Poetry and Experience in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Fall 2017 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Fall 2017 Poetic Possibilities: Poetry and Experience in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud Amalia Astin Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2017 Part of the Feminist Philosophy Commons, and the Other Philosophy Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Astin, Amalia, "Poetic Possibilities: Poetry and Experience in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud" (2017). Senior Projects Fall 2017. 30. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2017/30 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Poetic Possibilities: Poetry and Experience in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Amalía Astin Annandale-on-Hudson, New York December 2017 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor Ruth Zisman for her dedication and thoughtful support of my project. Her guidance made the writing process not only painless, but enjoyable. I also want to express the deep gratitude I have for my incredible and supportive family. I love you all so much. I additionally want to thank my extended family: My grandpa Sandy––for all his generosity and loving guidance. My grandma Lena––for her strength, beauty, and inspiration. My grandfather David––for his innately philosophical mind. Mike Glick––for his immense generosity and kindness: an honorary Astin. And my friendships—I will cherish each of you always. Finally, thank you to the Bard College Philosophy department for providing the framework for my intellectual growth. Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter I: Emerson…………………………………………………………………………….5 Chapter II: Nietzsche………………………………………………………………………….23 Chapter III: Freud……………………………………………………………………………..39 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….55 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………63 !1 Introduction Throughout the history of philosophy, we can observe an emergence of the poet as a figure the philosopher must contend with. From Plato’s Republic to post-modern philosophical texts, we have seen the question of the poet resurfacing. This is a character who is both inexplicable to, and unavoidable for the philosopher, eliciting the question: what is poetry to philosophy? In exploring this topic, many questions on the nature of this relationship arise. Does the philosopher benefit from the poet? To what extent are poets already philosophers? What do these two figures have in common, and at what point to they diverge? Are the two merely speaking the same truth in different languages? Do their distinct modes of articulation complicate or compliment one another? Do they each accomplish what the other cannot? More importantly, for our project, how does an investigation of this relationship––fraught with contention and admiration––lead us to a better understanding of the philosopher’s necessity for poetics in order to illustrate experience? To understand this relationship and to trace the necessity of poetry, I will turn to three thinkers who already work at the boundary of philosophy and literature: Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud. Through metaphor, descriptive imagery, and examples of poetry in their texts, each refrain from using strict analysis to form their philosophical arguments. Simultaneously, each has much to say about the genre of poetry itself. Uniquely, these writers survey the threshold at which analysis can no longer go, and by doing so, display the need for poetics. By examining Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud’s individual contributions to this project, we can begin to see how essential poetry is to philosophy, and understand its unique ability to convey truth differently than analysis. !2 Examining of these district thinkers side by side, we see an emerging need for poetry in order to create and relay our experiences of the world. Yet how are poetics able to uniquely generate and convey our experiences? By going beyond the limits of analysis and reason, poetry can create a landscape for the reader to inhabit and thereby gain access to an author’s truth. What we glean from Emerson’s texts is that experience can be conveyed through poetry, and it is in the poet’s specificity that he or she is able to speak to a universal truth. Even for Nietzsche, who may not believe in the existence of a universal truth to relay, poetry is still able––in its flexible relationship with language––to create our experience of the world and offer the path to the most fruitful life. Finally, for Freud, in order to understand the self we must suspend reason, and read the writings of our minds as poetry. What philosophy can gain from the incorporation of poetry, is the potential to communicate experience in such way that it can be understood universally. In conclusion, I hope to illustrate the ways in which this inclusion of poetry, as a means of imparting experience, allows for a larger range of voices to be incorporated and ultimately understood. Opening our examination with Emerson, Chapter 1 will start by comparing texts such as The Poet, Self Reliance, The American Scholar, Fate, and Experience to address Emerson’s notion of ‘the poet’ in conversation with his call for self-reliance and experience, ultimately illustrating how poetry is the ideal vehicle to impart these qualities. We will also see his initial argument that poetry, materializing from the singular experience of the writer, is capable of being understood universally through its telling. For Emerson, the poet is able to use the articulation of their individual and private experiences, to relay a relatable truth through poetry. With this !3 chapter, we will attempt to trace how for Emerson, poetry contains and conveys a person’s singular experience in such a way that its truth can be recognized universally. Turning to Nietzsche, who, unlike Emerson, does not believe that language is capable of imparting truth, we still see an argument emerging for the necessity of poetry. Examining his essay On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, in conversation with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” we observe that when there is no inherent truth in the world, we are left to build our experiences through language and create our reality out of poetry. He goes on to identify two distinct figures, each exemplifying the different modes of using language: ‘the man of reason’ and ‘the man of intuition.’ This chapter will illustrate how the path of intuition, in which language is used poetically, creates the more advantageous life. Finally, in exploring the performative aspect of his writing, we will trace Nietzsche’s own use of metaphor and poetry in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where we see the poet Zarathustra as the ultimate philosopher-prophet for Nietzsche. Turning to Freud in our concluding chapter, we see that the mind itself is poetic. Looking at his text, The Interpretation of Dreams, we learn that to successfully interpret one’s dream in order to understand ourselves, we must abandon the critical function of our mind. We will see how this process of psychoanalysis is that of reading and writing the mind––an interpretation, a translation, the work of making metaphors. What we glean from Freud is a better understating of the structure of the mind as poetry making. Finally, this chapter will trace the performance and inclusion of poetry in Freud’s work by examining the literary figures and excerpts of poetry he includes. Ultimately, this section seeks to show how even in his construction of a science, Freud cannot confine himself to analysis, but must use poetry to legitimize his theories. !4 In conclusion, I will illustrate what is at stake in an argument for the inclusion of poetry, turning to a feminist text by Patricia Hill Collins: Towards an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology. Collins argues that minority voices are excluded from academia based on their non-adherence to a strict positivist approach to knowledge. She encourages a broader scope of what can be considered truth, which makes a compelling argument for the inclusion of experiential knowledge. How do we really understand the experience of another? Understanding poetry as the containment of experience we observe how this mode of communication allows for the singular experience of a person to potentially be understood universally. In the end I will explicate the crucial role of poetry as a method to include the experience and voices of those typically excluded from the philosophical tradition. !5 Chapter I: Emerson––Poetry as the Containment of Experience Working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson is the ideal writer to explore the role poetry plays in philosophy. By looking at his edifying texts such as Self Reliance, The American Scholar, Fate, and Experience we can see how Emerson instructs his readers to live in the world. He encourages self trust and reliance, condemning adherence to the status-quo. In addition, Emerson campaigns for life experience and listening to your intuition, trusting your perceptions as truth. At the same time, in The Poet and throughout his other texts, Emerson worships the poet and explains how in their private musings, this person is able to illustrate a universal truth. If we want to truly know what is at stake when Emerson venerates the poet, how and why he worships this figure we must look to his other texts on self reliance and experience.

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