The Cudgel and the Caress: Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness
Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur
Reviewed by: Octavian Gabor (Methodist College)
A theologian once told me that philosophy and theology are two approaches that have the same object of knowledge, truth, but they come toward it from different directions due to their respective natures. According to him, philosophers stretch their hands toward heaven, playing with their fingers in the sky. On the contrary, theologians stretch their hands from heaven toward the earth. Coming from two different places, the fingers of philosophers and theologians become intertwined. Brian A. Butcher’s volume, Liturgical Theology after Schmemann. An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur, takes place on the stage of this encounter, bringing into dialogue Orthodox theology and contemporary philosophical problems.
Such an endeavor, while truly needed, always proves to be difficult, primarily because one needs to explain the benefits of this encounter between philosophy and theology. Does liturgical theology benefit from philosophical work? Do we understand a philosopher’s ideas better if we apply them to the study of the liturgy? The answers to these questions bring to surface both the virtue and the inherent problems of Butcher’s volume. On the one hand, his work is a remarkable excursion into Paul Ricoeur’s work, which emphasizes themes that remain at the core of theology: personhood, memory, symbol, and interpretation. On the other hand, it is difficult to establish whether we are dealing with a work in liturgical theology or one of philosophical exegesis. The double nature of the work is suggested by the two parts of the title: first, the impression is that we are dealing with a book that discusses the future of liturgical theology after Alexander Schmemann’s work; second, we are told that the author focuses mainly on an Orthodox interpretation of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy.
Be that as it may, the connection between Ricoeur’s philosophy and theology is an appropriate one. Even if Ricoeur ‘s work referred to the liturgy only tangentially, as Butcher’s acknowledges, his analyses of memory, symbol, metaphor, or personal and communal identities “offer liturgical theology a plethora of resources” (2). I take it, though, that this work of bringing together Ricoeur and liturgical theology generates a question: whether the use of these philosophical resources improves theology, or whether it shows that philosophical methods and theological methods may arrive at similar conclusions. Butcher’s book does not engage this question directly, and this leads to some lack of clarity as to how it should be read. It takes as its starting point liturgical theology as developed by Alexander Schmemann. One should not expect, however, that Butcher writes in the vein of Schmemann. In fact, Butcher criticizes him and his alleged claim that, throughout history, it is not the liturgy that has changed, but its interpretation. Butcher is in accord with various critiques of Schmemann which accuse him of rejecting prior interpretations of the liturgy because they are interpretations instead of revelations of meaning, while he, Schmemann, does not acknowledge that his work is an interpretation as well. I think, however, that Schmemann’s claim that we have departed from the liturgy is interpreted too radically by them, which has led to a misunderstanding of his work. I take it that Schmemann starts from the idea that we can find the meaning of the liturgy in the experience of the service itself. His critique was directed toward those who, in his perspective, considered the liturgy a symbol removed from that which it symbolizes. For him, however, liturgy is similar to an icon: it does not represent reality, but rather it makes reality present. If I am correct in assessing his approach, we can say that Schmemann advocated for a partaking of truth in the analysis of the liturgy and criticized what he perceived a discussion of the liturgy as a mere symbol.
Butcher departs from Schmemann and is more interested in finding a philosophical methodology that is applicable to theology. After the initial critique of Schmemann’s thought, he engages it only in passing, focusing rather on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach found in his philosophy, and thus analyzing how his methods of studying a text can be applied in liturgical theology.
