of “down-going” (der Untergang), the experience of supreme unshieldedness in the midst of the unholy, i.e., experiencing and living the absence of the holy in order to return courageously to the haunting experience of the oblivion of Being and triumphantly emerge. For it is only in this moment, context, and space, that the poet holds the potential to reveal and capture in his saying the barely perceptible murmurs of the voices and faint traces of the lingering and shadowy memories of the fugitive gods that have fled in the epochal abandonment of Dasein. To reiterate, Rilke does not rise to the level of Hölderlin, who alone is worthy of the moniker “poet of poets,” towering above other poets in Heidegger’s estimation. Hölderlin represents for Heidegger, “the precursor of the poets in a destitute time [and this is] why no poet of this era can overtake him.”76 To poetize the truth of Being as a historical founding and grounding phenomenon is still, for Heidegger, an event that “arrives out of the future, in such a way that the future is present only in the arrival of his words.”77 To talk of a “pure arrival” or authentic arrival is to reference the ultimate need in times of destitution of not only the poetic word but also, the preservers of the word, who for Heidegger have not as of yet arrived on the scene, or more accurately, are already present but are not appropriately attuned to the originary power of the poetic word. 72

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 140. Ibid. 74 Ibid., 141. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 73

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Despite the absence of those worthy of participating in and preserving Hölderlin’s poetry, his message and inspiration will not perish, for his “poetry remains a once-present being,”78 a reminder of the time when the fire from Heaven permeated the ether and the gods dwelled with humanity. To reiterate, Foti argues that Heidegger does not provide a definitive response to whether or not Rilke is a great poet, a sufficient poet, for destitute times, in the sense of being able draw in and attune preservers to his “song” in a way that inspires the other beginning, thereby heralding the return of the gods in the overcoming of the metaphysics of presence. Heidegger concludes the essay, “What Are Poets For?” with what reads as open-ended speculation, and it appears it is left for interpreters to decide and adjudicate Rilke’s fate and rank, based on the exhaustive and labyrinthine reading Heidegger offers: “If Rilke is a ‘poet in a destitute time’ [then] destiny decides what remains fateful within his poetry.”79 In response to Heidegger, I have argued that Rilke is a poet who accomplishes more than merely pointing the way beyond “the world’s night,” for his poetry and thought (Dichtung-An-Denken) might be said to poetize the way beyond the metaphysics of presence. Because Rilke is able to intimate a potential non-metaphysical understanding of the human in relation to the truth of Being, there is much inherent value and as of yet untapped potential in his poetizing. Thus, Rilke rises to the level of a poet that should be read and embraced by future generations of thinkers, for there is an abundance of wealth to be drawn from his poetry concerning our relationship to the Earth, world, and others through critical interpretation. Indeed, this is precisely what Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung works to accomplish, and similarly this is what my confrontation with Heidegger’s reading of Rilke hoped to achieve, namely, offering criticism that does not primarily censure or tear down, but instead, as related to Heidegger’s understanding of “genuine critique,” carefully traces that which is thought (and perhaps what remains “unthought”) and poetized by Rilke “in its effective force and not its weakness,”80 facilitating the release of the work’s power in a language that allows the pure presence of the poetry to shine forth. What remains fateful is still to come, and this necessitates our continued engagement with poets such as Hölderlin and Rilke.

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Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 141. Ibid. 80 Heidegger, Nietzsche, 5. 79

CHAPTER THREE JASPERS ON PHILOSOPHY AND SELF-BEING THE LOVING STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH AND EXISTENZ

This exegesis of Jaspers’ Existenz-philosophy (Existenzphilosophie) focuses on philosophieren (transcendence-thinking) and communication as a “loving struggle” grounded in the existential search for authentic self-hood or “self-Being.” The analysis is divided into four sections: First, it considers the difficulties scholars encounter when attempting to elucidate Jaspers’ dense philosophical ideas in a way that resists ambiguity; here we consider philosophical style and content as related to Jasper’s metaphysics and the subsequent communication thereof. Second, it analyzes Jaspers’ metaphysics - periechontology as against traditional ontology - and details his view of the human being, the world, and the Encompassing, a difficult notion that Jaspers equates with Being itself. Third, it focuses on elucidating Jaspers’ understanding of the practice of philosophy as “existential communication,” which facilitates enlightenment in moments of truth’s revelation, moments when Dasein, in pursuit of self-Being, simultaneously reveals and appropriates its subjective Existenz and worldly Transcendence. In this section, the crucial notion of selfresponsibility as related to becoming a self in Jaspers is considered. SelfBeing becomes an authentic possibility through existential enlightenment. When confronting boundary situations and expressing our dissatisfaction with everyday existence, we respond authentically to the reticent call of Being expressed through the manifestation of various ciphers. The essay concludes with thoughts on the manner in which the loving struggle that is existential communication unfolds as an intimate dialogue with others in terms of open communication. In this section the ever-present danger of dogmatism is considered; for when there is a rejection of the philosophical pursuit of existential truth, the potential for authentic communication is foreclosed. In the extreme, the dogmatic mindset, when universalized, holds the devastating potential for giving rise and justification to

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authoritarian religious movements and totalitarian political regimes. In resisting the pull of the dogmatic tendency, Jaspers stresses the unwavering determination required when undertaking and committing to authentic existential communication or philosophical dialogue with others. In addition to a skeptical attitude, he also calls for open-mindedness, tolerance, honesty, and justice.

On Philosophical Style and Content The Language of Jaspers’ Existenz-Philosophy Jaspers states the following about the communication of philosophy: “If it is true that philosophy concerns man as man, it must lie within our power to make it generally intelligible.”1 His stated goal is to make philosophy understandable for the reader, and when working toward that end, Jaspers insists that he endeavors to preserve what is most essential in thought even when it is exceedingly complex. Whether reading or doing philosophy, the aim is to change and expand our conscious awareness, e.g., when reading philosophy, according to Jaspers, we undergo a transformation, for our immersion in the writing broadens our mindset in relation to the intended meaning of the philosopher. Yet many scholars comment on the difficulty bound up with the task of interpreting Jaspers’ thoughts on Existenz, Transcendence, and the Encompassing. Admittedly, philosophy emerging from the existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic traditions is more often than not notoriously difficult to manage due to the dense language employed. With this in mind, we acknowledge that Jaspers’ use of language, call it phenomenological, mystical, or “cipher-language,” tends to make reading and communicating his thoughts a challenging task, and so care is observed when formulating and communicating our interpretive responses to Jaspers. Colin Wilson, a harsh critic of existentialism and self-proclaimed, “New Existentialist,” contends that Jaspers’ metaphysics, in both style and content, is dense to the point of appearing vacuous to uninitiated readers, for as “one struggles with Jaspers’ difficult terminology, one feels that [Jaspers] is on the point of giving up, for words and ideas are so inadequate for conveying the living, complicated stuff of human existence.”2 Filiz Peach provides valuable insight into Jaspers’ method, 1 K. Jaspers. Way to Wisdom, trans., R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 168. 2 C. Wilson. Introduction to the New Existentialism (UK: Aristeia Press, 2019), 19. Wilson criticizes the move to locate human Transcendence outside the traditional

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stating that it is “the description, exploration and analysis of subjective experiences which do not stop at the boundary of empirical knowledge but transcend it in thought, namely, transcending-thinking.”3 Not only are many concepts nebulous and difficult to grasp and explicate, Jaspers’ philosophy is made even more challenging due to the ambiguous and sometimes inconsistent use of terms. Ultimately, Peach concludes that Jaspers’ metaphysically loaded terms do not lend themselves to clear expression, and so interpreters need to be keenly aware of the limitations of language in relation to the existential content Jaspers is attempting to pass along to the reader. Beyond these observations, Kurt Salamun brings attention to the following interpretive paradox: The communication of the mystical elements in Jaspers’ philosophy reveals “unacceptable methodological consequences.”4 For example, in the meta-reflections on the practice of philosophy, Jaspers introduces contradictory statements into the text, imposing an existential demand that his philosophical language is to be read and interpreted as representing “signposts to the dimension of a nonobjective Being that he calls ‘transcendence’ and ‘existenz’.”5 As Salamun reasons, the content of these statements functioning as sign-posts cannot be legitimately “examined or proven, because their signpost dimension is epistemological register, and so claims that Jaspers’ thought devolves into an incomprehensible mysticism. He is also critical of Jaspers’ insistence that selfBeing is associated with our response to ultimate situations, “death, suffering, guilt, and sudden violent action,” for this is expressive, according to Wilson, of the pessimism that pervades Jaspers. Our exegesis dismisses these critiques, and as we argue, the conscious awakening occurring in the midst of boundary situations is in no way expressive of a pessimistic attitude toward the human condition. It is far more accurate to say that Jaspers adopts a “critical,” but hopeful, attitude toward humanity and philosophy’s potential to inspire transcendence, and our analysis defends this claim. 3 F. Peach. Death, “Deathlessness” and Existenz in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 88. With respect to phenomenology as it is related to “method,” Peach informs us of the following: Jaspers’ relationship to phenomenology is different than that of either Husserl or Heidegger, and the “place of phenomenology in his philosophy is a complex issue, [for although] he uses the method of phenomenology he does not consider himself as a phenomenologists.” Filiz Peach. “Phenomenology, History, and Historicity in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy,” Analecta Husserliana LXXXX, 2006, 46. 4 K. Salamun, “Karl Jaspers’ Conceptions of the Meaning of Life,” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Vol 1(2), 2006, 2. 5 Ibid.

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non-objective and cannot be verbally communicated.”6 Salamun insists that we must disregard Jaspers’ insistence that readers should “transcend or relativize the descriptive contents of his sentences,”7 or else it would be impossible to offer any interpretation of his philosophy; we would be forced to remain silent on the issues or, at the very least, hold in our minds an obscure intuition regarding the “mystical or transcendental dimension of Being, which we could not talk about and communicate to others.”8 Indeed, if we fail to acknowledge this methodological issue that Salamun raises, we foreclose the process of interpretation, which represents for Jaspers the essence of philosophy as an activity that is always on-the-way to truth. Our reading therefore embraces the approach Salamun suggests, which is to view Jaspers’ Existenz-philosophy as expressing an “overarching appeal to an anti-dogmatic way of philosophizing, and to a kind of philosophical open-mindedness that does not reduce all Being to dimensions of empirical and objective knowledge.”9 When Jaspers talks of philosophy as an ever-renewed practice that is always on-the-way, in a state of becoming, he is also speaking about the reading of philosophy, wherein we enter into the sway and oscillation of the written word and are led on a journey that opens and deepens our own potential for truth, which occurs only when we venture to release ourselves over to the text and insert ourselves into it. According to Richard F. Grabay, we should read Jaspers in such a way as “to perform the inner action of transcending thought with him,” for only when his Existenzphilosophie is “appropriated inwardly by the reader does it take on its full meaning and become free of misunderstanding.”10 Heeding these suggestions, our interpretive approach works to distill the essence of Jaspers’ ideas and communicate this essence to readers in a way that does justice to the depth of the original material, while avoiding the oversimplification of Jaspers’ philosophy. We also strive to remain consistent with the use of technical terms and provide a full definition of these terms, because it is the case that translators are at times inconsistent with their English renderings of Jaspers’ German terminology.11 It is our 6

Salamun, “Karl Jaspers’ Conceptions of the Meaning of Life,” 3. Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 R. F. Grabay, “Translator’s Preface,” in: K. Jaspers. Philosophy and Existence, trans., R. F. Grabay. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), xxii. 11 To this point, William Earle renders the German das Umbreifende, in Reason and Existenz (1955), as “the Encompassing,” whereas Ralph Manheim, translator of Jaspers’ Way to Wisdom (1954), expresses the same German term as “the 7

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goal to communicate the depth of the material in a way that remains accessible and inviting to readers who might be unfamiliar with Jaspers’ thought. Finally, it is also helpful to keep in mind what Ruth Burch and Helmut Wautischer state about Jaspers’ view of language: Against Heidegger’s view of language as the house of Being,12 Jaspers believes language functions more in terms of a “bridge (Brücke) than a house.”13 Jaspers’ style embraces a unique form of indirect communication, which offers readers a view of philosophy that is enticingly “suggestive of layers of content that are implied without being explicitly stated, [in that Jaspers is] intentionally vague as a mode of subtle inspiration that might prompt original thoughts in a reader.”14

Comprehensive.” Richard F. Grabay’s translation of Philosophy of Existence (1971) equates the “Encompassing” with “Being itself,” and then goes on to identify it as “reality,” and so the reader, through no fault of the translator, encounters three terms that actually mean the same thing for Jaspers. As stated, we strive for consistency with the use of Jaspers’ terms, and so seek to clarify the distinction between Existenz, Transcendence, and the Encompassing, all terms that can be somewhat confusing and difficult to differentiate. Existenz is one of the four modes of our Being-in-the-world, along with Dasein, consciousness-as-such, and spirit. It reflects the subjective manifestation of the Encompassing in the transcendent mode, stretching beyond the immanent expression of Dasein, it is intimately linked with both reason and our inner life of existential fulfilment that is associated with self-Being. Transcendence is an all-inclusive expression of the Encompassing in the mode of objectivity and penetrates and gives life to the world in its immanent mode and is inclusive of Existenz as the subjective expression of the Encompassing. The Encompassing is Being itself, which envelopes and shelters everything in existence, all that comes to presence and recedes from presence, it transcends the subject-object divide and the ontic-and-ontological distinction; it is whole and contains within it all horizons, but is itself, horizonless. 12 M. Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans., A. Hofstader (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 13 R. Burch, H. Wautischer. “Translating Karl Jaspers on Greatness,” Existenz: An International Journal of Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Vol 12(1), 2017, 4. These authors argue that often times it is the translation of Jaspers’ work that creates the difficulty for readers. For translators have “not been uniform in their choice of technical terminology,” and beyond this, translators such as R. Manheim and E. B. Ashton have made “tacit omissions and textual rearrangements of [Jaspers’] perceptive and dense writing.” 14 Ibid., 5.

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Jaspers’ Metaphysics as Periechontology Human Being, World, and the Encompassing Jaspers’ metaphysics draws on the critical epistemological model Kant employs, determining the conditions for what can and cannot be known, marking out the limits of human reason, and this begins with the basic distinction Kant embraces between the world of appearance (phenomenon) and the thing-in-itself (noumenon). For Kant the world behind the appearances, the noumenal realm, cannot be accessed through knowledge and hence cannot be known, and so has no positive meaning for us. This is not the case with Jaspers, for he believes that we can gain partial access to Kant’s noumenal world, in terms of fleeting insights or intimations, appearing through the ciphers of Being itself. Peach observes that Jaspers “is convinced that human beings are able to transcend everyday reality by means of transcendence-thinking [transzendierenden Denken],”15 and for Jaspers this type of philosophical thinking is grounded in what Peach labels, cognitive transcending, as an activity that expands our consciousness in a way that “mirrors the Kantian conception of reality and the self.”16 For Jaspers, much like Kant, philosophy begins at the level of human perception, at the level of phenomenality. And, in a way that also links him to Heidegger, Jaspers is critical of traditional Western metaphysics and ontology, where claims are advanced regarding the search for Being qua Being, but the philosophy devolves into the limited investigation of beings or entities, privileging objects over presence.17 According to Jaspers’ critical view of traditional ontology, it wrongly believes it is possible to know Being completely through thought without dissembling, it reduces Being to a single, original being and so remains at the mode of

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Peach, Death, “Deathlessness,” and Existenz, 45. Ibid. 17 Wildermuth, “The Concept of Philosophical Faith,” 11. Wildermuth differentiates the fundamental ontology of Heidegger from Jaspers’ “elucidation of the origin (Ursprung-Erhellung)” or hermeneutics of the origin (Ursprungshermeneutik). “Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ philosophies pursue different objectives: whereas Heidegger aims at overcoming metaphysics, Jaspers strives to incorporate metaphysics in the movement of existence and adopts, in Kantian terms, the position of Practical Reason.” Indeed, in Reason and Existenz, Jaspers includes what appears to be a brief, veiled critique of Heidegger’s ontology and phenomenological method and those philosophers embracing such methods in the quest for revealing Being itself or Being qua Being. 16

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the immanent or ontic,18 and finally, traditional ontology structures the meaning of Being according to determinate, technical categories. So it misses what periechontology19 grasps, namely, that everything is penetrated by the Encompassing (Being itself), which cannot be reduced to a thing, because it defies all efforts to capture it in knowledge, for all philosophical investigation into Being is severely limited, and periechontology, as opposed to producing static ontological categories, elucidates the Encompassing in the manifestation of its immanent and transcendent modes at the subjective and objective levels of human experience. Thus, Jaspers’ metaphysics as periechontology has the specific aim of questioning Being itself, or the Encompassing, which is beyond the subject-object divide, without objectifying it or any of the transcendent modes that it engenders, e.g., Existenz is the transcendent mode of the Encompassing of Subjectivity, and Transcendence is the transcendent mode of the Encompassing of Objectivity. Jaspers repeatedly poses the fundamental philosophical question: “What is Man?” Responding to this grounding concern inspires the elucidation of the human being, inquiring into who and what we are, and most importantly for Jaspers, who and what we might become, and this philosophical question “must be complimented by the essential question whether and what Transcendence is, [for] Transcendence alone is the real Being.”20 We have access to ourselves in two ways: First as an object of knowledge, e.g., physiology studies the body, psychology the mind, sociology the social being, empirical science the biological existent. However, Jaspers insists that we are irreducible to mere entities with a knowable hypostatic nature, for our essential nature or character, our 18

Modes of investigation focused on explaining only the empirical, objective aspects of human existence fail to penetrate into the depths of the human being, for we have the existential potential to transcend our empirical instantiation through the momentary revelation of and communion with the Encompassing through Existenz, an occurrence that serves as the origin of existential self-Being. Jaspers contends that Being in itself is irreducible to any being, and he argues that traditional ontology falls into the common error of reducing Being to an entity, a thing that we think and internalize as an object, and this is the fallacy of hypostatization. 19 H. G. Liddle and R. Scott. A Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell & Scott’s GreekEnglish Lexicon (San Francisco, Martino Publishing, 2015), 548. “Periechǀ” in the infinitive form, perischesthai, means, “to hold around, encompass, embrace.” This term is then combined with “ontology” (the study of Being) to produce Jaspers’ unique technical term and practice, “periechontology.” 20 K. Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” in: ed., W. Kaufmann. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1969), 42.

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potential as existential self-Being, is always in the process of developing and evolving, becoming other; we are incessantly driven out beyond ourselves, working to transcend our own givenness.21 Second, we have access to ourselves as (individual) Existenz and (worldly) Transcendence, and it is in the transcendent mode of Being-in-the-world that we can potentially glean authentic, transformative existential awareness of ourselves in a way that lives beyond formable and technical modes of knowledge. We note that for Jaspers, a point stressed throughout, all forms of human knowledge are limited, and so he insists that “we cannot exhaust man’s Being in knowledge of him, we can experience it only in the primal source of our thought and action,”22 e.g., when finding ourselves in a “boundary situation” (Grenzsituation), Jaspers insists that we must assume the responsibility to respond in a way that reveals and is hence guided by the fleeting and momentary insight into our Existenz. This is an occurrence of un-concealment, when through a small fissure, or renting of the veil of everyday (mundane) existence, the light of fundamental existential insight shines through and expands our conscious awareness. Through philosophical elucidation we develop an increasingly lucid intimation of Being that differs from all forms of calculative or determinate knowledge, and when experiencing this form of existential awareness or insight, Jaspers claims that “the dark walls of [our] prison seem to become transparent,”23 and when we “ascertain the truth that is to reveal being to [us], it is as if [we] were following the light and become free.”24 For we have been momentarily put in touch with truth that lives at a “hidden depth that we can feel in exalted moments, something that permeates all modes of the Encompassing,”25 which stretches out to meet us, holding the potential to transform our conscious awareness once we decide to engage it and appropriate it into our lives. Our subjective, phenomenal, immanent mode of Being-in-theworld is Dasein,26 which includes our practical involvements with others 21 K. Jaspers. Philosophy Is for Everyman: A Short Course in Philosophical Thinking, trans., R. F. C. Hull and G. Wels (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 33. 22 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 63. 23 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 65. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 28. 26 M. Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). As is well-known, contrary to Jaspers’ philosophy and choice of terms, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein (there-being) is employed to refer to the entirety of the human’s existence, e.g., Dasein holds the potential for

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and the so-called furniture of the world, and as Dasein, we are both objects among objects as well as subjects amidst subjects, i.e., Dasein is always immersed within the world. The World as a metaphysical phenomenon is an expression of the immanent mode of the Encompassing in its objective manifestation, we also generally understand the world as the “sum of all that cognitive orientation can reveal to [us] as cogently knowable for everyone,”27 but for those on the precipice of existential awakening, as Jaspers argues, the concern arises whether the phenomenal experience of the world exhausts its meaning. Indeed, there is more to the phenomenon of world than meets the eye, for Being itself, which comes to presence in manifold ways, does so indirectly within the context of our empirical experience. To Dasein, Jaspers includes the other modes of subjective immanence, consciousness-as-such, the general knowledge of the world shared with others; spirit, a mode of being that embeds us within the world as integral part of a larger historical unity; and finally, Existenz, which stretches beyond phenomenality as the subjective, transcendent mode of the Encompassing. Existenz is directly linked to the individual’s potential existential self-Being. The first three modes do not explicitly express or knowingly participate in Existenz, but live and unfold as potential, for prior to the moment of existential enlightenment or awakening inspired by philosophical elucidation, Existenz is tacitly and silently present. Philosophy has two inroads into Being itself: (1) The knowledge of appearances, through our perception of objects, through Dasein’s immanent mode, and (2) Through an internal awareness, when we are, as it were, touched, enlightened, and moved by Being itself, and this is expressive of the origin of both our existential self-Being and philosophieren. Thus, behind our concrete practical encounters, within our everyday dealings with the world and others as Dasein, Being’s presence tacitly perdures, and it must be discovered, it must be philosophically wrested from concealment by way of elucidation or the fundamental operation of philosophy. For Jaspers, Existenz is the essential way we are as subjective individuals in our relation to world Transcendence, an objective mode of the Encompassing, and this is an extra-empirical mode of Being-in-theexistential awakening when it is transformed in the mood of Angst and recognizes the need for the appropriation of its ownmost, authentic possibilities as Beingtowards-death. This occurs when Dasein, attuned through the mood (Stimmung) of Angst, responds to the reticent call of its conscience, which induces its separation (as solus ipse) from the masses (they-self), and this thrusts Dasein into its authentic mode of existence. 27 K. Jaspers. Philosophy Vol. 2, trans., E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 155.

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world beyond phenomenality and is resistant to all forms of objectifying thought. So, we cannot have knowledge of these modes of Being in the same way we know other things in the world. As Jaspers contends, Being is inaccessible to formable or calculative knowledge, indeed, “Being itself is the Transcendence which shows itself to no investigative experience,”28 for it manifests only as a fleeting intimation within an insightful philosophical awakening. As Jaspers contends, “The philosophical elucidation of Existenz, is a deliverance but not a fulfillment, as knowledge would be; it widens [our] scope”29 and expands our conscious awareness, “but does not create substance by demonstrating any being that [we] might objectively comprehend.”30 But Existenz is the mode of our Being that puts us in touch with the overarching existential aspects of the human condition, emerging from and returning to the shelter of the Encompassing (Being itself). It must be stressed that although we harbor the potential to consciously live beyond our empirical instantiation, Transcendence, in its direct relationship to the Encompassing, is not to be understood as a definitive metaphysical realm that is severed from the empirical world, based on a radical difference in substance (substantia) or essence (essentia). Transcendence in Jaspers is not to be confused with Plato’s two-world metaphysics that finds its way into the modern Cartesian division separating mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa).31 Our Existenz is inseparable from, because we can only access it through, our sensate, perceptual experience of the world, i.e., phenomenality, or the immanent modes of our existence. Jaspers stresses that although Existenz is irreducible to empirical, phenomenal existence, Existenz and the phenomenal realm are interwoven, for Existenz interpenetrates the world of appearances, and there is a counter-striving tension between the world of phenomenality and Existenz.32 When our empirical instantiation and our

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Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 60. Ibid. 30 Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 59. 31 Grabay, “Translator’s Preface,” xviii. Grabay makes the crucial observation that when translators of Jaspers employ the term “empirical existence” in contrast to Existenz and Transcendence, problems of the sort we described arise: “This practice raises expectations of another kind of existence - perhaps nonempirical existence – which…is not the case for Jaspers.” 32 Jaspers. Philosophy Vol. 2, 57. Here, it might be helpful to consider what Gabriel Marcel states regarding transcendence, because it relates to what Jaspers is philosophizing. Marcel argues that the “exigence of transcendence is not the exigence to go beyond all experience whatsoever, but to substitute one mode of experience for another, or more accurately still, to strive towards an increasingly 29

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possibility as Existenz are consciously united and held in a relationship highlighted by tension, through the unfolding of reason in philosophizing, we have opened a vista into existential self-Being, which we then work to preserve, expand, and deepen in communication with others. Dasein is aware of its limitations, its finitude, its temporal bound existence, but holds the potential to push against these limitations through philosophizing, and as we later discuss, this is partially related to reason’s drive to transcend all limits in its quest for the philosophical unification of the various modes of the Encompassing. As stated, Dasein holds the potential to reveal and establish its existential connection with Existenz, for as described, Dasein has the autonomy to pursue philosophizing, making the choice to appropriate its self-Being in order to momentarily, through existential enlightenment, break the bonds of its empirical and conceptual ties to scientific, and calculative forms of knowing the world.33 Self-Being requires a philosophical leap or, as we later describe it, an existential paradigm shift, which signals the move from the mode of immanence to transcendence, and our commitment to this inspired leap represents for Jaspers the essential task of philosophizing. This for Jaspers is the leap from the Encompassing that we are as immanent to the “Encompassing that we can be, or authentically are, as Existenz,”34 and it is also the leap from the Encompassing “we know as world to the Encompassing that Being in itself is,”35 and this leap is decisive for our freedom. As related to our purposes, we pay special attention to Dasein’s freedom and responsibility, for its choices, both its mundane, everyday choices as well as its higher order decisions, i.e., its unconditional choices made regarding its Existenz (Transcendence), as facilitated by the living presence of the Encompassing, define and determine Dasein’s original and existential self-Being, a mode wherein it achieves, or more appropriately, lives in the possibility of its Existenz. The Encompassing,36 which for Jaspers is synonymous with Being itself, envelopes and gives light and life to all that is conceivable, all pure mode of experience.” See: G. Marcel. Mystery and Being: Reflection and Mystery; Vol I, trans., G. S. Fraser. (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1950), ix. 33 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 64. 34 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 24. 35 Ibid. 36 A. E. Wildermuth, “Karl Jaspers and the Concept of Philosophical Faith,” 11. When presenting our account of the Encompassing we were informed by Wildermuth’s analysis: “In 1935, the series of lectures published as Reason and Existence (Vernunft und Existenz),” Jaspers “expanded his philosophy of existence of 1931 with the concept of the Encompassing (das Unigreifende),” and the

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that is in existence, all that comes to presence and all that remains concealed; the Encompassing, which Jaspers also labels living Being, shelters Transcendence in its objective mode and Existenz in its subjective mode, and holds it open as a possibility for Dasein.37 It is the source from out of which all horizons spring forth, but is itself without any horizons or bounding limits, and it announces itself, manifests its presence, within horizons and through the objects of our concern, without itself becoming an object, without becoming objectified in thought. The Encompassing expresses itself through us as we participate in it, as it pervades and permeates our worldly existence. However, it is not the presence of the Encompassing in its empirical manifestant that is Being itself, rather, as we have stated, Being itself is ever-present, but concealed from direct perception in the Encompassing that we are, for it always “seems to recede from us, in the very manifestation of all appearances we encounter.”38 The Encompassing, in its inconceivable expanse serves as the condition for the possibility of our experience of and interaction with objects in the world as thinking, sentient subjects. The Encompassing, although undeniably a difficult idea to concretize, for we are unable to conceive it in the same manner as we do the objects we investigate, might be thought of as the ever-present and foundational ground of Being. In authentic philosophical activity, it is intimated, revealed indirectly to us, and when its presence manifests and is appropriated we experience our Existenz, for we have been awakened, as described above, through our participation in the oblique revelation of the living Being of the Encompassing in one or more of its various modes of appearance.

concern expressed is whether the introduction of this idea served as an “expansion” or “unintended restriction” of Jaspers’ philosophy, which appears to lead to the “ontologizing of his existential approach,” in a manner that perhaps betrays Jaspers’ critique of traditional Western ontology. 37 Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 25. Jaspers’ description referencing “living being” is quite evocative and inspires a poetic analogy for understanding the Encompassing in terms of a transparent, flexible, fluid, living ontological “skin” that overlays or tightly encapsulates all of existence. However, in offering this analogy, in attempting to communicate the Encompassing through poetic description, we perhaps fail to capture and hence communicate its essential, unknowable and ineffable nature. 38 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 18.

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Jasper’s View of Philosophy as Philosophieren Self-Being and Responsibility Jaspers observes that the innate disposition to philosophize manifests in the probing questions that children often pose, which belie a depth of metaphysical intuition about the world. Jaspers provides several examples of the type of questions that express, in a non-formalized manner, nascent philosophical concerns: The mystery of self-identity, the puzzlement regarding the problem of the infinite regress, and the wonderment bound up with the difference between Being and becoming, permanence and change - the pre-Socratic concern with the One and the many.39 Here, we encounter an obscure intuition regarding the essence of philosophy already present to the quizzical mind of the child, and beyond this, Jaspers also identifies the tacit awareness of Being, or the Encompassing, from which Existenz-philosophy as transcendence-thinking draws its original inspiration. Although Jaspers argues that philosophy is always present to our lives, innate to our way of Being-in-the-world, the crucial issue for Jaspers, which we have already introduced, is whether we actively choose to pursue it, “whether philosophy is conscious or not, whether it is good or bad, muddled or clear.”40 Thus, these early stirrings of a philosophical nature must be nurtured, for we must purposefully and actively work to “preserve the depth which children for the most part…lose as they mature.”41 The decision to consciously choose to philosophize, taking it up as a life-task, occurs in fleeting moments when we experience our potential as Existenz and are thereby put in touch with our Transcendence, which shelters the highest possibilities of our Being. Since, as stated, to become our Existenz requires philosophical elucidation or transcendencethinking, we must inquire into Jaspers’ conception of philosophy. For Jaspers, philosophy, as philosophieren (the activity of philosophizing), is a practice and way-of-life, unfolding through inner dialogue and interpersonal communication, it holds the potential to awaken a sense of personal awareness and put us in touch with the non-objective, existential aspects of our lives. “The clarity of a life related to Transcendence,” Jaspers tells us, should “become communicable in thought, as a philosophizing with which we actually live.”42 The pursuit of self-Being, which moves through the elucidation of the Encompassing in 39

Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 10. Ibid., 12. 41 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 13. 42 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 128. 40

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all of its modes, is the fundamental philosophical project, as it “presses on reflectively to the point where thinking becomes the experience of [Being],”43 which for Jaspers emerges from four originary sources, all of which are inspired by the presence of Being itself (the Encompassing). The beginning of philosophy is distinct from the source; the beginning of various forms of philosophy represent historical beginnings, but the source of philosophy is that from which the originary “impulsion to philosophize springs.”44 Wonder, inspires questioning and provides insight; skepticism pushes us to question the limits of our knowledge; awe and forsakenness, as in the experience of boundary situations, drive us to seek selfknowledge and a sense of belonging as self-Being. To this list Jaspers adds a fourth source of inspiration and claims it lives as “the universal condition of man’s Being,”45 and this is the will to free and authentic communication with others. Philosophy, then, is grounded in “unreserved communication between men who live together and vie with one another in a free community,”46 it works to initiate and sustain the “loving contest which profoundly unites self and self.”47 In existential communication, we encounter the source and aim of philosophy, and in authentic philosophical discourse, “all its other aims are ultimately rooted: awareness of Being, illumination through love, attainment of peace.”48 When speaking of our Existenz and worldly Transcendence, Jaspers identifies the sources of philosophy we have introduced as emerging from the human being’s primordial and exigent need for order, support, and belonging, which manifests doubt, dread, and dissatisfaction, and according to Jaspers, these responses are indicative of the derivation of the world of our experience from the realm of possible Existenz. With this in mind, it is possible to state that alienation from or dissatisfaction with the world is grounded in Dasein’s tacit recognition of the ontological distance or proximity that it finds itself from Being when immersed in the world of its involvements. Although Jaspers identifies four sources of philosophy, it is clear that he is most concerned with the origin or archƝ of philosophy, and that is Being itself, which Jaspers expresses in terms of the “One,” a wholistic force and presence that can never become our possession in knowledge. This origin inspires the most primordial metaphysical question we can ask: “Why is there something rather than 43

Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 14. Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 17. 45 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 79. 46 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 26. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 44

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nothing?” This question breaks open a context of inquiry and produces a draft and force, which draws us in and holds firm within the experience, heralding the arrival of Being qua Being, which “is given to us, incomprehensible, impenetrable, [as] something that precedes all thinking and comes to meet us.”49 This origin is perennial to all philosophy, and this universal quest to reveal and elucidate the original experience of Being, despite differences in methods and approaches, is what all forms of philosophy have in common, and for Jaspers, the philosophy of existence (Existenzphilosophie) is “a form of the one, primordial philosophy,”50 and this is what Jaspers terms philosophia perennis. Although this talk of beginnings, sources, and origins might invite confusion, it is the case that all sources of philosophy draw inspiration from the origin; philosophy is informed and enlivened by the presence of the Encompassing in its living, unfolding Being, the primordial fount (archƝ) from which existential philosophy springs and to which it continually returns, drawing from this fount its life, sustenance, and inspiration for the ever-renewed quest to reinvigorate itself. It is our dissatisfaction with mundane existence that serves as the harbinger of the possibility of Existenz and Transcendence. As introduced, when experiencing the dawning existential insight that gestures beyond phenomenality, we are faced with a choice, either to pursue the philosophical search for authentic self-Being, or flee in the face of our unconditional existential responsibility and remain lost in the phenomenal world of the mundane, which is for Jaspers, the tacit embrace of nihilism. This represents the sense of nothingness that accompanies the loss of self, and philosophy is constantly plagued and threatened by the looming and impending danger of succumbing to the experience of nothingness. Jaspers laments that we have lost our connection, lost our awareness of the origin, because we are consumed within our immanent involvements within the world, and through philosophizing, “we are engaged in awakening the memory through which we will return to our ground.”51 Thus, the dismissal of a philosophical life represents the loss of self-Being and bespeaks the self-forgetfulness of Being, which becomes intensified and heightened by the continued rise and domination of mass society in the technological age, and so we must snatch ourselves from out of this mood of self-forgetfulness or we are doomed to lose ourselves “to the world, to habits, to thoughtless banalities, to the beaten track.”52 The dissatisfaction 49

Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 58. Ibid., 3. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 121. 50

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with the world is also linked to the sources of philosophy Jaspers describes, grounded in the existential moment when the world shows up as alien, and we seem detached from it and experience a sense of forsakenness, which might be linked with the mood of estrangement, wherein we experience the oppressive sense of not-being-at-home in the world. For the world is recalcitrant to all our efforts to know it with certainty and in its entirety. Jaspers insists that the more we attempt to master the world, to bring it to heel in knowledge, the more homeless we risk becoming.53 We can transcend our forgetfulness of Being when awakening to the existential insight that we are much more than an empirical existent and rational being inhabiting the world. Salamun contends that there are two main ways in which Jaspers believes we can potentially reveal and attempt to appropriate self-Being, our selfrealization as Existenz: First, by responding to boundary situations in the right way, and second, through the existential experience of communicating with others.54 Everyday situations are typically approached as problems requiring solutions, concrete problems can be successfully navigated and mastered through knowledge, boundary situations are not like practical problems, and are recalcitrant to our traditional efforts to ameliorate the pain and confusion they elicit.55 We can’t fully elucidate the existential meaning of our impending mortality, we can produce no certain truth regarding the manner in which we should live as Being-unto-death; we can’t fully explain the purpose of our suffering; we can’t rationally, in ethical terms, provide full and complete reasons for why we are burdened with inexorable guilt. Let us briefly explore in more detail what an appropriate response to a boundary situation might look like. When enduring unmitigated and inexplicable suffering, we seek an answer for why this is occurring, and beyond, we consider what larger meaning this might have for our lives. Asking about the purpose and meaning of our suffering as related to our Being-in-the-world does not require an explanation, because explanations are linked to empirical, formable, and objective knowledge. Rather, these situations demand an interpretive 53

Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 56. K. Salamun, “Karl Jaspers’ Conception of the Meaning of Life,” 4. 55 Marcel, Mystery of Being, 211. This is highly reminiscent of the distinction Marcel makes between our encounters with problems and mysteries. “A problem is something I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am involved,” and while a problem can be solved and eradicated, “a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.” 54

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response, for they are existential in nature, and it is the attempt to divine and philosophically interpret their veiled meaning that instantiates the process of opening our potential Existenz, for the reality and truth of boundary situations “can only be felt by Existenz.”56 Salamun provides a concise and clearly articulated interpretation of a response that rejects the pessimistic or nihilistic turn from life. Consider the boundary situation of guilt harboring the potential to “bring a person the insight that both action and non-action can always bring unforeseen and unintended consequences that will affect others,”57 and this aligns with Jaspers’ belief that we must accept responsibility for our actions and bear the weight of the consequences. In such moments, as we have stated, our discontent with the world manifests, or more accurately, our discontent with the way we are in the world arises, and no definitive reasons can sufficiently explain the mood within which we find ourselves, but in this mood of discontent there resides the reticent expression and presence of our possible Existenz, and we are responsible for acting in light of this presence, for our existential self-Being depends on it. In line with our foregoing description, in the throes of boundary situations, we immediately become conscious of a lack, and there occurs what Jaspers identifies as the foundering of thought in the stark and disturbing awareness of human limitations. The exigency of these encounters exposes us to the reality of failure, for knowledge, understanding, and technological expertise are powerless to extricate us from these situations, they fail to offer definitive solutions to our existential quandaries, and so we must acknowledge them and endure them in a way that requires “unconditional,” interpretive responses. Jaspers tells us that Self-Being is intimately linked to the awareness of our radical limitations, and philosophy prepares us, attunes us to legitimately confront our radical human contingency, but does so “in such a way that, instead of remaining crushed by our impotence, we find from the vantage point of our independence, the road to recovery.”58 Thus, Jaspers wants us to see and live beyond these situations, and what we encounter in the moment is the 56

Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 179. Salamun, “The Meaning of Life,” 5. Our claim is that it is possible to understand Jaspers as both endorsing inter-personal communication in relation to boundary situations as well embracing self-reflection and self-communication in moments of contemplative philosophical solitude. However, when Salamun draws our attention to this issue, he claims that, “Jaspers does not make clear the similarities and differences between these two concepts of self-realization. He also did not succeed in unifying them consistently in his existentialism” (8). 58 Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 161. 57

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existential sense of our true Being as we have described, and when experiencing the sense of true Being, when experiencing a conscious awakening, we become the Transcendence that Jaspers equates with philosophical redemption. This for Jaspers is nothing other than the existential paradigm shift, the transformation of our conscious Being that awakens the potential to establish our relationship to and participation in Being. Here, to reiterate, we determine whether or not the experience awakens our freedom and inspires our philosophizing (transcendencethinking), or induces a retreat, in the form of escapism, back into “mundane” existence, thus indicating the rejection of both philosophy and potential existential self-Being.59 Our true self as Existenz necessitates the autonomous act of breaking through or taking the leap beyond mundane existence, and this entails standing out of the realm of the immanent and entering into the existential mode of Transcendence, which draws its life from as it is penetrated by and situated within the Encompassing, and philosophical elucidation “is the thinking ascertainment of that act,”60 and such a leap becomes a radical possibility of our Being within the boundary situations we have explored. As indicated, our dissatisfaction with the world is partly grounded in the realization that our knowledge is radically limited, but beyond this, dissatisfaction “makes [us] feel that this whole world, for all its universality and validity, is not all of Being,”61 raising the essential concern regarding the unshakable responsibility we have for deciding what should be done with our lives, and this is the deep sense of inner and unconditional responsibility we have for authentic self-Being, the expression of our primordial “need to have [our] own origin.”62 To further add to our discussion of the existential paradigm shift occurring in boundary situations, when the Encompassing manifests its presence obliquely, it does so through the worldly ciphers of Being that we interpret 59 E. Young-Bruehl, Freedom and Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 71. In her book-length treatment of existential freedom, the issues of freewill and determinism are discussed. The author concludes that Jaspers believed “both sides mistake the problem,” but despite this critical observation, Jaspers did not “try to dissolve the problem or clear up a linguistic muddle; he moved to a level beyond the antithetical positions and appealed to the freedom of Existenz,” which is reveled in action, in autonomous decision and choice, and this view, as Bruehl recognizes, is both “nonobjective and undemonstrable.” 60 Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 19. 61 Ibid., 161. 62 Ibid., 175

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and elucidate. Here, we experience or become the “positive” freedom required for philosophieren, and this is captured in the existential movement from everyday situations in the world to our entry into boundary situations, from empirical consciousness to moments of absolute consciousness, and from actions qualified by their purposes, to unconditional actions as related to Existenz and Transcendence.63 In this movement the “discontent of possible self-being has broken through mundane existence and cast the individual back upon himself, back to the origin that lets him deal with his world and, with his fellow [in and through existential communication], realize his Existenz.”64 The movement, as we have described, is our step or leap out of “mundane” existence into the solitude of possibility, representing an enlightened change in attitude required for our existential paradigm shift, where we transcend the forgetfulness of Being and our existential possibilities are “brought into contact with the real [Being], as though films had fallen from our eyes not about things in the world as such, but about Being itself in them and in all possibilities.”65 This is the origin of self-Being, holding the ultimate potential to transform and turn us around when we are awakened to the possibility of philosophizing our existence and instantiating, through thought and action, our Existenz. It is for Jaspers the moment of the Augenblick,66 which is the “leap from everything that can be experienced 63 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existenz, 21. This is the manner in which Jaspers describes the philosophical operation of philosophieren, which transitions from a general idea of the Encompassing, “to its division into the Encompassing we are [Existenz] and the Encompassing that Being itself is,” and in doing so, through elucidation, it inspires the essential move from immanence to transcendence, and this is the realm where authentic self-Being as Existenz lives. 64 Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. 2, 70. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 111. The Augenblick is read in terms of a moment – “flash of the eye” – of existential enlightenment that occurs in a mode of attunement that puts Dasein in touch with Existenz, and just as it is a non-objective phenomenon, it is also a moment when Dasein stands-out (ek-static) and transcends the chronological, linear experience of “lived-time.” The Augenblick encompasses a moment of eternity in the present, “the identity of temporality and timelessness in the factical moment deepened to present eternity,” and in this moment of enlightenment, “temporal particularity is comprehended as the appearance of eternal Being.” In the Augenblick, as related directly to existential self-hood, an understanding dawns regarding the limitations and impossibility of reducing time to mere calculative measure, for in the Augenblick there is an experience of temporality that lives beyond the linear unfolding and duration of time as Dasein experiences it as an empirical existent.

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in time”67 to eternal Being itself, which cannot be known from out of our immanent temporal instantiation, “even though it comes to expression for us only in temporal existence.”68 Philosophy’s existential elucidation opens a vista into the fleeting and intuitive insight into Being, and through free decision and choice, we bring this new insight to bear on our lives. This transformative existential paradigm shift breaks open the widest realm of possibility, and everything we know, all of our actions, acquire a new “depth from [their] relation to this realm, from which [Being] comes to meet us,”69 casting a light for a brief moment that penetrates and enhances our worldly involvements. This, as discussed, is our authentic existential self that gathers and unites, in a sustained tension, the empirical reality (immanence) that we are and the non-objective realm of Existenz and Transcendence that we participate in through our philosophical elucidation, which is grounded in the interplay of reason and Existenz. Authentic philosophy, as described, seeks to reveal and establish our relationship to Being or what Jaspers often refers to as the primal mystery, which at once envelops all things (the Encompassing), and is present in ways that are obscure and oblique. Philosophical elucidation acknowledges the primal mystery of Being, and when bringing the eternal mystery of the philosophic endeavor to language, through cipher-language, the communication works to preserve and shelter the mystery of Being, allowing it to persist and remain “present as mystery,”70 and this for Jaspers highlights the sense of openness and tolerance required in existential communication as we discuss below. Since the philosophical leap always exceeds all rational insight, and philosophy’s “communication by language in figures of thought provides only signposts,”71 Being is revealed and communicated through intimations or philosophically enlightened existential gestures that carry along the hints or whispers of Being that have been mediated, brought before us, through our interaction with ciphers. According to Jaspers, ciphers, as mediators of the Encompassing, are identified as both subjective and objective, and this is what Jaspers means when stating that ciphers are not imagined, for in their objective mode, “something is heard that comes to meet [us],”72 and in their subjective mode, we divine and philosophically elucidate them, and in 67

Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 21. Ibid., 21. 69 Ibid., 19. 70 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 177. 71 Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 23. 72 Ibid. 68

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doing so we are in a sense creating them, or giving them personal meaning for our lives, “by [our] way of apprehending, by [our] way of thinking,”73 and when this occurs we interpret and communicate the message of ciphers through the language of transcendent-thinking, which we have called a form of “cipher-language.” To this point, Jaspers is clear that ciphers “are like a language of Transcendence, which nonetheless reaches us from there as a language created by ourselves.”74 Ciphers might be said to speak the reticent language of Being in ways that can only rise to the level of possible interpretations,75 for Jaspers contends that ciphers are “significations which cannot be annulled by equating them with the object signified,” and although they signify, “they do not signify a specific thing,”76 Recall Jasper’s view of language as a bridge (Brücke), for it might be said that ciphers function in a similar manner. Ciphers mediate 73

Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 94-93. Ibid., 91. 75 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 53. Related to our discussion concerning ciphers functioning as the reticent “voice of Being,” there is another phenomenon Jaspers discusses that might be said to “speak” from out of the depths of Being, and that is the Unconditional Imperative. Jaspers argues that the Unconditional Imperative moves us inwardly, it touches the deep recesses of our Being, but is at once given over to us, indicating that the manifestation of the Unconditional Imperative articulates a normative message that is beyond us, but is intimately related to us, for it calls to us and “comes to [us] as the command of [our] authentic self,” speaking to us though our empirical phenomenal existence. Self-Being is thus dependent on the responsibility that we demonstrate when responding to the Unconditional Imperative, and this existential imperative - unlike practical or hypothetical imperatives - emerges from Being. Indeed, we might say it is the reticent and unconditional voice of Being that speaks to and moves our inner sense of conscience regarding the authenticity of our thoughts and actions. When paying heed to the Unconditional Imperative, when beholden to its command, the potential exists for us to “win authentic Being as the foundation of [our] decisions.” 76 Ibid., 93. Death is perhaps the most important and pressing boundary situation we face, for it can be a source of existential dread or a cause for living authentically, depending upon how we approach it. However, in light of what Jaspers insists regarding ciphers, that they harbor what “remains hidden in endlessly varied significations,” it is also possible to imagine death as representing a cipher, e.g., in terms of an existential, transcendent experience of “death” as a boundary situation, where the biological fact of a loved one’s demise, as it occurs and objectively presents itself in a particular, concrete situation, serves as a cipher for the larger existential import and impact that this death will have on the way others will live through loss and awaken to authentic possibilities in light of their impending mortality, which gives shape and direction to their potential self-being. 74

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Being and Dasein, through a reticent mode of communication, and so bridge the existential gap between the Encompassing (Being itself) and human being in its immanent modes. As this discussion indicates, we don’t translate the language of ciphers as would a native speaker translate a foreign language to make it understandable, rather we attempt to divine their shadowy, inchoate message through a language that is always inadequate to the task.77 Jaspers argues that ciphers “are among the things that most urgently concern the origin and fate of our freedom,”78 and so they influence our responses to the presence of transcendent Existenz; what we decide and choose reflects our practical instantiation of Existenz, and so our interaction with and elucidation of ciphers determines whether or not we become and hence enact our existential self-Being. We conclude this section with some brief observations regarding existential freedom, for there is an undeniable sense of freedom at the level of immanence, or Dasein’s worldly involvements, and this is the “relative freedom to remain open to the Encompassing,”79 but it is the “positive freedom,” as discussed, which opens our potential Existenz, which “exists only as identity with the origin [Being itself] on which thought founders,”80 and so “positive” freedom exists only at the limits of human knowledge in the presence of the inexplicable and ineffable, the eternal or primal mystery of Being itself. Along with Salamun we have sought to highlight the responsibility required in claiming our existential freedom, and this implies, as discussed throughout, choosing to philosophize and choosing our authentic self-Being are conscious, autonomous acts wherein “an individual takes full responsibility for one’s own life-style and its consequences.”81 Although we face boundary situations in particular contexts related directly to our lives in specific and unique ways, these situations are universal to the human condition, and for this reason Jaspers stresses that a crucial aspect of our self-Being is linked to the

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To attempt yet another analogy to capture our encounter with the mysterious ciphers of Being: Imagine the ancient Pythia at the sanctuary of Delphi, enveloped within the Oracle’s rising vapors, channeling the prophecies of Apollo and attempting to communicate them to the uninitiated by bringing them to language, while inhabiting a space, call it ontological, that is situated at the limits of what can be definitively known and spoken. 78 Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 93. 79 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 25. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.

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open-ended existential communication that we share with others.82 It is undeniably the case that moments of philosophical or meditative solitude are necessary for fostering and developing our self-understanding, however, Jaspers contends that it is only through authentic inter-personal communication that the truth of self-Being can truly be fulfilled. For in and through existential communication, the loving contest that unites and connects us intimately with others, we are awakened to our Existenz and worldly Transcendence, for existential self-Being requires communication, it emerges “out of [our] being with others,”83 and this is nothing other than sharing and participating in a life dedicated to philosophizing.

Existential Communication as “Loving Struggle” Resisting the Dogmatic Tendency in Philosophy Just as Jaspers makes a distinction between Existenz philosophy (transcendence-thinking) and theoretical philosophy, or philosophy conceived in terms of a scientific model, he distinguishes between two forms of knowledge or insight, one prevalent within our worldly dealings and the other related to our encounters with ciphers, representing our intimate connection to the Encompassing or Being itself. Understanding (verstand) is grounded in everyday, mundane existence, but reason (Vernunft)84 is associated with Dasein’s higher state of attuned existential consciousness, for reason “melts down all truth as objective knowledge 82 Salamun, “The Meaning of Life,” 2. Salamun observes that Jaspers’ philosophy of the meaning of life is grounded in a “normative moral framework…We may call this framework an implicit liberal ethos of humanity, or in philosophical terms, an implicit ethics of virtue.” This, we note, however, is not an explicit ethics, with principles and a codified tablet of prescribed and proscribed actions, for Jaspers “never intended to postulate moral attitudes or virtues as explicit norms and general ethical rules.” Rather, it is his intention, according to Salamun, “to stimulate their acceptance by his philosophy, and to appeal to every individual in an indirect way to accept those virtues in their own life and personal relations.” 83 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 80. 84 P. Fairfield, Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted: Dialogues with Existentialism, Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Postmodernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 27. Fairfield observes that before Gadamer and Habermas, “Jaspers originated a communicative conception of reason that rejected the artificial narrowing of the concept that had occurred during the Enlightenment.” Fairfield identifies Jaspers as operating within the tradition of German Hermeneuticists, related most closely to Gadamer, and Fairfield makes the convincing case for existential communication as a form of philosophical hermeneutics.

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and elevates it into the approaching truth of the Encompassing.”85 Reason for Jaspers is a capacity of human thought, but as the purest form of cognition, it is also “bound to and borne by Existenz, without which it would disappear.”86 Through the power of reason it is “possible, for the truth of Existenz to realize and become manifest to itself,”87 in terms of granting a form of insight, which as we have described, heralds the awakening of our self-Being. The authentic will to communication emerges from out of the relationship between reason and Existenz, which inspires an open, receptive attitude in communication, for reason “elucidates not only so as to know; [reason] remains a questioning that is like a wooing.”88 Reason, as Jaspers insinuates, plays a hortatory role in communication as a way of thinking that facilitates our entrance into a context where the unfolding and sustained communication allows the matters of our concern to manifest and retain their question-worthy nature. Jaspers stresses, however, that philosophieren is not grounded in reason, but through reason, due to its intimate belonging to Existenz and the Encompassing, philosophieren is essentially grounded in the archƝ of the Encompassing. In the presence of Existenz, we hold ourselves open in a resolute state, and only in this receptive state can the “radical will-to-communicate which springs out of reason and Existenz work.”89 But, if we ignore the fact that reason never devolves into dogmatic knowledge, we close off our possibilities, we foreclose the potential for existential enlightenment through the practice of philosophy, for in erroneously embracing truth as a possession, we break off all meaningful communication with the other, and this is expressive for Jaspers of the “dogmatic tendency” in thought. Just as there is the innate drive to philosophize, communication is also an “original phenomenon of our humanity,”90 through which we have 85

Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 59. It should be noted that Heidegger also makes a distinction between forms of thought in relation to “conversation,” or what he indicates is authentic discourse. Heidegger separates “meditative” thought (besinnliches Denken), which is associated with thinking that is attuned and opened to Being, from “calculative” thought (rechnendes Denken), which is linked to technology and is, according to Heidegger, the mode of thinking associated with the attunement of das Ge-stell, the constraining mood of modern technology. This latter form of thought cannot be linked with “philosophy” as Heidegger conceived of it in his later writings. See: M. Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking, trans., J. M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 86 Ibid., 58. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 57. 89 Ibid., 98. 90 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 74.

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the potential to become ourselves in community with others in Existenz and Transcendence. Communication is so much our comprehensive essence that what we are and what we have the potential to become are both intimately expressive of and inextricably linked to our existential dialogue with the other, and Existenz “only becomes apparent and thereby real if it comes to itself through, and at the same time with, another Existenz.”91 This is related to the capacity, scope, and purview of reason, which as opposed to understanding, is by its nature, “the total will to communication.”92 We also discussed authentic communication as representing a critical and integral source of philosophy, and for Jaspers, as indicated throughout, there are two types of communication linking us with Existenz: (1) The private mode of self-communication that occurs in contemplative solitude or through solitary meditation, for “philosophical contemplation is the life of Existenz as it ponders over Being, as it reads the crypto-grams of empirical existence and all modes of Being.”93 (2) The inter-personal existential communication that occurs between two or more like-minded and philosophically inspired individuals seeking personal enlightenment in pursuit of ecumenical projects. As argued, the Encompassing pervades all modes of existence and communication, and “the Encompassing which is Being itself exists for us only insofar as it achieves communicability by becoming speech or becoming utterable.”94 Although there are specific modes of communication associated with each of the aspects or modes of the Encompassing - Dasein, consciousness-assuch, and spirit - existential communication, which unfolds as an interpretive dialogue that philosophically elucidates Existenz, is separated off from other forms of communication focused on empirical and pragmatic concerns. The practice of philosophy and its interpretive elucidation focuses on “the bringing forth of humanity under the conditions of a communication which is not deceptive, not superficial, not degenerating,”95 and in addition, it is a form of communication that, “in its movement, is never complete, but in every factual completion also remains continually open.”96 In our discussion of communication as a loving struggle, we must emphasize the precarious and difficult nature of philosophieren, for through its movement, “it is a continually insecure and endangered reality which must 91

Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 92. Ibid., 56. 93 Ibid., 143. 94 Ibid., 79. 95 Ibid., 97. 96 Ibid. 92

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always re-establish itself, limit and expand itself, test itself, and push on,”97 for it cannot and does not possess true Being in knowledge; it neither seeks nor arrives at a final state. Thus, although the human invests full faith in communication, the possibility of full and complete communication must be left in uncertainty, and beyond, rejected, for knowledge, understanding, and even reason, in its intimate bond with Existenz, are all limited forms of insight or knowledge, and indeed such limitations serve as the necessary precondition or existential attitude for philosophizing, let us call it the acknowledgement of our ignorance.98 When authentically practicing philosophieren we humbly acknowledge the limitation of all possible knowledge, for only then are we “open to the unknowable that is [partially] revealed at those limits.”99 To reiterate a crucial point, this is why Jaspers envisions philosophy as a practice that is always on-the-way, because it is a venture that is dedicated to continuingly questioning and re-questioning our Being-in-the-world, seeking deeper meanings and more lucid and profound interpretations. Ultimately, we seek out Being in its primal source to apprehend how this reality manifests in our lives, how it might be appropriated within our activities, and in doing so, we simultaneously attempt, with as much clarity as possible, to communicate this reality to others in and through a loving contest aimed at potential enlightenment. To approach this notion of dialogue or communication as a loving struggle, we begin by reiterating that the process of self-development in philosophical dialogue aims at seeking temporary consensus among participants, and this is an arduous and unpredictable process. Here, consensus in communication is directly related to Jaspers’ claim regarding reason’s drive for unity, which highlights the mutual, albeit temporary, agreement between communicants, for reason seeks to “bring everything back out of dispersion of mutual indifference to dynamic interrelatedness,”100 and from out of the “decay of mutual alienation, reason brings everything back into relation with everything else.”101 Jaspers admits that agonistic 97

Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 97. K. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals, trans., R. Manheim (New York: Harvest Books, 1962), 7. This idea mirrors Socrates’ approach, which as Jaspers observes, “one must know one’s ignorance and embark on the journey of thought,” and if one perseveres in questioning, “through a candid awareness of what one does not know, one will not arrive at nothingness, but at the knowledge that is crucial for life.” 99 Way to Wisdom, 127. 100 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 55. 101 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 55. 98

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elements are undeniably present to communication, but the critical interaction and struggle transpiring in existential communication is antithetical to the type of struggle common to polemics, eristic, or forensic debate, where the aim is to establish superiority with the goal of victory over an opponent or perceived enemy. In the extreme, when dialogue is truncated and the process of questioning ends and a single notion of truth is embraced and elevated to the level of universal or trans-historical status, then it is possible, as is common to totalitarian political regimes, to subjugate individuals under the yoke of this objectified, totalizing vision of absolute truth. Thus, when Jaspers speaks of a loving struggle, he speaks of a unique context of communication that eschews violence, subjugation, authoritative hierarchy, polemics, and the dogmatic tendency, which destroys the drive for healthy and robust skeptical philosophical questioning. Authentic communication with the other stands in contrast to “the struggle for existence over power, superiority, and annihilation, here, the struggle over the content of Existenz is without the will to power,”102 for existential communication is a mutual struggle where participants, in a caring and concerned manner, seek to inform and work toward the betterment of others as this aim is reciprocated. In authentic communication, “every advance of the individual comes only if the other advances too, and every destruction of the other is my own.”103 One crucial characteristic of this form of respectful communication, as we have already touched on, is open-mindedness, which embraces both the unfinished nature of philosophieren along with the unfinished nature of our conscious development in Existenz as self-Being. The openness in the will-to-communicate is twofold in nature: (1) Philosophy requires the “openness to the knowability of what is not yet known…openness strives to bring every possibility into the medium of communication so that it might attain Being for us,”104 and (2) Philosophical openness establishes our solidarity with others in the search for Being and self-Being. According to Jaspers, when pursuing the elucidation of Being, through reason, in communication with others, we are embracing and exhibiting a sense of honesty, which in “contrast with fanaticism in the pursuit of truth, possesses unlimited openness and availability for questioning,”105 and in light of what we might term “communicative justice,” we are open in dialogue to granting that “every

102

Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 91. Ibid., 92. 104 Ibid., 99. 105 Ibid., 57. 103

