Charles Bambach - Philosophers and Their Poets

Philosophers and Their Poets

SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor

Philosophers and Their Poets

Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant

Edited by

Charles Bambach and Theodore George

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2019 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bambach, Charles and Theodore George, editors.

Title: Philosophers and Their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant / Charles Bambach and Theodore George, editors.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2019. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781438477039 (hardcover : alk. paper) / ISBN 9781438477046 (ebook)

Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Charles Bambach and Theodore George

Mara del Rosario Acosta Lpez

Christopher Turner, translator

Theodore George

Babette Babich

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

Charles Bambach

William McNeill

Krzysztof Ziarek

Gnter Figal

Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Max Kommerell, trans. Christopher D. Merwin and Margot Wielgus

Acknowledgments

, Mara Acosta, On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte. This is a revised version of an article originally published as part of a special issue on Friedrich Schiller edited by Laura Anna Macor for Philosophical Readings 5 (2013): 17293. I would like to thank Kevin Thompson and Rachel Zuckert for inviting me to discuss this paper in the context of Chicagos 2015 meeting of the German Philosophy Consortium. The comments and questions that came up during that session were essential for my revision and rewriting of this paper. I would also like to thank Christopher Eagle for being such a patient reader of several versions of this paper, and for helping me to produce a more refined account of my philosophical ideas as well as a better translation of this text into English. I also want to thank Colin McQuillan for copyediting the final version of this paper for publication in this volume.

, Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichtes Werke , Vol. 8 (De Gruyter), translated by Christopher Turner. The editors would like to thank the Glassock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for generous support of this translation.

, Babette Babich, Who Is Nietzsches Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject. This essay has been presented in Scarborough, Freiburg, and Copenhagen as well as Dallas, Texas. I am grateful, first and foremost to Christian Benne in addition to Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen who discussed some of these concepts with me, in addition to my gratitude to Andreas Urs Sommer. I am also grateful to Charles Bambach and Theodore George. A German version has been published as Nietzsches Lyrik. Archilochos, Musik, Metrik in Christian Benne and Claus Zittel, eds., Nietzsche und die Lyrik. Ein Kompendium (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2017), 40529.

, Max Kommerell, Hlderlins Empedocless Poems, from Spirit and Letter of Poetry , trans. Christopher Merwin and Margot Weiglus. The editors would like to thank the Glassock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for generous support of this translation.

Introduction

Poetizing and Thinking

C HARLES B AMBACH AND T HEODORE G EORGE

The very gesture of thinking, Plato tells us in Theatetus , finds its origin in the experience of wondering (). But if otherness belongs to such wonder, then we might also say that othernessin the sense of ineradicable alteritylikewise bears and thoroughly governs whatever philosophy might undertake. What is other belongs to philosophy as its and ruling origin, one that it does not, however, leave behind as it makes its way within the world. Rather, in recognizing what is other as intimately belonging to its origin, philosophy confronts otherness as having an essential relation to whatever constitutes its own and proper task. In this sense, philosophy not only requires its other in order to be itself, but it is precisely this relation to its other that allows philosophical questioning to attend to the questionability of all that is.

In this same Cerisy lecture about the sense and origin of philosophical thinkingand not by accidentHeidegger takes up the question about the relationship between thinking ( Denken) and its otherpoetizing ( Dichten ). He writes:

But since poetizing, when compared with thinking, stands in the service of language in a wholly other and exemplary way, our conversation, which thoughtfully pursues philosophy, is necessarily led to discuss the relation of thinking and poetizing. Between both, thinking and poetizing, there prevails a hidden affinity since in the service of language both use and squander language. At the same time, however, between both thinking and poetizing there subsists a chasmfor both dwell on mountains farthest apart.

To think the chasm between thinking and poetizing means that we attune ourselves to the disparateness that attends this separation. Here, poetizing confronts thinking as its other. And yet in coming to experience the separation between them, we cannot help but encounter a certain affinity between thinking and poetizing as well, an affinity that emerges in and through the chasm that divides them. As Heidegger expresses it, [W]hat is said in poetizing and what is said in thinking are never identical; but they are at times the samenamely, when the chasm between poetizing, and thinking gapes purely and decisively. Yet here we also come to see that poetizing makes communication ever more difficult, since its very manner of presenting words undermines their clarity and stability and renders them ever more obscure. In this way, we can perhaps find an echo of the original sense of the German term dichten (poetizing) with its roots in the adjective dicht . Poetry thickens language, making it dense and difficult to penetrate ( dicht machen ), sometimes closing off its meaning in dense clusters that become almost watertight ( dichthalten).

Yet at the same time poetry beckons us to tarry awhile amid its dense, impenetrable word clusters, offering its hospitality to those readers/listeners who are patient enough to attend to its playful commerce with

In his very first lecture course on Hlderlin from WS 1934/35, Heidegger finds a clue to the meaning of poetizing as a making manifest. Going back to the semantic field of the Old High German term tithon, which he traces back to the Latin word dicere, Heidegger maintains that dichten shares the same root as the Greek deiknymi . It means to show, to make something visible, to make it manifestnot just in general, but by way of a specific pointing.

If there could be something like a poetic measure for thinking, then perhaps we might situate it in an abyssal separation that would allow for a disjunctive unity that might abide between thinking and poetizing. Such a measure would attend to what remains unsaidperhaps even what remains unspeakablein the language spoken by poetry. In his ode Rousseau, Hlderlin comes to understand poetizing as the beckoning intimations ( Winke ) of the gods. Here, we might warrant that it is in poetic language that the gods beckon us to heed what remains unsaid in that which comes to be said poetically. Poetic language brings us into the sphere of mystery, ambiguity, and enigmabut not as a mere gesture of obstruction or oblivion concerning what always remains obscure. In Heraclitus Fragment B 93, we find a hinting intimation of such mysterious beckoning, one that belongs preeminently to the gods themselves: