![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This contribution to phenomenological aesthetics takes inspiration from Martin Heidegger’s idea that poetry arises out of the experience of thinking and thinking out of the experience of poetry. The mutual nourishment of philosophy and poetry is put into practice here through a presentation of three poems and the reflections they provoke. The poems are the work of a contemporary Lithuanian-American poet, Rita Malikonytė Mockus. The reflections derive their basic orientation from Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy of art. This philosophy is phenomenological inasmuch as it views art in terms of what Being and Time characterizes as the preeminent phenomenon, the one bestowing presence on beings while itself receding from presence. This phenomenon, for Heidegger the one and only phenomenon in the strict sense, is Being as bestower of presence. For Heidegger, art in general and especially poetry might “awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which bestows.” Such vision and trust correspond to the ancient attitude of reverence for what has been bestowed, versus the hubristic attitude of modern technology. The goal of the paper is to appeal to poetry in order to help awaken this reverential attitude which Heidegger sees as the antidote to the thrall cast over us by the things of modern technology. At the end, reverence is brought into relation with Kant’s conception of the beauty of nature as purposiveness without a purpose.
Notes
1. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). The free English translation of the title (“The thinker as poet”) misses the point. See Poetry, Language, Thought (NY: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 1-14.
2. This is the jolt or shock (das Erschrecken) that, as the “basic temper” of the “other beginning,” figures prominently in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), §§ 5, 17, 50, 215, 249.
3. “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), p. 36.
4. Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 11th ed., 1967), pp. 31, 35. From the one phenomenon in a preeminent sense, namely, Being, Heidegger distinguishes phenomena in the “merely formal” sense (properties of beings) and phenomena in the “ordinary” sense (beings).
5. Parmenides (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992), pp. 171-73.
6. Formale und transzendentale Logik (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1974), p. 359.
7. “Sur la phénoménologie du langage,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 111.
8. The poems are all original compositions in English, this poet’s third language, after Lithuanian and Russian. Rita Malikonytė Mockus, b. 1970, is a native of Kaunas (“the Athens of Lithuania”) and currently resides in Pittsburgh. She has been published in World Literature Today and other literary magazines and is at work on a large poetry project tentatively called She-riffs.
9. Das Ereignis (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2009), p. 323.
10. The Dawn, Preface, §5.
11. Julius Caesar, I, ii, 243-246.
12. “Wie wenn am Feiertage … ” In Poems and Fragments, bilingual ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 376.
13. Hamlet, V, ii, 10-11.
14. Sein und Zeit, pp. 217-19.
15. “Die Frage nach der Technik,” p. 35.
16. Heidegger’s “Question concerning technology” was originally an address to a conference on “The place of art in the technological age.”
17. Afortiori if this god is the same as the “last god” of the Beiträge, since that god is “wholly other’“ than every previous one and “especially other” than the Christian one (Beiträge zur Philosophie, p. 403).
18. Überlegungen VII-XI (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), p. 280.
19. Parmenides, pp. 47-48.
20. Macbeth, V, v, 26-28.
21. Macbeth, IV, iii, 197-98.
22. Macbeth, V, vii, 19-20.
23. “Die Frage nach der Technik,” p. 36.
24. Hamlet, IV, vii, 43.
25. Hamlet, V, ii, 65.
26. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973), A314/B370.
27. Richard the Third, IV, ii, 113-114.
28. Hamlet, III, iii, 61; IV, vii, 136.
29. Platon: Sophistes (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992), p. 9.
30. Platon: Sophistes, p. 8.
31. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1963), §42, p. 224.
32. Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 226.
33. Sein und Zeit, p. 163.
34. Heraklit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), p. 3.
35. This interpretation of the voice of the friend is worked out fully in my “Corrigenda to the Macquarrie-Robinson translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time,” in Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 45 (2014), pp. 220-21.