The first obvious concern is the appropriateness of using Western philosophical tools for Eastern theological discourses, and Butcher engages this problem in his first chapter, arguing successfully for his approach. He emphasizes that Ricoeur’s work has already borne fruit in some Western theologians’ analyses of the liturgy. He believes that Ricoeur’s work can enrich the field of theology because the French philosopher shows that the nature of symbolism, “liturgical or otherwise, [is] to engender nolens-volens a multiplicity of meanings” (15). Butcher continues, “this is so because symbols, particularly as represented verbally through the work of metaphor, do not merely adorn a meaning equally accessible in a nonsymbolic, or nonmetaphorical manner. Instead, they give rise ex opera operato, so to speak, to original thinking, to a creative redescription of the world” (15). This attribute of Ricoeur’s approach can lead us, Butcher believes, to a liturgical theology that goes beyond that of Schmemann. The author’s perspective is well described by the quote I just mentioned and it shows the difference between his and Schmemann’s views. Butcher follows Ricoeurian thought, and so he begins from the perspective that symbols are meant to produce a creative redescription of the world. Schmemann is not interested in descriptions, but rather in how symbols bring in people’s presence the reality of the Kingdom. He should not be read as claiming that symbols have only one valid interpretation, but that any interpretation is irrelevant in the absence of communion between man and the deeper reality that the symbol brings forward. For Schmemann, I would argue, symbols do not interpret reality, but rather allow us to commune with it.
The two approaches are not contradictory, and we would be mistaken in placing them in opposition. Instead, they approach the same thing from different directions, as in the image with philosophers and theologians stretching their hands towards the sky. Nevertheless, I think that clarifying the difference between the two of them would be helpful. This is particularly so in the second part of Butcher’s volume (chapters 3 and 4). Here, the author analyzes the role of the metaphor in religious language. First, Butcher offers a convincing description of Ricoeur’s application of metaphor to the biblical text, emphasizing the polyphonic naming of God. God, for Ricoeur, becomes a limit-expression, “i.e., an expression that cannot be fully thought specifically because it dwells at the frontier of thinking” (73). Butcher dwells on this idea and develops elegantly the directions in which it can go, pointing to the perennial question of what kind of truth can be expressed in a metaphorical utterance. In the fourth, the author continues this approach, providing a rich discussion on metaphor.
When analyzing Biblical texts, one must always clarify how one understands the connection between that which is expressed and the expression itself. Butcher points out that Ricoeur’s analysis of metaphor is useful because the Bible speaks of events that are ineffable. The question is whether language can foster a connection between these events and the one who reads about them. Butcher gives the example of the Incarnation (92). If it is completely ineffable (92), then there are no accounts of it. “But if ineffability does not altogether preclude description (and, in turn, inscription) then the resultant texts—whether treating of the Incarnation or the Shoah—ought to be duly subject to analyses in keeping with their genre” (92-93). But one may allow for the possibility that we can look at these “descriptions” not as representations of some events, but rather as openings toward them. If we apply this to the liturgy or to sacred texts, then we could claim that the liturgy or these texts can be understood as places that make present the Kingdom of God on earth. Butcher does not travel on this path, though. It is true, however, that the effort of these pages is concentrated on clarifying Ricoeur’s thought and defending it against accusations that his view on metaphor (1) ignores “the uniqueness of the events attested in Scripture,” (2) subverts “the due authority of the Bible by making this authority a function of the believing community,” and (3) subscribes “to a perilously subjectivist notion of biblical ‘truth’” (91).
Butcher rejects this criticism (proposed by Graham Ward and others), emphasizing primarily that Ricoeur is not a subjectivist. Consider, for example, the claim that Ricoeur’s philosophy entails that the authority of the Bible is subordinated to the believing community. As a consequence, the community takes precedence over the sacred text. Still, even in a Ricoeurian analysis, one may say that the Bible has precedence even if, at the same time, the Bible must be read within a community, and this is because the community is the one that receives the revelation, and not because the community, as an entity different than an individual member of the community, tells him or her how to read the Bible.
Butcher, however, says that, “because Ricoeur appreciates the historical process by which the Bible was produced and canonized, he is reluctant to speak of its authority apart from the community integral to this process” (93). The possible implication of this is still that the community establishes what is true and not true in the Bible. The solution arrives in Ricoeur’s claim that “metaphor by its very nature points to the unsayable” (101). If this is the case, then even if the sacred text points to the unsayable, it does so within a specific community, and thus it depends on the community while it is connected with a truth beyond it.