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originary thing count as itself,”106 e.g., as earlier stated, it is necessary for us to allow the ultimate mystery of Being to manifest in our questioning in such a way that its mystery is respectfully preserved, thus Being rightfully retains its nature and we experience a sense of wonder in the awe-inspiring presence of its radical otherness. In solidarity with the other, we grant the charity and respect required for preserving, fostering, and enhancing the other’s freedom. This demands that we refrain from imposing our will on the other, this necessitates that we hold our prejudices in abeyance and allow the other to approach us as a unique individual with perspectives, beliefs, and opinions differing from our own. For Jaspers, this represents the power and truth of “tolerance which listens and gives and enters into the unpredictable process of communication,”107 and through the tolerance, charity, and respect we extend to the other, violence and coercion are assuaged. Indeed, when faced with differing perspective, beliefs, and opinions in dialogue, the presupposition exists that they will require reinterpretation and transformation, but it is also crucial, and this is essential for authentic existential communication, that we remain open to the possibility that our own views will be challenged and altered when necessary. Thus, when engaged in authentic communication, we must continually question ourselves, adopting and retaining an attitude of selfcritique and self-assessment, with an eye toward those possibilities that are still on the approach, but have not yet manifested, and so remain open as possibility in light of our Existenz in relation to the other’s self-Being. As previously discussed, boundary situations are universal aspects of the human condition, and so the solidarity we establish with others must also include the emotional concern for their wellbeing, e.g., offering the compassion and empathy required in moments when our partners in dialogue experience instances of suffering, and we might refer to this sense of empathy as solicitous care. Jaspers urges us to keep in mind that practicing philosophy as a way of life demands that we take seriously the experiences of others, demonstrating a concern for their happiness and hurt, for their successes and failures, e.g., in boundary situations, when in the presence of the ciphers of Being, which appear in an obscure and confused manner, we must work to ensure that the other, in the midst of an emotional upheaval, does not fall away and “sink into the abyss.”108 Recall that philosophy is always haunted and plagued by nothingness, the possibility always exists for us to abandon the supreme

106

Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 57. Ibid. 108 Ibid., 125. 107

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responsibility to Being and self-Being and shrink from the uncertainty, confusion, and pain we experience, and in the extreme, retreat into a state of pessimistic despair, abandoning the communicative process. To the point, in the midst of this loving struggle, we must assist others in the search to potentially find a deeper meaning in their suffering and assist them when actively and critically confronting it, with the hope that existential enlightenment will arrive to clarify philosophical decisions in ways the move and inspire us. As we have shown, individual responsibility is crucial for awakening and sustaining our self-Being, and so the care and concern we show others cannot be allowed to rise to the level - or devolve into the activity - of taking away the other’s responsibility and freedom, instead we must allow the other’s freedom to grow and ascend when pursuing the philosophical life. The foundational truth of the loving struggle that is existential communication is summed up by Jaspers in the following manner: “In existential communication, we disdain the use of instrumentalities, power or guile,”109 for it is a discourse without polemics or rhetoric, without violence of deception, for such modes and practices of inauthentic discourse always threaten “to overwhelm the realization of possible Existenz.”110 Beyond the misguided concern with beings over Being that we discussed in relation to traditional ontology, there are also forms of philosophy, such as we encounter in strict idealist readings of Plato,111 that reveal another problem Jaspers addresses, namely, the issue of dogmatism that is inevitably bound up with the illegitimate construction of systematized, reified doctrines of thought. In relation to this concern, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl stresses that Jaspers recognizes, despite the various turns that his philosophical project takes through its evolution, that the essential nature of philosophizing as a living and ever-renewed activity, defies reduction to a doctrine. Young-Bruehl rightly observes that although Jaspers’ philosophy resembles a “net of systemizations, schemata,

109

Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 125. Jaspers, Philosophy Vol.2, 91. 111 J. M. Magrini, “Jaspers’ Phenomenological Plato: Against the ‘Doctrinal’ Tradition,” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts. Vol. 12(2), 2017, 34-48. In doctrinal readings of Plato, the rigid metaphysical distinction between the intelligible and sensible realms of Being or the Forms is accepted, and beyond, it is said that the realm of the Forms can be grasped in terms of propositional (apodictic) knowledge through the systematized application of dialectic; these ideas, it is claimed, form Plato’s systematic philosophy. This is an interpretive view of which Jaspers is highly critical. 110

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and recurrent thought- patterns,”112 it is the case that he neither created nor established a doctrinaire philosophical system. As stressed throughout, philosophy for Jaspers is never equated with the possession of truth, and is instead embraced as the active and renewed search for truth through questioning, which is always a limited and incomplete endeavor. Indeed, philosophy’s basic operation is to “free our sense of being from its connection to knowledge,”113 working to conceive something non-objective in a communicable form, searching for that which can only be suggested or intimated and experienced through reason in its intimate connection to Existenz. Jaspers insists that no absolutist doctrines of thought can solve our collective problems, or address the exigencies of our existential nature, and so the true philosopher, the enlightened lover and seeker of truth, vehemently resists and denounces the construction of dogmatic systems of thought. Jaspers is highly critical of dogmatism in all of its forms, for “there is a radical abyss between the dogmatic and the communicative modes of knowing the world,”114 e.g., dogmatism, as we find within a “body of didactic principles purporting to be definitive and complete,”115 can manifest in terms of fundamental religious, philosophical, or political systems. Dogma can be understood as representing a doctrine that is accepted as universally binding, and entailed in this idea is the belief, as we find in fundamentalist Christianity, that the truth comprising the doctrine stands beyond and so is exempt from critical questioning. In relation to Kant’s critique of dogmatism, his transcendental idealism offers a correction to philosophies that accept that the universe is fully explainable in terms of inferences drawn from self-evident first principles without the necessity of observation, and taking this philosophical position to the extreme, the potential exists to fully transcend experience and dwell intellectually in a realm beyond sense experience, as in the philosophical notion of detached thought or intellect - pure noƝsis - related to the ancient Greek theǀria116- and this supra-sensible realm of the intelligible is 112

E. Young-Bruehl. Freedom and Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy, 10. Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 18. 114 Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 97. 115 Ibid., 12. 116 Plato. Phaedo, trans., G. M. A. Grube. (New York: Hackett, 1977), 15. In the Phaedo, Socrates, engaging in a hypothetical thought experiment, contemplates what truth as “theǀria” might be like if such a state of truth could obtain, and likens it to a superior form of thought that lives at a remove from the influence of the bodily passions: “If we are ever to have pure knowledge [theǀria], we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself” 113

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accepted as the one true, immutable, and eternal reality.117 Jaspers warns of the extreme dangers associated with establishing schools or producing systems of thought, and indeed, related to our earlier talk of ontology, Jaspers identifies the fallacy of the hypostatization of Being as representing “the essence of all dogmatism,”118 where there occurs an unfounded and illogical “shift from fluid ideas to a congealed Idea of Being, from experimental thinking to the finished product of thought.”119 Among the dangers associated with dogmatism, which Jaspers’ philosophy exposes, is the possibility of obfuscating and covering over the search for authentic self-Being. As Jaspers warns, “The authentic idea of the Encompassing disappears with every attempt to establish, isolate, and absolutize it,”120 for when the Encompassing is objectified, “it is no longer the true Encompassing.”121 As stated, Jaspers relates dogmatism to totalizing views that manifest in authoritarian religious movements and totalitarian political regimes, both of which mercilessly and radically attack philosophy and reject it as either useless or dangerous. Whereas existential philosophy stresses and fights for the inner independence of the human being, authoritative religion and the totalitarian state, both of which lay claim to exclusive truth and seek to mold us into the “material for [their] edifice of power,”122 leave no space for “individuality and even control leisure activities in accordance with an ideological line.”123 Religion decries philosophy, with its incessant questioning and denial of absolute truth, as a “worldly temptation which leads man away from God,”124 and so systematic religion speaks a dogmatic language to its adherents and devotees. Political totalitarianism attacks philosophy on the grounds that “philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various (66d-e). Generally, theǀria refers to the mode of thought that achieves the intuitive and immediate grasp of the intelligible, transcendent forms (eide). 117 Jaspers, Plato and Augustine, 7. Such dogmatic views are often attached to Plato’s metaphysics by certain scholars, but for Jaspers, there is an authentic standard of philosophizing in Plato, in a way that mirrors Jaspers own philosophy, that stands beyond the dogmatic tendency: “There is no explicit system and no indication of the stages of Plato’s development,” rather the sense of wholeness that encompasses his thought is to be found in the act of philosophizing itself, which resists the move “toward conclusive dogma.” 118 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 36. 119 Ibid., 57. 120 Ibid. 121 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 73. 122 Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 114. 123 Ibid., 110. 124 Ibid.

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ways,”125 but have failed to change it, and so when offering what is conceived of as a foolproof and totalizing utopian plan for revolution and the advent of governmental change, this authoritarian form of state politics also speaks the language of dogmatism to its adherents. Contributing to this line of reasoning, Young-Bruehl analyzes Jaspers’ critique of National Socialism and communism: “In 1931, with both the National Socialists and the communists in mind, Jaspers compared the ‘language of mystification’ and their ‘languages of revolt’.”126 The former works to control individuals by selling them the fiction that the status quo must be preserved and that the population must be dedicated, and beyond, subjugated, to working in service of the state; it assumes that “there is such a thing as a general interest, the general interest of a fictional all-embracing man writ large.”127 The latter appeals to impulses that seek to overturn the status quo and reigning political order through the violent destruction and recreation of the state, i.e., the establishment of a new state, and along with it, accomplish the true awakening of the human being, which occurs through revolt and revolution. As Young-Bruehl observes, neither of these “languages has anything in common with communication or appeal to Existenz.”128 Both disregard authentic communication as conceived in Jaspers’ philosophy and close down dialogue and skeptical inquiry, for they embrace a reified and disingenuous view of truth and ignore the limitations that are always bound up with human thought. As Jaspers recognizes, Marxism places a misguided faith in science and materialism, and although it never identifies itself in terms of a faith, it nonetheless “behaves like any other dogmatic faith: it is blind to everything that runs counter to it; it is aggressive and incapable of communication.”129 Conversely, National Socialism, which works toward the mystification of and control over the masses, represents the “rupture of communication in favor of self-willed violence.”130 In relation to authoritarian political regimes, Jaspers contends that for certain nefarious politicians, “their wretched trade would be easier if philosophers did not exist at all,”131 for the masses are always easier to

125

Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 14. Young-Bruehl, Freedom and Karl Jasper’s Philosophy, 26. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time, trans., S. Godman (London: SCM Press, 1952), 16. 130 Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason, 16. 131 Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 117. 126

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sway, control, and subjugate when “they do not think but only have a regimented intelligence.”132 Importantly, Jaspers stresses the connection between the scientific method and approach and philosophy when discussing our resistance against the dogmatic tendency, recognizing that “philosophizing can neither be identical with nor opposed to scientific thought,”133 but should work to draw inspiration from the scientist, in that philosophers must continually and relentlessly question their conclusions. For the “loss of the scientific attitude and approach is loss also of truthfulness in philosophizing,”134 and only by remaining in close proximity to and drawing inspiration from the curious and skeptical attitude or mindset grounding the methodological approach of the sciences can philosophy ever hope to dissolve the “dogmatism which tends to spring up in them again and again.”135 Let us briefly return to our discussion of reason and note that for Jaspers, it is the understanding that seeks the security and safety of firmly established truth, and often, in error, it surrenders to the exigent need for the unity of truth in the form of a doctrine. Whereas reason “continually overthrows what has been acquired by the understanding,”136 and because of its intimate connection with Existenz and Transcendence, it does not express “the deceptive will to achieve power by means of mere understanding.”137 Reason is critical of and so attacks “the narrowness of pseudo-truth,”138 it works to “dissolve fanaticism, and permits no comfortable assurance based upon either feeling or the understanding.”139 Ultimately, when considering the aim and dynamic movement of philosophy, as we have explored throughout, Jaspers is clear that philosophy (philosophieren) must live beyond instrumental concerns and resist all urges to engage in the misguided quest for absolute truth. Jaspers firmly believes that philosophy is a non-instrumental endeavor, for it is unable to truly produce anything tangible, however, it does prepare us to potentially avoid deception, and in light of the dangers bound up with the dogmatic tendency, philosophy equips us to critically question our knowledge claims and to confront potential disaster in a reasonable manner, with a sense of dignity. Philosophy, and here recall that 132

Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 117. Jaspers, Philosophy and Existence, 11. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 58. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 60. 133

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skepticism is one of its sources, works to disturb our complacency in the confidence of knowledge - the very epistemological complacency that dogmatism requires - it reveals that we are far more than mere empirical existents, and it “prevents us from taking thoughtlessness for granted and disaster as inescapable,”140 for what occurs in the world, Jaspers stresses, is still within our control if we are open and attuned to embracing existential communication. If we are dedicated to philosophieren, the loving struggle of existential communication, and strive to remain clear and steady in our thinking, Jaspers is hopeful that philosophy represents a form of existential salvation, for it offers a way to change our thinking and awaken us to authentic existential possibilities. For philosophy is not a “struggle for power; it is a struggle for lucidity through questioning, a struggle for clarity and truth,”141 and as consistent with our analysis, it is directed toward locating Being or “reality” in the primal source and origin, and then bringing the intuition or interpretation of reality into our reasoned attitudes toward ourselves and others. Philosophy is beholden to its origin, the Encompassing, and continually returns to this origin (archƝ) for its renewed strength, and philosophy inspires the pursuit of this origin, awakening this source in all who participate in and are dedicated to the loving struggle that is existential communication. Ultimately, as we have revealed in this analysis, the decision to appropriate and enact self-Being is grounded in and determined by the manner in which we reply to the following existential question: Do we actively respond to the emergence and presence of Being (Existenz, Transcendence, the Encompassing) through ciphers and allow this experience, rife with transformative potential, to inspire our philosophizing, or does the experience throw us back into the world, highlighted by the existential forgetfulness that holds us firm in the false security of mundane existence, as a mere subject among subjects and object amid objects? This essay serves as one potential rejoinder to this critical question linked intimately to Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie.

140 141

Jaspers, Philosophy Is For Everyman, 117. Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 86.

CHAPTER FOUR THE ENIGMATIC FIGURE OF SOCRATES IN HEIDEGGER A PURE VISION OF EDUCATION

This essay presents a view of “Heidegger’s Socrates” with the understanding that Socrates, unlike Plato, is a highly enigmatic figure in the Heideggerian corpus. In what follows, I attempt to sketch a portrait of Socrates—here understood as a decidedly “non-doctrinal” philosopher or thinker—based on an understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy in a way that might be related to a unique vision of education (paideia) as a philosophical way-ofBeing, or perhaps, and more appropriately, given Heidegger’s explicit and unwavering task during the “Turn,” as a mode of “pure thinking” unfolding in the relationship with the truth-of-Being, which is at once an originary educative event. Ultimately, I offer a counter-view to such common educational issues as the employment of methods, the means of knowledge acquisition, and the understanding of the learning process as they comprise the educational experience in the age of standardization and the rise and dominance of STEM curricula. The paper unfolds in three sections: (1) I explore Heidegger’s analysis of Plato and discuss how the metaphysics that can be drawn from Plato’s philosophy influences our conception and practice of education; (2) I offer a detailed analysis of pure thinking, truth, and dialectic method in relation to “Heidegger’s Socrates,” which includes insights on how this view might be clarified and enhanced by turning to a non-doctrinal interpretation of Plato’s Socrates emerging from recent scholarship focused on re-readings of the Platonic corpus; and (3) I synthesize foregoing analyses with a view of education (paideia), attempting to elucidate a unique vision of a Socratic education in the spirit of Heidegger’s reading, which lives beyond the understanding of philosophy as akin to a science and education, understood as a standardized, controllable, and predictable technological achievement. In relation to (2), a unique approach is adopted, which includes, because of the lack of detailed material written by Heidegger about Socrates, consultation of

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works that are not explicitly Heideggerian in theme or content, e.g., turning to Continental Platonic scholarship will assist in showing how key ideas emerging from Heidegger’s reading of Socrates might be understood when further illuminated by similar writings embracing Socrates, as does Heidegger, as a radically “non-systematic” thinker.

The Question of Heidegger’s Plato Truth as Correctness in Relation to Education Heidegger is often criticized in Platonic circles, Continental “phenomenological” Platonic interpretation, and Heideggerian scholarship for developing and espousing a “doctrinal” view of Plato’s philosophy. For example, Francisco Gonzalez states emphatically that the “figure who normally bears the name ‘Plato’ in Heidegger’s text is a dogmatic metaphysician,” and, we add, the first systematic metaphysician and, as related directly to our concern, “the complete antithesis to the figure Heidegger himself names ‘Socrates’”1 Against Heidegger, Drew Hyland offers a decidedly “non-doctrinal” reading of Plato, stating, “Heidegger’s reading of the cave analogy in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth is cursory and orthodox [doctrinal] to the point of [being] tedious.”2 As stated, to embrace Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s philosophy (metaphysics) as doctrinal in nature is not limited to Platonic scholars, for Otto Poggler, commentating on Heidegger’s path of thinking, also claims that Heidegger presents Plato as a doctrinal metaphysician, whose philosophy is grounded in a systematic view of both metaphysics and education; a philosophy that contributes to facilitating the birth and flourishing of the historical movement of secular humanism.3 Prior to attempting to understand 1

F. Gonzalez, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in: eds., S. Rappe & K. Rachana A companion to Socrates. (United Kingdom: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 431. 2 D. Hyland. Finite Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 141. 3 O. Poggler. Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans., D. Magurshak and S. Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987). It is crucial to examine the term doctrinal or idealist in relation to Platonic scholarship in order to highlight characteristics consistent with systematic readings, as we have pointed out, that are relatable in some degree to Heideggerian interpretations of Plato. These characteristics of “doctrinal” or “idealist” readings are also linked to the analytic tradition, e.g., read Plato as a systematic metaphysical idealist and embrace the notions that (1) Knowledge “produced” by the dialectic is propositional in nature; (2) The dialectic, as method sine qua non of the Philosopher-Rulers, culminates in

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Heidegger’s Socrates, it is crucial to address the question of Heidegger’s “doctrinal” Plato, because it is possible to encounter a different Plato that escapes rigid classification as a doctrinal philosopher, i.e., in terms of the systematic metaphysician present to Heidegger’s readings and found in at least three texts other than the well-known essay we later examine, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” Those sources are The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, On the Essence of Truth, and “Will to Power as Art.” As Fried observes, although in Plato there undoubtedly occurs “the transition of truth as alƝtheia from unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) to the correctness of representation,” this “error” is irreducible to the expression of a tenet or principle within an explicit philosophical doctrine, for we must be clear that when Heidegger employs the term “doctrine” (Lehre), he refers to “‘that which, within what is said, remains unsaid,’ rather than a self-conscious teaching of the thinker.”4 Although space does not allow for an overly detailed exploration of this issue, I examine, in connection to Heidegger’s writings, the scholarship of both Greg Fried and Richard Capobianco in the effort to arrive at a deeper and re-conceived understanding of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato. Fried, in his reading of Plato as a non-doctrinal thinker, points out that many times Heidegger “insists even in specific readings of Plato’s texts [that] he is confronting not Plato but Platonism.”5 This issue becomes explicit when examining Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician in the “Will to Power as Art,” where it is clear that in reading Nietzsche, Heidegger is dealing with “Platonism” and not Plato as he might be understood when traced back to his original dialogues. There is a gaping historical chasm between Plato the philosopher and Plato the systematic, doctrinal metaphysician, i.e., between Plato and Platonism. According to Heidegger, it is Nietzsche, when presenting in Twilight of the Idols (“How the ‘True World’ Finally Became Fable”) the “portrayal of

noesis by transcending the hypothetical method in the production of certain truth; (3) Knowledge accruing via the dialectic is of the essential “Forms” and ultimately the “Idea” of the Good; and (4) The “positive” experience of the dialectic, which is equated with “Socratic” education, is substantive, definitive, and reproducible. For a decidedly doctrinal reading of Plato, see: B. Sahakian and M. Sahakian. Plato (New Jersey: Twain Publishers, 1976). 4 G. Fried. “Back to the Cave: A Platonic rejoinder to Heideggerian postmodernism,” in: eds., D. Hyland and P. Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 157. 5 Ibid.

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the history of Platonism and its overcoming,”6 who establishes and attaches a doctrinal, two-tiered metaphysics to Plato, as famously represented by the irreconcilable division between the sensuous realm of terrestrial dwelling and the supersensuous, eternal realm of the transcendental Forms. Thus, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche’s understanding emerges through creative interpretation, for Plato’s original work “is not yet Platonism, [and further, the] ‘true world’ is not yet the object of a doctrine, [rather] it is what lights up in becoming present; it is pure radiance without cover.”7 Fried argues that Plato moves away from “the conflictual heart of truth as unconcealment” in favor of the movement toward truth as “genuine transcendence,” and in doing so, Plato misses, or better, fails to formalize what remains “unsaid” and only intimated in his philosophy, namely, that we “cannot possess [truth as alƝtheia] because we do not own or master history or fate.”8 Moving forward, I show that Heidegger’s philosophy is akin to Plato’s original thought, or view of philosophy, in more ways than many commentators might care to admit.9 Recall the meaning of Lehre in Heidegger from the discussion above, and relate this understanding to Capobianco’s illuminating analysis of light and lighting in Heidegger’s reading of Plato, which reveals that in Heidegger’s reading, what is and remains “unsaid,” that which resides beneath the surface of what Plato “said,” admittedly, through representational imagery—and not the logos proper—is that the Idea of the “Good,” which is beyond the Forms, is also beyond, and so more primordial than, either beings or Being(ness). This indicates that Plato’s thought is occurring in the midst of, but is unable to explicitly formalize, the lighting and enabling power (dem ursprünglichen Licht) of Being itself. As Capobianco contends, “Plato’s Idea of the Good is no ‘it’ at all,”10 in terms of an immutable, eternal essence; neither is it a normative ideal toward which to

6

M. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes 1 & 2., trans., D. F. Krell (San Francsco: Harper & Row, 1979), 203. 7 Ibid., 204. 8 Fried, “Back to the Cave, 170. 9 Although there is an ongoing scholarly debate about the doctrinal nature of Heidegger’s Plato, it is certainly the case that in the tradition of Platonism, Plato is read as either having a complete system expressed in an esoteric manner to initiates or a developing system evolving across Plato’s “early,” “middle,” and “late” periods of his life and philosophy, and indeed, as related to our themes, such interpretations of Plato as a systematic metaphysician are still taught in universities to philosophy students. 10 R. Capobianco. Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 105.

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strive; rather, it is “to be understood as the (temporal) ‘enabling’ (ermöglichend) of all beings in their beingness,”11 representing “the condition of the possibility,” for “all knowledge and truth about beings in their beingness.”12 Following Heidegger, Capobianco brings attention to, in relation to the cave allegory, the sun (‘KOLR9) as the primordial light (MZ9), as the enabling power (GXQDPL9) that makes possible and links together (]XJRQ), i.e., the ontological relationship between, what is seen in its presencing (‘RURPHQD) and the “seeing” relating to the original experience or event of presencing (‘RUDQ) as a phenomenon in terms of alƝtheia. Plato did relate the Forms to light and lighting as a “kind of letting-through—namely, a letting something be known as what it is in its full look (eidos), presence, whatness, beingness,”13 and although this “aspect of Plato’s thinking ultimately served as the foundation for the Western onto-theological tradition with its focus on timeless and immutable ‘essences’ of particular things,”14 as Capobianco importantly points out, “the allegory reveals to us that Plato’s thinking did not come to rest at this point,”15 and with the Idea of the Good (as the lighting of Being itself), he appears to be thinking beyond the Forms and did not, as Aristotle claims, organize such thinking into a coherent and systematic account of metaphysical essences, paradigms, or concrete universals. Drawing a crucial connection between Heidegger’s Plato and Heidegger’s philosophy, Capobianco demonstrates that the notion of die Lichtung in Being and Time is traceable to Heidegger’s early readings of Plato and develops in Heidegger’s later thought. The lighting and enabling power of Being that Plato intimates in the allegory is the event and occurrence of “lighting” within which Dasein participates when revealing and founding and grounding a world and appropriating a historical destiny.16

11

Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, 106. Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 T. Sheehan, “Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics,” in: eds., R. Polt and G. Fried A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 7-8. Turning to Sheehan, the “enabling power” of which I am speaking makes possible and so is “responsible for the correlation between an entity’s givenness and the dative of that givenness.” This enabling power is named by Heidegger as “ein drittes,” and insofar as it “makes Parousia possible, this enabling power is epekeina tes parousias, ‘beyond’ beings-as-givenness, in a way that is analogous 12

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Ontologically, Dasein is set within “the light that is the source of all that is seen in the light, [and not] in the first place, an ontic entity that possesses the ‘natural light’ of reason,”17 and though Heidegger does not weave the interpretation of the allegory into Being and Time, it is, as Capobianco argues, “clearly in the background of his thinking,”18 for Heidegger appropriates “Plato’s metaphor of light in order to articulate his primary concern with that which enables the truth of all beings in their beingness.”19 To return to the understanding of Lehre in Heidegger, based on the forgoing analysis, I am not reading Plato as a thinker consciously aware of establishing or developing a system or doctrine of thought in the modern sense of the term. What is instead suggested is that due to Plato’s inability to properly formalize or “say” what was always already present to his philosophical experience—that which ultimately remained “unsaid”— the essence of truth as alƝtheia as primordial concealment and the concern for Being as such were issues subsequently covered over and obscured. In direct and succinct terms: Since the enabling power of Being, which is rooted in its recession into finitude, was overlooked by Plato, so too was the essence of truth as alƝtheia as primordial unconcealment, which is linked ineluctably and intimately to the phenomenon of Being’s unfolding. As related directly to my concerns, Heidegger observes that Plato’s allegory is an experience of alƝtheia, but in Plato’s philosophy, “the fundamental experience from which that word D-OKTHLD arose is already disappearing”20—i.e., the originary pre-Socratic experience of truth—and thus it does not come to light in its primordiality or essence because Plato, perhaps through falling into error due to a “failure” (Verfehlung) or “mistake” (Versehen), is unable to formalize truth in its essence, in the antagonistic “characteristic of MXVL9 (being), to the NUXSWHVTDL MLOHL [“nature’s affinity for remaining hidden”], thus to hiddenness as such and not just to the false, not just to illusion.”21 This error, through which alƝtheia is neither clarified nor grasped, spawns Western metaphysics, for in Plato the “word [alƝtheia] and its semantic power is already on the road

to what Plato called to agathon [the Good].” Sheehan’s reading on this issue lines up, in many ways, with Capobianco’s interpretation as presented above. 17 Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, 106. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 107. 20 M. Heidegger. Plato’s Sophist, trans., R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 8. 21 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 8.

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to impoverishment and trivialization.”22 Thus, although Plato’s philosophy marks for Heidegger the beginning of Western onto-theological metaphysics, it is possible to interpret this “beginning” in terms that are other than the belief that Plato himself formulated and founded a doctrinal metaphysics, arguing instead that the systematization of Platonic metaphysics was actually achieved by Plato’s successors.23 Despite this insight, which should inspire rethinking Plato as a doctrinal thinker, I move to examine several topics that are unambiguous in Heidegger’s reading of Plato, namely, the influence of Platonic metaphysics—or Platonism—on our conception and experience of truth and how this understanding shapes our practice and experience of education, and I approach these issues in terms of “a questioning which in a fundamental way changes Dasein, man, and the understanding of being.”24 “Plato’s Doctrine (Lehre) of Truth,” one of Heidegger’s most well-known readings of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, elucidates a view of metaphysics that emerges from Plato’s philosophy of the essence of truth (alƝthiea) with the concomitant understanding of how the essence of truth ultimately determines an authentic view of education as paideia. Authentic education (paideia), for Heidegger, in his reading of Plato and the Allegory is represented in a series of “movements” as the turning around (periagǀgƝ) of the entire soul back to itself enlightened, i.e., an authentic education “lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first leading us to the place of essential Being accustoming us to it.”25 This, however, is the precise form of originary education that a Platonic view of metaphysics, with its privileging of presencing over concealment and its focus on the Being of beings as opposed to Being qua Being, ultimately fails to realize. As immersed in the Platonic tradition, we experience the essence of truth in terms of an epistemological issue and not an ontological reality, for it is taken as the agreement or relation between idea and thing as expressed through a locution or proposition, where the locus of truth is encountered, e.g., as in the history of Western philosophy and the understanding of adaequatio intellectus et rei (“agreement between intellect (idea) and thing”), expressed through the Correspondence Model of Truth. According to Heidegger, due to this misinterpretation of alƝtheia, Plato’s vision of knowing and learning, or “education,” does not rise to the level of paideia and rather is represented 22

Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 8. M. Heidegger. Pathmarks, ed., W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 145. 24 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 68. 25 Ibid. 23

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by gignǀschein, the process of “knowing by way of seeing,” and this is linked by Heidegger with the Greek idein in relation to idea in terms of homoiosis, as exclusively the overall “agreement of the act of knowing with the thing itself” as seen.26 Truth is inseparable from education, and following this line of thought, since the “first beginning” and Plato’s error, education moves away from an original notion of paideia as it is instantiated within the soul’s relation to the truth of Being; learning is no longer an open questioning grounded in finitude, mystery, and primordial hiddenness, attuned in wonder or “astonishment” (das Erstaunen), and is instead systematically “harnessed in a relation to looking, apprehending, thinking, and asserting.”27 This is because, according to Heidegger, education’s ontological origin in the experience of alƝtheia is occluded, and so we fail to realize the deeper truth that alƝtheia can never be arbitrarily possessed like propositional truths and passed along without dissembling “at some point in order to instruct or lecture other people.”28 This leads to a view of education that is directed toward the accumulation and possession of knowledge—established truths above falsehoods. Indeed, as Heidegger argues, if we were to receive a so-called “good education,” we would then “know everything possible to know in all realms of science, art, and the like, [and we would continue to] acquire each day what is newest and most valuable.”29 This is a view of education, resulting from the fallout of Platonism, which can be equated with models of teaching-learning instantiated within contemporary education; it is a form of education that G. A. Scott, in his reading of Plato’s Socrates’ non-doctrinal practice of education, claims is akin to an additive model of education, the very type of education—the filling up of empty vessels, the piling and building up of knowledge—that Plato’s Socrates continually decries in the dialogues,30 which stands radically opposed to an integrative model of education, which might be associated with an original form of paideia. In relation to these thoughts, Heidegger observes that when thinking in education is conceived as a “technique for explaining highest causes, [it comes to an] end by slipping out of its element,”31 and it then achieves its “validity as technƝ, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom 26

Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 177. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 182. 28 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 66. 29 M. Heidegger. Basic Writings, ed., D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1993), 58. 30 G. A. Scott. Socrates as Educator (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). 31 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 221. 27

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matter,”32 in terms of what we understand as the standardization of education, and, as Heidegger stresses, this presupposes that the standardization occurring in education already lives as a cultural concern. Drawing on Heidegger’s interpretation, I note that today in education we encounter a technological-and-quantitative view of the three educational issues this essay discusses: (1) Method is understood as a top-down, transposable schema for “problem-solving” (scientific method) or “teaching”; (2) Truth is conceived (and experienced) as the destination to which method inevitably leads, i.e., knowledge as something that is acquired, possessed, and validated by one or another epistemological model (e.g., Correspondence Model of Truth); and (3) Learning is a controllable, predictable, and terminal activity that occurs through the successful application of a given method, indicating that truth has been procured, and is then assessed to indicate the student’s or learner’s educational achievement.

