Friday, August 1, 2014

August & September's Essay_Voices, On Philosophy & Poetry

Preface: There are two distinct voices in this essay. The first is that of Phrontisterion; the second is that of a recent UCR graduate, Roland Bolz, who is currently studying philosophy in Berlin. On offer, then, is a polyphonic reflection surrounding the intellectual interplay between Martin Heidegger, German philosopher of the 20th century, and Friedrich Hölderlin, German lyric poet of the romantic period—two voices, together yet separate, in the same Gestell (framework).

Phrontisterion
            There is no denying that the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought about and was thoroughly bemused by Eros in all of its forms. Sometimes eros came to him embodied by the feminine—in the form of his wife of course, Elfride Heidegger, and, among others, Hannah Arendt, Margot von Sachsen, Sophie Dorothee von Podewils, Marielene Putscher, Andrea von Harbou, and Margret Magirus. Apparently, suffering a heart attack in Augsburg at the ripe old age of 81, the still-bemused and ever-priapic Heidegger even had to be removed from a current lover’s arms to be taken to hospital. Hope was, seemingly, always springing eternal in that human breast.
            However, it is also clear that Heidegger’s infatuation with Eros was translated into more than just the odd trifle, or the amorous grope, or the occasional longer idyll; for he was also bewitched by German romantic Poetry, one of the many modern, northern European descendants of Polyhymnia (Muse of Sacred Songs). Indeed, it seems worthwhile to consider the idea that Heidegger interwove a new harmonic element into the German romantic poetic tradition created by Hölderlin, which included his own personal perception of himself as Lady Philosophy’s bard.
            Here, then, is a fantaisie impromptu about Martin Heidegger, der Sänger, German Philosophy’s self-styled aède (from the Gk: ἀοιδός /aoidós—singer) in the tradition of Parmenides, or Heraclitus, or the Latin Lucretius, and then the German romantic Hölderlin. The idea of Heidegger as Sänger of Philosophy is in fact inspired by a Hölderlin poem, Heimkunft (A Future at Home), which was used by Heidegger as preface to his 1944 Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry.
Das bereitet und so ist auch beinahe die Sorge
Schon befriediget, die unter das Freudige kam.
Sorgen, wie diese, muß, gern oder nicht, in der Seele
Tragen ein Sänger und oft, aber die anderen nicht.

[Once the music] is ready, so is also, almost, the Worry
Already soothed, which came in along with the Pleasure.
Worries like these must he carry in his Soul, a Singer,
Whether he will or not, often; but not any others. [Translation, Aiken 2014]

It would seem that the Sorge, the Worry or Care, (a concept that will also occupy a significant place in Heidegger’s thinking during the Being and Time period (1927)), and which came in along with Martin Heidegger’s Pleasure in philosophy, was to be reflected in a life whose romantic vision and philosophical will was dedicated to singing into existence, and then safeguarding, the future spirituality of the German People (Letters, passim).
           
CAVEAT LECTOR: If one conceives of poetry as an entryway into the kosmos of the non- or the a-rational, what might it mean to use poetry as a gatekeeper for philosophical thinking, which pretends to make claims to some degree of articulated clarity or rationality? Given this inherent tension between poetry and philosophy, at least in their classical forms, does it make sense to pursue philosophical wisdom poetically, even admitting the oxymoronic nature of the question? Where might the poetic path toward philosophical wisdom lead us? And do we want to go there?

So, when we discover a poem that moves Heidegger in important and fundamental ways, what is it that we might also deduce about how that poetic “thought” would weave its way in and through the thinking of Martin Heidegger the philosopher? In August of 1918 the First World War is just 3 months away from the armistice, and the 29-year-old Heidegger is a soldier stationed as a weather observer on a German front in Lorrain, France. In a letter to his recent bride, Elfride, dated August 30, 1918 [Letters to his Wife; Polity Press, 2008, p. 48], Heidegger writes that he is experiencing Hölderlin as if for the first time, and, following a partial quote from Hölderlin's Socrates and Alcibiades, he writes: "Höld. is currently turning into a new experience for me -- as though I were approaching him wholly primordially for the first time."
           
