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Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets' contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition.

Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Poetizing and Thinking
Charles Bambach and Theodore George

1. On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte
Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez

2. Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichte's Werke, Vol. 8 (De Gruyter)
Christopher Turner, translator

3. Hegel, Romantic Art, and the Unfinished Task of the Poetic Word
Theodore George

4. Who Is Nietzsche's Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject
Babette Babich

5. Untimely Meditations on Nietzsche's Poet-Heroes
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

6. Heidegger's Ister Lectures: Ethical Dwelling in the (Foreign) Homeland
Charles Bambach

7. Remains: Heidegger and Hölderlin amid the Ruins of Time
William McNeill

8. The Poietic Momentum of Thought: Heidegger and Poetry
Krzysztof Ziarek

9. Learning from Poetry: On Philosophy, Poetry, and T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton
Gunter Figal

10. An "Almost Imperceptible Breathturn": Gadamer on Celan
Gert-Jan van der Heiden

11. Hölderlin's Empedocles Poems
Max Kommerell, trans. Christopher D. Merwin and Margot Wielgus

Contributors
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Esthétique et philosophie de l'art

Epistémologie

Philosophy

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 décembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438477046
Langue	English

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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 www.sunypress.edu
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
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
Poetizing and Thinking
Charles Bambach and Theodore George
C HAPTER 1
On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte
María del Rosario Acosta López
C HAPTER 2
Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichte’s Werke , Vol. 8 (De Gruyter)
Christopher Turner, translator
C HAPTER 3
Hegel, Romantic Art, and the Unfinished Task of the Poetic Word
Theodore George
C HAPTER 4
Who Is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject
Babette Babich
C HAPTER 5
Untimely Meditations on Nietzsche’s Poet-Heroes
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
C HAPTER 6
Heidegger’s Ister Lectures : Ethical Dwelling in the (Foreign) Homeland
Charles Bambach
C HAPTER 7
Remains: Heidegger and Hölderlin amid the Ruins of Time
William McNeill
C HAPTER 8
The Poietic Momentum of Thought: Heidegger and Poetry
Krzysztof Ziarek
C HAPTER 9
Learning from Poetry: On Philosophy, Poetry, and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton
Günter Figal
C HAPTER 10
An “Almost Imperceptible Breathturn”: Gadamer on Celan
Gert-Jan van der Heiden
C HAPTER 11
Hölderlin’s Empedocles Poems
Max Kommerell, trans. Christopher D. Merwin and Margot Wielgus
C ONTRIBUTORS
I NDEX
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 , María 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): 172–93. I would like to thank Kevin Thompson and Rachel Zuckert for inviting me to discuss this paper in the context of Chicago’s 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.
Chapter 2 , “Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichte’s 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.
Chapter 4 , Babette Babich, “Who Is Nietzsche’s 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), 405–29.
Chapter 11 , Max Kommerell, “Hölderlin’s Empedocles’s 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 (θαυμάζειν). 1 But to wonder at or about something is to experience its strangeness, its irregularity, or its difference. It is with the other that philosophy begins. What confronts us as other brings us to a perplexity that opens us to the experience of questioning as the very movement and dynamic of thinking itself. Pondering such strangeness, interrogating its anomalous disparity, we see how thinking not only begins in wonder at the other, but its every turn toward questioning is borne by such wondering as what makes it at all possible. In his 1955 Cerisy lecture “What Is That—Philosophy?” Heidegger put forward the claim that “the pathos of wonder, does not simply stand at the beginning of philosophy. … Wonder bears and thoroughly governs philosophy.” 2 But if otherness belongs to such wonder, then we might also say that otherness—in the sense of ineradicable alterity—likewise bears and thoroughly governs whatever philosophy might undertake. What is other belongs to philosophy as its ἀρχή 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 thinking—and not by accident—Heidegger takes up the question about the relationship between thinking ( Denken) and its other—poetizing ( 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 chasm—for both “dwell on mountains farthest apart.” 3
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 same—namely, when the chasm between poetizing, and thinking gapes purely and decisively.” 4 Both poetizing and thinking open a pathway into being, letting the unconcealment of being happen precisely in and as a concealment and a withdrawal. Moreover, both poetizing and thinking open us to language in an originary way, whereby we come to experience language less as a tool or as an instrument for communication than as “the clearing-concealing advent of being itself.” 5 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 language. We might even say that in the experience of its thick, dense, or close-grained ( dicht ) dictions, we begin to let go of our ordinary relationship to language in its instrumental properties and prepare ourselves for a more fundamental experience with the essence of language. To be able to enter into this experience, however, signifies that we refrain from collapsing language into “meaning” so that we might begin to hear the soundings of its rhythms, modulations, resonances, tones, and timbres. Responding to these soundings, entering into the sheer strangeness of their inflections, we resist the impulse to flatten out the difference enunciated in poetic speech and instead begin to attend to what Heidegger calls “the thrust into the extraordinary” ( Un-geheuere ). 6 It is in this space of difference cleaved out by the soundings of poetic speech that we begin to hear “the speaking of language” ( das