John Sallis - Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental

FORCE OF IMAGINATION

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

JOHN SALLIS, GENERAL EDITOR

CONSULTING EDITORS

FORCE OF IMAGINATION

The Sense of the Elemental

John Sallis

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2000 BY JOHN SALLIS

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

SALLIS, JOHN, DATE

FORCE OF IMAGINATION : THE SENSE OF THE ELEMENTAL/JOHN SALLIS.

P. CM. (STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT)

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

ISBN 0-253-33772-0 (CLOTH : ALK. PAPER) ISBN 0-253-21403-3 (PBK.: ALK. PAPER)

1. IMAGINATION (PHILOSOPHY) I. TITLE. II. SERIES.

BH301.153 S25 2000

128.3 DC21

00-027604

1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00

TO JERRY

AGAIN, AND ALWAYS

...das einzige, wodurch wir fhig sind, auch das Widersprechende zu denken, und zusammenzufassen,die Einbildungskraft.

F. W. J. SCHELLING, System des transzendentalen Idealismus

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Milton

In every landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth....

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature

CONTENTS

It is as if this book has always been already under way, never simply begun. Even if measured from the datings of the earliest sketches, its genesis has been protracted, drawn out quite beyond what was envisaged. The book has required, in several sensesincluding that to which Nietzsche alludes in the Preface to The Dawnslow writing.

The earliest sketches go back to a time, just after the completion of Being and Logos, when a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung afforded me the leisure needed for such a project to begin to take shape. A very preliminary draft was composed during a stay in Paris in the early 1980s, made possible by support from the American Council of Learned Societies. I continued developing and reshaping the project as I worked, simultaneously, on several other, more textually oriented studies (Delimitations, Spacings, Echoes, Crossings); these, as well as my other, later books, have left indelible traces in the present discourse. A more definitive draft of the initial chapters was composed during stays in Brussels and in Bochum, again with generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. The final draft was written in Boalsburg in the years 199699. Very able assistance with production was provided by Nancy Fedrow and Robert Metcalf, to whom I am grateful. I am grateful also to my editor and friend Janet Rabinowitch for her generous efforts in behalf of this book.

Because of the complex genesis of this project, I have ventured only a few presentations directly related to it: my inaugural lectures at Loyola University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and The Pennsylvania State University, respectively; a research session at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in 1994; and, as the book came to completion, papers entitled Monstrous Imagination and The Elemental Earth presented to the British Society for Phenomenology and the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, respectively.

It goes perhaps without saying that much of what was eventually drawn into this discourse was first sketched on singular occasions in places distinctively evocative: a deep Alpine valley, certain islands in the Aegean, the scene of a snowstorm in Pennsylvania, the sun-baked summer landscape of Umbria, the mountains around Soglio and Sils Maria, the canyons and desert of Utah, the sites of the temples at Sounion and at Agregento. On certain occasions in such places there comes an appeal that enlivens imagination and attests to the elemental.

BOALSBURG

JANUARY 2000

FORCE OF IMAGINATION

Imagine being there.

Imagine both sensing and sensed. Imagine them together. Enact the sensing imaginally with such force as to bring forth what wouldif it were an instance of sensing and not of imaginingbe sensed, what would be sensed while also, decisively, exceeding sense.

Let each sense share in what is wondrous and monstrous there. Yoking each to what would be sensed, double this double across the entire range of human sensibility. And beyond.

Imagine, then, being there, listening in silence as the swift mountain stream bursts and raves over the rocks. Imagine being there in the valley over whose pines, crags, and caverns the fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams sail. Imagine hearing the chainless winds as they come to drink the odors of the giant brood of pines and to hear the old and solemn harmony of their mighty swinging. Imagine then training ones eyes on the towering summit as it rises above what cannot but seem the scene of some ancient devastation, now strewn with unearthly forms of ice and rock. Imagine being there where its lofty peak commands every view, opening ones vision to its remoteness and serenity, feeling the intensity of the suns rays and at the same time the coolness of the mountain air, sensing withand beyondall ones senses the elemental conflict between fire and ice that rages there on high.

One could, then, perhaps also imagine having heard the song before hearing it sung to the words to which the poet set it. It is a song of the mountains, a song that celebrates what the primaeval mountains announce, their teaching.

The song was written in the valley of Chamonix in 1816. Shelley gave it the name of the mountain of which it sings: Mont Blanc. Yet the poets design is not just to sing of the mountain but to let the song of the mountain itself and of all that is gathered around it sound forth in the poetic song. The poet would echo a wild sound, like that of the roaring stream, itself echoing in the caverns of the ravine

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame[.]

(l. 20)

Attentive, yet

... as in a trance sublime and strange[,]

(l. 35)

letting be called into play his

... own separate fantasy,

(l. 36)

the poet would put into song what arises from the darkness of the ravine: