The God, when he draws
near, will the hearts stand fast.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.
-------------------------------------
3.
-------------------------------------
4.------------------------------------
5.
My Shame!
----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------
6.
And let me say at once ---------------------
7.
-------------------------------------------------
8.
That I approached to see the Heavenly,
9.
And they themselves cast me down, deep down
10.
Below the living, into the dark cast down
11.
The false priest that I am, to sing,
12.
For those who have ears to hear, the warning song.
13.
There ---------------------------------------------
2
In a footnote,
Harries says that this problem was brought to Heidegger’s attention as the
text was being prepared for the Gesamtausgabe edition.By omitting the last portion of the poem, the
text that is presented as Hölderlin’s poem is already an interpretation; in
essence, Heidegger’s selected portion of the text.As Harries point out, this would mean that
Heidegger’s commentary on the poem would be an interpretation of his own
interpretation.(Harries n.36,20)Rather than changing it, Heidegger allowed it
to stand.
Harries reproduces
only a portion of the omitted lines (lines 6 – 13) in his essay and claims
that “the disintegrating last stanza of ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…’ speaks for
itself,” (Harris 18) a dangerous claim to make, especially about Hölderlin’s
poetry.The reason Harries thinks that
lines 6 –13 (actually the ninth and last stanza of the poem) are
“disintegrating” is that the 6th line is incomplete, and the
7th line is missing, not to mention the incompleteness of line
13.
In terms of content,
Harries claims lines 6-13 show that Hölderlin renounced his prophetic
authority and, thus, the last stanza becomes a song of warning against the
presumption of such authority.When
Heidegger omits the last portion of the poem, he selects only the first seven
strophes and half of the eighth strophe which support the position of the poet
as prophet, hence, Harries criticism that Heidegger’s version of the poem is
self-serving in that he only selects the major part of the poem which supports
the position of poet as prophet and omits the so-called renunciation of that
role in the last portion of the poem.
In response to
Harries’ criticism of Heidegger, it is important to notice that Harries only
reproduces lines 6 – 13 and fails to reproduce the other part that Heidegger
left out: that is, lines 1 – 5 (the second part of the eighth strophe).If Harries had reproduced the whole portion
of what Heidegger left out, it would be evident to the reader that the poem is
an incomplete draft; the eighth and ninth stanzas are incomplete.All of the seven completed stanzas are
nine-line stanzas, except one which has eight lines.Thus, Heidegger’s version ends with the first
four lines of the eighth stanza.
The principle of
Heidegger’s editing is fairly clear here:he cuts the poem off at the last completed
line (the fourth line) of stanza eight.Why?Because the rest of stanza 8 and 9 is an
incomplete draft.Harries does not tell
his readers that the poem is a draft and that stanzas eight and nine are
incomplete.Contrary to Harries, “the
disintegrating last stanza” does not speak for itself:stanzas eight and nine are simply incomplete
and are not necessarily “disintegrating” in the sense that the fragmentation
reflects the poet’s state of being.
Thus one can accuse Harries of
the same manipulation of which he accuses Heidegger: on the one hand,
Heidegger omits the last portion of the poem leading his readers to believe
they have the entire poem.On the other
hand, Harries does not tell his readers that the poem is a draft and that
stanzas eight and nine are simply incomplete and, thus, leads his readers to
believe that the last two stanzas are coherent and complete.Finally, this leads readers to believe that
the only reason Heidegger omitted the end of the poem was to eliminate
that part of the poem which did not conform to his interpretation.
For the sake of argument, let us
assume that Heidegger deliberately left out the last portion of the poem
because it did not support his own interpretation. It would certainly place
Heidegger’s whole essay in grave doubt; however, it would not necessarily
place all of Heidegger’s other commentaries on Hölderlin’s poetry in doubt:
his commentaries on such poems as “Germania,” “The Rhine,” “Andenken,” “The
Ister,” and“Griechenland” would still
have to be assessed on their own terms. Furthermore, the omitted portion of
the poem would place Heidegger’s commentary in grave doubt only if the omitted
portion conclusively renounced the position the poet takes in the first seven
and a half strophes.
