Home 9 Passage 9 Convoking (Em)Pathy

A qualitative text can suddenly open up to a fundamental insight that cannot be reduced to a conceptual phrase or an intellectual statement. Instead, there is a moment of felt meaningfulness or sense. It is this desire for the experience of meaningfulness that is at the core of much human searching and reflection. The term convoke derives from convocare, to call together, to assemble; a convocation, a convoking—a call together (to remind us of what we share as humans). To convoke is to create communal ethical space. Pathic linguistic devices tend to make text more memorable, more worthy, and more capable of memorization. This is also a reason that early Greek epic tales were usually written in memorizable form.