The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling
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The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling Author: Christopher S. Yates Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3056 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2011 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy THE POETIC IMAGINATION IN HEIDEGGER AND SCHELLING a dissertation by CHRISTOPHER S. YATES submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2011 © copyright by CHRISTOPHER S. YATES 2011 ii The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling Christopher Yates Advisor: John Sallis Readers: Richard Kearney, Jason Wirth Abstract This dissertation investigates the importance of the imagination in the thought of F.W. J. Schelling and Martin Heidegger, and argues that Heidegger’s later philosophy cannot be understood properly without appreciating Schelling’s central importance for him. It is increasingly recognized today that Schelling, who had long been overlooked, is an important figure in post-Kantian German Idealism. However, his significance for Heidegger’s concentration on the creative character of thought remains undervalued. I argue that, by tracing the theme of imagination in these thinkers, the milieu of Schelling’s absolute idealism and that of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenlogy may be understood as distinct discourses that nevertheless share in a profound impulse to overcome sensible- intelligible and subject-object dualisms and retrieve and refine the productive and projective character of reason. This impulse is first evident in both thinkers’ attention to the role of imagination in Kant’s critical project (for Schelling, cir. 1800; for Heidegger, cir. 1929). It then proves inseparable from Schelling’s treatments of intuition, identity, ground, and freedom; and it becomes still more evident in Heidegger’s 1936 lecture course on Schelling and his affiliated inquiries into the essence of art and poetry. Even as Heidegger labors to deconstruct the alleged visual and subjectivist bias of metaphysics, he remains preoccupied with Schelling’s ontological treatment of the law of identity and intent on translating Schelling’s aesthetic emphasis into a poetic paradigm for philosophical inquiry. By focusing on how, alongside his engagement with Schelling, Heidegger endeavors to recover the imagination as a poetic (as opposed to reductive and willful) basis for reason, we attain a decisive rubric for understanding his later thought. Contents Introduction 1. Art of the Root: The Kantian Imagination and New Possibilities for Thought………………16 1.1 Concealed in the Depths: The Elemental Art of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 1.2 The A Deduction: Imagination in the Work of Synthesis 1.3 The B Deduction and its Aftermath: Imagination in the Drift of Combination 1.4 Arousal & Attunement: Repurposing the Imagination in the Critique of Judgment 1.5 The Free Hand and the Fundamental Retrieval: Schelling and Heidegger at the Threshold of Possibility 2. Poeticizing the Root: Production and Artistry in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity………..66 2.1 The Ideal Receptivity for the Real 2.2 From the Standpoint of Consciousness, For the Standpoint of Identity 2.3 Reimagining Harmonious Production 2.4 The Artistry of Intuition and the Striving of Imagination 2.5 The Art of Creation and the Absolute Standpoint 3. The Divine Imagination and the Question of Ground in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift………126 3.1 Essence and Connected Matters 3.2 The Mechanizing Imagination and the Being of the Copula 3.3 The Divine Imagination and the Being of Two Mysteries 3.4 The Measuring Imagination and the Word of Man 4. Heidegger on Schelling’s Impulse and Poetizing Impasse……………………………………169 4.1 Creative Transformations 4.2 The Poetry of Thought: The Open Occurrence and the Primordial Band 4.3 The Mood of the Moment 4.4 Imagination at a Poetizing Impasse? 5. The Word Springs Forth: Schelling’s Shore, Heidegger’s Hölderlin, and the Aletheiac Imagination………………………………………………………………………………………...200 5.1 Asystic Form and the Truth of the Mirror 5.2 The Measure of Poetry’s Quivering Half-Light 5.3 Truth in the Poetizing Work of Art 5.4 Poiesis, Projection, and the Preserving Imagination 6. Thought in the Meantime: Imagination as the Measure of Crossing………………………..255 6.1 Preliminaries: A Path of Necessity and a Light Surmised 6.2 Basic Measures: Between Supposing and Sounding 6.3 Creative Measures: Capacitating Projection and the Event of Imagination 6.4 The Dimension For Every Measuring Act i Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………….315 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………..323 ii Introduction There is a type of mind which thinks about things, and another which seeks to know them in themselves, according to their pure necessity. -F.W.J. Schelling Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature (1807, 1809n) I wish to increase and keep awake philosophy’s need to be ever turning upon preliminary questions, so much so that it will indeed become a virtue. -Martin Heidegger The Phenomenology of the Religious Life (1920) In 1920 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) begins a lecture course on The Phenomenology of the Religious Life by announcing that philosophical concepts are “vacillating, vague, manifold, and fluctuating.” He then declares that it in fact belongs “to the sense [Sinn] of philosophical concepts themselves that they always remain uncertain.”1 Some twenty-five years later, at the outset of a course entitled “Introduction to Philosophy: Thinking and Poetizing,” he observes that “historical humans always already stand within philosophy because they do so essentially.”2 Together these statements say that the human being, in spite of his rational perspicuity or blithe indifference, stands within a domain of thought in which the purported markers of illumination are necessarily kinetic and provisional – one could say, essentially preliminary. But this account is a descriptive reckoning, not a concession to relativism, skepticism, or nihilism. It bears witness to the sojourn of reflective human dwelling and evokes something of the ‘virtue’ exercised in remaining awake and attuned to those basic questions which, following Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), seek to know things – be they entities or matters – in accordance with their own necessity. To behold such questioning in the 1 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of the Religious Life (1920-21), trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010) 3/3. The translation follows Gesamtausgabe Bd. 60. Pagination appears as English/German. Hereafter PRL. 2 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy—Thinking and Poetizing (1944-45), trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011) 1/90. The translation follows Gesamtausgabe Bd. 50. Hereafter TP. Pagination appears as English/German. Heidegger continues: “We believe we know in which realm and space building’s stand and in which realm the trees grow. We barely think about which realm philosophy, thinking, is in and in which realm art is, and what they are. We do not even think about the fact that philosophy and art could themselves be the realms of the sojourn of the human” (2/91). 1 terrain of its inevitable standpoint is to glimpse what poet Paul Valéry calls the “Image of a thinking mind/ Where the spirit spends itself/ To be increased by what it gives.”3 I. Task and Methodology This dissertation is one attempt to keep watch with Heidegger and Schelling as they remain alert to the dynamic potential and elemental standing of a matter that is as much in question for philosophy as it is in practice for poets and artists: the imagination. It is a project that concerns the poetic imagination in these thinkers – in their field of conceptual navigation and in the manner of thinking they bring to this domain. The phrase ‘poetic imagination,’ though a necessary heuristic, denotes something different from a hard and fast conceptual matter that these thinkers will chisel and polish with the ready instruments of rational command. Perhaps, alternatively, we hear the phrase in the same register we hear the conjunction appending the title to Schelling’s 1809 treatise, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith (. und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstäande), as though the poetic imagination denoted a semblance of secondary concerns. But what is true of Schelling’s text is true of decisive stages in the thought of Heidegger and Schelling – that the imagination as a ‘matter connected’ is in fact something integral to their courses of inquiry. But before elucidating the meaning of ‘poetic imagination’ in this regard a more immediate question presents itself: Why Heidegger and Schelling? Accustomed as we are to treating Heidegger in concert with Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, and possibly Aristotle and Plato, and to treating Schelling in concert with J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, and possibly the mystical tradition, this pairing may well strike an anachronistic and unlikely chord. Schelling and Heidegger indeed appear to inhabit the summits of ‘mountains most separate.’4 Schelling is the protean German Idealist for whom the Absolute is the unconditioned, infinite, living 3 Paul Valéry, “Charms,” in Paul Valéry: An Anthology, ed. James R. Lawler