Heidegger’s Socrates Pure Thinking in the Sway of the Unfolding of Essential Truth Heidegger labels Socrates the “purest thinker of the West,”33 and it is this classification as a pure thinker that I am committed to unpacking as it relates to Socrates’ understanding and practice of dialectic, his view of “truth,” and his understanding of philosophy (or thinking) as a process of original learning (paideia). Heidegger observes that Socrates is courageously “drawn to what withdraws” in the process of enacting the authentic process of thinking, which draws him into “the enigmatic and 32

Heidegger, Basic Writings, 221. M. Heidegger. What is Called Thinking? trans, F. Wieck and J. G. Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17. It is necessary to include, to this definition of “pure thinking” in relation to Socrates, another reason why Heidegger considers him a “pure thinker”: Socrates was unique in that he understood and embraced that what he philosophized and thought was ineffable in terms of written communication, and this of course extended for Heidegger beyond even the type of “allegory,” “metaphor,” and “mythology” Plato employed. “For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness,” declares Heidegger, “must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them,” for Socrates knew that when thinking, he was pointing “at something which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech.” The so-called elusive, hidden, and original “truths” which Socrates pursued could not be formulated linguistically, via the logos.

33

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therefore mutable nearness of its appeal, [despite being] far away from what withdraws [and even though] the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever.”34 This instantiates for Heidegger the “living context” of thinking, a context facilitating the “draft” of the dynamic counter-striving of lighting and primordial concealing, and Socrates, according to Heidegger, did “nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it,” 35 and this is why, according to Heidegger, he was the purest thinker of the West. To bring clarity to this notion of thinking in terms of an immersion in the “draft,” I turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of what he terms Da-sein’s Being-historical thinking (inceptual/mindful thinking), which is an original way of doing philosophy, or more correctly, thinking, “according to more originary basic stance,” within the context sheltering the unfolding of “the question of the truth of be-ing,” which is no longer a “thinking about something and representing something objective,”36 but rather a thinking of matters in the poietic manner of bringing forth what is thought in its incompleteness while at once retaining and sheltering traces and intimations of its supreme and primordial power, which inspires the respect for the ineffability of that which is thought, for there is a refusal of that-which-is-thought to be brought to full disclosure or rendered wholly intelligible in language. For Heidegger, it is Being qua Being or the essential truth of Being that is thought of as the grounding ontological topic. With respect to Socrates, as is known from the dialogues (especially the “early” dialogues, which are aporetic in nature), what Heidegger speaks of might be related to the Being or ineffable and mysterious essence of the virtues, which Socrates continually and relentlessly questions within the context of his ever-renewed thought and examination. Heidegger claims that inceptivemindful thinking is attuned in an original mode of questioning, which draws in and holds the thinker in the primordial “sway” of the relationship between thinking and the essential truth of Being. This type of thinking does not come to an end, for it is never a means to the end of truth that might terminate the thinking, and so is always actively underway as an ever-renewed event of thinking and questioning, or we might say, of learning. It abides amid Being’s essential unfolding, and as an experience of the coming-to-be and passing-away of Being, it breaks open and holds open what is most question-worthy. Heidegger claims that authentic thinkers are enraptured and attuned within the exigent and distressing need 34

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 17. Ibid. 36 M. Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, eds., P. E. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2000), 258. 35

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of “holding [themselves] within the essential sway of truth.”37 This form of thinking shelters the mystery, or Being’s recession into hiddenness (Entrückung) that initially facilitates unhiddenness (Berücking), illuminating beings in such a way that the event and truth of Being unfolds in its most primordial manner. This is one way to interpret Heidegger’s comments regarding Socrates’ pure mode of thinking, and in phenomenological nondoctrinal readings of Plato’s Socrates, it is possible to understand the questioning-context of the dialectic as sheltering and instantiating the unfolding of Socrates’ mode or practice of questioning, his mode of dialectic examination, which is directed toward the most question-worthy issues. Heidegger claims that Socrates thinks and hence is driven by a single thought, for he repeatedly thinks “on no other topic than what things are [and continues to say] the same thing about the same thing,”38 and, as stated, this for Socrates is an attempt to wrest from concealment the Being of the virtues. Socrates thinks the same thing because the matter demands the unwavering dedication to continually return to it, responding to its enigmatic withdrawal and appeal, because its very essence resists being exhausted by the questioning; it defies acquisition and possession, and this is because, as stated, what Socrates questions always remains essentially open-ended and hence question-worthy. To think such thoughts we must first, states Heidegger, “incline toward what addresses itself to thought [or] that which of itself gives food for thought,” and this he identifies as a gift, and the “gift of what must properly be thought about, is what we call most thought-provoking,”39 i.e., that which is most question-worthy. This I relate directly to the the question Socrates asks, which finds its origin (archƝ) or beginning (Ursprung) in an attunement or pathos Heidegger calls “astonishment” (das Erstaunen) as related to “wonder” (thauma), and as Socrates explains in the Theaetetus, this attunement grounds philosophy.40 When talking of the “beginning,” Heidegger references 37

Heidegger, Contributions, 358. M. Heidegger. What is Philosophy? trans., W. Kluback & J. T. Wilde (New York: Twayne Publishers 1958), 76. 39 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 17. 40 Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, 83. In relation to our treatment of the attunement of originary thinking, Capobianco reminds us that pathos is related to paschein, the suffering and enduring through a mood or mode of attunement, and the Greeks’ and Heidegger’s understanding of pathos “is far removed from the modern psychological understanding of inward subjective feelings and emotions.” Rather, pathos is more “originally understood as the way in which the human being is ‘attuned’ and ‘disposed’ by Being.” 38

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archƝ, which “names that from which something proceeds,” but that which emerges never truly leaves behind its origin or source, for the beginning is that which produces and also holds reigns over what is produced, for “the verb achein expresses, that which governs,”41 i.e., astonishment and wonder give birth to and continue to nourish, invigorate, and direct Socrates’ ever-renewed philosophical inquiry. In short, turning to Capobianco, “philosophia begins—and ends—in ‘astonishment’.”42 In and through “wonder” we are set within a relationship to what is inquired into, and here recall my initial comments regarding Socrates and the “draft” of thinking, wherein that which is questioned, that which is essential, “retreats” from our advances, as we are held in a state of “wonder” or “astonishment” and simultaneously drawn into the inquiry and secured there by that which recedes or retreats from our grasp. From out of this phenomenon what Heidegger terms “original questions” spring forth, and original questions never terminate in definitive answers, they can never be closed-off or solved in terms of problems, and the most original question for Socrates, as Heidegger informs us, is the “Greek ti estin,” or “What is the essence of x?” Since philosophy has its beginning (archƝ) Erstaunen, original questions also have their origin in the pathos of astonishment. This beginning, according to Heidegger, gives rise to a questioning that “pushes [Socrates] into the open,”43 and as an original questioning, it “transforms itself (as does every genuine questioning), and casts a new space over and through everything.”44 The type of truth consistent with doctrinal or idealist readings of Plato’s Socrates focuses on knowledge that can be grounded, as we saw in Heidegger’s reading of Plato, in “correctness,” but contrarily, Heidegger’s Socrates might be said, as Kirkland contends, to devote himself to the pursuit of truth, which presupposes an “attitude toward his subject matter in which he does not impose his will upon it,”45 because it can’t be a pure object of his thought. Rather he “aims to allow it to come to light in his discourse.”46 This is strikingly similar to the manner in which Plato in Letter Seven describes philosophical understanding as an original occurrence of alƝtheia, which manifests in dialogue, but cannot at all be 41

Hedegger, What is Called Thinking? 18. Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, eds. G. Fried and R. Poly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 32. 45 S. Kirkland. The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2010), 51. 46 Ibid. 42

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expressed or captured precisely “in words as other studies can, but instead, from living with the subject itself in frequent dialogue a light is [eventually] kindled and a leaping flame comes to [settle] in the soul where it presently nourishes itself” (341b-d).47 I want to explore this notion of Socratic truth as it might relate to Heidegger’s philosophy in a bit more detail by looking to the early Greek experience of alƝtheia, which is by now quite familiar to readers of Heidegger, as an encounter with unhiddenness (un-concealment) linked intimately with hiddenness (concealment) as the ground for its possibility, the possibility of entities presencing or showing up for our appropriation—in their givenness—in the first instance. As previously stated, Heidegger finds the original understanding of alƝtheia in Heraclitus’ Fragment 123: MXVL9… NUXSWHVTLD MLOHL, which might be translated in a straightforward manner as “Nature has an affinity for hiding or remaining hidden.” To relate this idea to the language of the “sway” within which Socrates thinks, it is within the midst of the sway that the Being of beings “loves to conceal itself.”48 This Heideggerian understanding of alƝtheia is stressed in Sean Kirkland’s non-idealist reading of Plato’s Socrates in pursuit of the phenomenal Being of the virtues. In the course of questioning and interrogating the initial appearance of the virtue present to the doxai, as opposed to definitions or ideas filling the content of consciousness, “what emerges into truth through the questioning of the doxa with Socrates is ‘what virtue is’,”49 but this truth cannot be brought to stand in propositional language, and rather must remain in an incomplete form. Indeed, Socrates’ living-with the appearance and instantiation of this truth, which like a flashing light attunes, nourishes, and enlivens the soul, represents the true success or positive aspect of the dialectic, for “it marks the [ontological] limit of virtue’s appearing to us, disturbing our doxai and pointing thereby beyond them to what is present in doxa only in exceeding it.”50 In his analysis of the pathein-of-truth (“suffering under” truth), Kirkland argues that the experience of alƝtheia is not only “excessive,” but can also be “dangerous” in the sense of opening us up to an encounter with 47

The citations of passages from Plato’s dialogues are from: J. M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). I note for the reader where emphasis has been added to the text and where translations have been altered. 48 M Heidegger. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans., T. Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 9. 49 Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning, 115. 50 Ibid.

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ta deinon, or the awe-inspiring presence of truth, which “resists being delimited and made intelligible, not merely frustrating our specific expectations, but radically calling into question what we presumed to be the limits of ‘what is,’ even of the possible.”51 Here, we can understand Heidegger’s claim regarding Socrates as a “pure thinker” demonstrating the courage to hold himself in the dialectic’s unfolding and resisting the temptation to flee-in-the-face of truth, to which many interlocutors ultimately fall victim. AlƝthiea, as philosophical understanding, manifests as the flashing flame within a momentary revelation, as an intimation of truth, where there is the concomitant movement or recession of what disappears into mystery, and certain aspects of the virtue Socrates interrogates—including its very essence—remain concealed. Thus, as opposed to the type of propositional or axiomatic certainty that many analytic or Anglo interpreters of Plato link with the (potential) philosopher-rulers’ practice of the dialectic in the Republic, it is possible to grasp Socrates’ notion of philosophical understanding, as would be consistent with Heidegger’s portrayal of Socrates, as intimated and poetized by Heidegger, in the following manner, which I have formalized: (1) It is a form of insight that although emerging from an interactive and discursive process of dialogue, is itself non-discursive; (2) It is nonpropositional, but it is irreducible to rote or basic “know-how,” this because it is both an ontological and a “normative” form of insight; (3) It is manifest and comes-to-presence only in the midst of dialogue or the practice of the philosophical method; (4) It is neither wholly subjective nor objective and rather mediates both realms, and it is also reflexive in nature as a potential form of “self-knowledge.” It is now to the issue of the practice of dialectic in Heidegger’s Socrates that I turn. When separating the sophist off from Socrates—or from Socratic philosophy—the real philosopher, the ontos philosophos, Heidegger describes Socrates as embodying the vocation, task, or occupation that looks upon the bios, as this term and concept is set off from zǀe. This indicates for Heidegger that the philosopher is not concerned with the life of things and entities set within the “nexus of animals and plants, of everything that crawls and flies,”52 but rather directed toward the “sense of existence, the leading of a life, which is characterized by a determinate telos, a telos functioning for the bios, itself as an object of praxis,”53 and for this reason, philosophy is a way-of-Being in the world. The philosopher

51

Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning, 115. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 168. 53 Ibid. 52

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is concerned with living out various kinds of life, and most importantly, makes a determination regarding the best type of life to live. For Socrates, as already stated, this is a life in pursuit of virtue, excellence, and the “good”; it is a life that is inseparable from the practice of the dialectic or dialektikƝ—the practice and way-of-Being that is at once a living with the logoi. Unlike typical doctrinal or idealist readings of Plato that view the dialectic as a tool or trusted method for arriving at certain truth, truth grasped in and through noƝin—beyond dianoia where the hypothetical method is jettisoned, as described in the Republic—Heidegger focuses on the dialectic’s flaws, revealing problems that Plato does not overcome. Gonzalez, in his reading of the Sophist, informs us that according to Heidegger, the “logos pervading all forms of disclosing … has a tendency to conceal”54; as such, what the dialectic aims at is what amounts to the transcendence of language or the logos, by way of “proceeding through (dia) logos,” and “its ultimate aim, that towards which it is inherently directed must be a pure seeing or noein beyond logos.”55 However, the dialectic can never accomplish this end and so has an “inherent tendency toward a ‘pure seeing’ that it can never attain.”56 At first blush, this appears to render the dialectic a failed project. However, this does not sound the death-knell for the dialectic in Socratic philosophy, for there are positive elements associated with the dialectic as practiced by Socrates, despite its failing to rise to the level of epistemological trustworthiness granted in doctrinal or idealist readings of Plato. It is successful within limits, and there are positive aspects of the Socratic dialectic that relate to truth, education, and the potential development of our character and disposition (hƝxis). If, as Heidegger argues, the dialectic is limited, what then can it accomplish as related directly to a “Socratic” philosophy? In a response requiring some explanation, I show that the dialectic is both essential and beneficial to a philosophical life, as described above, in that it instantiates a living-practice and way-of-Being that is educational or heuristically educative in its essence, in terms of Heidegger’s understanding of paideia as initially described. The dialectic is a process that is disclosive; however, according to Gonzalez, what it discloses is disclosed “indirectly, negatively, and ‘reflexively’ (i.e., through the process of philosophy itself).”57 When speaking of disclosing things “negatively,” this for Heidegger means 54 F. Gonzalez, “On the way to Sophia: Heidegger, on Plato’s Dialectic, Ethics, and Sophist,” Academia.com, 2004, 18. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 19 57 Ibid., 38.

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“denial by way of legein,”58 which indicates that “saying ‘no,’ is a letting be seen,” but always in a limited and incomplete manner. Negation in the dialectic for Heidegger, and here I include Socrates, possesses a “disclosive character,” in that within the denial of a line of argumentation or position, an encounter with the aporetic breakdown of examination, “within the concrete [but limited] uncovering of beings,” serves a “purifying [cathartic] function, so that negation itself acquires a productive character.”59 Negation is understood by Heidegger as an integral component of the Socratic dialectic, which is thought of as a process of “NDTDUVL9 of the DJRLD by HOHJFR9,” which works by “setting the GRFDL against each other through the VXQDJHLQ HL9 ‘HQ”60 - i.e., the purification of ignorance through the questioning and synthesizing or the gathering of beliefs and opinions held by those who are engaged in the dialogue, which importantly includes the process of winnowing out those beliefs and opinions determined untenable. In this process, what is positive for Socrates is the partial and limited revelation of the matter under discussion, i.e., the partial appearance of and glimpse into elusive phenomenal Being of the virtues. Here recall Plato’s claim in Letter Seven regarding the leaping flame of truth that settles in the soul, which transforms it through periagǀgƝ, or the soul’s turning back or around to itself enlightened, which is an “educative” (paidƝutic) occurrence or event. What Heidegger indicates about what is positive in the dialectic is linked intimately with a Socratic attitude, which achieves the “positive only in actually carrying it out,”61 by living within the draft and sway of the inquiry and not in terms of the dialectic producing positive results in terms of truth that somehow stands at the end, and hence beyond, the inquiry itself,62 i.e., we are transformed only within the dialectic, only within the process itself, and not by some result it might produce.63 How this 58

Gonzalez, “On the way to Sophia,” 19. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 388. 60 Ibid., 260. 61 Ibid., 368 62 Ibid. 63 M. Heidegger. The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans., J. van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 11. Heidegger defines phenomenology in precisely the same manner, as a “method” within which truth manifests that cannot be jettisoned once we have arrived at it, e.g., when talking of interpreting facticity, Heidegger is clear that this interpretation can be nothing other than “living” it, for only in interpretive activity is Dasein’s possibility for “becoming and being for itself” made known and pursued; ‘HUPKQHXHLQ (the interpreting of facticity), is a method for living and acquiring “an understanding of itself.” 59

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enlightenment occurs, however, is not clearly explicated by Heidegger; however, in relation to his reading, I explore this issue by turning to nondoctrinal readings of Plato’s Socrates’s practice of dialectic in the attempt to show that, although never culminating in noetic insight of the so-called “truth” of the essence of virtue, the logoi, in rigorous, well-meaning discourse, does demonstrate a revelatory capacity in the process of questioning, refuting (negating), and winnowing out opinions and beliefs that are shown to be problematic and questionable. Heidegger describes the practice of the dialectic as a vigorous questioning (GLHUZWDQ) with the purpose of shaking one out of familiar and complacent modes of knowing whereby many doxai are brought together and set in tension in relation to that which is questioned. Within the unfolding interrogation, the doxai “slap each other in the face,”64 and there occurs the “casting out [DSDOODJK] of ungenuine GR[DL,” and a “clearing away,” or a “removal of what stands in the way of the PDTKPDWD, the proper positive learning,”65 which demonstrates the function of “HNEDOOHLQ,”66 the act of casting out ignorance and transcending DPDTLD in a way that “clarifies” or “purifies” (NDTDUVL9) the soul. Indeed, when Heidegger describes the context of the Socratic dialectic, and here recall Heidegger’s description of the philosopher’s life as introduced above, it should not be conceived as “a dwelling with the material content of knowledge,”67 i.e., not a process privileging contentover-method, or propositional knowledge over a more vague and limited form of understanding. Rather, it is a matter of “the Being of Dasein itself: to what extent does it dwell in DOKTHXHLQ [understanding/truth of the virtues and the “good” life] or in DJQRL [ignorance of the virtues and the “good” life].”68 But how, returning to Heidegger’s critique of the dialectic, as a practice driven by and given structure within language, a process that cannot transcend language in the pursuit to arrive at a pure form of seeing (noƝsis) that is beyond the logos, is it possible to imagine truth emerging from a practice driven by and at once limited by language? Gonzalez observes that what philosophy requires is a form of speech, or manner of approaching discourse, that “breaks through speech in a process of ‘speaking for and against,’ [in a way that might direct our] attention beyond what is said, thereby leading us more and more to the matter under 64

Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 261. Ibid., 262. 66 Ibid., 258. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 262. 65

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discussion and letting it be seen.”69 If we take into consideration what Heidegger has said regarding the Being of Dasein as representing the true philosopher’s concern in relation to what he claims about dialogue, perhaps it is possible to suggest a response to this query and concern related to Socratic dialectic. Heidegger informs us that if dialogue focuses exclusively on what is directly said and what might be directly known through this saying, dialogue “becomes haulting and fruitless.”70 However, if inquirers in the dialogue situate themselves in close proximity to the Being of that which is interrogated, they potentially dwell “in the soul of the dialogue” where the questioners and speakers are “led into the unspoken,” but in this case, what emerges from the logos is irreducible to it.71 This for Heidegger, as we have discussed, represents the context of original questioning, which gives rise to speaking in and from out of the “site of thought in its relation to the essential truth of Being.”72 To approach an understanding of how this movement into the unspoken through the logos might occur in the unfolding of the Socratic dialectic, we consider Gonzalez’s and Gadamer’s insightful analyses of Plato’s Letter Seven, focusing on the manner in which the four ways of knowing contend in order to open a space for the presencing of the “fifth way,” or brief insight into a truth barely seen in the midst of the dialectic. I now consider how this phenomenon might occur through the winnowing process of clearing away the negative and making space for the positive in dialectic, as Heidegger describes above. In Letter Seven, Plato discusses four ways of knowing: through (1) Names/words, (2) Images/figures, (3) Propositions, and (4) Resulting insight (knowing). Plato also discusses a “fifth way” that emerges from out of these, and it is a form of philosophical insight (philosophical understanding) that he stresses is ineffable; it cannot be spoken of like other things philosophers discuss, and I note that it certainly does not possess the degree of certainty required to ground any systematic doctrine of philosophy (EP VII 341c). Whereas Heidegger elicits the imagery of the doxai “slapping against each other” within dialogic exchange, in both Gonzalez and Gadamer, we encounter a similar metaphor, namely, that of the dialectic unfolding as a process wherein the doxai or the “ways of knowing” are rubbed against each other, and this relates to the notion of language’s potential transparency in

69

Gonzalez, On the Way to Sophia, 18. M. Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking, trans., J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 78. 71 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 78. 72 Ibid. 70

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relation to the Greek term that Plato employs, tribein, “to rub down.”73 Ideally, in the dialectic, we might imagine words fading into the background so that partial meaning shines forth. However, as Gadamer contends, in the “rubbing” together of the four ways in dialectic, language fails to achieve the level of full transparency required to let the “thing itself” (Being of virtue) move to the fore unimpeded so as to be seen in the fullness of its self-showing.74 Now, consider what Gonzalez contends about the Greek term tribein, as a “process of a vigorous rubbing that wears things down,”75 or wears them away, and it is possible to understand the process of truth-happening in Plato’s Letter Seven, as this relates to the “negation” stressed in Heidegger’s reading of the dialectic: As we move through the four ways, rubbing each against the other, there occurs a “wearing down” of the language, so to speak. The more intensely we seek to clarify the names, images, and propositions we employ to ground our knowledge, the more the words/images begin to wear down and away; they recede, as it were, and a partial and momentary transparency of language occurs, and the fleeting light of truth shines forth, like a leaping flame. In more direct terms, according to Gonzalez, through the “process of question and answer in which we expose the weakness of the words, propositions, and images we use”76—through negation—we are afforded a momentary and partial vista into truth, and “just barely glimpse through the cracks [opened in the process] the true being which they all attempt but fail to express.”77 It is possible to link the “fifth way” of “barely” knowing the “thing itself” with the moment when language reaches its limited, but disclosive and “positive” potential as a transparent medium for alƝtheia.

73 Original passages from Plato’s Letter Seven will assist the reader in understanding the analysis we have provided: “Only when all of these things— names, definitions, and visual and other perceptions—have been rubbed against one another and tested, pupil and teacher asking, and answering questions in good will and without enmity—only then, when reason and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, can they illuminate the nature of any object (344b) … [but] this knowledge is not something that can be into words like other sciences; but only after long-continued discourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like a light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born of the soul and straightaway nourishes itself” (341c). 74 H-G. Gadamer. Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutic Studies of Plato, trans., C. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 105. 75 Ibid., 265. 76 F. Gonzalez. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 268. 77 Ibid.

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This is not, however, to indicate that this form of insight transcends language usage entirely, or that it is a moment when truth is fully disclosed with no dissembling, because this moment of truthhappening occurs only in and through the vigorous use of language, which is always grounded in human limitation and radical finitude. As Gonzalez stresses, in a way related to this reading of Heidegger’s Socrates, this unique, fleeing, and fragile instance of philosophical insight as described is not and can never be “the kind of knowledge that will put an end to all inquiry or that can be ‘grasped’ once and for all,”78 for it requires everrenewed attempts to bring it to light, which requires the participants in the dialectic, as Heidegger has stressed in relation to Socrates, to strive to situate and hold themselves in the draft of the inquiry, for as Plato teaches, whatever “we learn” must be “learned together” [synerchomai], through long and earnest labor” (EP VII 344b). To further contribute to this line of thought as related to a theme already discussed, Kirkland stresses that the process of “truth-happening” highlights the ontological distance that the human being is situated in from full disclosure of truth, which is always given in an obscure, oblique, and partially veiled manner. However, the dedicated participants in pursuit of truth agree to inhabit the space, the “site of distance from but nonetheless toward the being of virtue,”79 and this indicates that we “abide with doxa while pointing beyond it and to its limits.”80 In relation to what Kirkland identifies as the deinos associated with philosophical insight, what has been described is a distressing distance from Being, but one that is, in a sense and in an important way, wonderous and alluring—evoking the mood of “astonishment”—which establishes our relationship to issues that remain “as concealed, hidden, and thus questionworthy.”81 We are drawn, as Heidegger indicates about Socrates, to the pursuit of that which withdraws from our grasp, and in its withdrawal it beckons us to continue our pursuit, because it is truly worthy of our continued questioning and represents the very essence of an education directed toward those things that are most beneficial for the development of the soul. The site of the dialectic, the ever-developing, ever-expanding context of originary learning, which is the locus of “distance and the excess of truth, belongs essentially to the site opened by meletƝ,”82 which is related directly to Plato’s Socrates’ practice of philosophy as care for the soul (as a paidƝutic practice), “by our being 78

Gonzalez. Dialectic and Dialogue, 267. Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning, xxi. 80 Ibid., 114. 81 Ibid., 55. 82 Ibid. 79

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originally concerned with the being of virtue, compelled to be toward it in its withdrawal.”83 We have more to say regarding this phenomenon, occurance, or event in the concluding section below.