The discussion on whether it is possible to meaningfully say something on Divine Being is not new. The question has often been raised, in theological as well as philosophical discourses. In philosophy, it becomes this: is it possible to have logos about the Logos? Is it possible to ever understand the deep structure of reality? Is it possible to ever reach an understanding of God?[i] Butcher moves immediately to the difference between the kataphatic and the apophatic ways. It may prove helpful to also consider a distinction between studying as observers and studying as participants. The observers contemplate their object of study and give more or less complete definitions of it. The participants cannot distinguish themselves from the object of study because there is no such object to begin with, but rather only relation in communion. Consider this example: if we were to claim that our role is to understand the divine being in Trinity and thus offer definitions of what nature and personhood are and how these definitions can be applicable to the three divine persons, then we place ourselves in the positions of researchers who study an event (again, using the notion loosely) from the outside. Similarly, those who study the song of birds describe the various sounds they make, the sequence of the sounds, the movements, the relations between them, but are never able to sing with them. The birds themselves do not “understand” the Song—they are in the middle of it; they are living it. They have it in their hearts. The birds’ song is not their Song, but it is the Song that is sung in them on different voices. The Song takes place in their midst only when they are coming together with their own voices. But one can see here that the Song is both the beginning, the source of their singing, and also the end. The Song is that which nourishes them and that which is expressed in their communion. The Song is that which lives each one of them—the Lord in their hearts. At that moment, the personal logos is nothing else than the glorification of the Logos, its joyful expression. In the tradition of someone like Vladimir Lossky (to whom Butcher will refer in the third part of his work), Orthodox theology has this precise aim: to glorify the Trinity in the union between the “knower” and Divine Being.
If Orthodox theology contemplates the divine being, this contemplation cannot be done from the outside, but from the inside. This means that the contemplation of the Trinity is not analysis of it, but its glorification: the birds sing not their song, but rather the Logos of the universe. Vladimir Lossky says that Christian apophaticism transforms rational speculation into “a contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity” (50). The negative way of apophatic knowledge cannot be, though, only this, a negative way. If it is understood as a method, apophaticism inscribes itself in a list of methods from which one may choose in one’s attempt to achieve knowledge. In some respect, apophatic knowledge stems precisely from a preference for a way of approaching knowledge. However, if it is to be Christian, apophaticism begins in love. Contemplation of the divine stems from the thirst for being, if I may use Mircea Eliade’s phrase (64). If we consider the example with the birds, contemplation of their Song stems from the thirst for this Song which awaits its birth in them.
In fact, any time we approach metaphor and truth, we are also called to give an account of knowledge, and Butcher does exactly that in various parts of the book. In Chapter 6, he shows that the notion of truth at work in the liturgy “constitutes just that kind of truth eligible for the designation ‘attestation’” (138) that we have in Ricoeur. Attestation is not knowledge in the sense of episteme, but neither is it belief in the sense of doxa, in the sense of opinion that has no given justification. Attestation goes beyond these categories—it does not lack justification in the sense that justification is not applicable to it. As Ricoeur proposes, “attestation belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe in’” (see Butcher 138), and so it corresponds to testimony—I would even say to glorification. Butcher reminds us of Ricoeur’s important discussion about the one who engages in attestation, the witness. In “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” the French philosopher shows that the agent of attestation is the figure of the martyr. Butcher cites Ricoeur saying, “Testimony is also the engagement of a pure heart and an engagement to the death” (Ricoeur, Essays in Biblical Interpretation, see Butcher 141). Ricoeur’s observation is remarkable and it engenders a discussion about the recognition that takes place in the liturgy, which, according to Butcher, is best seen in the exchange of gifts, the moment of the kiss of peace. There are various aspects that Butcher mentions here, and I think they can be furthered developed. First, the exchange of peace takes place between persons who recognize each other as witnesses by the very fact of participating in the liturgy. At the same time, the exchange is personal: it is performed with someone who maintains his ipse-identity, different than mine, and different than any other person’s, and thus making the exchange unrepeatable. This idea correctly leads the author to mentioning Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of face, which, as he says, reveals the otherness of the other (147). But Butcher rejects too hastily that it is possible to behold this “Levinasian” face because, “all that is unveiled, as with Moses on Mt. Sinai, is the shekinah or glory of the Lord—and this from behind” (147). I think, however, that in a liturgical context, the one who is revealed—and the one to whom people also give testimony—is the ultimate Other, Christ. One can also find scriptural textual support in Jesus’ own words, in John 14:7: “If you had known me, you would know my Father as well. From now on you know Him and have seen Him.” Since Jesus proclaims that he himself is the truth, as Butcher reminds us, perhaps one could find here even more reasons to point to attestation. The one who testifies to Christ in the liturgy, the ultimate Other revealed in the face of any other, testifies also implicitly to the Father, the one whose shadow was seen from behind on Mount Sinai.
