SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant

Charles Bambach, Theodore George, Charles Bambach, Theodore George

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438477046
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets' contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.

1

On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing

A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte

MARÍA DEL ROSARIO ACOSTA LÓPEZ

“Only a matter of style”

On June 24, 1795, Fichte received a letter from Schiller informing him that his essay “Concerning the Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy in a Series of Letters [Über Geist und Buchstabe in der Philosophie in einer Reihe von Briefen]” had been rejected for publication in Die Horen.1 Die Horen was a monthly journal for literary and philosophical writings that Schiller had co-founded with the publisher Cotta in Tübingen a few months earlier. Explaining the reasons behind his decision, Schiller wrote in his letter:

I was hoping to enrich the philosophical section of the journal with your essay on spirit and letter, and the subject that you chose led me to expect a piece of work that would be understandable and interesting to a general audience. What have I received instead, and what do you expect me to present to the public? Old material that does not even seem entirely finished to me, even in the antiquated epistolary style I had already chosen, and all of this according to such an eccentric plan that it is impossible to bring the parts of your essay together into a whole. I regret to say this but as it stands I am satisfied with neither how it is decked out nor with the content, and I find precision and clarity lacking in this essay, two qualities that usually characterize your work.2

If one follows the correspondence that resulted from this initial communication, it becomes clear that for Fichte the reasons behind this harsh rejection came—to say the least—entirely as a surprise. At the time both authors were already aware of their significant philosophical differences. This had not become yet an obstacle for their intellectual exchange. Quite the opposite, Schiller had very recently published an article by Fichte in Die Horen, “On Stimulating and Increasing the Pure Interest in Truth [Über Belebung und Erhöhung des reinen Interesses an Wahrheit],” which contained a critical response to some of Schiller’s latest philosophical reflections. Schiller’s only reaction at the time had been to suggest a few changes in the paper’s “style.” After Fichte insisted that the article be published in its original version, the argument had not gone any further.3

Now, in this following essay, there were again indications of a confrontation between Fichte and Schiller’s philosophical project. As the former stated in the paper he submitted, the idea of “raising human beings towards the dignity of freedom and, along with it, towards freedom itself by means of aesthetic education, falls into a vicious circle.”4 Fichte was most certainly referring to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity, which had just appeared in three parts in Die Horen.5 And indeed, as Schiller himself would explicitly recognize, there is a kind of unavoidable circularity surrounding the project of an “aesthetic education towards freedom.” However, such a circularity was for Schiller the only way to achieve an “aesthetic overcoming of duty.”6 If the purpose, as it appeared in the Aesthetic Letters (but also in previous essays such as “On Grace and Dignity,” which Fichte might also have had in mind when developing his criticisms), is to avoid the risk of turning freedom into a violent subordination of sensibility to reason (something that, according to Schiller, may have been in the letter, but not necessarily in the “spirit” of Kantian practical philosophy), the highest good must be not only moral but also aesthetic.7 To go beyond mere moral duty, the aesthetic dimension of our humanity must serve both as means and as end. There is indeed circularity in such a way of arguing, but a necessary one, according to Schiller, since the aesthetic character is both a condition for and the final result of a truly moral character.8

These philosophical differences were therefore part of an ongoing discussion between Fichte and Schiller. One could even say that they were part of an ongoing discussion within Schiller’s own project, which was in fact also permanently under revision.9 Moreover, Fichte’s objections and reflections were essential for Schiller, as he recognized in various occasions throughout the Aesthetic Letters. Thus, there were no motives to think that such a philosophical disagreement would be the cause for Schiller’s rejection of Fichte’s paper. Fichte had no way to understand the decision other than as a matter of a difference in style. The question was for Fichte how to interpret Schiller’s invitation in the “Announcement of Die Horen” to “liberate philosophy from its scholastic forms” and to present it “in a more attractive, or at least in an easier wrapping [einfacher Hülle], to try to render it understandable for the common sense.”10 This is the context of his initial response to Schiller. Fichte writes:

This is not the first time that I discovered that we have very different principles concerning the popular philosophical presentation. I already saw it from your own philosophical writings. … your popularity is established by your overflowing use of images, which you employ nearly everywhere in place of the abstract concept. My popularity is particularly established by the approach [Gang] that I take—which misled you into too quickly considering my first letter to be shallow and superficial. … In my case, the image does not take the place of the concept, but rather precedes or follows it, as a simile [Gleichniß]. … If I am not mistaken, all ancient and modern authors who are famous for their excellent presentation have considered it as I endeavor to. But your kind is completely novel. … You bind the imagination, which can only be free, and wish to compel it to think. That it cannot do.11