Paideia as Philosophical Task and Way-of-Being A Socratic Notion of Truth-and-Method in Learning What I have described in these foregoing sections might be said to represent an originary understanding of method and truth in Socratic philosophy, as a practical way-of-Being or living out of one’s existence attuned to the understanding that this also instantiates a life-of-learning. In terms of what Heidegger describes, in relation to the undeniable Socratic influence on Plato’s thought, philosophy is a way of life, a way-of-Being, that is “on the way” toward learning, which can never be equated with, to return to my earlier description of contemporary standardized education, the application of methods in the pursuit of acquiring sure and certain knowledge in education. Learning in a manner associated with Heidegger’s Socrates is never reducible to the rote accumulation of the day’s lessons, to be rehearsed on exams that calculate and assess the proficiency level of the student in memorizing and regurgitating the lesson; this is not Socratic learning, which I argue can never be authentically reproduced in the classroom, e.g., as is claimed by many embracing the Socratic Seminar. Heidegger assures us of this when observing that SDLGHLD is not education in terms of transmission and accumulation of facts, linked with the additive model of learning; rather, it is “SUDJPDWHLD, a task, and hence not a self-evident possession,”84 and further, it is not merely a “task any person can take up according to whim but is one which precisely encounters in each person its own proper resistances.”85 Heidegger recognizes that learning, just as is the case with thinking, is something we must first begin to “learn,” for learning in an essential way “means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time.”86 Education calls for, as opposed to the speaking of monologues or the delivering of lectures, an attuned mode of “listening” in advance for the call of education itself, and here, I return to the archƝ of authentic philosophy—from out of which we are attuned and continually guided and directed by the original issues we 83

Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning, 114. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 258. 85 Ibid. 86 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 4. 84

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pursue and questions we ask—and the “unspoken” essence in dialogue, which reveals truth that partially and momentarily nourishes the soul, and does so in such a way that we are at once challenged by it and attuned to continue on in the pursuit to better understand it, to bring to light further aspects of it that continue to recede from full disclosure. Education, or authentic learning, as understood and practiced by Heidegger’s Socrates, is an ongoing and ever-renewed “task”—recall Heidegger’s understanding of education as “SUDJPDWHLD,” as exercise or labor—that is instantiated within the educational practice of dialectic, which according to Heidegger, “provides the positive only in actually carrying it out and not by making it the direct theme of reflection,”87 and then producing objective instances of knowledge that terminate the method or process.88 Based on this speculative reading of Heidegger’s Socrates, what we term the originary context of education, which shelters the draft of authentic thinking and learning, unfolds in the following manner, grounded in the understanding that in learning there occurs a twofold movement, captured by Heidegger’s use of the Greek term “DSDOODJK”: (1) Our soul moves away from ignorance or amathia and (2) Because of the excessive and elusive nature of that which we seek to reveal, its essence moves away from us, living at an ontological remove from the scope and parameters of our inquires, and we are set at a distance from the full disclosure of the essence of what we are inquiring into. Admittedly, if this two-fold movement fully captured the process we identify as paidiea, the situation of learning would indeed appear frustratingly pessimistic in the extreme. However, there is a third component that is inseparable from the movement that Heidegger importantly stresses, 87

Heidegger, Pathmarks, 368. Gonzalez, On the Way to Sophia, 427. In Gonzalez’s reading of Socratic philosophy and the dialectic, he stresses that philosophy is an endeavor where truth and method are inseparable, and that “the truth of the matter shows itself, not in some definition or teaching that would conclude philosophical questioning, but rather in the very carrying out of this questioning.” If we relate the issue of “pure thinking” to an education that would be consistent because it is instantiated by Heidegger’s Socrates, the ever-renewed practice of the dialectic requires, as Gonzalez elucidates, a form of pure thinking that is “always underway and yet so in touch with the being of the matter in question as to be continually changed by it,” i.e., a thinking in relation to truth that can never be brought to full unhiddenness and yet still holds the supreme power to transform the soul (epagogƝ). And this thinking “pays more attention to the way,” or practice and movement of the dialectic, “than to the content without becoming contentless,” or devolving into a transposable, applicable, formable, and hence, empty method, and this type of pure thinking transforms without offering instructing. 88

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namely that as we are attuned within this process, we are at once transformed, we are drawn toward and to the very thing that withdraws from our inquiry. In relation to this concern, I argue that authentic learning occurs within the dynamic “draft” created by the counter-striving movement between thought and what is thought set within the ontological context that instantiates our relationship to the essential truth of Being, and this movement is highlighted, as in the case of Socrates, by the back-andforth of the question-rejoinder-refutation of the dialectic in praxis—all while, as Heidegger claims, there is an attendance to what remains “unspoken” in the dialogue,89 i.e., this highlights our relationship to and encounter with alethiea. When learning, as stated, we are inspired, attuned and held fast in wonder (thauma) to continually inquire into that which withdraws from full disclosure, “drawn to what withdraws,”90 and in this process, we are located at an ontological distance from the essential nature of what remains question-worthy, and hence worthy of our educational pursuits, and here we experience a way-of-Being within a context of thinking highlighted by the “mutual nearness of its appeal.”91 So, within this questioning in the midst of this distance from truth, a proximity we can never close off, although distressing, we find the inspiration to continue on, for this thinking at a distance is attuned to continuing on in the pursuit of what withdraws from our inquiry. In learning, the partial and oblique revelation of truth, or the intimation of truth, nourishes the soul and inspires us to hold ourselves in the ever-evolving draft of thinking, for like Socrates, if we are attuned to the “call” of education itself, we do “nothing else than place [ourselves] into this draft, this current, and maintain [ourselves] in it,”92 for it is only in this draft that enlightenment and authentic education can occur.93 What we have described in this essay, in relation to Socrates and inquiry, might be expressed in Heideggerian terms as the event of 89

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 17. Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 H. G. Liddell and R. Scott. Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell & Scott’s GreekEnglish Lexicon (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2015), 76. We undoubtedly get the sense of DSDOODJK (apallage) referring to the “casting out” of ignorance through dialectic. But this term can also indicate, as we have suggested, in addition to “deliverance, release, riddance of a thing,” the “going away” or taking a “departure” from a thing, hence our reference to truth’s movement away from our understanding as well as the movement away that we experience from our previous state of ignorance in the midst of the dialectic 90

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education that uniquely includes the phenomena of attunement (Erstaunen) and Gelassenheit occurring with the context of learning. Heidegger is emphatic that the pathos of Erstaunen penetrates and pervades the entire philosophical project or process of seeking knowledge—as its archƝ—and so it determines, as we have mentioned, the practitioner’s “dis-position.”94 Das Erstaunen facilitates the resolute approach to questioning as described above, a questioning, we recall, that both propels Socrates forward and holds him in the sway and draft of the inquiry. In this occurrence or event, the inquirer is inspired to display, and beyond, instantiate, the attuned attitude of “self-restraint,” which is a dis-position in which the inquirer refrains from imposing her prejudices in advance onto to the thing or issue under investigation. Here, Heidegger has in mind a troubling characteristic of contemporary thinking, let us call it “calculative thought,” associated with a way of knowing grounded and enacted in the willed effort to know and hence “possess” and “appropriate” things in a way that exhausts their Being in knowledge.95 Rather than imposing our will onto that into which we inquire, Heidegger urges us to release ourselves over to it in advance— Gelassenheit zu den Dingen (“releasement toward things”)-granting it the space to manifest and reveal itself in its own Being, on its own terms, in its own unique manner of self-showing. In this occurrence, as Heidegger points out, the inquirer stays and remains released in inquiry in such a way that she is given over to the thing and in effect, in an original manner, belongs to it, “insofar as [she] is appropriated initially” by it, rather than the reverse.96 In this attuned disposition, to return to Heidegger’s analysis of Erstaunen, there is a “retreat” of that which is questioned from full and complete disclosure, and although, and indeed because, the inquirer, under the spell and in the grip of Erstaunen, remains “self-restrained,” she is “forcibly drawn to and, as it were, held fast by that which…retreats,”97 or, as we have stated, the inquirer is drawn into and secured within the inquiry into that which perpetually withdraws or recedes from full revelation. It is understandable, then, why such an event occurs and must occur as the continued “repetition” of the process, which is why, as stated throughout, the event of originary learning finds no end, no teleological point of complete closure, no final moment of full enlightenment. For enlightenment, when and if it comes, arrives slowly and only after long and engaged inquiry, granted in the sway and draft of the unfolding educative process. 94

Heidegger, What is Philosophy? 83. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 58. 96 Ibid., 85. 97 Heidegger, What is Philosophy? 85. 95

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Returning to and concluding with Socrates, Heidegger states that as Socrates is drawn into what withdraws, “he points into what withdraws,” and in this way we might think of him as serving as a “sign, a pointer,” but what he is pointing at is “something which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech.”98 Indeed, still to this day, what Socrates philosophized—which he could not properly or systematically bring to language—has not yet been understood by a majority of educators, who are “like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them.”99 In the presence of Heidegger’s Socrates, we find ourselves faced with the practice of education that is not only foreign but radically at odds, proximally and for the most part, with the way we as contemporary educators have viewed and practiced education. For education as described relating to and emerging from Heidegger’s Socrates cannot be reduced to the type of method that can be successfully reproduced or imitated in the classroom with the aim of producing the result of learning, which can be gauged through quantification. To even attempt to thematize or systematize it would serve only to bastardize its unique and original essence; indeed, to write it down in the service of a systematized or scripted curriculum, with the requisite set “lesson-plans,” already betrays Heidegger’s point about one of the things that makes Socrates the purest thinker of the West, namely, that he wrote nothing, and if he would have attempted to do so, he would have turned away from authentic thought, or pure thought, to become a fugitive of thought.100 Thus, a Socratic education drawn from Heidegger’s reading is a form of learning and education, and to continue a theme drawn from contemporary Platonic scholarship, by its very essence, it is a form of education that must remain non-systematic; it cannot become a doctrine in the sense that we in education understand it today. However, it is my hope that this essay might work in service of offering Socratic intimations of and gestures toward—despite how veiled these elucidations must remain—inspiring new and potentially fecund thinking on the ways we currently go about educating our students, offering philosophical insights into the potential re-conceptualization of what we currently understand about the standards for methods, truth, and learning. For the education I have attempted to describe and elucidate, as related to Heidegger’s Socrates, depends on a genuine form of questioning that lies at the heart of the educational experience, where deep transformation and attunement to

98

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 18. Ibid., 17. 100 Ibid., 17-18 99

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the soul (psychƝ) or disposition (hƝxis) occurs. Here, it is possible to understand the pathos-of-education in Heideggerian terms as the event of “tuning” or the “turning” of the “dis-position and determination,”101 i.e., the soul in periagǀgƝ turned back to itself enlightened, and it is enlightened in and through a unique and non-systematic understanding of the experience of truth as alƝtheia, in the occurrence of alƝtheuein as it is inseparable from the originary context of education, which shelters and facilitates the draft of authentic thinking and learning: authentic paideia.

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Heidegger, What is Philosophy? 83.

CHAPTER FIVE SOCRATES IS NOT A TEACHER BUT, CAN WE LEARN FROM HIM?

Whether it is Socratic Circles, Socratic Method, or Socratic Seminar, educators employing these teaching strategies and methods hold the view and accept the conclusion that Socrates employs a reproducible “method” that can be explicated, packaged, marketed and taught in the classroom to produce sustainable and reliable results. Bernard Freydberg, highly critical of such efforts to reduce Socrates’ philosophy to a method, contends that Socratic Seminar or Method in education has become a “cliché that refers to hard-hitting question-and-answer exchange quite apart from the concerns with truth and justice that animated Socrates,”1 and is often flagrantly misused in ways that “Socrates would have found appalling, - in training lawyers for instance,”2 and we add, within the classroom as an educational method that can be transposed and applied with consistent positive results. For example, E. Wilberding, within his scripted Socratic curriculum, organizes learning objectives around what he classifies as the Ten Commandments of Socratic Questions, which serve as systematized Socratic principles for structuring lessons within the curriculum.3 Undeniably, we can derive beneficial insights from Wilberding’s analysis of Socrates as a teacher, however, our claim is that it is problematic to attach an indelible method for teaching students to Socrates, who would have denied possessing or employing such a method. This because it is questionable whether or not Socrates had a method, and further, whether or not we can even legitimately classify Socrates as a “teacher.” Socrates’ unique pursuit of knowledge, differs radically from the contemporary, 1

B. Freydberg. “Homeric 0HTRGR9 in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues,” in: ed., G. A. Scott. Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato’s Many Devices. (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2007), 78. 2 Ibid. 3 E. Wilberding. Teach Like Socrates (Waco: Prufrock Press, 2015).

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standardized world of education, which in the extreme, tends to emphasize skills and determine achievement in learning in ways that are, proximally and for the most part, reducible in a multiplicity of ways to rote numerical statistics, results that are quantitative in nature. We are primarily concerned with the analysis of the so-called “Socratic Method” (dialectic) as related to knowledge construction and Socratic ignorance, in defense of the claim that Socrates is not a teacher, at least not in the sense of a traditional educator. We conclude by briefly considering the potential benefits that thinkers, educators, and students might draw from our reading, without attempting to establish definitive tenets or principles defining a so-called “Socratic education” in the classroom. Socrates’ manner of practicing philosophy that we describe is often referenced as a “method” of inquiry called “elenchus,” which is commonly linked with a mode of questioning that seeks to disprove or refute the other’s position. Let us briefly explore the use of “method” and “elenchus” when accurately attempting to understand Socrates’ philosophy. Freydberg points out, “Socrates uses the word PHTRGR9 on very few occasions and never, or perhaps only obliquely, in reference to his own practice,”4 and Freydberg continues, observing, “(OHJFR9 is never called a PHTRGR9.”5 It is also the case that “elenchus” does not appear with any consistency in the dialogues in a way that would allow us to state with certainty that Socrates’ practice of philosophy should be labeled as such. Harold Tarrant stresses that we should limit the use of elenchus when referencing Socrates’ practice of inquiry to only those instances when he is seeking to refute an interlocutor, instead we should refer to what Socrates does most of the time as simply, “exetasis.”6 For example, when Socrates is describing to the jury what he does on a daily basis in Athens, setting himself apart from the sophistic teachers of virtue, he says: “I question and examine [H[HWDVZ] and cross-examine [HOH[Z]” (Apology, 29e) the people encountered in the quest to understand virtue, and again at 38a, Socrates states, “I say that to talk every day about virtue” is the greatest thing, and this is why “you hear me talking and examining [H[HWD]RQWR9] myself and others.” Indeed, this practice of “examination” is famously, for Socrates, the only antidote for the deadly poison of the “unexamined life,” however, he neither endorses nor adheres to a single, overarching technical

4

Freydberg, “Homeric 0HTRGR9 in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues,” 111. Ibid. 6 H. Tarrant. “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth,” in: eds., S. Rappe and K. Rachana. A Companion to Socrates (United Kingdom: Blackwell, 2009), 142-159. 5

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or systematic “method.”7 Our reading is focused on Socrates examining himself and others by means of a rigorous practice of testing and scrutinizing opinions and knowledge about virtue through questioning and cross-examination, with the goal or aim stated simply as follows: Socratic philosophy works to arrive, through critical, rational argumentation and consensus, at a deeper understanding of what the virtues are and how they should be best organized within an ethical and excellent life.8 Based on this understanding, we employ only the term “dialectic” throughout when describing Socrates’ philosophical practice. Dialectic, which is set apart from both the didactic method and instances where Socrates employs elenchus refutation, generates both negative and positive results, indicating that through examining and questioning, Socrates is testing opinions and beliefs about virtue, with an eye to refuting and rejecting arguments put forth in defense of these views that are contradictory, inconsistent, or otherwise problematic, seeking, as the harbinger of enlightenment, to purge “others of their pretense of wisdom.”9 Socrates works not only to “test and refine definitions of virtues,”10 but also to “deliberate about right actions, and when the nature of right and wrong action is clear enough,”11 when a deeper understanding of the virtues is brought to light, Socrates exhorts “others to pursue what is right 7

The citations of passages from Plato’s dialogues are from: J. M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). I note for the reader where emphasis has been added to the text and where translations have been altered. 8 Referencing Plato, the source, as it were, dialectic is a form of inquiry characterized by the repeated process consisting of the movement between posing a question, receiving a response, and then questioning and testing the rational legitimacy of that response in the service of the continued progress of the investigation or examination. Plato informs us that when practicing dialectic, when speaking about what is just and unjust, we work through “names, definitions, and visual and other perceptions,” and when these are “rubbed against each other and tested,” through the process of asking and answering questions, “in good will and without enmity,” it is then, “when reason and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, can they illuminate the nature of any object (Ep. 344b). In joint pursuit of the understanding (phronƝsis) of the virtues, revelation (a-lethƝia) occurs only after “long-continued intercourse,” then “suddenly, like a light flashing forth when [the] fire [of truth] is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightaway nourishes itself” (Ep. 341d). 9 T. Brickhouse and N. Smith. Plato’s Socrates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 29. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

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and shun what is wrong.”12 Importantly, for our purposes, Socrates’ dialectic is not restricted to testing others, for as our quotation from the Apology demonstrates, Socrates is also intensely concerned with selfexamination in the process, and we have more to say about this below in terms of synerchomai, which for us means to go together in learning. Let us conclude this discussion by turning briefly to the Charmides, where Socrates punctuates this point, while intimating the negative and positive elements of dialectic. Here we encounter Socrates’ concern for both is own soul and the souls of the others engaged in dialectic: How could you possibly think that even if I were to refute everything you say, I would be doing it for any other reasons than the one I would give for a thorough investigation of my own statements – the fear of unconsciously thinking I know something when I do not. And this is what I claim to be doing now, examining the argument for my own sake primarily, but perhaps also for the sake of my friends (Charm. 166c-d).

Alexander Nehamas emphatically stresses that Socrates is “not a teacher of arête,” but as educators know well, it is undeniably the case that Socrates is often “perceived as a teacher,”13 and beyond, held up as a paragon of pedagogy to be emulated and imitated. At his trial, Socrates is accused of “wrongdoing because he corrupts the youth and does not believe in the gods the state believes in” (Ap. 24c). Beyond these charges, he is accused, in the manner of Anaxagoras and other Greek physical scientists, of “investigating the things beneath the earth and in the heavens,” and also charged with, in the manner of the sophists, “making the weaker argument stronger,” importantly, Socrates is, according to his accusers, “teaching [GLGDVNZQ/didaskǀn] these things to others” (Ap. 19bc). In his defense (apologia), Socrates distances himself from both the natural philosophers and the sophists, such as Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Ellis, who all charge fees for their services and usually teach through speeches or didactic methods that communicate or transfer knowledge to their pupils. In light of these remarks, returning to Nehamas, although his accusers, and even his friends consider Socrates a teacher, this offers no valid reason or sufficient evidence for us “to refuse to take his own disavowal of that role as face value.”14 The Greek, “GLGDVNDOR9” (didaskalos) defines a “teacher or 12

Brickhouse and Smith, Plato’s Socrates, 89. A. Nehamas. Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 62. 14 Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 71. 13

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master” of one or another subject, such as rhetoric, medicine, craft making, or even poetry.15 With the understanding of the didaskalos related to the type of instruction in virtue or excellence (arête) offered by the sophists, it is against the charges of Meletus that Socrates emphatically denies that he is teacher, specifically of the virtues, claiming that he “was never anyone’s teacher” (Ap. 33a). Scott provides us with four distinct characteristics that define the didaskalos: (1) The didaskalos is an authority, he possesses the knowledge he imparts through transmission to students who do not know; (2) The didaskalos demands payment for his teaching; (3) The didaskalos teaches only upon receipt of payment; indeed without payment there is no instruction; and (4) The didaskalos (the knower) instructs through expository speeches employing didactic methods designed to communicate or transfer knowledge to the paying client, the non-knower or learner.16 We add to this list, (5) The didaskalos has a responsibility toward a student based on the service that has been rendered, i.e., since the sophist takes payment for imparting knowledge to the pupil, a sense of responsibility for the learning must obtain; in short, the sophist is liable for the end product of his labors. This is precisely what Plato’s Socrates denies, “I cannot justly be held responsible for the good or bad conduct of these people, as I never promised to teach [didaskǀ] them anything and have not done so” (Ap. 33a-b), and in addition, adds, “If you have heard from anyone that I undertake to teach people and charge a fee for it, that is not true either” (Ap. 19d-e).17 Recall the disastrous results that ensued when the young men imitated Socrates, contributing to the formulation of the charges against him. When the youth attempted to copy and employ Socrates’ supposed “method,” performing elenchus refutations of prominent Athenian citizens, they encountered many people who thought 15

H. Liddell and R. Scott. Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell and Scott GreekEnglish Lexicon (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2015), 169. 16 G. A. Scott. Socrates as Educator (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 44-45. 17 We stated that Socrates refused responsibility for the behavior of those who participated in philosophical discussions. In line with our reading regarding the results or outcomes of these discussions, we consider the following: If indeed Socrates was a teacher, and his so-called instruction had a positive, educative influence on the ethical disposition of the participants, why did many of the interlocutors with whom he discoursed become rouges, ne’er-do-wells, and even violent tyrants? For example, in the case of Alcibiades, betrayer of both Athens and Sparta, Socrates could not muster the power to “teach” him anything that might have turned his soul around in an ethical manner, and indeed Alcibiades admits this in the Symposium. Readers will note that Chapter 6 of this book deals explicitly and in a detailed manner with the failure of the education of Alcibiades.

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they had knowledge, but in truth were shown to sorely lack the knowledge they claimed to possess, and as a result, the Athenians who were examined and shamed by the youths became angry with Socrates (Ap. 32c-e). It is crucial to note, in relation to our theme, that as opposed to training or teaching (didaskǀ) these youths to be upstart “gadflies,” it was through chance and neither by Socrates’ design nor the implementation of any formal instructional strategy that these youths were inspired to imitate him. Socrates did not, even in an indirect manner, “teach” the youths anything valuable about his practice of philosophy or the virtues. From our description of the didaskalos, it is possible to infer a view of education associated with this type of teacher, and it is a form of learning, according to J. King, which works off the “additive,” or what we refer to as the “edifice” model of knowledge acquisition through the primary mode of transfer. In the additive model new knowledge is piled on previous knowledge in a manner resembling the accumulation of a growing store of knowledge, and as King importantly stresses, in this mode of learning, the knower as receiver is passive.18 Educators are probably most familiar with this model in terms of the “factory model” of learning or, as in the Marxist-existential inspired critical theory-pedagogy of Paolo Freire, the “banking concept of education.”19 If we relate it to Socrates’ understanding of education, it would be closely akin to what we term a productionist model of learning, and this is consistent with the technƝ/epistƝmƝ-poiƝsis-ergon model of craft making, which is employed when a master, one who is an authority or expert, passes along his expertise to the apprentice, one who lacks the knowledge of the expert. Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith observe that Plato often uses technƝ and epistƝmƝ interchangeably when referring to the knowledge of both the craftsman and the sophists, and in the dialogues, “Socrates’ claim to lack HSLVWKPK (knowledge),”20 in relation to understanding the virtues, “is contrasted directly with the craftsmen’s having it.”21 The type of knowledge linked with the productionist model introduced is precise and explanatory, it affords the possessor a reasonable if not a confident sense of predictability, and as Kirkland contends, “one who possesses it knows not only what is the case but why this must be so, making it therefore

18 J. King, “Non-Teaching and its Significance for Education,” Educational Theory, 26(2), 1976, pp. 223-230. 19 P. Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Press, 2000), 72. 20 Brickhouse and Smith, Plato’s Socrates, 33. 21 Ibid.

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teachable.”22 This is why it is transferable from master to apprentice, as in the case of architects, engineers and, as is often referenced by Socrates, physicians. Socrates distrusts this “banking model” of education as a mode of transfer-learning, specifically as it is related to normative issues of value and human excellence, for according to Socrates, this is not the manner in which anyone learns to be virtuous, and we have more to say regarding Socratic philosophy and normativity as we proceed. The critique of transfer-learning is made explicit in the dialogues, e.g., in the Symposium, Agathon hopes to “absorb” knowledge from Socrates as it is passed through didactic transfer, to which Socrates slyly responds, Wouldn’t it be marvelous, Agathon, if ideas were the kind of things which could be imparted simply by contact, and those of us who had few could absorb them from those who had a lot – in the same way that liquid can flow from a full container to an empty on if you put a piece of string between them?” (Smp.175d).

The exchange indicates that Agathon believes knowledge can be divined, possessed, and then passed along with certainty to others lacking in knowledge. For the type of education and learning Agathon stresses is, according to Socrates, sophistic and technical in nature, indicating that truth can be secured and possessed in a form that resists disambiguation when transferred from one person to another. Indeed, it is in the Protagoras that the Socratic question of whether virtue is teachable or transferable emerges in its most well-known and detailed form. The pressing concern, which ultimately separates the philosopher (the seeker and lover of virtue) from the sophist (the one who claims to have virtue) runs thusly: If virtue “turns out to be entirely knowledge [HSLVKPK],” it would therefore be teachable, however, “if virtue [DUHWK] were anything else than knowledge [HSLVKPK]…obviously it would not be teachable” (Prot. 361a-b). Thus, we conclude, along with Kirkland, if virtue could be reduced to epistemƝ, it would provide Socrates “the propositional definitions he demands,”23 along with the subsequent ability to defend those definitions “from elenctic refutation.”24 Such a view, as we contend

22

S. Kirkland. The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in the Plato’s Early Dialogue (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 80. 23 Ibid., 80. 24 Ibid., 7-8.

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throughout, runs counter to Socrates’ conception of the understanding, or phronƝsis, of the virtues that dialectic makes possible.25 Admittedly, in the Meno it is possible to state that Socrates does indeed share some similarities with the description of the didaskalos from above, despite adopting a dialectical mode of projective questioning, especially when Socrates educates Meno’s slave boy in geometry. In this instance Socrates appears to instantiate the Socrates-as-teacher model embraced and imitated by those practicing Socratic Seminar, the so-called educator as guide-on-the-side. We note that the Meno is one of several dialogues, along with the Gorgias and Lysis, from which the Socrates-asteacher model is drawn, and indeed, the view of Socrates-as-teacher is most often justified through a standard interpretation of the Meno. In this dialogue Socrates leads Meno’s young slave to the knowledge of Euclidean geometry through a series of questions and statements designed specifically to enlighten and awaken the boy to the knowledge that is

25 F. Gonzalez. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 9. In the dialogues, technƝ and epistƝmƝ are separated off from opinions and belief and also the knowledge or understanding Socrates seeks of the virtues, which is often rendered as sophia, but also, more consistently, as phronƝsis or a derivative thereof. In Definitions, a late work probably compiled by students of Plato’s Academy, we read: “PhronƝsis – practical wisdom…productive of human happiness” (Def. 411d). Importantly, to the issue of epistƝmƝ, although Liddell and Scott (Lexicon) link it to the Greek understanding of scientific knowledge, it also informs us that it can simply indicate understanding, skill, and wisdom. Even in the Republic Plato does not suggest that epistƝmƝ gives the philosopher rulers sure and certain knowledge of the so-called “Forms,” for the type of knowing that reveals “first principles” by means of intellectual intuition is “noƝsis,” a form of knowledge or insight that for Socrates, in his idealized vision of the perfected city of words, demonstrates categorical certainty. In a way that draws on the certainty of axiomatic truth in mathematics, Plato claims that through dialectic we make our way to a “first principle that is not a hypothesis,” but proceeding from a hypothesis, “using forms themselves and making the investigation through them” (Rep. 510b). It is essential to mention within the context of our discussion about knowledge forms, scholars writing on Plato and Socrates must be attentive to the fact that when equating certainty with epistƝmƝ as a knowledge form, they run the danger of conflating “scientific” knowledge with propositional certitude. Science, as now practiced, as it is divorced from what might be labeled “Newtonian predictive certainty,” more resembles the type of inquiry embraced and practiced by Socrates, which as we have argued, is continually in the process of revising its conclusions and renewing its inquiries.

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supposedly already present within his soul.26 However, when examining the dialogue we note that there are two forms of dialectic and types of education transpiring, one a mode of teaching and the other the practice of what King calls non-teaching, or what we identify, along with Socrates, as a dialectical process of co-learning or seeking together. Thus, we encounter: (1) a “positive” or “constructive” dialectic concerned with mathematical or axiomatic truth that is set or nested within (2) the larger and overarching context of dialectical examination that is both “negative” and “positive” in its unfolding, ending in aporia as is consistent with Socratic discourse practiced throughout the Platonic dialogues (especially, but certainly not limited to, the early dialogues). This form of dialectic is ultimately focused on ethical (normative) issues and questions regarding the nature of virtue and the concern for whether it can be acquired with certainty and subsequently taught or transferred to a pupil without dissembling. A. E. Taylor is one of the only Platonic scholars explicating for analysis the realm of the normative in Socratic discourse, this despite Plato never naming or making this modern epistemological distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and normative statements. Taylor informs us that when referencing the normative in Socratic interpretation, we are naming the things in life that are of supreme value (axios), which for Socrates is a concern for the ethical, the concern for those things that should be pursued and ought to be done in relation to and in pursuit of a life of moral excellence.27 26 Sahakian W. and M. Sahakian. Plato (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977). Prior to the geometry lesson, Socrates discusses the immortal soul and suggests that all learning is recollection (DQDPQKVL9/anamnƝsis), intimating the remembrance of our past life when dwelling with the Forms, and this in Sahakian and Sahakian is identified, and I would argue, incorrectly, as the Doctrine of the Immortal Soul and the Doctrine of AnamnƝsis in Platonic philosophy. However, we note that Socrates cuts this line of discussion short, abruptly insisting that this “captious argument” should be avoided (Men. 81c). Instead, what he describes resembles inference in learning, i.e., by recalling one thing, we can then work from there to recall or learn another in relation to the first (Men. 81d). It is unnecessary to attach mysterious, religious, or transcendent meanings to the term “anamnƝsis,” for the way Socrates carries out the Geometry lesson resembles what Liddell and Scott refer to as “calling [something] to mind” within a process where new insight dawns based on or inspired by what one already knows or has learned. To reiterate, amamnƝsis might be an instance of logical inference, and although this Socratic lesson is undeniably impressive and inspirational, there is nothing other-worldly, religious, or mysterious about it. See: Liddell and Scott, Lexicon, 52. 27 There is no Greek word in the dialogues that Plato incorporates that is the equivalent of the Latin “norma,” concerned with patterns, rules, and precepts. In

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The first dialectic, where Socrates takes the boy through a geometry lesson, might be said to represent educators employing the “Socratic Method,” or Socrates-as-teacher model. Although the boy has no prior knowledge of mathematics, through a series of leading questions, and the fact that Plato’s Socrates has knowledge of geometry, the boy is able to solve the problem, i.e., the slave boy is led to the knowledge that Socrates possesses. In the geometry lesson we encounter aporetic breakdowns in the process of learning, for when the boy is unable to follow Socrates’ line of questioning, he becomes confused, but importantly, this is not the case with Socrates (Men. 84e). Indeed, such occurrences are for Socrates, valuable moments rife with potential for new insight, and in the geometry lesson, Socrates uses these moments as a valuable teaching tool. Within these moments, which Socrates controls and manipulates, the boy “feels the difficulty he is in, and besides not knowing does not think he knows” (Men. 84a), and so with prompting and encouragement, through Socrates hortatory (protreptic) encouragement, the boy seeks to “push on in the search gladly, as lacking knowledge” (Men. 84b). Although Socrates states that as a result of this “perplexity” (tes aporias), the boy will go on to learn with Socrates (“joint-inquiry”), and further, that Socrates will not technically be “teaching” the boy (Men. 84d), it is clear that Socrates has the knowledge of mathematics required to complete the lesson and bring the boy to enlightenment. So, as opposed to Socrates personally experiencing the confusion of the aporetic breakdown in the pursuit of knowledge, coming to the conclusion that he himself does not know, as he does in the second dialectic concerned with virtue, Socrates in this case is using the moment of confusion (aporia), or learned ignorance, the Greek, the idea of the normative is traceable to what Socrates understands as “nomos” and “nomoi,” expressive of laws, traditions, principles, and rules. Socrates, focused on values and ethics, formulates, communicates, and defends arguments presented in the form of “normative statements” rather than exclusively in the form of propositions. Certainly, Plato does not formulate the issue of the fact/value distinction in terms of Hume’s modern understanding, but the it is present within the dialogues, thus although “unsaid,” it is certainly not “unthought” by Plato, despite its lack of systematic classification. Clearly, as this essay indicates, Socrates is concerned with “norms” of behavior that are regulative of ethical conduct, concerned with judging and determining, through dialogue, through deliberating well (boulƝ), good, and true about what actions should and ought to be done and what actions should be avoided in service o the ethical life. Indeed, as we learn, this deliberation is actually “koinƝ boulƝ” (“common deliberation”) in Socratic philosophy, a deliberating well in the company of and with others.

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to the boy’s educational advantage. Socrates, to reiterate, is not the one inferring the knowledge of geometry or learning it, rather he is imparting it, through a unique pedagogical strategy consisting of questioning, a mode of teaching that although not didactic in nature, still depends on and presupposes that, Socrates has the knowledge required to enlighten the boy, the student. Here, we are not diminishing the educative significance of aporetic breakdown in the lesson, the difficult moment of acknowledging ignorance, which holds the potential to inspire continued inquiry. We are, however, pointing out that in this instance Socrates is not experiencing aporia in a manner that would indicate that he truly does not know the things he investigates, as in the case of the second dialectic in the Meno. The second dialectic deals with the question of whether or not virtue is teachable, and also, perhaps more importantly, with the question of what virtue is, the Socratic question: “What-is-x?” (ti esti;). In the second form of dialectic, unlike the geometry lesson, the conclusions regarding whether or not virtue can be taught are not only unsatisfactory they are confused, and as Nehamas stresses, this is because no agreeable definition is or can be provided in response to the perennial Socratic question, “what is virtue?” that would foreclose continued discussion and argumentation. As discussed, the teacher must possess knowledge and know that something is the case in order to give a reasoned account of what is true and how it is true in order to impart it or even lead others to it. In addition, the teacher has mastered the method to be employed in order to secure knowledge and he must then be able to instruct the pupil in the proper practice of dialectic in order to bring the student to a state of enlightenment. This indicates, and here Nehemas asks us to keep in mind Socrates’ unique philosophical project, that it is necessary, that Socrates possesses, and hence be a master (didaskalos), much like in the geometry lesson, of both the “knowledge (episteme) of arête and the craft (techne) of teaching it.”28 This demands that one has or possesses knowledge and that one can articulate it through explanation and ultimately pass it along through transfer, or bring it about through the formulation and application of a series of pointed, leading questions, “with reasonable assurance of success.”29 Weiss also contributes to this line of reasoning when asserting that in order for Socrates to be a master or expert instructor (didaskalos) in virtue, he would need to acquire, objective knowledge of the virtues, or what R. Weiss calls, theoretical definitions. For to have such knowledge, which for 28 29

Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 69. Ibid., 69.