Now, just to be quite certain that there is in fact some justification for the idea that there is a vital attachment to decrypt between Hölderlin, German romantic poet, and Heidegger, German romantic philosopher, there are yet other letters that pick up the Hölderlin leitmotiv, among which one dated from 11 October 1934
– “It’s difficult to be alone with Höld – but it’s the difficulty of everything great. I wonder if the Germans will ever grasp that this was not a weakling unable to cope with life who took refuge in verse, but a hero facing up to the gods of the future – without any followers, ‘rooted fast to the mountains for days on end’.—
                  But as I’ve told you before, this time I won’t yet be a match for him in thought, for philosophically he’s far beyond even his friends Hegel & Schelling & in a quite different place which for us is still unspoken & which it will be our task to say – not to talk about.—“

Then there is the quasi-Jungian language of archetypes in a letter dated 26 November 1939, where we learn that there are three ideal or ur-“figures” for Heidegger: the ungrounded; the woman who, through Love, is the guardian of nobility; and the poet-thinker.
            – “These three invisible and uniquely real figures prepare the ‘poetic’, upon the ground of which alone the history of man is founded. To these three figures [1) those ungrounded who, in acting out their life (e.g., through war), act for something “else for which they’re willing to make the sacrifice, something they cannot say, yet only create in the sacrifice”; 2) “women who out of an originary love keep secluded spaces ready for the soarings of what is noble & by virtue of this love are indestructible.” 3) “And thirdly we may count those who, running on far ahead in their poetizing & thinking, belong to another history.”] belongs the gift of Being [Seyn]—that it is given to them, each in their different way, to be open to the coming of originary decisions & each in their way protect it.
                  What the philosopher must always already know, others too may now perhaps learn – that the invisible is more existent [seiender] than the visible.--
           
Hölderlin: a succinct profile.
            By way of giving a brief background: Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was a German lyric poet of the Romantic period, which included the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hölderlin was to have an important philosophical impact on his fellow seminary students, Hegel and Schelling, in developing what was to become known to philosophers as German Idealism. Part of the impact that Hölderlin’s poetry was to have on the German imagination was its admiration of and fascination with ‘things Greek,’ or with the Greek way of thinking about men in the world. Hölderlin’s famous tragic poem, for example, entitled The Death of Empedocles, which was named eponymously after the Greek pre-Socratic poet-philosopher, was to have such an impact, later, on Nietzsche’s imagination, that this latter wanted originally to name his Zarathustrian hero, Empedocles. It is also thought that through his study of Heraclitus, another Greek pre-Socratic poet-philosopher, Hölderlin contributed to Hegel’s development of the notion of the “dialectic.” So it can rightly be argued that Hölderlin helped bring back into general vogue in German thought and expression the thought-world of the ancient Greek poet-philosophers.

Hölderlin’s Poem: Socrates and Alcibiades.

Warum huldigest du, heiliger Sokrates,
Diesem Jünglinge stets? Kennest du Größers nicht,
Warum siehet mit Liebe,
Wie auf Götter, dein Aug' auf ihn?"

Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich.

Translation
(Aiken, 2014)

Why, oh divine Socrates, do you revere
This youth so? Know you nothing Greater?
    Why, with love,
As if upon gods, does your eye look upon him?

Whosoever has grasped what is Most Profound, is in adoration of what is most full of life;
Is in possession of High Excellence, whosoever has gazed into the World;
    And even the Wise, sometimes, bring themselves
To bend their knee, finally, to that which is Beautiful.

Strophe I (free verse): Now there are three entirely different ideas to consider at this point in our reflection, which we might call “profiles” of Socrates. There is our first Socrates, contained inside Hölderlin’s poem, which is his wondering at the type of attraction that could keep Socrates’s gaze riveted on his decadent student, Alcibiades. Then there is a second profile of Socrates, which is grounded in a consideration of Plato’s original representation of the relationship between S and A in the Symposium– because any worthwhile analysis of what it is that Socrates “saw” in Alcibiades must include a consideration of the original Socratic profile found in Plato’s Symposium. Finally, there is the third profile of Socrates, which is how Heidegger uses or mis-uses his application of this particular Hölderlin poem in his letter to Elfride.