The third part of the book is the strongest and most germinal. It focuses primarily on self-identity and how Ricoeur’s notions of self apply to the interpretation of the liturgy. There are two reasons for its germinal nature. On the one hand, the text abounds in information, and the author has some powerful intuitions. He proposes that Ricoeur’s analysis of memory can “chasten the hubris of a facile historicism” (151), such as the one proposed by Michael Aune, who believes that liturgical theologians would have to focus more on historical research. Calling on Vladimir Lossky’s discussion of the Church’s tradition as holy memory to support his thesis, the author reminds us of Lossky’s view of Mary’s life “as the paradigm of anamnesis” (160). However, while Butcher agrees that a historical approach may “yield a wealth of insights” (160), he also shows that this cannot “replace the qualitatively different, existential engagement with the past that is memory; the past as lived from within” (160). In doing so, he places himself in the tradition of a Lossky or a Schmemann, and he does so by summoning Ricoeur to his defense: “According to Ricoeur, the former [the “objective” historical approach] depends in great measure upon the latter [subjective memory]” (160).
On the other hand, the text abounds in questions that need further elucidation. The author has a habit of proposing interesting avenues by asking questions that suggest an answer already formed in the author’s mind. But the connections the readers should make between what is stated and what is implied are not always that evident, and are in need of a deeper analysis. For example, on page 163, at the end of the section, “The Crisis of Testimony: Experiences ‘At the Limits,’” the author asks two questions. He begins, “Do not ‘incredulity and the will to forget’ threaten the memory of the magnolia Dei that Christian worship attempts to preserve through a manifold deployment of poetic and aesthetic resources?” Then, after just a few lines, another question ends the section: “Does not this dichotomy impel the very mutation and multiplication of forms of worship to which liturgical history bears witness, while also occasioning the atavism within this same history of iconoclastic (and fundamentalist) movements—as well as the perennial presence of mystical currents eschewing corporate prayer altogether in favor of silence and solitude?” (163). Both questions purport to be rhetorical, and asking such questions seems to belong to the author’s style. Nevertheless, their frequency throughout the book can be frustrating.
The final section focuses on the Great Blessing of the Waters, the liturgical service that is best suited to a Ricoeurian analysis. Indeed, while one may say that a liturgy is the revelation of the body of Christ, the Church, that is formed in the coming together of worshippers, the Great Blessing of the Waters has a revelation at another level as well: it is the moment when, according to Tradition, the Trinity is revealed. Both God the Father and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove attest and witness to Jesus’ divinity. To my mind, this service can provide the occasion for an analysis of human work of attestation in the likeness of the divine self-attestation, but Butcher does not go in this direction.
Butcher’s volume is a tour de force, in which the author exhibits a wide awareness of the scholarly work in liturgical theology and Ricoeurian studies. While I believe that it leaves certain aspects not fully developed, focusing, perhaps, too much on a description of various responses to Ricoeur’s work instead of deepening the analysis of the ideas that the author proposes, it certainly emphasizes the need for an increase in dialogue between contemporary philosophical work and theological studies.