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Socrates is impossible due to the built-in limitations of all normative concerns, would amount to establishing “a god’s eye perspective [sub specie aeternitas],”30 and to have access to such a perspective would require a person to be either a god or god-like. Not only does Socrates reject god-like knowledge, he claims that “human wisdom” is essentially pervaded by a lack of complete knowledge – pervasive dialectic ignorance - for according to Socrates, when compared to the gods’ wisdom, “Human wisdom [DQTUZSLQK VRMLD] is of little or no value” (Ap. 23a). As Nehemas stresses, because the philosophical “domain in which Socrates is concerned is exclusively ethical,”31 i.e., normative, the type of knowledge required in order to teach the virtues to anyone is the precise form of knowledge that defies sure and certain possession and transmission, and for this reason continually eludes Socrates. Indeed Socrates’ entire philosophical project as care for the soul, is dedicated to pointing out and inspiring in others the necessary recognition of ignorance – of not-knowing – about the most important things in life, namely, the philosophical pursuit of the virtues along with the concomitant understanding of their proper role and place in a life of eudaemonia. Here, when referencing HXGDHPRQLD/ eudaemonia, we are not suggesting, as does Christopher Bobonich, that Socrates practices a system of either rational eudaimonism or psychological eudaimonism, but rather that Socrates seeks a life directed toward the idea and ideal of personal (private) and communal (public) perfection that is grounded in and inspired by notions of the good and ethical excellence.32 Gary Alan Scott contends that Socrates assumes “the role as a paideutƝs,”33 and let us note that in the Greek, “SDLGHXWK9/paideutƝs” is not a term that is interchangeable with the teaching or instruction of the didaskalos, for paideutƝs, as the Lexicon confirms, references “an educator” that assumes the critical role of a “corrector, chastiser,” and beyond, one that participates in the process of learning in such an intimate way that the educator’s character, disposition, and state of soul is at stake; education in this view consists of both the receiving and bestowing of an education.34 In line with this 30 R. Weiss. “Socrates: Seeker or Preacher?” in: eds., S. Rappe and K. Rachana. A Companion to Socrates (United Kingdom: Blackwell, 2009), 167. 31 Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 69. 32 C. Bobonich, “Socrates’ Eudaimonia,” in: ed., D. Morrison. The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 298. 33 Scott, Socrates as Educator, 31. 34 N. Davey. Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). Based on our reading, in conjunction with Davey’s understanding and analysis of philosophical hermeneutics, it is possible to

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understanding, Socrates is more of a seeker (zƝteos), or “lover of wisdom,” than one who is in the possession of truth or knowledge of the virtues (e.g., Meno 80c; Tht. 155d; Phds. 278d; Gor. 506a; Al. I 124a-c), who often assumes the role of co-participant or co-learner in the dialectical context of the investigation. The limited nature of Socrates’ understanding (phronƝsis) of the virtues, a way of knowing that can never be wholly trustworthy or complete, locates him “in-between” the ultimate wisdom of the gods and the bare, unacknowledged ignorance of those who do not practice philosophy (Sym. 202a-b). If there is a superiority to Socrates’ knowledge, if indeed Socrates can be called “wise” (Ap. 21d), and we must note that what he knows and the degree to which he knows it fails to qualify him as a teacher (didaskalos), it is to be found in his superior understanding of what the philosophical life encompasses and entails, which includes, as we have already stated, being attuned to the limited nature of all human wisdom. In addition to misrepresenting the form of knowledge associated with the Socratic dialectic, the Socrates-as-teacher model also appears to discount the legitimacy of Socrates’ claims to ignorance regarding the wisdom of the virtues, interpreting him as ironically masquerading as a coparticipant in dialectic, when in reality Socrates is in the possession of knowledge, holding the answers up his sleeve, as it were. This view incorrectly locates Socrates at a radical hierarchical (epistemological) distance from the interlocutor, as one who is far superior in his absolute possession of knowledge. It also, as stated above, wrongly presupposes that Socrates as educator already knows where he wants to lead the student and does so by framing a series of pointed questions, which if answered correctly, will lead the student down the path toward what appears to be authentic self-discovery. Such a position, argues Nehamas, wrongly assumes that irony is “saying one thing and meaning the opposite,”35 for when interpreting Socrates as ironist, as someone in the actual possession of the truth he is denying, the “holding back is part of the trope.”36 This view is similar to Gregory Vlastos’ reading, wherein he argues that although Socrates is not a teacher who adopts a method of rote transfer, he is indeed a teacher in another and more important sense, one who engages establish an intimate connection between Socratic paidƝusis and Bildung as a form of education highlighted by personal involvement, formation of the character, and transformation of the intellect and soul, as this might be related to the moderate hermeneutics of Gadamer, who has given us many detailed hermeneutic studies of Plato’s dialogues. 35 Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 71. 36 Ibid.

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potential “learners in elenctic argument to make them aware of their own ignorance and enable them to discover for themselves the truth the teacher had held back,”37 and so, as Vlastos concludes, “Socrates would want to say that he is a teacher, the only true teacher.”38 This conclusion apparently discounts critical evidence from the dialogues regarding Socrates’ emphatic disavowal of knowledge, which indicates, as we have argued, that Socrates truly does not hold back any knowledge of virtue in dialectic, and rather, through his recognition of ignorance, seeks to further pursue it. As opposed to reducing Socrates’ claims of ignorance to examples of Socratic irony or the Platonic incorporation of a literary trope, it is on this point, as Nehamas emphasizes, that “we should take Socrates very seriously, if rather literally, when he insists that he does not teach anyone anything.”39 The failure to acknowledge and take seriously the literal nature of Socrates’ claims to ignorance, “robs him of much of his strangeness,”40 conversely, taking seriously Socrates’ claims to not knowing, actually “supplies him, paradoxically, with a much more profound ironical mask.”41 Nehamas gives us a nuanced and complex treatment of Socratic irony in which it represents an instance where “not-knowing” actually grounds the instantiation of Socrates’ philosophical project, which is inseparable from attempting to live an ethical life. In other words, despite Socrates’ disavowing the possession of the form of ethical knowledge that would be required to be a teacher, Socrates is nevertheless and for that reason someone whose practice of philosophy embodies the paradigmatic ethical life, even though he is unable to pass the truth of the virtues along to those with whom he engages in dialogue. This is because he could not categorize it, systematize it, or formalize it in such a way required for educational transmission, but despite this, he realized that the pursuit of this understanding (phronƝsis) of the virtues, even though the fulldisclosure of their truth forever reside beyond the human’s full grasp, calls for and even demands the unwavering devotion to a philosophical lifestyle, and this for Socrates is the most ethical way in which to live. Despite perceptions to the contrary, Socrates does not view himself as a teacher of virtue, and indeed, as Nehamas observes, Socrates’

37 G. Vlastos. Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32. 38 Ibid. 39 Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 19. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 71

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“moral stature derives directly from his refusal to accept that role,”42 based on his ignorance of the sure and certain meaning of the virtues. Karl Jaspers, in his existential-phenomenological reading of Plato’s dialogues and philosophy, refers to the fundamental sense of irony in Socrates, as that “which strives to give an intimation of the hidden truth.”43 In line with Nehamas’ reading, Jaspers also interprets Socratic irony in terms of an expression of Socrates’ authentic claims to not having knowledge, for irony, claims Jaspers, actually “provokes the knowledge of nonknowledge.”44 e.g., as in the crucial function of confusion or aporia in Socratic dialectic, which emerges as both the positive philosophical content and function of dialectic. According to Jaspers, Socratic irony unmasks through sheltering and concealing “the candid awareness of what one does not know,”45 and by means of this “one will arrive not at nothingness but at the knowledge that is crucial for life.”46 Even though dialectic as practiced by Socrates, through reasoned and rigorous exchange, reaches a point where there is consensus regarding the temporary truth of the issue under investigation, Socrates urges his interlocutors to continue working toward deeper modes of understanding by continually questioning their findings. Listening to Socrates’ words, we ask the reader to recall our earlier description of dialectic: All of us ought to be contentiously eager to know what’s true and what’s false about the things we’re talking about…I’ll go through the discussion, then, and say how I think it is, and if any of you thinks that what I agree to with myself isn’t so, you must object and refute me. For the things I say I certainly don’t say with any knowledge at all; no, I’m searching together with you so that if my opponent clearly has a point, I’ll be the first to concede it (Gorg. 506a).

Since the validity of the claims regarding the virtues that are brought to stand momentarily through the logos in dialogic-consensus, refuse, in Socrates’ words, to be “held down and bound by arguments of iron and adamant” (Gor. 508a), it is impossible for Socrates to possess the knowledge required to assume the role of didaskalos, and so he cannot be a teacher in this sense, for he admits that he both lacks the knowledge in

42

Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 62. K. Jaspers, K. Plato and Augustine, trans. R. Manheim (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1962), 27. 44 Jaspers, Plato and Augustine, 27. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 7. 43

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question and that he is a legitimate and dedicated “co-participant” (colearner) in dialectic. In relation to what we have said about that manner in which normative statements function, manifesting the difference between epistƝmƝ and phronƝsis, contrasting, as Jurgen Mittelstrass points out, the difference between “the systematic character of textbooks or treatises.”47 The understanding (phronƝsis) of the virtues is fluid and elusive in nature and holds only the precarious potential to inspire and facilitate ethically informed “attitudes,” transforming the disposition (hƝxis) and soul (psychƝ) by informing and shaping the philosophical orientation of those participating in dialectic. In essence, it is the lack of possession of epistƝmƝ, or some other “objective” form of knowledge, as Nehamas emphasizes, which prevents Plato’s Socrates “from being a teacher of the good life.”48 This represents the crucial issue that Socrates continues to struggle with throughout the dialogues, namely, as we have shown, the difference between dialectic and craft, which is to say, the difference between “pure persuasion by means of argument” and an “authority that can justify itself by its tried and true accomplishments,”49 the latter of these two views relates to our earlier discussion of the factory model of learning in standardized education, and this represents, to reiterate, a productionist model of learning consistent with the technƝ/epistƝmƝpoiƝsis-ergon model of craft-making, of which Socrates is critical when relating it to understanding the virtues. Bringing this analysis to a conclusion, let us now consider the exchange following Meno’s frustration during the dialogue’s aporetic breakdown where we encounter an authentic instance of Socratic ignorance in the dialogue, which might be understood as synonymous with “learning” in Socratic terms. Recall when previously discussing aporia in the geometry lesson, it was only the boy who truly experienced the confusion and frustration of “not-knowing,” yet here, as we have pointed out, in the ongoing discussion concerned with virtue, it is Socrates who is also befuddled and confused because he too experiences and so participates in the aporetic breakdown in questioning. For when Meno becomes exhausted with Socrates’ questioning he claims that Socrates, in a shrewd and beguiling manner, possesses the power of a “broad-torpedo fish” because Socrates stings and numbs interlocutors as part of his unique method of dialectical teaching. This analogy gives the surface impression that Socrates is in possession of knowledge and his teaching strategy is 47

J. Mittelstrass, “On Socratic Dialogue,” in: ed., C. L. Griswold. Platonic Writings Platonic Readings (London: Routledge Press,1988), 138. 48 Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, 67. 49 Ibid., 69.

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designed to confuse or confound the pupil before finally revealing the knowledge that was in his possession all along, as in the aforementioned geometry lesson. Indeed, this is not the case, and Socrates assures Meno of this when stating that he does not possess sure and certain knowledge of virtue, he is ignorant of its nature, and further, that the pursuit of such knowledge must be carried out in terms of a joint zƝtetic-educative venture, i.e., “to examine and seek together” (skepsasthai kai suzƝtƝsai) within the context of co-participatory learning. Unlike the “additive” model introduced earlier, King claims that this type of “joint-learning” resembles an “integrative” model of education as “non-teaching,” which is expressive of an active interpretive process through which understanding is revealed and reworked, reassessed, reconfigured, and rearranged. In addition, it is possible to state that in this educational model both the form and content of the learning are at issue as related directly to the enlightenment and transformation of the dispositions and souls of those participating in the process of dialectic. Socrates, setting irony aside, assures Meno that he does not resemble the stinging fish, because the fish does not wound or numb itself when stinging and numbing its prey. For Socrates declares that when he “perplexes” others he is just as perplexed as they are: “It is from being in more doubt than anyone else,” observes Socrates, “that I cause doubt in others” (Men. 80d). Socrates continues, asserting, “I do not know what virtue is,” but nevertheless, “I want to examine and seek together [VNH\DVTDL NDL VX]KWKVDL] with you what it may be” (Men. 80d). Scott contributes to our reading when observing that what might be termed, with caution, the “Socratic education process,” which is inseparable from the practice of Socratic dialectic, is “guided by an erotic striving in which both teacher and student become co-seekers (sunerastes) after truths which are sure to be difficult to express and which turn out to be harder still to discover.”50 Although we are skeptical of Scott’s use of “teacher and student,” which connotes a traditional, asymmetrical pairing in education, we agree with his interpretation of the so-called “educational context” comprised of co-participants or co-learners united in the quest – “VXQHUFRPDL/synerchomai” “to go along with or together” – to search out together trust-worthy responses to the “what is x?” question. As related to the Gorgias, Meno, and Charmides, in the Alcidiades I,51 we also 50

Scott, Socrates as Educator, 47. A. E. Taylor. Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Dover Books, 2001), 522. It is generally agreed among Platonic scholars that Plato is not the author of this dialogue, which is often classified amongst the Apocrypha. Taylor (2001) disputes its authorship but does have praise for it, stating that it is worth reading 51

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encounter notions of co-learning, for although Socrates clearly has a greater understanding of what is entailed when caring for the soul than Alcibiades, there is, nevertheless, a clear indication that Socrates is legitimately embracing and acknowledging the limits of his own knowledge, professing the acceptance of his ignorance. Socrates assures Alcibiades that they are both “in need of education” and that Socrates will participate as a “co-learner” in the process of interrogating “justice” (dikaiosynƝ) in the service of “self-cultivation” while dedicated to deepening his own self-knowledge in dialogue with Alcibiades. Far from giving Alcibiades the impression that he’s a teacher of virtue, Socrates suggests that they should “take council together” (koinƝ boulƝ) in dialectic. When young Alcibiades asks Socrates to show him, or teach him, the art of self-cultivation, which is the process of becoming educated in the virtues, Socrates suggests the following: “Let us discuss together how we can become as good as possible. You know, what I’ve said about the need for education applies to me as well as you (Alc. I 124b-c my emphasis). Let us note, as Nicholas Denyer observes, that despite Socrates’ perpetual claims to ignorance of the virtues, we must acknowledge that he is morally superior to all of his interlocutors based on what he has learned in his diligent and relentless philosophical pursuit of understanding the virtues.52 However, in line with our argument, Socrates undoubtedly benefits from the discussions within which he participates, for through the process he learns more about himself and those with whom he is engaged in discourse. Despite the sure and certain knowledge of the virtue in question evading Socrates’ firm grasp, he undoubtedly benefits through his participation with Alcibiades as co-learner in the examination. We began with a brief discussion about Socratic Method in education, and highlighted the fact that it is questionable and even problematic to claim to “teach like Socrates.” Indeed, we went so far as to suggest that Socrates really doesn’t have a method, if by method we mean a transferable schema for learning, which can be formalized and applied with predictable results. Our reading exposed the chasm dividing educators embracing the Socratic Method in classroom instruction and Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogues, where he practices the nonsystematic, open-ended form of dialectical examination. The question remains: If Socrates is not a teacher in the traditional sense, if he disavows claims to the type of knowledge required to be a teacher in the first and analyzing: “This [the Alcibiades I] is in compass and worth the most important member of the group [Apocrypha], as it contains an excellent general summary of the Socratic-Platonic doctrines of the scale of good and the ‘tendance’ of the soul.” 52 N. Denyer. Plato: Alcibiades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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instance, are there lessons we can learn or at least draw from his unique practice of philosophy as presented? We answer in the affirmative. For example, as an instructor of philosophy and ethics, it is often the case that I look to Socrates for inspiration, drawing out new ways to conceive myself in relation to my students, new ways to imagine education as something other than a means of transmitting knowledge, as a product of learning, to students who are being prepared for their marketable vocational futures. As we have shown, Socrates is far more concerned with turning our attention, both educators and students, to the supreme value to be found in the pursuit of an ethical education, or in less formal terms, the quest to improve, to whatever degree possible, our attitudes toward and the values we hold about ourselves, others, and the world. Space does not allow us to compile a lengthy list of so-called “benefits” that might be derived from Socratic philosophy, indeed many books have been written on this topic. However, although not attempting to systematize his process and offer for the reader indelible principles or even loose tenets of a Socratic education, there are three crucial aspects of Socratic philosophia that are worth mentioning in relation to our study–all of which, we might say, serve as preconditions for philosophizing and the enactment of authentic learning. First, Socrates’ philosophy, which is inseparable from the practice of dialectic, demands the acknowledgement and acceptance of the limited nature of human knowledge. For as against dogmatism, the enemy of Socratic inquiry, admitting one’s lack or privation of knowledge (ignorance) is essential for beginning and for inspiring and facilitating the continued and renewed pursuit of philosophical enlightenment, despite the limited nature of that enlightenment. This might be called the philosophical acknowledgement of human finitude. Second, rather than teaching, Socrates brings our attention to the supreme importance of co-learning, where the quest for knowledge and enlightenment, the pursuit of the reasoned understanding (phronƝsis) of the virtues is carried out in communal dialogue through a form of examination that is precarious and unpredictable, difficult to manage, and monumentally demanding because of the stakes involved for all participants. For Socrates, what is ultimately at stake is the perfection of the soul or enlightened transformation of the ethical dispositions of all those involved. Communal discourse, however, always holds the potential danger to expose the vulnerability of our finite and fragile human natures, and so an intimate form of trust is required, because in the process of co-learning, our most cherished, long-held beliefs are rigorously challenged, put into question in such a way that calls for their reassessment, and in some

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instances, demands their rejection. The quest for self-improvement through dialectic is always already inextricably bound up with the potential improvement of others, and from out of this type of co-learning, a sense of communal or ecumenical possibilities also arises, indicating that in the process of revealing and appropriating my possibilities in relation to others, there is a collective transformation in learning also occurring. This we might say is the enlightening philosophical process of becoming other in the face of the other. Third, as opposed to answers or definitive solutions to the weighty ethical problems we face, Socrates shows us that we are more often than not confronted with the task of formulating appropriate questions about the things we deem the most valuable and meaningful. The pursuit of virtue calls for us to formulate original questions about the ethical life, queries about how to live in an excellent manner, questions that shape, guide, and direct the unfolding of our investigations. However, as we have shown, these inquiries and problems defy categorical answers and solutions, and this pushes us into the presence of all that is and must remain, questionable, for they demand further examination and require the formulation of new and different questions. Socrates inspires us to live in a way that instantiates learning as a life-long endeavor, task and vocation, because philosophically questioning the ethical life, although remaining an incomplete task, is for Socrates, the most worthwhile and rewarding thing we can do, and this we call the Socratic devotion to live a question-worthy existence. Indeed, outside of the single fatality of death, Socrates demonstrates that it is possible and desirable to continue the search for wisdom. However, we must note that Socrates is unwilling to acknowledge or conclude with utter certainty that human learning truly ends with death (Ap. 41a-b).

CHAPTER SIX THE “FAILURE” OF ALCIBIADES’ EDUCATION THE DIFFICULTY OF SOCRATIC SELF-CULTIVATION

The Alcibiades I or Alcibiades Major is part of the Platonic Apocrypha, situated within the philosophical/literary classification of Sokratikoi Logoi.1 These writings, as Nicholas Denyer brings to our attention, focus on “GLDORJR9” (dialogos) or Socratic dialectic, which is to say, these works or philosophical exercises dramatize Socrates in dialogue with others.2 The Alcibiades I, as A. E. Taylor concludes, “is in compass and worth the most significant member of the group, as it contains an excellent general summary of the Socratic-Platonic doctrines of the scales of goods and the ‘tendance’ of the soul.”3 We note that the ancient authors contributing to the Sokratikoi Logoi were concerned with defending Socrates and Socratic philosophy, for as W. K. C. Guthrie asserts, “One of the complaints against Socrates was that young associates, of which Alcibiades was most notorious, had discredited political careers,” and many, including Xenophon, were “anxious to extricate him from the charge”4 that Socrates was a failure because he could not teach virtue to his companions and interlocutors. Richard Hunter also observes that the complex and problematic relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades was of particular interest to those seeking to “fashion Socrates’ posthumous reputation, [e.g.] Polycrates’ lost Accusation of Socrates certainly exploited the potential of this relationship to arouse prejudice

1

W. K. C. Guthrie. The History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 5, The Later Plato and the Academy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 384. 2 N. Denyer. Plato: Alcibiades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 3 A. E. Taylor. Plato: The Man and his Work (New York: Dover Books, 1962), 522. 4 W. K. C. Guthrie. Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 28.

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against Socrates.”5 Gary A. Scott bleakly observes that the vexing case of Alcibiades, as powerful as it is, can potentially leave us “pessimistic about the effectiveness of Socratic Paideusis.”6 Indeed, even Plato responds to this issue, for in the Symposium we encounter “the same desire to dissociate Socrates from Alcibiades’ unprincipled conduct.”7 The effectiveness or success of Socrates’ philosophy can be traced to the Apology, and this includes its propensity to inadvertently produce adverse results, which in the extreme, stirs and rouses the youth to rebel against traditions of the polis. The general scholarly perspective regarding the authenticity of the Alcibiades I is expressed by D. S. Hutchinson, stating that (more than likely), “Plato never wrote a work whose interpretation was as simple and straightforward, [but in fact, that] very quality makes it an excellent introduction to [Socratic] philosophy.”8 In approaching this dialogue, I admit the following: Since I am unqualified to render an expert opinion regarding the dialogue’s Platonic authorship from a historical perspective informed by philology, I focus instead on attending to the merits of its “Platonic” treatment of Socrates and his method in an early and unvarnished form, and so I agree with both Taylor and Hutchinson from above with respect to its value for the purpose of this essay.

The Indictment of Socratic Philosophy Accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was known to be a close friend of the young political upstart and firebrand Alcibiades, and as Mary Nichols claims, Alcibiades’ crimes against Athens “provided fuel for the charges against [Socrates].”9 Scott recognizes three types of interlocutors that Socrates engaged in the dialogues: imitators, rogues, and disciples. For the purpose of this essay, I focus on the imitators and rogues, those, like Alcibiades, who were far more nefarious and potentially deadly than mere imitators. These associates of Socrates tending towards malevolence were perceived by his accusers to be students of Socrates, and their close connection to Socrates was used as a pretext to charge him with state and religious crimes and “to slander him publicly.”10 The imitators of Socrates practiced elenchus in an amateurish manner, using the techniques of cross5

R. Hunter. Plato’s Symposium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103. G. A. Scott. Socrates as Educator (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 161. 7 Guthrie, Socrates, 28. 8 D. S. Hutchinson, Alcibiades I, in Cooper, Plato: Complete Works, 558. 9 M. Nichols. “Philosophy and Empire: On Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium,” Polity 39(4) (2007): 502. 10 Scott, Socrates as Educator, 18. 6

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examination to question and refute powerful and wealthy Athenians. Instead of inspiring the love of wisdom that Socrates embraced as a model for ethical living, when practiced by the youths, dialectic had the unintended deleterious result of angering those questioned. Socrates wryly observes that, after being interrogated and refuted, it was not toward the youths that the humiliated Athenians directed their wrath, instead their collective enmity was aimed at Socrates himself: “The young men who follow me around at their own free will…often imitate me and try to question others…the result is that those whom they question [and refute] are angry…with me” (Ap. 23c).11 The rogues were associates of Socrates whose actions had disastrous implications for Athenian society/politics and its history, and included such familiar dramatis personae from Plato’s dialogues as Charmides, Critias, and Phaedrus; the first two were linked to the bloody, murderous rule of the Thirty Tyrants, and Phaedrus was indicted on serious religious and political crimes that led him to flee Athens.12 Perhaps the most well-known, albeit infamous, rogue of the dialogues is Alcibaides, who, in addition to displaying the raw and unchecked drive to acquire power and notoriety, engaged in countless debaucheries and seditious activity, betraying both Athens and Sparta, reputedly involved in the destruction of the Herms and suspected of the religious crime of revealing–or, more accurately, lampooning–the sacred rites of the Eleusinian mysteries.13 The basic question we initially consider runs thusly: Can Socrates’ philosophy be held accountable, and ultimately indicted, as a failed practice based on the so-called results it produced or failed to produce? This is a relevant concern considering that many of his associates, interlocutors, and friends failed to acquire an ethical disposition (hƝxis) or soul (psychƝ), and indeed, refused to work to potentially cultivate their ethical dispositions, or care for their souls properly. As stated, Nichols argues that Socrates’ brand of philosophy, dedicated to questioning and de-structuring untested and accepted opinions, contributed to fostering a radical form of skepticism toward democratic laws and conventions, 11

The citations of passages from Plato’s dialogues are from: J. M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). I note for the reader where emphasis has been added to the text and where translations have been altered. 12 D. Nails. The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002). 13 Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives, trans. A. H. Clough (Danbury: Grolier Enterprises, 1985).

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producing a rebellious attitude in Alcibiades akin to an imperialistic and even tyrannical mindset.14 This indicates that Socrates failed to instill the importance of pursuing the ethical life, and instead had the unintended effect of liberating Alcibiades from any pressing sense of duty toward the state, a responsibility essential for those pursing politics as conceived by Socrates (Alc. 134c). Nichols’ reading aligns with the views of Socrates’ accusers, for here we encounter the original belief driving the ancient postPlatonic authors’ concern which argues that Socrates is a failed teacher of virtue, and hence his practice of philosophy represents a flawed and potentially dangerous endeavor. In this view we also encounter the erroneous notion that Socrates, even if possessing the knowledge of virtue, fails dismally in the pedagogic attempt to pass it along through transmission.15 In relation to these claims, it is necessary to address an often overlooked issue when seeking to understand the so-called “failure” of Socratic philosophy, and that is the issue of whether or not Socrates can be rightfully labeled a teacher or instructor, and most specifically, a didaskalos of virtue and ethics. If Socrates can be identified as teacher, then it is possible to hold him accountable and responsible for the product of his instruction. This requires that Socrates be identified, in no uncertain terms, as a didaskalos, a “teacher or master” of knowledge and instruction, educating students through the process of transmission (Symp. 175d-e).16 Let us listen to Socrates’ words on this matter from the Apology: “I have never been anyone’s teacher…I do not converse when I receive a fee and not when I do not…I never promised to teach them anything…I cannot justly be held responsible for the good or bad conduct of these people” (Ap. 33a-b, emphasis added). This denial is a crucial element of Socrates’ defense, and assists in addressing our concern, for Socrates is emphatic that he is not a teacher in the sense of a sophist or didaskalos. Contrary to Socrates’ understanding and practice of philosophy, the didaskalos must be able to successfully pass along knowledge to his pupil without dissembling or confusion. In addition, the didaskalos is a knowledge-authority and commands the instruction process; he does not learn along with the student as he moves through the process of pedagogy. Indeed, it is Socrates’ relentless and legitimate claims to ignorance of the knowledge of the virtues (Ap. 21d-e; 23a) along with his insistence on assuming the role of 14

Nichols, “Philosophy of Empire,” 503. A. Nehamas. The Virtue of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 16 H. Liddell and R. Scott. A Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell & Scott’s GreekEnglish Lexicon (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2015), 169. 15

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co-participant or co-learner (synerchomai) in the dialectical and educative process that separates him from the traditional Athenian didaskalos (e.g., Men. 80c; Phdr. 278d; Grg. 506a). When Socrates suggests to Alcibiades the need for the practice of “self-cultivation” (epimeleian tina poiƝisthai), Alcibiades believes that Socrates, assuming the role of the didaskalos, will teach this philosophical art to him – or impart the truth of justice and sophrosunƝ directly – however, Socrates corrects him at once, stating, in a manner that is somewhat shocking and confusing to Alcibiades, “Yes–but let’s discuss together [koinƝ boulƝ] how we can become as good as possible. You know, what I’ve said about the need for education [chre paideuthenai] applies to me as well as to you – we’re in the same condition (Alc. 124b-c). Alexander Nehamas emphasizes this point: Socrates, although often perceived to be a teacher – indeed the paradigmatic pedagogue–“is not a teacher of arƝte”17–which is to say, Socrates is not a didaskalos as described above. If Socrates could have taught virtue to Alcibiades, a person in pursuit of a career in state politics, a vocation requiring a virtuous disposition, then Socrates would have done so. However, as Joseph Lawrence observes, the undeniable “impossibility of teaching virtue is nowhere more convincingly shown than in Socrates’ failure to teach Alcibiades.”18 Whether or not Socrates might legitimately be labeled a “teacher” in another sense is a legitimate concern, however it is an issue beyond the scope of this essay.19 Socrates could not and did not teach (didaskalia) virtue to anyone, in part based on the manner in which the knowledge of virtue functions. In fact, the pursuit of virtue is a normative concern and endeavor, and such knowledge or understanding (phronƝsis) defies sure and certain acquisition and transmission from pedagogue to pupil. Scott offers one reason for the so-called failure of Socrates’ interlocutors to become virtuous, claiming that “their pedagogy [remained] incomplete, and without the guidance from the philosopher,” and so the project of selfcare could “never find its proper completion,”20 thus indicating that Socrates is not responsible for Alcibiades’ slide into immorality and his rejection of the philosophical life. It is possible to conclude that Socrates had no hope of truly turning the souls of his interlocutors around in 17

Nehamas, The Virtue of Authenticity, 62. J. Lawrence. Socrates Among Strangers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 112. 19 On this issue, see Chapter 5 of this book: J. M. Magrini. “Socrates is not a Teacher: But Can We Learn from Him?” 20 Scott, Socrates as Educator, 55. 18

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enlightenment (periagǀgƝ) because of their weak, and in some cases, depraved and dogmatic dispositions. I move to explore why this Socratic pedagogy remained incomplete, and in doing so my concern is not with the end result (“product”) of Socratic dialectic, but rather I direct the reader’s attention toward the extreme difficulty and even danger involved in the sustained participation in the philosophical “process” itself.21 I argue that it is the difficulty encountered in the unfolding of the precarious and unpredictable practice of the Socratic philosophical life that is responsible for the failure of Alcibiades’ education, hence the blame for the failure lies with Alcibiades and the weakness of his character. Alcibiades was simply not cut out for undergoing and enduring the intellectual rigors, with subsequent effects on the disposition or soul, demanded by the Socratic project of philosophical self-cultivation or “care for the soul”.