The structural argument of Hölderlin’s poem makes it clear that Socrates is the philosopher who “perceives” highest wisdom, and that it is Alcibiades who represents the mysteries and attractions of the world—the Beautiful. Socrates is the one who 1) “has grasped what is Most Profound,” and is the one 2) who “Is in possession of High Excellence.” And it is because he has grasped [gedacht—thought] that which is most profound [das Tiefste] about the world, that Socrates adores that which is most full of life [Lebendigste], which is to say: Alcibiades. And it is because he has gazed into the world, which is to say that he has embraced Alcibiades in his understanding or knowing perception, that Socrates is in possession of or understands High Excellence. Formulaically, the argument of the poem would work like this:
·      Socrates the wise has grasped what is Most Profound, which is that he loves a certain type of aliveness in Man, which we discover most fully in the person of Alcibiades, who is, among Greeks, most wonderfully full of life;
·      Socrates is in possession of or understands High Excellence or Virtue, because he has gazed into, and loved, the world, which is represented by Alcibiades.
·      Socrates therefore illustrates for us that the man who is most divine and most wise, is so precisely because he understands how to admire that which is Beautiful and Desirable, which is to say the World/Alcibiades.
   
So what do we discover about Socrates, or rather, what precisely are we to understand about Hölderlin’s puzzlement concerning Socrates, through this poetic interrogation? Situating himself as the Outsider to the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, Hölderlin reflects on that relationship, wondering what there was that attracted Socrates, the philosopher and wise man, to Alcibiades, the dissolute but beautiful Athenian noble. To Hölderlin it would seem natural and reasonable that Alcibiades would be drawn erotically to Socrates the wise, the Seeker after high and permanent truths—after all this is a classical Platonic metaphor for the natural eroticism of the human’s striving after knowledge. What the poet finds mysterious, however, is that the wise man could, in turn, allow himself to be drawn to simple, transient physical beauty, performed in the person of Alcibiades. But then the poem seems to suggest that it is possible, perhaps, that this is in truth the Deepest Truth of the wise man—that his wisdom calls him out to a love of Life Itself in its most alive and flourishing manifestations (das Lebendigste), and not simply to revere some wisdom that is only otherworldly, a dead or dying knowledge.

Strophe II (free verse): It is important to step away from Hölderlin’s poem at this point in order for the Reader to reconsider Plato’s original depiction of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium– because Hölderlin’s poetic interrogation of the nature of that relationship is entirely, and finally, anchored in and informed by the text of the Symposium.
            We have seen that Hölderlin’s Socrates and Alcibiades happens from the point of view of the outsider-poet interrogating Socrates, wonderingly, about what draws him, the wisest and most divine of men, to admire Alcibiades, decadent but beautiful general of the armies of both Athens and her enemy Sparta. However, Hölderlin’s interrogation is a poetic inversion of the dramatic mise en scène of the relationship that is offered to us in Plato’s Symposium.
            A compendium of speeches on the subject of Eros, the Symposium can be divided into seven parts: six expected speakers + one unexpected Alcibiades who gate-crashes at the end of the evening. From the first five speakers we learn about almost every possible variation on the subject of physical eroticism, ranging from what motivates heroic conduct, to love between men; from self-love as the origin of desire for the other, to medical healing as a harmonizing erotic art, to celebrity attractions. From these expected speakers we learn about physical and emotional, about this-worldly eros. It is then Socrates’ turn to speak, and we begin to hear about a higher wisdom—a more noble form of eroticism, which is the longing of the soul for truth and beauty, an other-worldly eroticism of a philosophical sort, which is enduring and therefore superior to the transient eroticism that is of the natural world.
            The gate is then thoroughly crashed as Alcibiades makes his drunken entry into the soirée, arriving on the scene as the unexpected seventh speaker on this evening of discourses concerning things erotic. Alcibiades the polarizer; debauched whoremonger; often unruly; traitor to his native Athens; talented orator, lisp notwithstanding, and general of armies despite a tendency to transfer allegiances as regularly as we might change socks; of imposing strength and great personal courage; sometime blasphemer; and former student of Socrates.
            Upon this unexpected and surprising entry our gaze has been riveted for over 2,000 years, for by it we learn what Plato wishes to teach us about this man, Socrates, in the Symposium. About eroticism we first learn all the various forms of erotic conduct possible among natural men—and that while some forms are arguably more worthwhile than others, all are arguably good. From Socrates, though, we learn about a more noble form of eros, which does not concern the vagaries of the body and the emotions, but flows rather from the noble longings of the soul after knowledge and the beautiful. Finally, we learn from Alcibiades that Socrates is, in fact, the absolute highest embodiment of eros.
            Plutarch, 1st century AD historian and biographer, composed a Life of Alcibiades by means of which we may confirm the Platonic tradition concerning the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades (6.1):
“But the love of Socrates, though it had many powerful rivals, somehow mastered Alcibiades. For he was of good natural parts, and the words of his teacher took hold of him and wrung his heart and brought tears to his eyes. But sometimes he would surrender himself to the flatterers who tempted him with many pleasures, and slip away from Socrates, and suffer himself to be actually hunted down by him like a runaway slave. And yet he feared and reverenced Socrates alone, and despised the rest of his lovers. Alcibiades "feared and reverenced Socrates alone, and despised the rest of his lovers."

