Learning to learn

Learning to learn.  Diotima, during her conversation with Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, says to the wisest man in Athens that our need to study, to revisit what we have already gone over, to think again and afresh what we have thought before, is a salient expression of our fundamental mortality, of our lack of immortality or perpetuity for the outlines or forms of our lives.  Should we despair when she says this, seeing with bluntness the absurdity in ever having set about studying anything at all, in ever having attempted to commit something to our frail memory, in ever having embarked on the course towards mastery of any kind?  If our regulative ideal is one of a god or a monster of learning or memory, one for whom there is no forgetting or stumbling on the way to incorporating our insight, then it seems we are right indeed to despair, to give up before we even get started on the enterprise of philosophy, or science, or anything at all for that matter that takes more than the fleeting present as its foundation and guidepost, one for whom change or becoming or accomplishment is not accompanied by destruction or the impasse of stupidity or failure.

            But what sort of an ideal is this; how are we to assess such an alternative in the light of what we have already, in our learning lives, learned about learning?  To put the question otherwise and with more force: granted it is possible to live forever, without having to worry about the deaths of parts of us or our death as a whole, would it still be best for us to do so, would it still be worth gaining, would it be a prize in any way?  If genuine learning is possible, and with that too if true creation is possible, without forgetting, without losing parts or all of ourselves in the winding course of learning or creation, it seems we should shake our heads, whimper and sigh whenever we set our hands to paper, or undertake any vision or the erection of any building, if it is not perfect, and by perfect meaning immutable.  If it is possible we might not give up, but everything might still seem to fall short of the possibility, as though even our most complex and formidable monuments were but paltry, abortive reflections of what are real creations, what are real lessons.  It would be sensible, in other words, to try and to try without cease, all the way up to death, and when death comes, to try one more time and if, when we consider it without the bias of our flesh, as mothers do their children, we find it unsatisfying from the view of eternity, we might justifiably shake our heads and sigh one final time.  That is, the ideal, even if it is real, does not take us away once and for all from the possibility of despairing–it only provides another route to despair in our practice, as it happens in earthly life.

            But what if the ideal of perfect, or immutable, knowledge and creation is not only unattained, but is also unreal, and moreover an unreal ideal bolstered up by our too-real spitting in the face of life as we find it, not only when it comes to our enterprises of building and knowing but always?  As we live and practice in life, we see without fail learning tied to forgetting and creation tied to destruction, the permanence of anything granted and upheld by the impermanence of something else, of anything else, of everything else.  And if this reciprocity, this de facto bind, were all we have?  What then?  Even in order to learn or create our way into resignation, we would have to surely leave behind, utterly abandon a host of other powers, other directions for thought and other possibilities for vision and vision’s enactment.  There is no other reason, outside of dissatisfaction with life lived in this middle zone, to posit on the hither side of it some absence of the tension. 

            We have been fooled by Diotima and so many others when they try to send us scrambling up their ladder, on the top rung of which is Beauty itself, because down here, on the so-called bottom rung, or anywhere in between, we are caught up in the uncertainty of beauty and many other things besides: all the promises we made to ourselves, the sense of anticipation as well as the sense of progress in pursuit, definitions of all kinds, identities of all kinds, sure and perfect, indestructible things of all kinds.  Socrates could have answered Diotima with a nonchalant So what, or So be it, and carried on with his affairs, interminable in any case, with or without the reality of the possibility of immortality, instead of once again getting carried up and away by what seemed always to be his heart behind his meandering speeches and queries, or at least in the heart of his disciple, the one who created the mouth and nearly created the ugliness of the man, Socrates, Plato: that this world, the life we live, is the reflection, and the pale one at that, for another world and another life and and the nurturing of this sensibility; at bottom the unwillingness, or the lack of constitution, to endure the leveledness of only one world and only one life, this monism; at bottom a dual soul with dual wishes, who wishes learning-forgetting, this sole phenomenon as well as other phenomena, to signify something else, and better, rather than itself, and solely itself.