Works Cited:
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Orlando: Harcourt, 1987.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
[i] I acknowledge that, taken separately, each of these questions can be understood differently in its own right. At the same time, the use of Logos is quite liberal; I do not imply here Christ, but rather the Logos used in ancient philosophy, the one of Heraclitus, which one may not utter, but may hear behind the various particular utterings of people.
Hölderlin's Hymn "Remembrance"
Reviewed by: Shawn Loht (Baton Rouge Community College, USA)
This text originates in a lecture course Heidegger gave at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1941-42. This course preceded a second course, on Hölderlin’s “The Ister,” which Heidegger later gave in Summer 1942. As reported in the Editor’s Afterword, Heidegger originally conceived these courses as a single course covering the poetry of Hölderlin, but ended up using the entire winter 1941-42 semester to develop his reading of “Remembrance.” This work comes seven years after an earlier course Heidegger gave on Hölderlin, in winter 1934-35, on the hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” This very readable translation of Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” furnished by eminent Heidegger scholars McNeill and Ireland completes the English translation of the entirety of Heidegger’s Hölderlin courses, the others having appeared intermittently over the last several years.
The majority of this lecture course shows Heidegger providing a very close reading of Hölderlin’s important hymn “Remembrance,” often dissecting it line by line and word by word. However, equally important are the introductory sections, which comprise a significant portion of the course and which engage at length the correct mode of access for reading a poet such as Hölderlin. The correct way into understanding Hölderlin, Heidegger says, is not to focus on Hölderlin the person, or his life and times, or even his mental illness. Nor does the task involve getting a grip on the images or content of Hölderlin’s poetry, as if the primary obstacle is simply to understand what the poems are about. (Throughout the course, it will be clear to the reader that constructing a “correct” reading of the poem is not of significant interest for Heidegger.) He asks rhetorically on this note, are we sure that the content of the poem “coincides with what this poetizing poeticizes” (19)? Heidegger emphasizes instead that in order to comprehend Hölderlin’s poetry, one must “think into the poetizing word” (22) encountered in the poem. One cannot appropriate the meaning of Hölderlin’s poetry without entering into the proper hearing of what has come to language in the poet’s work. The task involves appreciating the poetized moments, the disclosures of being that were occasioned to the poet and which gave themselves to expression in words. In a way, then, Heidegger’s point here about comprehending what has been poeticized echoes the methodological claims one also finds in his writings on ancient thinkers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides from the same period, to wit, that there is no understanding to be gained of the thought at hand solely through an analysis of the philosopher’s words alone. Instead, the task calls for appreciating the matter of thought [das Zu-Denkende] – the disclosure under whose sway the thinker operates – or in the present case, the poeticizing of what has been poetized. Much of the territory explored in Heidegger’s reading of “Remembrance” has its focus in this approach.
On Heidegger’s reading of “Remembrance” proper: Heidegger suggests at the outset that Hölderlin’s hymn thematizes the concept of thinking [Denken] just as much as it connotes a notion of commemoration or memory. Heidegger highlights the root word at work in the poem’s title: “Remembrance” in German is An-denken. For Heidegger this entails an overlap in the notions of thinking and poetry; “thinking” [Denken] in the genuine sense involves tracing the poetic disclosure and movement of being. He says in a passage well into the text: “Poetizing and thinking is authentic seeking” (114), where seeking is questioning, with the poet’s vocation to question the holy.