From my own reading of the
omitted incomplete strophes, I agree that a warning song is introduced in the
sense that Hölderlin portrays himself as a false priest. What role this
renunciation plays, however, is unclear. In addition, the degree of
renunciation is unclear: is it meant to subvert the preceding strophes
completely or only conditionally?We do
not know with any degree of certainty because the poem is incomplete. In the
end, the poem does not speak for itself.
While we are on the subject of
ellipses or things left out, let us examine Harries’ claim that the austere
style (Harries calls it the rough style) practiced by Hölderlin and other
modern poets “recalls Nietzsche’s description of the style of decadence”
(Harries 5). This association leads Harries to the following question: “does
the sublimity of the rough style of so many modern poets herald a new
beginning or is it merely the expression of a decadence unable to hold on to
the whole of life” (Harries 5)?Harries’
point is that the call of authenticity that Heidegger associates with the
rough style “may be understood as a phenomenon of decadence” (Harries 5).
In order to support this claim,
Harries presents the following citation from Nietzsche’s The Case Of
Wagner:
What is the style of every
literary decadence? That life no longer lives
in the whole. The word becomes
sovereign and leaps out of the sentence,
the sentence reaches out and
obscures the meaning of the page, the page
gains life at the expense of
the whole …. The whole no longer lives at all:
it is composite, calculated,
artificial, and artifact (Harries
5).
Harries explains what this quotation means in the
following lines: “characteristic of the style of decadence is the almost
hallucinatory power of individual word gestures – Hölderlin’s late hymns would
seem to offer ready examples” (Harries 5). The question is whether the austere
or rough style, the style of Pindar, Hölderlin, and many modern poets, can be
adequately described as decadent in Nietzsche’s sense of the word.
If we turn back to
Harries’ citation of Nietzsche from The Case of Wagner, we see that
Harries has left out material from the citation: an ellipsis occurs in the
latter part of the quotation. The following is the material that Harries has
omitted:
The page gains life at the expense of the whole – the whole
is
no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every type
of
decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms,
disintegration
of the will, “freedom of the individual,” to use moral
terms –
expanded into a political theory, --“equal rights
for all.” Life,
equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of
life pushed back
into the smallest of forms; the rest, poor in
life. Everywhere
paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and
chaos: both more
and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of
organization.
The whole no longer lives at all….
3
What is obvious from the part that Harries has omitted is
that the austere or rough style, when it is understood correctly, does not
conform to what Nietzsche describes as the decadent style.
Although Hölderlin
uses parataxis, inversions, and enjambment, he does not use these elements to
the point that individual words become sovereign and leap out of the sentence
the way Nietzsche means it.Words in
Hölderlin’s poetry do not become “an anarchy of atoms” in the way Nietzsche
describes the decadent style.Harrier
mentions Adorno’s claim that Hölderlin’s rough style is a “‘paratactic revolt
against synthesis,’” (Harries 7) and I would agree, but not to the point where
words can no longer be gathered together.After all, Hölderlin’s poetry can be read
(gathered) like the lines Harries quotes from the beginning of Patmos:
“Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott” (“Near is / And difficult to grasp,
the God”) (Harries 7).The inversion
does make us stumble and makes the word “Gott” conspicuous, but the words
still hang together.
The austere style,
according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, uses words “‘like blocks of building
stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth,
but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity’”4This is not, however, an “anarchy of
atoms.”The blocks may be rough and
become conspicuous, but are still laid together.They still belong to a syntactical structure
and do not leap out of that structure.
