Real Presences
The Spirit breaking forth at the turn of the incarnate God moves through all time and makes history possible. From its original utterance in Christ's turning from his disciples to found the visible Church, it flashes in a multitude of like moments: when representation reveals itself as identical with speculative truth; when we look upon a lamp-bowl and kingfishers catch fire; when the young man turns out of the Land of Lament into death but in so doing gives meaning to life, and when we turn into the chapel at Little Gidding.
And there is the refusal of: that turn, the rejection of dynamism (what Hegel calls 'Bewegung'), brought about by the seductions of stasis. That denial is reflected in another, converse series of connected moments, in which attempts to conceal the face of God in fact reveal it through their own self-contradiction: the pastor cutting himself off from his community; Zarathustra standing before the Gateway of the Moment, the prophet of an impossible redemption; the evaporation of the finite centre laying claim to an absolute perspective.
We have seen how these two series of moments are interwoven with each other — both represent responses to the near and distant God, which haunts philosophy and poetry from Kant to Eliot. The opening words of 'Patmos', 'Nah ist | Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. | Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst | Das Rettende auch', express both the precariousness and the saving consolation that emerge, in German Idealism, from Kant's revolutionary redefinition of the self: intense presence sliding into total absence, and the Spirit in which moments of absence and alienation can resound with the utterance of the Word and be filled with presence again, becoming moments in history. The historical hermeneutic of Spirit is the central post-Kantian discovery, from its nascent realisation in Hegel's Der Geist des Christentums, through Hölderlin's consciousness of being 'thrown' in the Spirit towards the limits of expression in Über die Verfahrungsweise, to the perspective on history, subjectivity, and redemption achieved firstly in 'Patmos' and then in Phänomenologie des Geistes. Both of those works treat life after the turn. They are founded on faith and hope that in the moment when the face of the incarnate divinity moves away from us, it in fact fully reveals itself to us in the scope of human history, and in the community of Spirit of which we become conscious members, moving towards the final fulfilment that is both the end of history and the condition of expression, which Hölderlin terms transition or metaphor.
However, the temptation to deny hope, felt increasingly in Hölderlin's late poetry but resisted through every possible means available to him, exerts an almost unbearable power. It is the temptation not to trust in the presence of Spirit in the world — not to trust that we still look upon the face of God. It means trying to step beyond the community of Spirit, and breaking it down. That turn against community is a turn against the possibility of meaning, and in it a doctrine is born whose paradoxical function is to oppose all doctrine: 'deconstruction teaches us that where there is no "face of God" for the semantic marker to turn to, there can be no transcendent or decidable intelligibility'.1 Whereas Hölderlin kept struggling to see God's face, some of the major philosophical successors to post-Kantianism in the nineteenth century gave in to the temptation he had diagnosed, and decided that there was no divine countenance to look upon. They replaced that countenance with their own features, at whose centre was the all-surveying eye of Zarathustra. The process began with Strauss's purported attempt to develop Hegel's system into a textual hermeneutic for the understanding of scripture, which in fact turned against Hegel by denying scriptural representation any claim to truth, and so could never achieve the meaning for which it argued. Strauss's illogic of deferment anticipated Nietzsche's attempt to deconstruct the community of Spirit with Zarathustra's penetrating gaze — a gaze that veers into blindness, and looks for a redemption that can never come. Nietzsche's linking of hermeneutics and morality in the turn against transcendence — his allegory, in Zarathustra, of life beyond good and evil — is the central moment in the post-Hegelian crisis of redemption. We have seen that crisis too in British Idealism, which in its rejection of dialectic replicated the tensions of Strauss and Nietzsche. Bradley's metaphysics reflects the turn against community and the problem of deferral in the paradox of the unrealizable Absolute.
In Mörike, Hopkins, Rilke, and Eliot, poetry feels the implications of, and struggles to redress, that crisis of redemption. It represents a protracted attempt to recognize, turn back towards, the face of God. These poets are all successors to Hölderlin in that they see the danger of lapsing into stasis, of denying the space behind poetic utterance that makes poetic utterance possible — the space into which the incarnate God turns in 'Patmos', out of sight. And the stakes for poetry are high. In Mörike and Hopkins, the development that leads from Strauss, through Nietzsche, to Bradley is countered by a recognition of Spirit. Mörike's things, and the poems which speak of those things, open our perspective to the horizon of human history and moral life in which poems and things are reflections of the original creation at the beginning of time, and signs of time's ultimate fulfilment at the end. They oppose themselves, through a great effort of making, to the process of deconstruction that renders Strauss's hermeneutic unredeemable. For Hopkins, writing at the same time as Nietzsche and the flourishing of British Idealism, the attempt to see the face of God shining forth in human history was both a necessity and a near impossibility, and his most famous poem, like 'Patmos', holds out a hard-won hope that, if we accede to it, redeems it from meaninglessness and allows us to feel in spite of everything the love which Hegel identified as the structuring principle of reality.
