Friday 17 June 2011

Heidegger and Wallace Stevens on Poetic Thinking

Is there a specifically poetic way of thinking? Heidegger thought there was. In his later writings he  distinguishes poetic thinking from meditative philosophical thinking. For Heidegger these two styles  of thinking are in some ways alike - both require the thinker to abstain from logical-scientific (or what Heidegger would call 'technological') thinking in order to be able to approach the 'holy  mystery' of being. But Heidegger also emphasizes that they are distinct. Just what the distinction is  Heidegger found difficult to say. As he put it, the dialogue between poetry and thinking is a long  one, and is only just beginning.

Julian Young (in his book 'Heidegger's later Philosophy') suggests the following interpretation of  Heidegger's distinction. Meditative thinking is discursive, while poetic thinking is intuitive and  direct. Meditative thinking is thus limited to pointing to being in a negative way, while poetic  thinking enables the thinker to actually set foot within the realm of being.

A problem with this way of drawing the distinction is that while experientially direct access to the  realm of being may be the successful outcome of poetic thinking, only the most optimistic and  mystical of poets would think of such access as characterizing their everyday way of thinking.  Perhaps Holderlin, in his final days of madness, was granted a more or less continuous vision of  being; most poets' everyday way of thinking is a more meandering, less ecstatic affair, only occasionally punctuated by moments of poetic vision.

Wallace Stevens' account of the poet's way of thinking (in the lecture 'A Collect of Philosophy') is  more realistic in this respect:

"The probing of the philosopher is deliberate, as the history of the part that logic has played in  philosophy demonstrates...On the other hand, the probing of the poet is fortuitous..Up to the point  at which he has found his subject, the state of vague receptivity in which he goes about resembles  one part of something that is dependent on another part, which he is not quite able to specify...It  may be said that the philosopher probes the sphere or spheres of perception and that he moves about  therein like someone intent on making sure of every foot of the way. If the poet moves about in the  same sphere or spheres, and occasionally he may, he is light-footed. He is intent on what he sees and  hears and the sense of the certainty of the presences about him is as nothing to the presences  themselves. "

Here Stevens is describing, not the moment of poetic vision itself, nor the process of poetic  composition, but the everyday way of thinking of a poet in search of a poem. Moreover, the  description not only differentiates the poet's way of thinking from logical-scientific thinking, but  also suggests a difference betweent the poet's way of thinking and Heidegger's meditative thinking.  Despite the fact that, according to Heidegger, it involves a turn away from willed deliberation, there is after all  something deliberate, slow and cautious about meditative thinking that contrasts with the easy, 'light-footed' and 'fortuitous' approach of Stevens' poet. Although both may involve a  state of 'vague receptivity' ultimately directed at what Heidegger calls Being, or what Stevens calls the 'supreme fiction' (in 'A Collect of Philosophy' he suggests that 'the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea'), Heidegger's 'Gelassenheit' differs from the relaxed, playful way of  thinking Stevens seems to be after.