Actually, Harries’ attempt to cast the
austere or rough style as something decadent in Nietzsche’s sense is a red
herring.Later in his essay, Harries
begins to talk about the rough style in positive terms:“Is the shift from a smooth to a rough style
that von Hellingrath found so characteristic of Hölderlin not itself called
for by the evolution of the aesthetic approach . . . ?”(Harries 12).Contrary to Heidegger, Harries is trying to
keep Hölderlin within the evolution of aesthetics.Once Harries places Hölderlin within that
context, he no longer mentions Hölderlin’s rough style as “monstrous” (Harries
6-7); indeed, the evolution of the aesthetic approach now in fact calls
for the transition from the smooth to the rough style!Harries supplies David’s painting Oath of
Horatii as an example of such a transition and concludes by staying that
“In painting and architecture, too, this shift from the smooth and beautiful
to the rough and sublime style finds inspiration in the art of the ancients”
(Harries 13).
I find it odd how something as “monstrous” as
Hölderlin’s austere or rough style could be placed alongside something as
sedate as the “unmediated opposition” evident in David’s Oath of
Horatii.What has happened is that
Hölderlin’s “monstrousness” has been translated into the aesthetic approach,
one that Harries favors over the unique significance Heidegger attributes to
Hölderlin which goes beyond aesthetics.Rather than thinking through the radical
singularity of Hölderlin’s “monstrousness,” Harries opts for sedating that
“monstrousness” into something less threatening by placing Hölderlin’s rough
style alongside David’s Neoclassicism.“Rough style” now functions as a critical
concept of aesthetics which refers indifferently either to David’s “unmediated
opposition” or to Hölderlin’s parataxis and, thus, tends to obviate
Hölderlin’s unique historical significance.
What are the consequences of placing
Hölderlin’s poetry in the context of Harries’ aesthetic approach?The first consequence is that Hölderlin
remains within the context of metaphysics.Harries acknowledges that “Heidegger does
seem to me right when he seeks the origin of the aesthetic approach in the
metaphysical world view” (Harries 13).Harries also agrees with Heidegger that the
metaphysics of the ruling world paradigm based on the objectification of
reason “lacks the power to give meaning to life” (Harries 9).In other words, the ruling paradigm of modern
metaphysics “and, more specially, the Cartesian project of mastery, tend
toward nihilism” (Harries 9).Although
this metaphysics leaves no room for art, beauty, and poetic thinking, it
nevertheless does not make them “altogether superfluous” (Harries 9).
Rather than breaking out of metaphysics,
Harries sees art as a response to and compensation for the poverty of modern
metaphysics.Thus, art compensates for
the “loss of reality” in modern metaphysics.But since art and poetry cannot break out of
metaphysics altogether, they arise as a compensation to modern metaphysics on
the basis of another metaphysics: the loss of reality inherent in
modern metaphysics “gives birth to dreams of a fuller life where the split
between sense and spirit is healed” (Harries 13).
Harries is ambiguous here.Like Heidegger, he sees art and poetry as
having an ontological function:“all
genuine poetry places us beyond the understanding of being that rules
metaphysical thinking and reminds us of its insufficiency” (Harries 15).Unlike Heidegger, Harries does not see this
“beyond” as non-metaphysical.He does
not see Hölderlin’s poetry as embodying a poetic thinking that goes beyond
metaphysics in Heidegger’s sense; rather, he sees art and poetry going beyond
the poverty of modern metaphysics on the basis of a richer, fuller metaphysics
which remains dialectically connected somehow to modern metaphysics.Harries does not clarify this relationship.
At this point, we would expect some outline
of what this richer, fuller metaphysics is on the basis of Hölderlin’s works,
but no such metaphysics is developed.Rather than constructing the aesthetic, or
better, the poetic, on the basis of an examination of Hölderlin’s poems and
essays, Harries constructs his own view of poetry as an aesthetic object
(based on Paul Valery and Archibald MacLeisch) apart from Hölderlin and then
simply assumes that the poet will fit the construct.
Harries presents a poetic based on a
non-instrumental view of language; the language of poetry is language that
does not refer beyond itself and thus creates its own presence in which it can
exist:“Just because poetic language
does not have an instrumental function, is not a means to an end, it can grant
us a sense of being at one with ourselves that we are denied so long as care
and anticipation binds us to the future.Self-renewing, self-repeating, the poem lets
the present triumph over the past” (Harries 12).The assumption here is that the only way we
can be “at one with ourselves” is when we are no longer bound by care and
anticipation to the future, only when we deny our participation in the
finitude of temporality.