While the ins and outs of Heidegger’s analysis of “Remembrance” are too complex for me to summarize in a short space, in what follows I will highlight some of the principal themes and contours of Heidegger’s reading. I begin at the end of the course, in view of his claim that the last lines of the hymn connect it with its beginning and reinforce its message. Overall, as Heidegger reads it, “Remembrance” is a description of the poet’s experience as a poet. The hymn’s last words read “Yet what remains the poets found” (18). As Heidegger reads this line, the poets preserve and keep alive the time-space of the historical being of the human, the things that have come to pass and those that remain to be borne (165). Heidegger interprets the hymn as poeticizing a narrative of the poet’s sojourn and homecoming, such that the hymn illustrates the poet’s experience as one of figuratively departing from one’s own land, and then returning to it. (On this score Heidegger observes the correspondence between the hymn’s travel narrative and Hölderlin’s own return to Germany, on foot, after a period in Bordeaux.) The poet is the one who can appropriate this very crossing from the foreign to the homely, recognizing the foreign and the homely in their own right. Heidegger highlights several images in the poem that articulate metaphorically the poet’s sojourn: the northeasterly wind’s promise of the sun’s return; the turning of the equinox; a footbridge crossing a narrow valley (from France to Germany, and more distantly, Germany to Greece); the Garonne river of France joining the Dordogne and spreading to the sea.
Heidegger does not spend much time in this lecture course discussing what the poem means. The reader should not expect that Heidegger’s analysis will enhance their understanding of what Hölderlin was trying to say, or of the metaphorical allusions Hölderlin gives to the various places and phenomena mentioned in the hymn. Heidegger’s interest is much more to isolate the poeticizing, historically significant moments that phenomenologically condition the poem’s principal images and overall composition. In other words, Heidegger attempts to highlight within specific concepts and themes of “Remembrance” the primordial disclosures that were poeticized for Hölderlin and which received some voice in his poetry. One such theme is that of the “festival” or “holiday,” and the relation of these to the more fundamental notion of the “holy.” As Heidegger describes it, the festival constitutes a commemoration of a momentous event in the past, a celebration of a god’s presence in and consecration of the human domain. In its original instantiation, “[t]he festival is the event in which gods and humans come to encounter one another” (62). For Heidegger, this commemorated moment originates with the dawn of history in Greece and the advent of the Greek gods. Accordingly, the festival and the holiday occasioning it are a reflection of the presence of the holy in the historical being of the present. Phenomenologically speaking, Heidegger’s meaning seems to be this: the existence of the festival as articulated by the poet is significant because the festival and its holiday illustrate the extraordinary quality of certain days and times by which they command celebration, revealing their own consecration. More broadly, Heidegger interprets the festival and holiday to commemorate historical being itself, including the circle of life to which human beings belong as the receivers of this being.
Another theme for which Heidegger gives a rather idiosyncratic, yet ostensibly phenomenological account is that of dreams. This treatment is noteworthy given that dreams are a subject that does not figure prominently in many other texts of Heidegger’s corpus. He takes up dreams here in the course of discussing the ending lines of the second strophe of “Remembrance.” These lines read “And over slow footbridges/Heavy with golden dreams/Lulling breezes draw.” In the wider context of this citation, Heidegger interprets this image as a reference to the poet crossing over to the homeland, where “golden dreams” convey the slumbering but still extant, “lulling” presence of ancient Greek culture (103ff). However, Heidegger gives a deeper analysis of how dreams are to be understood in their own right and outside the framework of modern psychology. He emphasizes that we should consider dreams “nonscientifically,” an approach that stands to be “more scientific” than traditional science by virtue of interpreting dreams outside of any standard point of reference. Heidegger offers a phenomenological description of dreams, citing for illustration two passages from the Greek poet Pindar, whom he identifies as an ancient counterpart of Hölderlin. In the first cited passage, taken from Pindar’s eighth “Pythian Ode,” the key phrase reads: “Shadows’ dream are human beings” (95). Human beings are the dream of shadows. Heidegger interprets this phrase to portray dreams as a vanishing within an appearing, but an appearing which itself is constituted by a darkening, a shadow-character. In Heidegger’s words:
Pindar wants to say that the dream is the way in which whatever is itself in a certain way already lightless, absences: the dream as the most extreme absencing into the lightless, and yet nevertheless not nothing, but in this way too still an appearing: this vanishing itself still an appearing, the appearing of a passing away into that which is altogether devoid of radiance, which no longer illuminates (98).