In the Symposium Plato displays for our earnest consideration the erotic Socrates as seen through the eyes of the clearly enamoured, and yet cynical Alcibiades. For, oddly enough, of all the speakers in the Symposium Socrates excepted, it is only from Alcibiades, a seventh and impromptu speaker who came along to crash this philosophical “kegger” (with wine replacing a modern’s more traditional beer) that we learn about eros and things erotic in the most absolute philosophical sense—the soul’s eros for knowledge and understanding and just action is far superior to simple bodily eros.
            It is by means of a juxtaposition—of the most physically beautiful and desirable man of Athens, Alcibiades, who is also morally ambiguous to the highest degree, and of Socrates, reputedly the ugliest man of Athens—that Plato will teach us that Socrates is, in reality, the most erotic and therefore most truly desirable man of Athens, because he embodies in his divine person what is most truly beautiful to the highest degree—the beauty of the virtuous soul seeking the good and the beautiful through a just and honourable life.
           
Raphaelo_School of Athens
 
Strophe III (free verse): Finally, then, there is a third profile of Socrates for us to consider, which is reflected in the manner in which Heidegger interprets and applies this particular fragment of Hölderlin’s poem in his letter to Elfride. In an aside: it is interesting to note that Heidegger dedicates an entire book to Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry, (1944; ISBN 9783465041405), and yet the particular short poem that interests us here, Socrates and Alcibiades, which was clearly important to Heidegger in 1916, occupies no clear place in his later thinking about this poet.

As a prelude to this final stage in our reflection, let us review what we know about Martin Heidegger from the context of his earlier letters –
            In a general consideration, and in reference to our CAVEAT LECTOR from above, it was suggested that if one conceives of poetry as a gatekeeper for philosophical thinking, as a vehicle for entry into the kosmos of the non- or the a-rational, as does Heidegger, this would seem to undermine philosophical thinking as a method for questioning and organizing information concerning Man in his world. For while philosophy classically perceived pretends to articulate clarity and rationality as a basis for understanding the human condition, the space in which poetic experience “happens” is oddly hidden, and this will remain relevant to our understanding of Heidegger as he creates the “spaces” of his poetico-philosophical “song” (cf. Letters, inter alia, 10/11/18; 18/05/40; 2/2/45; 17/2/45; 11/3/45; 8/4/46; 8/5/46). This means that there is an inherent tension between poetry and philosophy, which Heidegger very deliberately tends to blur.
            As a method of articulating un-rational thought, the tendency to cloud over the distinction between poetry and philosophy seems, unavoidably, to be a significant agenda item to the Heidegger of 1916, and there is no reason to believe that he ever deviated from that agenda; for in a letter to Elfride from Freiburg (March 1916) he writes
– “today I know that there can be a philosophy of vibrant life [des lebendigen Lebens] – that I can declare war on rationalism right through to the bitter end – without falling victim to the anathema of unscientific though – I can – I must --& so I’m today faced by the necessity of the problem: how is philosophy to be produced as living truth & as a creation of the personality valuably & powerfully. The Kantian question is not only wrongly put – it fails to capture the problem; […] …but I take deep pleasure when I see before me that I have a living philosophy to be lived -- & it is no coincidence that yesterday I worked out & wrote down my theory of consciousness so felicitously, purely intuitively –“