This poetic would have us assert “the
self-renewing presence of the poetic realm” (Harries 12) as a unity in
opposition to the loss of reality and nihilism inherent in the metaphysics of
objectifying reason.The result,
however, is simply the assertion of one metaphysic (the metaphysics of spirit)
in opposition to another (the metaphysics of rationality).The permanent presence of the poetic is
asserted in opposition to the permanent presence of the logical and
mathematical.Harries himself recognizes
that the assertion of the poetic in the face of the metaphysics of the ruling
world paradigm cannot succeed (Harries 14).
The assumption Harries makes in all of this
is that Hölderlin’s own poetic conforms to this construct of poetry that he
has presented.Nowhere in his essay does
Harries attempt to justify this assumption.No attempt is made to present Hölderlin’s own
poetic.
Harries’ final point, to illustrate that
Heidegger’s claim about Hölderlin’s unique historical significance is
unacceptable, consists in showing that Heidegger’s claim is incompatible with
Western freedom of thought,“a freedom
that refuses to be bound by what happens to be our place in space and time and
by its perspectives” (Harries 17).In
other words, because Heidegger’s claim about Hölderlin is tied “to the magic
of one particular tradition, one particular language, one particular poet,” he
is practicing a “deliberate provincialism” which is incompatible with the
cosmopolitanism of Western freedom (Harries 17).Thus, in order to avoid the criticism that
his choice of the local is arbitrary, Heidegger invests Hölderlin “with the
authority of a prophet” (Harries 17).It
is this reading of Hölderlin as a prophet that Harries finds self-serving on
Heidegger’s part.
In response, I find it interesting that
whenever Harries discusses the impoverishment of objectifying reason which has
“debased human beings into mere appendages of a lifeless mechanism,” he is
sympathetic to the ability of art of provide “a world full of meaning”
(Harries 9).But when he focuses on the
ability of art to provide such a fullness of meaning, he sees this movement as
one that consists in a necessary removal from reality:“Emphasis on the presence of the aesthetic
object has to lead to interpretations of the poetic realm as an autonomous
sphere, removed from everyday reality and its concerns, indeed removed from
reality altogether” (Harries 12).This
attempt, however, to create an autonomous aesthetic realm cannot succeed,
according to Harries.
The second consequence is that we are left
with a seemingly powerful but nihilistic metaphysics of rationality on the one
hand and an impotent metaphysics of spirit full of meaning on the other.Although Harries assigns an ontological
function to art in that “All genuine poetry places us beyond the understanding
of being that rules metaphysical thinking” (Harries 15), he, nevertheless,
wavers as to what precisely this function is.I assume he means that genuine poetry places
us beyond the metaphysics of objectifying reason, but not out of metaphysics
altogether since the whole tenor of his essay argues against Heidegger’s
placing Hölderlin outside or beyond metaphysics.But what is this “other” metaphysics into
which poetry displaces us?For the lack
of a better term, I have called it the metaphysics of spirit.
What is of interest are “the powerless dreams
of a world full of meaning” that arise from the poverty of modern metaphysics
(Harries 9).They are powerless because
objectifying reason “excludes art” (Harries 9), because even though
“objectifying reason demands the aesthetic as a necessary complement” (Harries
9), these dreams have no place to be in the ruling world paradigm,
because even in the long run when they become art, they cannot maintain the
self-sufficiency of their permanent presence.Whatever this other metaphysics is to which
art and poetry belong, it ultimately fails, not simply because it is
impossible for a poem not to refer beyond itself.Even if poetry could maintain its
self-sufficient presence, it still would have no place to be within modern
metaphysics.