The Difficulty of Socratic Self-Cultivation Alcibiades I As Driskin Clay writes, Socrates’ elenchus (dialectic) is employed to “reveal faults, just as touchstones are used to discover counterfeit metals,” and as Clay keenly observes, the Greek term elenchus can mean “refutation and reproach, just as the word touchstone (basanos) can mean torture.”22 This particularly interesting observation bespeaks the difficulty of practicing philosophy, which demands that Socrates devote himself to it as a lifestyle, vocation, and exigent task. I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men (Ap. 38a). Whenever a man has taken a position that he believes to be the best or has been placed there…when the god ordered me…there he must, I think, remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace (Ap. 28 d-e, translation altered).

The Socratic elenchus is a difficult practice, there is an undeniable sense of danger associated with and ineluctably bound up with Socrates’ practice of philosophy or dialectic. There are three components of dialectic which 21 F. Gonzalez. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 22 D. Clay. Platonic Questions: Dialogue with the Silent Philosopher (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004), 180-181.

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regularly pose insurmountable problems for interlocutors. The first one is that, in challenging the untested opinions and beliefs of his interlocutors, Socrates understands that most of the people questioned by him will vigorously resist the rational and logical challenge to their beliefs that elenchus poses. For Socrates, confronts deeply held beliefs that give form to the worldview of those he examines in the pursuit of excellence (Euthphr. 15c-e).23 The second controversial component of dialectic is that truth or understanding of the virtues is unlike the truth associated with epistƝmƝ or technƝ, it is elusive, dialogic, and hermeneutic in nature.24 This demonstrates that human knowledge cannot be absolute, and so there is a radical uncertainty bound up with the practice of Socratic philosophy, for it pushes participants into an ek-static state of “learned ignorance” and out of their epistemological comfort zone (Tht. 151d-e).25 Finally, Socratic philosophy works towards and indeed demands a change or transformation to one’s disposition or soul, in such a way that a new and enlightened outlook might emerge, one in which the relationship between one’s words (logos) and deeds or life (ergon/bios) is established and instantiated in praxis (Chrm. 157e).26 The issues of co-learning and self-learning are also crucial to dialectic, for in the Alcibiades, it is shown that philosophy is not only practiced as a co-learner with Socrates, i.e., in the presence and under the guidance of Socrates, it also requires a dedication to “self-learning,” a daunting requirement beyond the abilities of Alcibiades and most all of Socrates’ other interlocutors. Indeed, when Socrates admonishes those unconcerned with caring for their souls, he reveals just how vigorously or “strongly” they should pursue its perfection: “I go about doing nothing else than urging you…not to care [epimeleisthai] for your persons or your property more than the perfection of your souls (Ap. 30b, my emphasis). Here, Socrates highlights both the necessity of relentlessly pursuing self-cultivation and the extreme difficulty involved in the process. This passage gives us the sense and evokes the understanding that pursing the ethical soul is a process that is carried out in an “excessive” or even “violent” manner,27 23

H. Teloh. Socratic Education in the Early Dialogues (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). 24 H-G. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutic Studies on Plato, trans., P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 25 Sean Kirkland. The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). 26 J. Sallis. Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 27 Liddell and Scott, Lexicon, 685.

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for the pursuit of self-cultivation requires an excessive commitment to the task, for as stated, it potentially includes the sacrificing of the interlocuter’s most deeply held opinions and beliefs. To endure what is difficult in dialectic and experience its rewards, as the Republic, Phaedo, and Craytylus show, courage is required. For example, working to wrest truth from concealment “is a frightening and insecure thing to do,” and so courage is required (Rep. 450e). To avoid the trap of dogmatism, it is necessary to “believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness” (Phd. 90e, my emphasis). And, in the Craytylus, when pondering whether the things he investigates demonstrate stability and permanence or endless flux and change, Socrates concludes that what is required, above all else, is to “investigate [things] courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything easily” (Cra. 440d, my emphasis). Thus, despite the topic that Socrates and his interlocutors examine in the dialogues, it is necessary to strive “courageously” and “eagerly” in the difficult and unpredictable quest for truth. To deepen this line of thought, Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith contend that Socrates’ elenchus can “never fully achieve the goal of making the practitioner wise,” [for even Socrates] continues to be confused and to err on a number of important issues.”28 But, what can be said, in relation to elenchus in the Alcibiades, is that Socrates employs it to confront and challenge Alcibiades’ beliefs in a way that is beyond simply discerning the truth or falsity of propositions, rather its goal is to, along with contributing to Socrates’ own ethical development, purge Alcibiades of his pretense to knowledge and in the process “to deliberate about right action, and when the nature of right and wrong action is clear enough, exhort [Alcibiades] to pursue what is right and shun what is wrong.”29 The Alcibiades is unique in that it is concerned directly and explicitly with what is ethically right and wrong as related to politics, and Socrates is dedicated to awakening the young man to the error of his beliefs and revealing to him his ignorance about the very things he requires in order to become a virtuous and effective leader of the citizenry of the state. It is the revelation of ignorance, the temporary shock of the state of perplexity, or aporia, that highlights the extreme difficulty and pain of persisting in dialectical investigation. This experience, as Sean Kirkland observes in his reading of the “early” Platonic dialogues, freed from the sheltering effect 28 T. Brickhouse and N. Smith, “The Socratic Elenchus?” in: ed., G. A. Scott, Does Socrates Have a Method? (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2002), 21. 29 T. Brickhouse and N. Smith. Plato’s Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 50.

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of both epistƝmƝ and technƝ, instantiates the “exposure to excess,” for it represents a momentary but powerful revelation into the excessive nature of the philosophical “truth [phronƝsis] of the virtues,” which always frustrates Socrates’ efforts to arrive at an “explainable and thereby teachable understanding of virtue.”30 I now move to explore several key moments in the dialogue when Alcibiades’ soul is nourished by the flashing light of partial truth, which is the crucial revelation and unconcealment of his own ignorance, the necessary but difficult precondition for the search and pursuit of self-knowledge. In 113b, Socrates convinces Alcibiades to take ownership of his ignorance about politics and justice. Nevertheless, it is established that the attempt to give advice about such things when one does not know, and further, when one is not committed to pursuing the knowledge of justice (dikiaosunƝ) and moderation (sophrosune), will surely be followed by disastrous results (Alc. 113c). Socrates guides the discourse in the direction of linking justice with what is both good and advantageous, however, the connection stressed by Socrates between justice and its essential effects has not been legitimately made by Alcibiades, who wavers when pushed by Socrates, and so, in the midst of his contradictory remarks, an aporetic breakdown occurs, and in the thralls of his exposed or learned ignorance, Alcibiades cries out in frustration: “I swear by the gods, Socrates, I have no idea what I mean – I must be in some absolutely bizarre [atopos] condition! When you ask me questions, first I think one thing, and then I think something else” (Alc. 116e). In a moment of ek-static attunement, Alcibiades is temporarily transported and inhabits a “strange” and threatening intellectual place or dwelling; he now flounders in an altered and transformed state of mind, we might even say that his own soul has become unfamiliar to him. Continuing this line of thought, in 112d, Socrates observes that Alcibiades’ “opinion wavers so much” about justice and injustice that it is impossible that any legitimate knowledge of virtue and vice exists in his soul. The passage gives the distinct sense that Alcibiades is rambling and babbling about the topic without knowledge; it also connotes a vivid image of Alcibiades “wandering about, roaming, straying.”31 Alcibiades is intellectually lost as if in a foreign land or an unfamiliar location. Again, what is revealed in this moment of un-concealment is what I have termed Alcibiades’ “learned ignorance” about what Socrates deems the “most important things,” and, as frustrating as this experience is for Alcibiades, it 30 31

Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning, 109. Liddell and Scott, Lexicon 562.

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serves as a necessary and positive transitional stage/phase in the discourse, because it awakens and potentially rescues Alcibiades, if only for a short time, from the most detestable of all conditions described by Socrates, namely, “the most disgraceful sort of stupidity,” that is the ignorance linked to the erroneous and dogmatic belief that one knows, when in fact one does not know (Alc. 118a-b). When discussing the best way to manage the city and best serve its citizenry, the dialectical examination once again breaks down in aporia (Alc. 127d). When political management is linked by Alcibiades to the type of mutual friendship associated with familial relations, a contraction is revealed by Socrates: Based on Alcibiades’ newly attempted definition of politics, as each doing his or her own thing, a contradiction is exposed, and it becomes impossible to reconcile this view with his original definition of political management understood as the agreement between mutual family members (Alc. 127b). Deeply frustrated, since the extreme depth of his ignorance has been fully exposed, Alcibiades exclaims, “Well, Socrates, I swear by the gods that I don’t even know what I mean. I think I must have been in this appalling state [kinduneuo] for a long time, without being aware of it” (Alc. 127d). It is possible to link the Greek Alcibiades speaks regarding his state of mind, “kinduneuo” with ecstatic transcendence and aporetic breakdown, inducing an altered state of mind, for in this powerful and overwhelming state of revealed ignorance, Alcibiades admits that he is venturing out into uncharted territory, which is potentially dangerous and treacherous. Indeed, at this point, in an attempt to assuage Alcibiades’ discomfort in order to inspire his continued pursuit of virtue and the archƝ of politics, Socrates employs the exhortative technique of protreptic. Afterwards, as opposed to further challenging and shaming the frustrated young man, Socrates urges him on in a hortatory manner (Alc. 127e). Such moments reveal to Alcibiades disturbing things about his character, but these occurrences are also moments rife with potential educative value for the growth and development of the soul, but the essential question remains: Is Alcibiades strong enough and dedicated enough to submit himself to the painful and disturbing enlightenment that comes by way of acknowledged ignorance, in order to persist and hold himself within the sway and oscillation of Socratic questioning? The aporetic breakdowns in dialectic reveal the difficulty of the philosophical life’s search for understanding, but they serve the educative function as harbingers, for those insightful enough to accept this truth, of the soul’s potential transformation. Socrates demands that his interlocutors demonstrate the courage to assume personal responsibility for what is learned and what

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needs to be learned in the future, especially considering that elenchus is given structure and pushed forward by the initial quest for self-knowledge, as immortalized in the Delphic epigram, “Know Thyself” (seauton gnothi), a task grounded in limits and finitude, and as such, is never truly complete or fully actualized in knowledge. In the Alcibiades, the supreme burden of assuming responsibility for self-learning is an issue. For Socrates continually attempts to instill a sense of ownership in Alcibiades for the learning, and at the end of the dialogue, it is obvious that Alcibiades must commit to the process of selfcultivation as it is inextricably bound up with the political life he seeks, with the caveat that all learning, even co-learning, requires the crucial element of self-instruction mentioned above. Indeed, Alcibiades’ enthusiastic promise to effectuate a philosophical role reversal, where he will be the one to attend to Socrates, is contingent on Alcibiades’ continued practice of philosophy, especially when out of the company of Socrates (Alc. 135d). I briefly turn to the Theaetetus to draw a contrast between Socrates’ role as midwife and the analogy of the love-inspiring stork [pelargou] in the Alcibiades (Alc. 135e). Socrates, in the Theaetetus discusses the difficulty and pain involved in the practice of elenchus when searching for truth, those pursuing the understanding of philosophical issues, “suffer the pains of labor, and are filled day and night with distress” (Tht. 151a). In response, Socrates assumes the role of the philosophical midwife and works to “allay” pains in order to assist in birthing – bringing to light, wresting from concealment – the interlocutor’s own beliefs (Tht. 157d). Socrates accompanies Theaetetus, attends to his labors, and encourages him by offering a palliative (pharmakeia) for even the most difficult and painful elements of the dialectical process, which at times requires the midwife to sing soothing, incantatory songs (Tht. 149d). However, in the Alcibiades, the midwife analogy is not employed, and Socrates introduces a new and intriguing analogy of the “stork,” informing Alcibiades of the following as they prepare to part ways: SOCRATES: My love for you my excellent friend, will be just like a stork [pelargou]: after hatching a winged love in you, it will be cared for by it in return. ALCIBIADES: Yes, that’s right. I’ll start to cultivate justice in myself right now [in order to return it to you in the future]. SOCRATES: I should like to believe that you will persevere, but I’m afraid – not because I distrust your nature, but because I know how

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powerful the city is – I’m afraid it might get the better of both me and you (Alc. 135e).

Although there is an undeniable sense of intimacy bound up with this idea, there are indicators in the dialogue that unlike the midwife, whose presence is required during the process of birthing knowledge, it is Alcibiades who is required to continue his own education, his own selfdevelopment when he is not in the presence of Socrates. This is important, for it indicates that Alcibiades’ self-development is not wholly dependent on Socrates, because the ultimate success or failure of self-cultivation is actually contingent upon “the God,” or in essence, dependent on Alcibiades and not Socrates. When Alcibiades promises to attend Socrates – “from this day forward I will always attend on you” (Alc. 135d) – it must be noted that if such a role reversal is possible, Alcibiades will be required to adopt the philosophical life. Turning to ancient ornithology, Denyer analyzes the notion of role reversal in this dialogue in an intriguing way, in terms relating to the way that “young storks treat their parents,” for once storks brought their offspring to an age when they could fly, the “roles were then reversed, and the offspring tended to their parents.”32 To care for Socrates, attending on him in a loving, caring manner, requires Alcibiades to devote himself tirelessly to the task of self-cultivation, which, as stated, requires the continued process of self-education, especially during times when it is impossible for Socrates to be present. However, this task proves far too great for Alcibiades, who later recounts this fact in the Symposium. Rather than continuing to practice philosophy, Alcibiades seeks to escape it, since the extreme difficulty of continually examining himself causes him to abandon philosophy and to ultimately cave into the desire to please himself and his acolytes— despite experiencing intense shame for doing so (Smp. 216b). Although his love and admiration for Socrates is unwavering, in the Symposium Alcibiades no longer displays an erotic longing for Socratic philosophia, the esketic process that reveals disturbing and uncomfortable truths, an exercise that pushed Alcibiades beyond the limits of his courage and perseverance.

The Testimony of Alcibiades Symposium The themes of difficulty, persistence, and endurance are highlighted in Alcibiades’ praise or encomium of Socrates in the Symposium; traits that Socrates displayed and instantiated, traits that simultaneously attracted and 32

Denyer, Plato: Alcibiades, 247.

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repulsed Alcibiades, for to want to be like Socrates is not the same as actively pursuing, with unflagging dedication, the task of living up to Socrates as a moral exemplar. In his encomium to Socrates, Alcibiades lauds Socrates’ demonstration of endurance and persistence amid difficult and painful situations. For example, Alcibiades describes Socrates’ stoicism in the face of adversity during his military service, enduring harsh weather conditions without flinching, drinking to excess yet avoiding inebriation, and demonstrating the ability to hold himself in contemplative reflection for hours on end. Indeed, at the end of the symposium, Socrates leaves and spends the day, without sleep or nourishment, as he always does, examining his own soul in the company of others (Symp. 223d). Socrates’ entire life instantiates this type of unshakable resolve, and this of course includes his practice of self-cultivation, which calls for the ultimate expression of “restraint and strength of mind” (Symp. 219d). If we listen to Plato, it is only after long, persistent, and arduous questioning–“longcontinued intercourse”–that the “flashing light” of truth manifests and is “born of the soul and straightaway nourishes itself” (Ep. VII 341c). It is this trait of endurance and persistence, perhaps one of the philosopher’s most important attributes that is stressed in the Alcibiades, which lies beyond the powers of Alcibiades, who admits to regularly caving into the ways and desires of the crowd while tearing himself away from Socrates and the difficulty of the philosophical life. Alcibiades desperately and actively seeks to avoid the commitment to the persistent pursuit of the excellent life in order to, without restraint, satiate his wanton desire for his “own ambition and desire for recognition” (Symp. 216b). We also encounter Alcibiades’ misrepresentation of both Socrates and his practice of philosophy when speaking of Socratic argumentation that emerges from his comparison of Socrates to ancient “Silenus-figures,” small sculptures that can be opened to reveal likenesses of the gods inside (Symp. 215b). Immediately, readers are struck by a familiar theme in Plato, namely, as Hunter observes, the danger of prima facie acceptance of the unity of interiors and exteriors, a visible appearance and inner reality, “a mistake against which much of Platonic philosophy is directed.”33 Alcibiades does however, recognize that beneath the disheveled, slightly off-putting exterior of Socrates, a treasure is awaiting those who are equipped to engage him, potentially revealing an opening into an encounter with all that is “godlike and golden, beautiful and wonderful” (Symp. 216e). Alcibiades describes the arguments of Socrates in these terms: 33

Hunter, Plato’s Symposium, 100.

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On the face of it, it’s just a collection of irrelevant words and phrases…It’s all donkeys and bronzesmiths, shoemakers and tanners…But look beneath the surface, and you get inside them…they’re the only arguments that make sense; on top of that they are supremely inspiring, because they contain countless models of excellence and points towards it…they deal with everything you should be concerned about, if you want to lead a good and noble life (Symp. 221d-222a, my emphasis).

Yet, this philosophical treasure does not come easily, it is not given, and it is certainly not for sale, neither through monetary exchange nor the tawdry bartering of sexual favors for wisdom (Symp. 217a). Socrates cannot simply hand over (transmit) to Alcibiades those things that are god-like, golden, and beautiful, for his method of doing philosophy is, as we have already discussed, never the equivalent of the didaskalos’ craft, a teacher who claims to impart knowledge via transmission for a fee (219e). Indeed, as noted, this is not the manner in which knowledge of the virtues functions. The models of virtue and excellence referenced by Socrates in discourse are not fully formed, but they rather must be revealed, worked, and shaped through examination and argumentation, which amounts to moving through Socrates’ arguments as they point to or gesture towards the truth that dialectic obliquely and partially reveals. The arguments of Socrates do not so much “tell” us about things – for instance that virtue is undeniably x - instead they “show” us things, gesture toward things, in a limited, but insightful and enticing way. If one wants to lead a good and noble life, it is chosen freely, and demands courageously working through the difficult give and take and relentless question and refutation of elenchus. These arguments, and particularly Socrates’ preferred form of argumentation, are designed to bring into focus the ineluctable relationship between the virtues discussed and the manner in which they are lived out in praxis. Dialectic holds the power to reveal the disturbing and shameful truth that one is sorely lacking in the virtue being interrogated, putting the radical disconnect between one’s logos-andergon/bios on full public display. P. Christopher Smith argues that Socrates’ primary form of argumentation might be understood in terms of “dialectical rhetorical arguments,” which begin from erotesis endoxis, things that are generally believed and held close to the soul, and then are rigorously questioned and de-structured.34 Denyer refers to these arguments

34

P. Christopher Smith. “Apodeiknumai, Dialegasthai, Peithein: A Reconstruction of Plato’s Methods of Argumentation in the Phaedo,” in: The Third Way: New

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as “İʌĮțIJLțȠȚ ORJRL” (epaktikoi logoi), or inductive arguments, used to form generalizations that can, by astute interlocutors, be related in intimate ways to their lives, for they see themselves in the arguments, as it were.35 What makes these arguments slippery, disconcerting, and difficult to manage –much like our understanding of normative statements – is that the premises are open to reexamination and hence can only reveal “provisional, inconclusive ‘conclusions’.”36 Where I have discussed the attuning capacity of aporia, engendering the “waylessness” associated with “not-knowing” or revealed ignorance in the Alcibiades, in terms of an ek-static and transformative experience (pathos), Hunter claims that in the Symposium, which presents an older, more worldly Alcibiades, it is the case that the Socratic “spell” Alcibiades is under defies explanation in terms of “philosophical aporia,” and should instead be read as indicating the fatalistic acceptance of Alcibiades’ “present condition,” which is expressive of the bleak realization that “life is not worth living.”37 It is certainly the case that no philosophical aporetic breakdown occurs in the speeches at the symposium in a way that is comparable to what we have described earlier in relation to aporia in the elenchus of the Alcibiades. But, it should be understood that Alcibiades’ realization in the context of the encomium to Socrates is the painful recollection of the overarching attuning power of Socratic philosophy, and the memories of the transformative nature of his experience with Socrates in dialogue are released and come flooding back to Alcibiades when he finds himself in the presence of Socrates. The force and depth of this transformative attuning power of Socratic philosophy is compared to the flute playing of the satyr Marsyas, for Socrates’ philosophy demonstrates a charming yet dissonant musicality that holds the power to “carry people away” (Symp. 215c). So powerful and transformative is this realization for Alcibiades, which lays bare and puts into question his entire existence, that the experience is likened to a religious conversion or philosophical paradigm shift. Recalling being in the presence of Socrates and listening to his words, Alcibiades describes the profound effect of Socrates turning his beliefs and indeed, his “entire soul [he psychƝ] upside down,” opening Alcibiades to the most “disturbing realization that [his] whole life is that of a slave.” (Symp. 215e-216a).

Directions in Platonic Studies, edited by F. Gonzalez. (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 96-97. 35 Denyer, Plato” Alcibiades, 210. 36 Smith, “Plato’s Methods of Argumentation,” 97. 37 Hunter, Plato’s Symposium, 102.

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As Alcibiades painfully recalls, undergoing Socrates’ relentless questioning is analogous to the “worst kind of religious hysteria [mallon e ton korubantionton],” which connotes a strong and exceedingly overpowering experience resembling ecstatic frenzy, a moment where, as already described, Alcibiades “stands outside” himself (ek-static) within the event of attunement that induces a philosophical paradigm shift (Symp. 215e). Alcibiades claims that it was Socrates’ continued admonition of him that now “forces [him] to admit all of [his] faults,” and to face the fact that he does nothing to improve his soul and simply continues with his life devoid of philosophical concerns (Symp. 216a-b). It is crucial to note that Alcibiades admits that he should have stayed in the company of Socrates and continued self-cultivation, a process/practice initiated in the earlier dialogue already discussed, for if he had done so he would have perhaps been equipped to avoid falling victim to temptation and the weakness of his own soul. However, such devotion to Socrates was far too much for Alcibiades, for it would necessitate continually admitting and owning up to his own faults, lack of knowledge, all the while undergoing the torturous questioning, driven down the uncertain path towards potential ethical improvement. So, as Alcibiades admits in a sorrowful tone, “I tear myself away from him, as if stopping my ears against the Sirens; otherwise, I would spend my whole life sitting at his feet…when I leave him I have no defense against my own ambition and desire for recognition” (Symp. 216b, my emphasis). Alcibiades is explicitly indicating that it is Socrates who is responsible for the success or failure of the philosophical endeavor; the persistent presence of Socrates, in the mind of Alcibiades, is necessary for philosophical enlightenment. Admittedly, Socrates does have “some power to improve” Alcibiades’ soul (Symp 218e), and this bold if not wry Socratic claim is also found in the Alcibiades (Alc. 105d). However, recall the discussion of co-learning and the need for one’s responsibility to and for self-learning in the pursuit of ethical excellence, but here I want to be clear about what “self-learning” might mean in Socratic philosophy. Socrates in the Theaetetus offers a description of what we might term “self-reflection” by stating that this process happens when the soul is “carrying on a discussion in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself, affirms and denies” (Theaet. 190a). This relates to Alcibiades’ description of Socrates lost in thought for hours (Symp. 220d), however, this is not to be construed as suggesting that Socratic philosophy can be carried out in the modern sense of Cartesian self-reflection in isolation. For as Jean-Pierre Vernant clarifies, “The Cartesian cogito, the ‘I think therefore I am,’ was no less foreign to the knowledge the Greek man had

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of himself than it was to his experience of the world.”38 Indeed, as related directly to the Alcibiades and the analogy of the soul and the eyes as reflecting mirrors, Vernant emphasizes that for the Greeks, “what one was, one’s face and soul, could be seen and known only by looking to the soul of another,” and each person’s “identity was revealed through his relationship with others, through the intersecting of gazes and the exchanging of words” (Alc. I 133a-b).39 When speaking of “self-learning,” as Daniel Werner importantly observes, “even mature philosophers require another, that is, an astute interlocutor who will challenge their claims in unexpected ways and be alert to biases and blind spots that one might overlook.”40 This is to say that in the absence of Socrates, in service of continued self-cultivation, Alcibiades is responsible for seeking out the appropriately informed dialectic partner, and as Werner concludes, for Alcibiades this is a difficult if not impossible task, for he “is in no position to be able to select an appropriate partner on his own,” this because it requires the attuned “ability to discern a wise soul,” thus indicating the “very wisdom and self-knowledge which Alcibiades is lacking.”41 I consider one final analogy offered by Alcibiades in his attempt to describe the intense and disturbing feeling of being in the presence of Socrates, and this is the idea of being bitten by a snake, and beyond, “something worse than an adder, and in the worst possible place,” i.e., directly in the “heart or soul [tƝn kardian gar Ɲ psychƝn]” by a “method of philosophical argument, whose bite, when it gets a grip on a young and intelligent mind, is sharper than any adder’s” (Smp. 218a-b). To get to Alcibiades’ heart and soul, i.e., his ethical center or disposition, requires that the flame of philosophy is kindled by a personal desire and willful drive for excellence, in that the “wild passion for philosophy” when ignited must be nurtured, stoked, and kindled in a community of likeminded thinkers (Symp. 218b). Alcibiades shuns the company of Socrates and his philosophical invocation much like Socrates turns from the erotic advances of Alcibiades. As Lawrence keenly observes, in relation to what we have described as the pain and difficulty bound up with Socratic selfcultivation, “It is Alcibiades, and not Socrates, who makes that hazardous suggestion (in an aside to Agathon) that one should be able to live life without experiencing pain, [missing the crucial point that the] willingness 38

J-P. Vernant. The Greeks, trans., C. Lambert and T. L. Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16. 39 Vernant, The Greeks, 17. 40 D. Werner. “The Self-Seeing Soul in the Alcibiades I,” Ancient Philosophy, 33(1) (2013): 15 41 Ibid., 18.

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to endure pain,”42 which, as shown, requires the Socratic courage to hold oneself in the unpredictable sway of dialectic examination, “is the hidden but necessary condition of all erotic ascent,”43 and this is one of many things that Alcibiades fails to understand. Here we offer Lawrence’s eloquent take on the relationship of Socrates and Alcibiades, which speaks to the willful autonomy of Alcibiades to abandon philosophy and his socalled Socratic education: “Alcibiades was the strength of his passions and his mental vision. What he deplored was the entanglement of that vision in the sphere of a narcissistic ego,”44 in a gesture of true love and philosophical eroticism–the love (philia) of the pursuit of wisdom (sophia)–Socrates offered the young man a potential path to enlightenment, or the ethical betterment of his soul, however, when Alcibiades recognized everything he would have to give up, suffer, and continually undergo (pathein) in the process of renewed and repeated examination for the sake of virtue, “he responded with anger and refused the liberation.”45

Socrates, Alcibiades, and Philosophy Concluding Thoughts When speaking of the difficulty in pursuing and committing oneself to the philosophical life, Plato provides valuable insight, which came through his personal experience with Dionysius, who failed to truly comprehend the vocation of philosophy and so was ill-suited to commit to this rigorous life-style. What Plato writes can be directly related to my conclusions about Alcibiades’ responsibility for his own educative and philosophical failure as a follower and friend of Socrates: Those who are really not philosophers but have only a coating of opinions, like men whose bodies are tanned by the sun, when they see how much learning is required, and how great the labor, and how orderly their daily lives must be to suit the subject they are pursuing, conclude that the task is too difficult for their powers; and rightly so, for they are not equipped for this pursuit. But some of them persuade themselves that they have already heard enough, and need make no further effort. Now this is a clear and infallible test to apply to those who love ease and are incapable of strenuous labor, for none can ever blame his teacher, but 42

Lawrence, Socrates Among Strangers, 116. Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 110. 43

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Indeed, early on Socrates foresees the fate of Alcibiades, expressing his “greatest fear” that the “love of the common people” will corrupt him, a disastrous fate suffered by the majority of Athenian statesmen (Alc. 132a). Indeed, in ominous and foreboding terms, Socrates voices his deep concern regarding the potential of Alcibiades to abandon the strict, disciplined, and difficult life of philosophy; Socrates fears Alcibiades will neglect and corrupt his soul (Alc. 135e). In the Symposium, the emotional and psychological anguish Alcibiades suffers regarding the self-destruction of his soul, leads to Alcibiades’ testimony, his confession that without philosophy, passion and desire dominate and rule his life–a life freely chosen–and much like the “unexamined life,” Alcibiades concludes that his life, “the life of a slave…is just not worth living” (Symp. 216a). Hans-Georg Gadamer echoes what has been stressed throughout in his hermeneutic reading of Plato’s Letter Seven, emphasizing that dialectic inquiry never ceases, and through the “untiring movement [spiel] back and forth,”46 participants are brought ever closer to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the virtues, allowing them to take a stance and remain within close “proximity to what is sought,”47 instantiating a dwelling in the understanding (phronƝsis) or Being of virtue as it is partially revealed in dialectic at an epistemological and ontological distance, always beyond the full grasp of the human’s limited, incomplete, and finite intellectual powers. It is possible to grasp the essence of Socratic paideia, by turning to Plato’s understanding of education in the Republic, which he defines in terms of the soul turning back to itself in an enlightened manner (periagogƝ). Based on the understanding of the sustained and renewed nature of dialectic, the process of Socratic philosophy always requires “another turning,” an additional and continual turning of the soul back to itself, which indicates that education as the facilitation of one’s ethical disposition in praxis always requires a continuing of the education process, and this need and exigency for further education is immanent, harbored and sheltered within the activity of dialectic itself, which must be, as argued, courageously sustained and continually renewed. The ultimate success of the Socratic project is contingent on Alcibiades demonstrating the courage and dedication required for taking up and continually renewing the task of self-cultivation, which always 46 47

Gadamer, Eight Hermeneutic Studies on Plato, 121. Ibid., 121-122.