In addition to a deliberate anti-rationalism in his approach to philosophizing, Heidegger also seems to become progressively clearer and more confident about this very particular anti-rationalist path, as he writes (ca. May, 1917):
“I cannot accept Husserl’s phenomenology as a final position even if it joins up with philosophy – because in its approach & accordingly in its goal it is too narrow & bloodless & because such an approach cannot be made absolute. … it’s a question of discovering the liberating path in an absolute articulation of relativity.”

It is reasonable to suggest, however, that the “articulation of relativity” is the wrong role for Lady Philosophy, and is not even within her repertoire. On the other hand, such an “articulation of relativity” perfectly corresponds to the role of a philosophically minded but not necessarily theory-driven poetry, of the sort composed by the pre-Socratic poet-philosophers, by Hölderlin, and, I would suggest, by Heidegger.
            So, forging onward to our specific consideration of Heidegger’s reference to “He who has thought what is deepest, loves what is most alive,” from Hölderlin's Socrates and Alcibiades To be sure, (grammar being what it is), Heidegger is necessarily using the Hölderlin reference metaphorically, where one reasonably and unmistakeably assumes that he reserves the beau rôle, namely Socrates, for himself, and Elfride is Alcibiades.
            The protracted context of the citation, however, which puts one in mind of Carlin Romano’s enduring epithet for MH: “the pretentious old Black Forest babbler,” might open up interpretative doors for us… so Heidegger waxes on thusly:
–“knowledge of one’s innermost & absolute belonging with the most beloved person among the living – above all the absolute, simple pleasure in this possession in the midst of the destruction, primitiveness, harshness & impoverished meaning of one’s surroundings has a deeply invigorating effect & latently so, moreover – not merely upon the base of expressly summoned up acts of memory & attitudes of longing from the daimon of love – also, today, the knowledge of the coexistence of this love with one’s most sacred life’s work [emphasis mine]– of the mutual interpenetration of the two & the advance towards the greatest fulfilment possible – ‘He who has thought what is deepest, loves what is most alive’ we read in a poem by Höld.-- "Höld. is currently turning into a new experience for me -- as though I were approaching him wholly primordially for the first time.
                  This whole configuration of moods & emphases will specifically influence my own – I hope, as soon as things are running properly, to make real progress.”           

So another possible interpretation or supplement to the complexity of this first reading, although it seems more remote given the immediate context, is that whatever Heidegger means by the third party in the Martin-Elfride-‘sacred life’s work,’ triad, whether by this he is referring to his marriage, which is distinctly possible given the general tenor of the letters, or else, which is more likely, to the philosophical destiny that he believes yet attends him as the German poet-philosopher of the future German Volk… it could be this third triadic element that plays of role of Alcibiades. What remains constant and unveiled, though, is that Martin Heidegger is always cast in the role of the great Socrates—for our viewing pleasure.

Heidegger reading Hölderlin’s The Ister (2004)
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* * *

Roland Bolz
And yet I do not know, whether I [...] will be able to ascend to the true religion, in which, instead of the holy, a great human appears, whom I can only embrace with the enthusiasm of true love, and exclaim: my friend and my brother! And to be allowed to say such things confidently to a great human! – If only I could be Alcibiades for a day and a night, and then die! –
                   (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Johann Gottfried Herder, 1771, my translation)