The question that Harries leaves in the
background is the question of power.Following Harries, it seems to me that though
art asserts a metaphysics counter to the metaphysics of objectifying reason,
it does so by using the same means: that is, by asserting itself as a form of
permanent presence in competition with the permanent presence of modern
metaphysics.A permanent presence of
plenty and perfection asserts itself and rivals the permanent presence of
poverty.But why couldn’t a metaphysics
of art rival and even displace the metaphysics of objectifying
reason? That possibility does not
seem to be a live option for Harries.I
ask the question because I wonder if it is not the question of the power of
art that animates Harries’ essay on Heidegger rather than the question of
Hölderlin’s unique historical significance.
When Harries says that Hölderlin is not
unique in Heidegger’s sense, he implies that metaphysics of art could
accomplish the same kind of transformation with respect to modern
metaphysics.If any genuine poetry has
the power to place us beyond the ruling paradigm, then metaphysics of art
should certainly include this possibility.It becomes a moot point, however, when
Harries states that art ultimately cannot succeed and, thus, cannot “replace
the ruling would paradigm with another” (Harries 8).
In the end, Harries opts for the freedom and
universality of metaphysical thought when he takes Heidegger’s “deliberate
provincialism” to task.Heidegger’s
choice of Hölderlin is deliberately provincial in the sense that thinking can
be saved only by submitting itself“to
the magic of one particular tradition, one particular language, one particular
poet” (Harries 17).The claim is that
Heidegger’s adherence to the local, that is, to the sense in which Hölderlin
is “rooted in a particular time and place” and to “a particular history and
language,” is antithetical to the freedom of thought that refuses to be bound
by such particulars.
This assumes that Hölderlin’s poetic thinking
remains bound by his particular time and place and his particular
language.The same claim could be made,
however, about Harries’ use of Paul Valery and Archibald MacLeish as poets who
also remain bound by their times and places as well as their languages and,
thus, provide an additional reason why poems cannot maintain their
self-sufficient presence. But again, the real issue is not whether poetry can
assert a permanent presence which could rival the hegemonic universality of
objectifying reason and provide an alternative hegemony to modern
metaphysics.I would argue that poetic
thinking can provide an alternative to this clash of one permanent presence
with another precisely because poetry does not offer a God’s eye-view apart
from times and places, languages, and perspectives.
I would argue that Hölderlin is
neither bound by his time and place nor is his poetic thinking
to be taken apart from his time and place in the sense that it rises above it
in the attempt to establish a form of permanent presence.Hölderlin is not bound by his time and place
precisely because the whole point of his poetic thinking is to move out from
what is native of his own tradition and language in order to experience and
learn what is foreign to it.What is
native to the poet cannot be learned without first learning what is
foreign.Furthermore, what is native
must be as well learned as what is foreign.5
This holds true linguistically as well.Hölderlin’s transliterations of Pindar’s odes
directly into the German language bring the foreignness of the Greek into the
German language and transform it.It was
a well-known claim before 1933 that Hölderlin had in effect created a new
language that was neither Greek nor German.Paul Fechter in his massive work entitled
Dichtung der Deutschen (Poetry of the Germans, 1932) states that
Hölderlin had reached an extreme polarity in his poetry where “the Greek had
become German and the German Greek.”6Hölderlin’s poetry is not a local poetry
preoccupied with the local.Nor does
Heidegger choose Hölderlin’s poetry out of some misplaced provincialism.
Heidegger’s choice of Hölderlin has much more
to do with a poet who was able to step-off or demarcate that realm of nihilism
which still haunts us today, not by asserting another form of permanent
presence, but by establishing in his poetry the movement of a thinking that
moves with finite temporality through the nihilism in order to
find an alternative to metaphysical thinking.It is the attempt to establish a place in
time through a poetic retrieval back and forth from past to future, from what
is native to what is foreign and back again; to institute a poetic retrieval
in consonance with the finite movement of temporality without resorting to the
assertion of permanent presence apart from that movement.
The word “movement” here is deliberate.In 1933, Heidegger saw “the movement,” that
is, the movement of National Socialism and the upheaval that Germany was
undergoing as one that contained possibilities for heading in Hölderlin’s
direction.
To be continued.