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involves both the commitment to co-learning and self-learning. To this point, Socrates stresses that humans learn best when they “want” to learn and “work” things out for themselves (Alc. 106d), and in discussion with Alcibiades, Socrates is explicit that learning will require Alcibiades’ dedication and participation, for when learning, Alcibiades must take responsibility to acknowledge that it will be “partly” up to him “to keep [the] conversation going well” (Alc. 108c). Ultimately, it is Alcibiades who must invest the effort to change himself, to transform his soul and disposition to the highest ethical level required to resist the temptation to give into his material and superficial desires and ambitions rooted in the pursuit of power, fame, and glory. Mitchell Miller, in relation to this issue, and here recalling the earlier reference to the “stork” (pelargou) in the Alcibiades, argues that to truly “become philosophical” one must willingly “appropriate the Socratic essence,” and, in direct relation to what we have argued, this means arriving at a state where one no longer requires Socrates’ “personal presence.”48 Thus, to conclude, it was ultimately Alcibiades’ unwillingness to commit to the exceedingly difficult practice and vocation of a life grounded in philosophical examination that was responsible for his failed education. Neither Socrates nor philosophy, as a practice, discipline, or way of life, were responsible. Indeed, as Scott suggests, this dialogue might be thought of as a “cautionary reminder” regarding the difficulty required for self-cultivation and the radical sense of unpredictability bound up with the process itself. For the Alcibiades teaches us the valuable lesson that discourse or dialogue (dialectic) must be continued “beyond the preliminary result it achieves in this one conversation” between Socrates and Alcibiades.49 When describing the philosopher in the Sophist, Socrates speaks of the difficulty associated with identifying the philosopher and defining his practice, for philosophers “range from city to city,” manifesting in “all sorts of shapes,” they appear to some as sophists or even madmen, while to others, they often “seem quite worthless” (Sph. 216e-d). Here, the insightful thoughts of Martin Heidegger might be related to the practice of philosophy and Socrates, for Heidegger once praised Socrates as the “purest thinker of the West,” who set himself within the “draft” or “current” of dialectical thinking and courageously “maintain[ed] himself in it.”50 Heidegger claims that we can’t really do anything with philosophy 48

M. Miller. The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2004), 10. 49 Ibid., 83. 50 M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans., Fred Wieck and J. Glen Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17.

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– and so it might appear to be quite worthless - but this is not the final word on this practice to which Socrates demands we dedicate our lives. For, although we can do nothing with philosophy, for it produces nothing that would categorically indicate its worth in terms of instrumental or utilitarian value, and it cannot, despite Socrates’ heroic efforts, necessarily produce an ethical soul or transformed disposition in any of the interlocutors with which he engages throughout the dialogues. Simply put, it is possible to state that philosophy, as practiced by Socrates, or when practiced in a similar manner, cannot guarantee definitive and positive results, as I have shown in relation to Alcibiades’ failure. However, as Heidegger opines, with a rare hint of optimism, “granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy,” if we concern ourselves with it, and dedicate ourselves to it in the manner of Socrates, “do something with us.”51

51 M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 13.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES AND PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTATION THE CONTINUING CRISIS IN CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION

In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, Cornell West and Jeremy Tate comment on the recent administrative decision at Howard University to dissolve the classics department, “amid a move for educational ‘prioritization’,”1 which is to say, in favor of disciplines and fields of study that are deemed more essential and more efficient at delivering an education to meet the many challenges that await students upon graduation. As West and Tate rightly conclude, “the removal of the classics is a sign that we,”2 as educators, and beyond, “as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling.”3 P. W. Fettner traces and links the crisis in contemporary education in institutions of higher learning manifesting the decline of the humanities and liberal arts in the education of our students to the “business model of the university, or what’s called ‘corporatization’.”4 This view of education is grounded in the misguided belief that the function and purpose of a so-called “democratic” education should be understood in terms of the dual ends of vocationalism and instrumentalism, and thus in terms of producing tangible, quantitative, standardized markers for academic achievement linked directly and inexorably to economic productivity. In this instance, 1

C. West and J. Tate, “Howard University’s Removal of Classics is a Spiritual Catastrophe,” Washington Post, 2021. https://washington.post.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornell-west-howard-classics/. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 P. W. Fettner, “The Crisis in the Humanities and the Corporate Attack on the University,” Academia.edu, 2014, 1.

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economic productivity in higher education might be grasped in a two-fold manner: (1) The student is viewed as a “product,” and by this we mean that she is a valuable and contributory democratic citizen when acquiring the potential, through learned skill-sets, for earning a sustainable living. That is, upon completing her education, the student is employable. (2) The university is driven toward the economic end of securing and maintaining a profit, which means the administration’s “decision-making process depends upon adopting a business model according to which financial criteria supersede any other criteria, including education, academic integrity, or citizenship.”5 A running and consistent theme among critics of contemporary education systems such as Martha Nussbaum, is that the education for profit or education for economic growth movement and model has the serious, deleterious effect of either reducing or terminating programs in the humanities and liberal arts, which as Nussbaum highlights, the administration deems invaluable and hence expendable.6 This problem as introduced is certainly not recent, but it is persistent and intensifying in its current expansion. According to West and Tate, the neglect of the humanities or liberal arts represents an undeniable “sign of spiritual decay, moral decline, and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”7 Fettner catalogs some of the problems contemporary education faces that include de-funding the humanities, reducing the “number of jobs for humanities graduates, increasing utilitarian requirements for grants and budgetary cutbacks for departments and programs.”8 West and Tate observe that although the tenured staff at Howard University continue to instruct students in the classics, their expertise is dispersed to other departments, indicating that the classics are relegated to an ancillary role and that other fields of study are deemed to possess more educative value, and this move broadcasts an ominously disturbing message to the academic community at large, a bleak harbinger of what is perhaps still to come. In line with what West and Tate have written, Nussbaum, with deep concern and regret, also reminds us of the “notorious cuts in the [US] humanities at SUNY Albany and the University of Las Vegas,”9 noting that she has “not seen any state system that is not deeply shaken.”10 All of this, according to Fettner, 5

Fettner, “The Crisis in the Humanities 9. M. Nussbaum. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 10. 7 West and Tate, “Spiritual Crisis,” 2. 8 Fettner, “Crisis in the Humanities,” 7. 9 Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 146. 10 Ibid. 6

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reveals the grim and troubling mindset that the “humanities are too subjective, or of unclear relevance, or of limited practical use and thus less vital than science or business or medicine.”11 Fettner issues a dire warning that the importance and contribution of the humanities must not be downplayed or underestimated, for they hold the potential to assist students in rendering difficult but informed ethical decisions, helping them to evaluate which ends need to be pursued, and equip them to assess and judge “which projects are humane,”12 which endeavors are truly worthy of their concern and pursuit. Interestingly, as related to our discussion, Pierre Hadot writes of what is undeniably a historical crisis in education when detailing the radical transformation of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, from an ethical exercise contributing to the development of the soul and disposition into a dry theoretical, academic discipline, a move that occurred in the Middle Ages. Ancient philosophy, Hadot argues, as we encounter in Plato’s Socrates, was a way of life or form of life grounded in what might be termed eroticism, that is, a life devoted to and driven by the perennial love of knowledge (phronƝsis) or wisdom (sophia) of the virtues, which was highlighted not by the drive to possess or have knowledge, but rather the exigent need to consistently and tirelessly pursue it; philosophy thus conceived is an ever-renewed search for wisdom, hence the understanding of Socrates as a “seeker of wisdom,” as a philosophical or zetetic skeptic.13 Ancient philosophy, as Hadot points out, established an inextricable bond or link between “philosophical discourse and the form of life”14 that one adopted and pursued, instantiating the indissoluble relationship between one’s logos and bios or ergon, namely, the intimate relationship between one’s word-and-deed.15 However, in the Middle Ages, philosophy was above all a discipline, a theoretical, systematic subject of study, which sorely lacked “a direct relationship to the [ancient] philosopher’s way of life.”16 This occurred when Christianity subsumed philosophy to theology, indeed the so-called Scholastic Tradition was nothing other than the merging of philosophy and theology as expressed by educators in the 11

Fettner, “Crisis in the Humanities,” 7. Ibid. 13 D. Blyth, “Plato’s Socrates, Sophistic Antithesis and Skepticism,” Journal of the Plato Society, 2018, 13. 14 P. Hadot. What is Ancient Philosophy? trans., M. Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 253. 15 J. Sallis. Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 16 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? 253. 12

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university. For in the early universities, from the 13th-century onward, education was distributed between two faculties or fields of study: (1) The Faculty of the Arts and (2) The Faculty of Theology. However, the Liberal Arts curriculum, which included philosophy, “became a servant to theology, it supplied theology with all the conceptual, logical, physical, and metaphysical materials it needed to make its case,”17 and in such a state, “the Faculty of the Arts came to be no more than a preparation for the Faculty of Theology.”18 In this atmosphere, not only did philosophy suffer devaluation, the once noble ideal of learning and erudition for its own sake was seriously put into question, and this is a view we experience today within the drive for social efficiency and instrumentalism in education. Gone is the yearning for and pursuit of a life of learning and questioning that is intrinsically valuable in its own right, holding the potential to contribute to a flourishing life of eudaimonia; a life, as Socrates assures us, which cannot be reconciled with the incessant, illfated, and soul-killing drive for unbounded material possessions and lofty public stature (Apology, 39a). Tarrying with the theme of philosophy and the intrinsic value of the pursuit of wisdom, Richard Wolin, in his critique of higher education, acknowledges that the so-called results that philosophy might be said to “produce” cannot be rigorously tested and validated in such a way as to allay all skeptical doubt, which is to say, philosophy’s conclusions never achieve veritable certainty. What philosophy potentially offers us cannot be measured by applying quantifiable or instrumental standards, however, the “study of philosophy instructs us in the virtues of reasoning and moral judgment: how to distinguish the substantive from the superficial, what is cogent from what is slack, the convincing from the merely suggestive.”19 Here, we might invoke Heidegger, whose keen observation regarding philosophy in relation to the crisis in education we are discussing resonates with a true Socratic tonality. “It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, ‘you can’t do anything with philosophy’,”20 or the classics, or the humanities, but this is not the end of the story for Heidegger, for as he observes, “even if we cannot do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us provided we engage ourselves with it?”21 For 17

Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? 253. K. Nielsen, “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Academia.edu, 2020, 12. 19 R. Wolin, “Reflections on the Crisis in the Humanities,” The Heidegger Review, 2011, 15. 20 M. Heidegger. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans., G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 13. 21 Ibid. 18

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Socrates, as for Heidegger, it is the pursuit of the philosophical life and not the results it can guarantee that makes it a valuable and necessary pursuit. Philosophy is a mode of inquiring into what is extraordinary, and taking Heidegger’s lead, to release oneself over to the philosophical life is to at once transcend the “prejudice that one can evaluate philosophy,”22 or any of the classic texts for that matter, “according to everyday standards that one would otherwise employ to judge the utility of bicycles or the effectiveness of mineral baths.”23 This is precisely the manner in which West and Tate discuss our engagement with the classics, for although they do not produce the types of results consistent with the sciences, they offer us, if we approach them with respect and reverence, learning experiences that pay great intellectual and spiritual dividends. Jacques Derrida champions an interpretive approach to reading texts displaying reverence and respect, and this is a critical reading that facilitates the deconstruction of great texts. For example, Derrida contends that there is a “way to read Plato, Aristotle, and others,”24 which does not merely reiterate, re-present, or lionize their work, and it is a manner of reading that seeks to actively engage in analyzing “the functioning and disfunctioning of [their] work,” and in this way, for Derrida, we remain “true to Plato, and this is a sign of love and respect for Plato.”25 Mark Slouka is also concerned about the deleterious influence of vocationalism, corporatism, and economics on contemporary education, which includes the unadulterated privileging of what Slouka terms “Mathandscience” in the curriculum, or disciplines in science, math, and technology that make sense because they compute, this because they are instrumental in nature and thus, unlike philosophy as described above, do things and secure tangible results, and so they are everything administrators require, for they provide a “solid return on capital investment, a proven route to success.”26 What at first blush remains hidden when analyzing 22

Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 13. Ibid. 24 J. Derrida. Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed., J. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 115. 25 Ibid. 26 M. Slouka. Essays in the Nick of Time (New York: Gray Wolf Press, 2010), 171. Slouka, when speaking of the vocational bent in American education, identifies a privileged form of knowledge, to which he attaches the neologism, “mathandscience.” R. Scott Webster, in a similar manner, when exploring the rise of social efficiency and instrumentalism in education as related to administrative policy decisions, observes the following: “Even the concepts of both ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ have become so hegemonic in policy literature that they are often 23

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curricula promoting science and technology at the marginalization of the humanities and liberal arts, is the insidiously pervasive foundation that John Gray reveals and links with secular humanism. It is possible to link this secular philosophical outlook with contemporary “standardized education, which harbors religious undertones and smuggles in the unstated faith and belief in the myth of unlimited [human] progress”27 through science and technology, a worldview and ideology which dangerously courts imminent destruction due to its hubristic tendencies. In this view, in relation to science and technology, a form of horizontal transcendence (secular/historical) as opposed to vertical transcendence (religious) is embraced, but just as in the former, it is driven by a false sense of utopianism, and so the existential notions of human fragility and finitude, which are bound up inextricably with the necessary recognition of human limits, are downplayed or ignored outright. As William Barrett recognizes, finitude, which is a concept that permeates Heidegger’s phenomenological-ontology and moves through the popularization of existential philosophy through and beyond the 1940s, is about limits and the acknowledgement that the human being simultaneously exists in truth as well as untruth, for it is stretched out between lethƝ and alƝtheia, situated between what is forever hidden (lethƝ) and what is only partially revealed (alƝtheia). Barrett relates rationalism, a form of calculative thinking, to “technical intelligence, in the power over things,”28 the earth and other humans, and this form of intelligence or calculative knowledge holds the potential to degenerate and become “demonical in action, as recent history has shown.”29 For example, simply consider the continued destruction of the planet for the purpose of acquiring resources amidst the condition of global scarcity that we ourselves have created and continue to perpetuate. As Barrett recognizes, when technological knowledge rises and dominates an entire civilization, “individuals in the civilization do less

assumed to be a singular term ‘teachingandlearning’.” So the technical aspects of teaching and learning become the main focus of research and practice, and are thus substituted with deleterious fallout for the heuristic understanding of “education.” See: R. Scott Webster. “Rehumanizing Education Policy,” in: Humanizing Education in the 3rd Millennium, ed., R. S. Webster. (Singapore: Springer, 2022), 63-72. 27 J. Gray. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2007), 115. 28 W. Barrett. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 274. 29 Ibid., 274.

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thinking, and perhaps wind up doing no thinking at all.”30 Scientific rationalism, or in the extreme, scientism, is instantiated in both technology and bureaucracy, and both aim at “rational control and ordering of social life,”31 and both reside at the cold heart of the standardized, contemporary educational system. As stated, an education in science, technology, mathematics can offer results that are tangible and concrete, in that their results are measurable, and hence they are deemed “successful.” However, what rightly concerns Slouka is what educators actually mean when identifying an academic discipline as a “success.” Education, ineluctably bound up with corporatism and economics, is a function of capitalism and, according to Slouka, capitalism is driven by the goal of “bringing education to its heels,”32 with the result of “downsizing what is most dangerous,”33 that is to say, what is most difficult and most feared in education, namely, critical thought and self-exploration in dialogue that leads down a path of uncertainty, a journey of self-questioning where there is no perceivable end in sight. However, as Slouka points out, in privileging fields of study grounded in scientific and mathematical approaches to learning, the educational system sacrifices what is perhaps most essential to our students, namely, “the deep civic function of the arts and humanities,”34 and as a result, “we are well on our way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens.”35 In essence, as Slouka asserts, “the humanities are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values,”36 the influence of which contributes to our development as civicminded and informed individuals and citizens; this too should be considered part of a successful education, for it attunes and informs an entire way of life. Robert Scholes echoes these sentiments when arguing that educators must take seriously the role of “literary and linguistic study in the development of citizens who will themselves play many institutional roles in their lives, either critically aware or as insensitive dupes and victims.”37 Academic institutions should be required to work to foster, 30

Barrett. Irrational Man, 269. Ibid. 32 Slouka, Nick of Time, 160. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 R. Scholes. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), xi. Scholes talks of Socrates and his practice of philosophy in terms relating to an institutionalized education, where the 31

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establish, and sustain the connection between the humanities and the world of our lived experience. In the view of West and Tate, education that emphasizes the classics actually encourages and inspires students to “live more intensely, more critically, more compassionately,”38 it pushes them out of their comfort zone, turning their attention “away from what is superficial”39 and toward the things that really matter and have a lasting value as they contribute to transforming and developing the character, disposition, and soul. In the great tradition of Humboldt and Bildung, an education in the humanities and classics holds the potential to forge “human beings of courage, vision, and civic virtue.”40 Bildung is grounded in the student’s formation and transformation, and this is based on the intimate concern for the inner being of the student, “as a way to approach the ancient [Greek] ideal of struggling and ultimately living with ideas,”41 which indicates that learning is not the “end” or telos of one’s education, but rather an ongoing process within which an individual evolves through dialogue with texts and ideas drawn from antiquity or the past. However, as West and Tate stress, this also includes our engagement with the developing history of the humanities, where students meet and are challenged by a tradition of “great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of the voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world.”42 Indeed, the potential exists to transform the student’s disposition through critical dialogue, engaging historical texts in ways that “force [her] to radically call into question…presuppositions,”43 those unexamined opinions and persistent unfounded beliefs, which reveals the need for continued questioning of traditions and authority, and this importantly includes questioning the very academic institutions providing students with an education. This, as related specifically to one’s civic duty, might be said to represent and instantiate “parrhesia,” the invaluable activity and humanities function as a vehicle for the type of learning and teaching Socrates did, for “Socrates did not simply want knowledge for himself, he wanted it for others as well, which is to say that he was a teacher: his dialectic was a path toward collective knowledge, gained by critical exchange.” 38 West and Tate, “Spiritual Catastrophe,” 2. 39 Ibid. 40 Slouka, Nick of Time, 160. 41 R. Horlacher, “What is Bildung?” in: ed., P. Siljander. Theories of Bildung and Growth (New York: Sense Publishers, 2012), 141. 42 West and Tate, “Spiritual Catastrophe,” 2. 43 Ibid.

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drive grounded in and cultivated by the courage to speak truth to power, truth to authoritative institutions and systems, truth to governmental representatives harboring authoritarian and tyrannical ambitions. Our critical views develop in relation to our engagement with great texts, formed and guided through questioning with the potential to facilitate an “individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms.”44 Socrates self-proclaimed appointed (“divine”) task and vocation was to goad and prod others to examine their beliefs and souls in order to recognize and acknowledge their ignorance and limits, this in order to potentially become better humans in the renewed ethical pursuit of a “good life.” Take pause and listen to the words of Socrates as he addresses the jury: “For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse,” and it is in this guise and capacity that “I go about rousing, and urging and reproaching each of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long” (Apology 30e). The humanities, according to Slouka, teach us “incrementally endlessly, not what to do, but how to be,”45 and much like Socrates’s practice of philosophy, the humanities do this in a way that is confrontational and agonistic, in a manner dissimilar to the sciences and technology discussed, this because the so-called “product” of the humanities “is not the truth but the reasoned search for truth,”46 and their success, as indicated above, is not to be found in tangible, concrete results, but rather, as in Socrates’ understanding of the esketic practice of care for the soul, in the unfolding of the journey itself, through aporetic setbacks, renewed questioning, and hard-won moments of partial enlightenment. As students tread the path of dialogueand-inquiry and persist in its precarious and unpredictable unfolding, Slouka rightly contends that students are engaged in the activity of “selfbuilding,” which might be labeled a process of finite human transcendence47 - we are changed, transformed, and attuned in ways that 44

Slouka, Nick of Time, 168. Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 J. Cottingham, “The Fine, the Good, and the Meaningful,” The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 45, 2009, 35. When speaking of “human transcendence” we are not referencing the understanding of religious transcendence, in terms of vertical transcendence. Rather, along with Cottingham, we take human transcendence to indicate, “l’homme passe l'homme - man transcends himself. “Part of what is meant by this, I think, is that the human being always reaches beyond any given set of circumstances, any given formula for existence; we are never satisfied with what we are ‘given,’ but have the mysterious urge to question, to seek more.” 45

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demonstrate we are “capable of humility in the face of complexity,”48 which is to say, we instantiate a sublime understanding of the limits of all human projects and endeavors, with the awareness of the potential rewards that await if we are courageous enough to commit to the task of selfcultivation. Nussbaum argues that to attempt to replace a liberal education with the “latest achievements in technology and their role in generating profits for business and industry”49 represents the pursuit of “possessions that protect, please, and comfort us,”50 and such pursuits are superficial in the extreme. Recalling Gray’s critique of secular humanism, the knowledge afforded by science and technology, as valuable as it is, cannot assist in solving all of humanity’s problems; indeed science is ill-equipped to address the many ethical and existential crises we regularly encounter. We are given a stark and horrific reminder in and through the tragic wisdom of the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone that scientific knowledge and technological expertise cannot stave off the pressing existential inevitability of pain and suffering, destruction, death, or the unpredictability of the intervention of chance. The chorus reminds us that we are courting ruin and disaster when becoming overconfident in our technological skill, our ability to master the world through the process of machination, when, as Sophocles wisely observes, the human being attempts to hubristically transcend its mortal bounds. In the Ode to Man the human is called “to deinon” by the chorus, which although translated as “wonderful,” Heidegger offers a corrective and claims that to deinon is more accurately understood as “that which is fearful and therefore arouses fear.”51 For despite our cleverness and resourcefulness, we have the hubristic potential, when failing to recognize and abide by limits, to destroy both the world and ourselves. In the quest to avoid the type of difficulty we encounter in any serious study of the humanities, in pursuit of what might represent more secure and easily obtainable truths, we forget or obfuscate the problematic and troubling nature of such existential situations described above that lie at the center of and quite rightly define the human condition. In essence, for Nussbaum, as related to education, this represents the heedless forgetfulness of the importance of the human soul. However, it is literature, the classics, as Nussbaum has for decades argued, which invite students into a world where thought blossoms in the soul and then reaches 48

Slouka, Nick of Time, 168. Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 6. 50 Ibid. 51 Martin Heidegger. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans., W. McNeill and J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 63. 49

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out to embrace the souls of others, grounding and connecting students to “the world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner.”52 In Nussbaum’s philosophy, this idea of a soul-to-soul connection is intimately related to Socrates’ communal practice of dialectic, for in the dialogues, we learn “what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than a mere instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans,”53 and importantly, Socrates demonstrates what it is to genuinely converse “as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex.”54 Whereas Fettner and Slouka focus exclusively on the crisis in the humanities in higher education, West and Tate, when remarking on the pervasive nature of the crisis, also claim that it is present to the early years of schooling, this too is the case with Nussbaum, who explicitly brings our attention to the decline of the humanities and liberal arts in both higher education and “standardized” schooling at the elementary and secondary levels. This is particularly disturbing considering the problem in the curriculum stemming from the education for profit model begins in the early stages of the educational lives of our young students, where schools are cultivating “useful and highly applied skills suited for profitmaking”55 and fostering “testable skills that seem likely to produce financial success.”56 For example, in K-12 education in the US the STEM programs are focused on “scientific and technological proficiencies as the key abilities, and the humanities and arts are increasingly perceived as useless frills that we can prune away to make sure our nation remains competitive.”57 Here, educators and students experience the quantitative, standardized test overtaking other forms of assessing student learning in 52

Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 6. Ibid. 54 Ibid., 2. 55 Ibid., 4. 56 Ibid., 133. This is not to indicate that science and technology are not of “crucial importance for the future health of nations,” and Nussbaum is not suggesting that “nations should stop trying to improve in this regard.” The salient point is that the fervent academic pursuit of science and technology should not be allowed to overshadow or diminish the crucial contribution that the humanities and liberal arts make to the good health of the nation. When other disciplines such as science and engineering “are infused by what we might call the spirit of the humanities,” they are bettered, for in essence, as Nussbaum rightly asserts, “science has a humane spirit,” grounded in and expressive of “searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds.” In short, the humanities are essential “to cultivate the capacity of creative innovation.” 57 Ibid. 53

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the curriculum, specifically types of student evaluation that focus on the “imaginative and critical abilities that lie at the core of the humanities education.”58 In the current milieu of education described herein, what might be called the tradition of the philosophical ideal, as we encounter in Socrates, is in serious peril. For Socrates, the practice of care for the soul (“self-cultivation”) instantiates an education (paideia) that unfolds as an exercise in learning (askƝsis) that aims to turn the soul around and back to itself in an enlightened manner (periagǀgƝ) through the process of rigorous dialogue or investigation. Nussbaum recognizes and laments that in this technological age students are in danger of losing “the ability to think and argue for themselves.”59 The life and practice of philosophy and education followed by Socrates and the ancients, appears utterly at odds with a standardized education driven by “marketable outputs of a quantitative nature.”60 William Barrett expresses dismay at the fact that Americans are not only “non-intellectual but are an anti-intellectual people,”61 and that a “good dose of intellectualism,”62 and not merely the type of rationalism we described in connection with scientific and technological (calculative) thinking, “would be a helpful thing in American life.”63 Written in 1959, Barrett’s words ring as true today, for one look at the state of today’s impoverished politics, with its anemic “truth-denying” pundits engaging in vitriolic, polemical rhetoric, it cannot be denied that a good dose of intellectualism is desperately needed, and along with that, we require an attitude embracing ethical compassion and a genuine concern for the future of our young people and their need and right to an education rich in diversity and critical thought, which much like Heidegger’s definition of philosophy, is a form of education in the humanities and the classics that would rightly raise more questions than could ever be answered.

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Nussbaum, Not For Profit, Ibid., 45. 60 Ibid. 61 Barrett, Irrational Man, 269 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. It is interesting to note that when making these remarks, Barrett references the oracular god Apollo, the thinker and seer par excellence. It is Apollo, we recall, who in an idealized manner, represents a bridge between the past and future in Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia, pointing a way toward reconciliation between the two horizons of temporality, which is to say, learning from the past in order to better inform the present with an enlightened eye to the future, with the goal to forge a new and more prosperous time. 59

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What Barrett recommends might be directly linked to what Heidegger in his later philosophy termed “meditative thinking” (besinnliches Denken), a form of thinking all but lost to the contemporary age, a thinking that is poiƝtic in nature (Dichtung) that neither “objectifies” nor merely “re-presents,” what is thought, but rather “thinks of” and not “about” things, and is open to and for what is unexpected, what is still on the approach. It is a way of thinking attuned to the unpredictable, colored in advance by the eternal mystery, open to all things that are difficult and at times inexplicable, which includes those facets of our lives that defy linguistic expression and so remain ineffable. Let us release ourselves over to Heidegger’s thoughts and words: “Calculative [technological] thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself.”64 On the other hand, meditative thought requires patience; it demands our effort and attention. Yet despite this, Heidegger assures us that “anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits.” Meditative thought need not be high-flown, it need not be understood as an elitist practice available only to initiates, and here Heidegger is certainly not equating meditative thought with Aquinas’ notion of vita contemplativa. If we seek to think in a meditative manner, as Heidegger demands, “it is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon what concerns us, each of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now in the present hour of our history.”65 As Nussbaum observes, and indeed, in one way or another, all the critics of contemporary education we have included in this essay are in agreement, this type of meditative contemplation, which Heidegger interestingly enough equates with Socrates (and NOT Plato) - who is identified by Heidegger as the purest thinker of the West, holding himself in the persistent “sway” of Being’s unfolding - is absent from the current educational and academic environment described herein, an environment that is, proximally and for the most part, becoming more and more hostile to authentic, autonomous inquiry and critical and creative thought. It is the case that when our systems of education are in decline and crisis, the “Socratic aspects of both curriculum and pedagogy are likely to be left behind,”66 or, in other cases, where such discourse is attempted within the standardized environment of contemporary classrooms, “its abilities are

64 M. Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking, trans., J. M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 46-47. 65 Ibid., 55. 66 Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 55.

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likely to be underdeveloped.”67 Here, anticipating an objection based on the well-known academic teaching practice of the so-called “Socratic Method,” of instruction, implemented in classrooms at all levels of learning, we turn to Bernard Freydberg who reminds us that we should view this “Socratic” educational practice with a healthy dose of skepticism. For as Freydberg asserts, educators should not be surprised by the manner in which “the names of [the] founders of our philosophical enterprise have been misapplied, used in a context they clearly would have found appalling – in training lawyers for instance. ‘The Socratic Method’ has become a cliché that refers to hard-hitting question-and-answer exchanges quite apart from the concerns of truth and justice that animated Socrates.”68 Nussbaum concludes, on a somewhat somber and even pessimistic note: “Socrates lost his life to [the] ideal of critical questioning,”69 and this type of authentic and original questioning is consistent with an education in the humanities, central to the ideas of liberal education, which is the very idea that is in danger of vanishing completely in the contemporary milieu of standardized education. Regrettably, this conclusion reached by Nussbaum appears to be accurate.70

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Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 55. B. Freydberg. “Homeric 0HTRGR9 in Plato’s Dialogues,” in: ed., G. A. . Scott. Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato’s Many Devices (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 111. 69 Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 57. 70 Scholes, Textual Power, 15. Related to what I have said throughout regarding the benefits of the humanities, Scholes, adopting a view that favors studying texts as opposed to merely teaching literature, reminds educators of the pressing responsibility they have for the enlightenment of their students: “What students need from us…is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests…to see through manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own view in some appropriate manner.” 68