Instead of supplementing abstract concepts with helpful similes, Schiller’s writings substitute the former with the latter. He uses images in the place of,and not only in addition to, concepts. In doing so, Fichte argues, he forces imagination to think,something imagination cannot do. These are the accusations Fichte uses to respond to Schiller’s criticisms. Both are clearly for Fichte erroneous ways of making philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Both are also direct responses to some of Schiller’s statements in his first letter:

We must have very different conceptions of what constitutes an appropriate presentation, since I must confess that I am not at all pleased with yours. Above all, I expect a consistent tone from a good presentation, and, if it is to have aesthetic value, reciprocal action [Wechselwirkung] between imagery and concept, not alternation between the two, as is often the case in your letters.12

For Schiller, the issue at hand is not a substitution of concepts with images, as Fichte suggests in his reply. As he will also insist in his next letter to Fichte, the ideal is rather to be able “to extend what I presented to the understanding [by means of a concept] to the imagination as well [by means of an image]” without losing sight of “the strictest connection [strengster Verbindung]” between one and the other.13 Such a connection is expressed by Schiller in terms of a “reciprocal action” in opposition to what Schiller describes as a mere alternation between images and concepts in Fichte’s text.

For anyone relatively familiar with Fichte’s philosophical writings, Schiller’s description of the problem does not come as a purely stylistic one. Schiller is here purposely making use of his opponent’s tools: “reciprocal action” is indeed a concept taken from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, and therefore refers not only to a “style” of writing but also to the actual contents of Fichte’s philosophy. What seems to be a disagreement on the most adequate “style [Manier]” for a “philosophical exposition” thus reveals a much deeper philosophical divergence.14 In what follows, I will briefly discuss the context of this disagreement, before returning to Schiller’s discussion with Fichte on the form of a philosophical style of writing. My intention is at least twofold: first, I want to shed light on the relationship between this debate on style and Schiller’s views on the relationship between aesthetics and practical philosophy. This will allow me to move to my second and main goal, namely, to show in more depth all that is at stake for Schiller in a discussion on philosophical modes of writing. I will have to leave aside Fichte’s side of the debate, and the consequences it will have for his development of aesthetics as part of his philosophical project.15

Reciprocal Action and Schiller’s Notion of Aesthetic Freedom

Fichte introduces the concept of reciprocal action in the second part of his 1794 Foundation of the entire Wissenschaftslehre. According to Fichte, the drive to sensibility is essential for helping us understand the limits of our rational capacities. A reciprocal action between sensibility and reason therefore becomes a necessary intermediate stage toward the full development of our moral freedom. In this stage, sensibility is subjugated to reason, but reason must also be subjected to sensibility. A form of “reciprocity” is thus instituted between them.16 However, this intermediary stage must ultimately be overcome by a unique and essential drive determined exclusively by rational precepts: the drive to self-activity. “The highest good,” Fichte writes in his “Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation [Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten],” also from 1794, “is the complete accordance of a rational being with himself.”17 “Man’s final end,” Fichte continues, “is to subordinate to himself all that is irrational, to master it freely and according to his own laws.”18 Hence, reason must entirely subsume sensibility if humanity is to achieve its vocation. This is, for Fichte, an end that is as unattainable as it is necessary. The overcoming of sensibility by reason must therefore be the ultimate guide for our determination as human beings.

The concept of aesthetic education in the Aesthetic Letters is based mainly on Schiller’s discomfort with this reading of morality and freedom, which understands them both exclusively in terms of a negation and an overcoming of sensibility. According to Schiller, this interpretation is as present in Kant as it is in Fichte (at least, as mentioned above, in the “letter” and not necessarily in the “spirit” of their practical philosophy).19 Fichte’s concept of reciprocal action, no longer taken only as an intermediary stage, but also, and simultaneously, as an end in itself, becomes for Schiller the point of departure for an alternative interpretation of the best possible state for humankind. Thus, in critical distance to what he describes at the beginning of the Aesthetic Letters as the risks of a too “technical” and “analytical” mode of procedure in philosophy,20 he a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Poetizing and Thinking
• Chapter 1 On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte
• Chapter 2 Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichte’s Werke, Vol. 8 (De Gruyter)
• Chapter 3 Hegel, Romantic Art, and the Unfinished Task of the Poetic Word
• Chapter 4 Who Is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject
• Chapter 5 Untimely Meditations on Nietzsche’s Poet-Heroes
• Chapter 6 Heidegger’s Ister Lectures: Ethical Dwelling in the (Foreign) Homeland
• Chapter 7 Remains: Heidegger and Hölderlin amid the Ruins of Time
• Chapter 8 The Poietic Momentum of Thought: Heidegger and Poetry
• Chapter 9 Learning from Poetry: On Philosophy, Poetry, and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton
• Chapter 10 An “Almost Imperceptible Breathturn”: Gadamer on Celan
• Chapter 11 Hölderlin’s Empedocles Poems
• Contributors
• Index
• Back cover