So Heidegger’s account of dreams sets about attempting to describe the underlying phenomenological character of dreaming, particularly as dreams are characterized by an evanescent but nonetheless definite, illuminating appearance from a hidden source. In claiming that he aims to give a nonscientific account, Heidegger’s emphasis seems to rest in the fact that dreams are first-person experiences. As such, the most one can provide in a genuinely philosophical reckoning must be formulated on the basis of how dreaming presents itself.
On the relation Pindar’s ode sketches between the dream and the human being (“Shadows’ dream are human beings”), Heidegger goes on to comment as follows:
The shadow’s dream is the fading presence of that which is faded, lightless; by no means a nothing; to the contrary, perhaps even that which is real – that which alone is admitted as real where the human being is stuck only with that which is constantly vanishing, the daily aspect of the everyday, insofar as the latter counts as the only thing that life knows as proximate and real (Ibid.).
Heidegger offers something profound here in his citation of Pindar. He casts dreams more broadly as reflecting the vanishing of the original illumination that constitutes the open of human being itself (100). Dreams echo the original, yet always withdrawn presence of being. The evanescent character of dreams simply is the character of the human experience of meaningful intelligibility, and of everyday human life. This observation yields at once a metaphysical sketch of everyday human being, and a cloaked criticism of modern culture, on the ground that every moment of life is a fleeting instantaneous juxtaposition of consciousness and forgetting. Heidegger concludes that dreams reflect the presence-in-absence constitutive of human being itself: “And so it is that what the human being is, as presencing in the manner of a shadow, he is not in the manner of mere presence and cropping up…. That which presences stretches itself as such…in accordance with its essence – into absencing” (100). In sum, to call human beings the dream of shadows is a way of sketching the temporally stretched, yet self-negating character of human existence. While this interpretation stands on its own and greatly fills in the opaque meaning of Pindar’s words, Heidegger also explains the significance of this excursus for Hölderlin’s mention of “golden dreams.” Here Heidegger cites a fragment from Hölderlin’s philosophical treatise “Becoming in Dissolution,” where Hölderlin describes the freedom realized in the creation of art as a terrifying yet divine dream, straddling the line between being and nonbeing, possible and real, and actual and ideal. Heidegger explains: “the dreamlike concerns the becoming real of the possible in the becoming ideal of the actual” (103). As Heidegger writes elsewhere in his own accounts of the origin of art, art’s creation articulates the interplay of one’s own place and time with the presence of the divine. Thus, the “golden dreams” of the “lulling breezes” blowing across the footbridge convey the historical presence of Greece’s golden age, which in turn also represents the dawn of historical meaning occasioned in the advent of art, poetry, and language. So while Heidegger provides an exhaustive hermeneutic analysis of dreams and their presence in human being, he also interprets Hölderlin’s lines regarding the lulling breeze crossing the footbridge to express at once the poet’s experience of straddling the homely and foreign, and more broadly, the essence and meaning of the existence of art.
On a related note, another example of Heidegger’s preoccupation with the phenomenological disclosure bound up with the birth of poetry and art is visible with his highlighting of Hölderlin’s emphases in “Remembrance” of phenomena as they occur to him. In the first strophe, Hölderlin describes the “northeasterly” as the most beloved of winds “to me” (16). A few lines after, he invites the reader to “go now and greet/The beautiful Garonne” (Ibid.). And in the second strophe, Hölderlin says “Still it thinks its way to me” [Noch denket das mir wohl] (17), suggesting a notion of being reminded, of having a thought occasioned from outside oneself. For Heidegger, Hölderlin’s use of these locutions indicates that the poetic experience involves heeding moments that disclose themselves, rather than actively seeking out words that describe experiences. In this light, the northeasterly wind, or the Garonne, are poeticized phenomena that self-present, as it were. They are not discovered by the human agent’s searching or cataloguing of geography or atmospheric patterns, or finding aesthetically pleasing ways to describe these.