To ask the question regarding LOVE is to turn towards asymmetry: the TWO which are not measured by a common ruler. No need for treatises on aesthetics to realise that juxtaposition is the art of making two different arrows point together. And does love have to be beautiful and pointy!
            But who fashions the madness of claiming to “understand” such an asymmetry? Those who “share” their lives, marking the progress of this sublime collaboration “silver” and “golden,” if death does not “Do Them Part” before..? The sovereign dancers who know chaos well but joyfully align their rhythm from time to time? The communicator who does his “best” to share his needs and to accommodate yours truly? The traveling one who makes waitresses and other lonely souls laugh through anecdote before vanishing into anonymity?
            This asymmetry is the asymmetry of philosophy too, the abyss between love and wisdom. “If only I could be Alcibiades for a day and a night, and then die!” writes the 22-year-old Goethe to his friend Herder after intensely reading Socratic dialogues. What is it that makes us despair in love?
            “"Humans are not equals." And they should not become so! For what would be my love to the Overman, if I would speak differently?” spake Zarathustra. ("Von den Taranteln" in Also Sprach Zarathustra, p. 81, my translation)
            Philosophical love indeed lives off difference, both between the Two and between the present and the future. Socrates loves Alcibiades for what he “will have been”; Zarathustra loves his disciples for the “Übermensch” that might grow out of them – our beloved is a possibility, not a thing...

            * * *

A reflection on Socrates and Alcibiades will make us consider the asymmetries between lover and beloved, teacher and student, and philosophy and poetry. This time we look at another German poet's homage to this duo, namely Hölderlin's 1798 poem "Sokrates und Alcibiades," and will concern ourselves with Heidegger's interpretation thereof. Here is the poem:

"Warum huldigest du, heiliger Sokrates,
Diesen Jünglinge stets? Kennest du Größers nicht?
Warum siehet mit Liebe,
Wie auf Götter, dein Aug' auf ihn?"

Wer das tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Jugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich.

["Why, holy Socrates, must you always adore
This young man? Is there nothing greater than he?
Why do you look on him
Lovingly, as on a god?"

Who the deepest has thought, loves what is most alive,
Who has looked at the world, understands youth at its height,
And wise men in the end
Often incline to beauty.]
(translation from What is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger, trans. J. Glenn Gray)

The poem opens with a rather vulgar question posed to Socrates by an unknown interlocutor, which, however, contains a crucial clue regarding Hölderlin's reading of Socrates. For it is concerned with the fact that Socrates has turned his "eye for gods" towards a human, which is the cause of outrage masked behind a naive question here; it was Socrates after all who was sentenced to death for impiety: for inventing new gods. Socrates' trial is thus already foreshadowed in his question. However, we can also see a certain German reinterpretation at work here. In the Apology, the charge is as follows: "Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things." (24b, trans. G.M.A. Grube) In the Hölderlin poem, the two charges seem to have become confounded into one; the tendency of the German poets to turn the divine to the realm of humans, perhaps culminating in Nietzsche, for whom this becomes truly axiomatic. For Nietzsche, if the concept of god has a purpose, it is to designate a human of high remark.
            The second stanza of the poem gives the answer to the question posed in the first, telling us what juxtapositions his love for Alcibiades involves: deep thought – liveliness; high youth – having seen the world; wisdom – beauty. And yet again we get a subtle hint at the nearing end of Socrates' life: "am Ende ...". But this life phase of old age is also the moment of deep reflection for Hölderlin, not at all characterised by a stifling fear of death, but rather by a rare lucidity. It is this poignant insight into the asymmetry of love that holds us, that the old Socrates offers us.
            But how to decipher these lines? Who can the two people really be? How can we possibly know what exactly stands on each side of this bond? And: what can we learn from it apart from a lesson in the history of philosophy?
            We have learned to interpret Socratic/Platonic eros by looking at dialogues like the Symposium or the Phaedrus, where we get a wealth of information on how one can engage in such love, what ethics underlie it, what it does to our body and mind, what its relation to thought is, what feelings accompany it, what makes it shameful or honourable, and even speculations regarding its origin. Let us focus on some of the explanations given in Socrates' speech in the Symposium, where he retells the explanation once given to him by the wise woman Diotima of Mantinea.
            According to Diotima, and this explanation seems wholly endorsed in the Symposium, the spirit of love (Eros) is the son of the gods of plentitude (Poros) and lack (Penia). Being love, he combines desire/lack with resourcefulness. Love is thus the desire for beauty, neither fully having it nor fully lacking it – a wholesale abundance of beauty would not inspire desire; neither would a complete lack, which would in fact mean ignorance of that lack. Again: love as an in-between figure of asymmetrical poles. A lover, as such, is one who does not possess beauty but has grasped its existence. His lack dialectically drives him towards a cunning resourcefulness. What truth!
            But what is this beauty that has been grasped, but not yet attained by the lover? That, of course, is the question of philosophy! For Plato, Beauty is something eternal, a truth and ideal at the same time, which transcends an individual life, and also allows the lover to transcend his finite life: "Love must desire immortality." (207a, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff)
            According to Diotima, there are those who are pregnant in body and those who are pregnant in soul. Whatever is "pregnant" strives to create an offspring most beautiful. Those who are pregnant in soul thus strive to create what is most adequate to a soul, which is, by definition, "wisdom and the rest of virtue." Now this is precisely done through contact with other minds:

Since he is pregnant, then, he is much more drawn to bodies that are beautiful than to those that are ugly; and if he also has the luck to find a soul that is beautiful and noble and well-formed, he is even more drawn to this combination; such a man makes him instantly teem with ideas and arguments about virtue—the qualities a virtuous man should have and the customary activities in which he should engage; and so he tries to educate him. In my view, you see, when he makes contact with someone beautiful and keeps company with him, he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages. (209b-c)

But what role does the (sexual) body play in this? Plato's answer is clear: immortal beauty is only ever reached by starting with lower level beauty. One simply has to be exposed to all that the human body has to offer in terms of beauty in order to later progress to appreciating the beauty of "laws and activities," then knowledge, and then divine Beauty itself (infinite, unchanging and beautiful in every respect). According to Plato's philosophy, lover and beloved asymmetrically aid each other by sharing bodily beauty (which is a step towards divine beauty) and by sharing insight regarding divine Beauty. Here we can detect another shift in emphasis in Hölderlin's rendition. For, in the poem, the turn to things young and beautiful ("neigen zu Schönem") happens late in life ("am Ende"). However, as I summarised Socrates' speech from the Symposium, the turn towards beautiful bodies purportedly happens early in life, effectively enabling the turn to "Beauty" at a later stage, by taking the required steps from appreciating the beauty of (many) bodies, then laws and activities, then knowledge, and finally Beauty itself.
            As much as Plato's affirmation of a sexual component to philosophy might surprise us – Plato spends more time explaining the underlying theory of the soul in Phaedrus –, it has become clear that there are other modalities of philosophical love equally mysterious: the teacher-student relationship, the different gazes upon the world and discursive modes of young and old, and the temporal difference between lover and beloved.
            All of this is further complicated by the fact that "thought," which is supposed to be one pole of the equation, is by no means an available "thing" or "event" anyone can comprehend just like that. Much to the contrary, it is thought which is ultimately rare and not marked by any inward or outward signs, never ready at hand for us to identify. Indeed: what youth would be able to recognise a "modern Socrates," a true thinker? The mysterious precariousness of the activity of thought is the very starting point of Heidegger's lecture series Was heißt Denken?. [What is Called Thinking?] He stresses that just because thought is one of humanity's possibilities (as animal rationale), that does not mean that a human can think, like a human can swim, eat or speak. For, to think means to learn to think. And to learn to think is to become sensible to that which is to be thought ("das Bedenkliche"). But unlike, for example, water, which is readily available for those who can swim, that which is to be thought withdraws from the one who tries to think it. "We learn to think by giving our mind to what there is to think about." (WiCT?, 4) According to Heidegger, that which is to be thought stands in a peculiar relationship with the time or epoch in which thought operates and is not a trans-historically fixed entity. Rather, it strongly concerns the stance humanity has come to take towards its own Being. He announces his affinity to Nietzsche's struggle to create a higher human when he announces and often repeats: "Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking." (WiCT?, 6) Thought, which stands on one side of our asymmetry, is a precarious category.
            It is entirely in keeping with this Socratic stress on the precarious nature of true thought and insight that Heidegger defines the relationship between teacher and student, which I would like to propose to read as one of the modalities of philosophical love:

The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they–he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official. (WiCT?, 15)