What results from Heidegger’s often tangential explorations in this lecture course are as penetrating and exhaustive discussions as one will find in his oeuvre on the nature of poetry and particularly, what it means for disclosures of being to be “poeticized.” This book will make a fine companion to Heidegger’s other writings on poetry such as On the Way to Language, “Poetically Man Dwells,” and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Also noteworthy in this volume, several early sections of the course address at length the biography and legacy of Norbert Von Hellingrath, the young Hölderlin scholar who, before his untimely death in the first World War, collected the edition of Hölderlin’s poems Heidegger deems essential. Although many of Heidegger’s other writings of this period, especially those on Hölderlin, exhibit a nationalistic streak, the presence of this dimension in Heidegger’s analysis of “Remembrance” is for the most part rather muted. In this vein, Heidegger primarily takes his cues from Hölderlin’s historical conceptions of Germania and does not develop much material from out of his own voice. These topics feature most prominently in Part Three of the text, which is entitled “The Search for the Free Use of One’s Own.” I do not believe this text will provide a major contribution for understanding themes of nationalism in Heidegger’s work.
I will finish by highlighting one last issue to which Heidegger gives attention in this lecture course that I believe is very interesting vis-à-vis his treatments of art and poetry elsewhere. Heidegger gives repeated attention to the concept of images [Bild], particularly in the context of the visual representations one experiences in reading and hearing poetry. In these passages, Heidegger emphasizes that the images evoked by poetry cannot function as a vehicle for understanding what is poeticized. Similarly, he argues that images are not simply the visible counterpart of an unspoken, invisible form or essence comprising the real truth of the poem, as if the poem were some kind of derivative, lesser version of a true reality not possible to capture in words (29-30). As Heidegger describes, images have this limitation because what is poeticized transcends the poem altogether. What is poeticized is not something the poem represents or symbolizes. Thus, the fact that a piece of poetry contributes to the formation of images in the hearer has no bearing on a poem’s meaning or the disclosure of being that occasioned the poem’s composition. Interestingly, Heidegger does not speak here of the actual ontology of images, or of the human capacity for image consciousness. Nor does he comment on the western tradition of privileging visual perception among the sources of knowledge, as he does more critically elsewhere in writings such as “The Age of the World Picture” and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In those works, Heidegger’s position is that artworks (which, as he says, have their origin in poetry) do not merely represent; art in the genuine sense does not simply re-produce a subject by placing it in front of the viewer in the manner of a copy. Instead, artworks have the function of preserving the eventuation of historical truth for a particular time, place, and culture. Artworks wrest truth from oblivion and bring it into light, albeit not permanently. In view of his comments on images in the course on “Remembrance,” I believe one can take issue slightly with the dichotomy Heidegger draws between the images occasioned through poetry, and the question of whether such images represent a more original meaning or not. In other words, Heidegger’s suggestion that images are merely representative, and not reflective of a deeper disclosure, is perhaps overly restrictive. As Karen Gover has written on this topic, Heidegger perhaps ought to say that art and poetry do in fact represent their subjects (in the manner of re-presenting), but in a way that goes deeper than merely copying their subjects. Maybe the key is that they simply represent in a more originary way, and not that they do not represent at all. In the case of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s “Remembrance,” Heidegger would seem to allow that the hymn re-enacts some trace of the primordial disclosure that was given to the poet; one simply needs to be in the correct mode of hearing to appreciate the offering of this disclosure. On the other hand, the equally decisive point emerging from Heidegger’s interpretive framework in the lecture course seems to be that the images Hölderlin’s hymn affords us must not distract us from the fact that poetry’s origins transcend both images and words; poetry (or poeticizing) is the moment of being coming into language. Understanding Hölderlin’s hymn therefore concerns heeding the eventuation of being that precedes both the poem and its images.
Works Cited:
Gover, K. “The Overlooked Work of Art in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’” International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2) (2008): 143-53.
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