Indeed, with regards to knowledge, it would be a gross misreading of the asymmetrical love relationship to think that on one side stands a person with more knowledge. One should compare this to the famous remark of Socrates at 21d of the Apology: "So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”" In fact, the character of "having thought deeply" is dissimulating of positive wisdom, which tends to be exactly what the young and lively are after. The coming-to-age of the philosopher is ideally an abandonment of authoritative knowledge, thus a largely negative movement. It is this tenet that was embodied most intensely by Socrates, whom Heidegger praises for not being a philosopher-writer, for having stood fully in the "draft of unsheltered thought."
            But Heidegger's actual interpretation of the Hölderlin poem Socrates and Alcibiades draws in yet another asymmetry that requires our attention, which stands between thought and poetry. Responding to the (self-posed) question of why he had drawn upon Hölderlin's poetry in an earlier stage of the lecture series, Heidegger responds that it was by no means to adorn and enliven "the dry progress of thinking." Much to the contrary, Heidegger supposes poetry to be a privileged passage, through Beauty, to that which is to be thought ("das Bedenklichste"):

Its statement rests on its own truth. This truth is called beauty. Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance. We are compelled to let the poetic word stand in its truth, in beauty. And that does not exclude but on the contrary includes that we think the poetic word. [...] What is stated poetically, and what is stated in thought, are never identical; but there are times when they are the same–those times when the gulf separating poesy and thinking is a clean and decisive cleft. This can occur when poesy is lofty, and thinking profound. Hölderlin understood the matter well. (WiCT?, 19-20)

Heidegger seems to suggest that Hölderlin understood the productive asymmetry between Socrates and Alcibiades to be similar to the one between thought and poetry! As much as this may be a stretch in terms of interpretation, there is nonetheless something fascinating in this thought, for it suggests nothing less than the possibility of profound contact between otherwise heterogeneous discourses of truth, in this case thought and poetry. For each approaches "that which is to be thought" in its distinct, individual way, yet shares a historical situation, a relation to world, a human predicament, a time. Is this not also a modality of love: a difference in discourse, a difference in access to the same world?
            There is much to be made of the idea that the love of philosophy entails a love of heterogeneous discourses. Philosophy has always stood at a productive intersection between science, religion, poetry, politics, and individual existence. At times it has limited itself to an intense interaction with one of these, rendering the others derivative or subordinate (as, for example, analytic philosophy has done with mathematical logic). Yet on the whole, events in any of these domains will call for the attention of philosophers time and again, as Plato was well aware; but the philosopher's task is not to "explain away" what happens in poetry or science by reference to systematic philosophies. Rather, the point is to adopt its own discourse to accommodate and think the connection between a number of contemporary discourses. In closing of this essay, I want to draw attention to Alain Badiou, who fittingly calls himself a Platonist, and who has contributed greatly to generalising Heidegger's above insight. For him, philosophy is indeed defined as the attempt to think its time by creating a discourse which aims to connect various discourses like science, politics, and art. He also calls this the "compossibility" of various "heterogeneous truth procedures."
            Is "philosophical love" a relationship between two live people? In concluding this essay, I would answer this question with a perhaps frustrating "yes and no." It has become clear that multiple modalities of love can be thought just like that, as two people, lover and beloved, teacher and student, wise and youthful, etc., meeting and exchanging from the perspective of difference. Yet there is also the tendency in philosophy to extend the love relationship, to stretch its temporality, to include the reception of writers and discourses from other times or situations. Goethe's desire to be Alcibiades was prompted by a reading of Plato; Heidegger's attempt to think through poetry was inspired by a reading of Hölderlin. Philosophical love is just as much a face-to-face phenomenon as the hearing of a distant calling, signed by an ancient author.
            What belongs to philosophical love by right is the moment of recognition of a productive asymmetry between thinkers, discourses, situations. It is at that moment that the other lights up our world as the possibility of another world to come.

Works Cited
Badiou, Alain, Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press; 1999).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, An Johann Gottfried Herder. Letter, 1771.
Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe Band 8: Was Heißt Denken? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann; 1954).
Hölderlin, Friedrich, Sämtliche Gedichte.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Also Sprach Zarathustra. (Köln: Atlas Verlag).
Plato, Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company; 1997).
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