Rilke and Eliot too want to turn beyond poetry in order to redeem poetry. The journeys in the Tenth Duino Elegy and 'Little Gidding' are journeys with Nietzsche's ghost: that journey reaches a climax in Eliot's encounter with his 'dead master', who by way of Bradley points back to Nietzsche. Erich Heller rightly saw Rilke and Eliot as post-Nietzschean poets. We have seen how as post-Nietzscheans they are involved, like their predecessors Mörike and Hopkins, in the 'purchase of poetry' — investing in the redemptive possibility of transcendence, so as to save themselves from the fate of Zarathustra. For both, that investment is a matter of life and death. Among all the poets we have looked at, Rilke stands out as different: unlike Hölderlin, Mörike, Hopkins, and Eliot, he lacks a hermeneutic of revelation, and has no explicit conception of Spirit. However, the redemption through Spirit for which the other poets hope does find expression in Rilke. In his attempt to ground language in death, and by holding out the possibility that life can only be affirmed through reference to what is beyond it, Rilke sees the danger of Zarathustrian temptation. And though it is true that Rilke remains fixated on the uniqueness of one's own death (the death of Eurydice, or the death of the young man in the Tenth Elegy) rather than on death as part of a collective history, it is also true that the universality of death as that which leads beyond, and gives significance to, individual lives is apparent in the way death is made the condition of communication. We must look to the transcendent space of death in order to be able to read Rilke's poetry: to glimpse the 'Gleichnis' of life and death that makes figurative language — metaphor or transition, in Hölderlin's sense — possible. At the end of the Tenth Elegy we see poetry not simply left 'in the shallows caused by the Spirit's ebbing away' from it, as Heller says; rather we see an awareness that the condition of words and representation is felt fully only when words move beyond representation. That is the sense in which Duineser Elegien provides a 'vindication' of ideas formulated by Hegel.
Eliot, however, goes beyond Rilke in explicitly linking death to history, and recognizing Spirit. 'Little Gidding' is an attempt to overcome the unredeemed time into which Zarathustrian death endlessly delivers us: Eliot saw that possibility of redemption from Zarathustrian time as identical with the possibility of redemption from the suffering of Europe in 1942. In his concern with the historicity of the self — its belonging to a shared tradition and inheritance — he is Hölderlin's clearest twentieth-century heir, and in him the insights of Mörike, Hopkins, and Rilke are brought to bear on a time that we recognize unmistakably as ours. Four Quartets, like 'Patmos', closes with the hope that the face of God is present in human experience, and is revealed in the writing of poems that grasp their relation to what is beyond them. That hope is supremely difficult to utter, but impossible to deconstruct. It echoes down from Kant and post-Kantianism, and is the defining characteristic of Hölderlin's successors — the theological core of modern poetry.
By the time Eliot wrote 'Little Gidding', the themes of time, historicity, inheritance, and death had already been taken up by the most significant German philosopher of the twentieth century, himself a major part of the Idealist aftermath. In Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger sought to investigate his central question, the meaning of Being, through reference to the nature of our being, Dasein. In the fifth chapter of Sein und Zeit, Dasein is found to be essentially historical — stretched forward towards death, which as Rilke said is part of our experience but cannot be experienced (Heidegger's account is shot through with the Rilkean terminology of the turn, making frequent use, for example, of 'Abkehr' and 'Hinkehr'2), and also back towards the moment of its 'thrownness' ('Geworfenheit') into the world. Heidegger therefore uses many of the ideas we have seen developing since Kant: not only historicity and its relation to life and death, but also the 'throwing' of the self, identified by Hölderlin in Uber die Verfahrungsweise and present in all the poets we have investigated. For Heidegger here no less than for Hölderlin, Mörike, or Hopkins, the central questions are concealment and revelation, now addressed in the characteristic language of the existential analytic of Dasein:
Diesen in seinem Woher und Wohin verhüllten, aber an ihm selbst um so unverhüllter erschlossenen Seinscharackter des Daseins, dieses 'Daß es ist' nennen wir die Geworfenheit dieses Seinden in sein Da, so zwar, daß es als In-der-Welt-sein das Da ist.3
[This characteristic of Dasein's Being — this 'that it is' — is veiled in its 'whence' and 'whither', yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the 'thrownness' of this entity into its 'there'; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the 'there'.4]
Heidegger restates these issues as necessary themes for philosophy after him, and through him these questions have an extensive trajectory in post-structuralism and beyond. However, although Heidegger re-emphasizes the post-Kantian themes of historicity and community in a way that is lacking in Nietzsche, for example, and connects them to life and death, the terms of his analysis differ decisively from those of Hölderlin and Hegel. Whereas for Hölderlin to be thrown is to become conscious of one's createdness, which is to say one's participation in the community of Spirit, for Heidegger it is to be delivered over to particular circumstances (possessed of their own particular 'existential possibilities'), through which Dasein chooses to define itself, and which permit no reference to anything beyond them — certainly not to a universal community moving through all time.5 The exercise of existential analytics seems to involve a certain process of disembodiment. This, certainly, is the view underlying the critique of Heidegger put forward by Emmanuel Lévinas: 'Le Dasein chez Heidegger n'a jamais faim' [Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry].6 In the refusal of bodily relation which Lévinas attributes to Dasein, we might see a further variation on a familiar Zarathustrian theme; this would suggest deep links between Heidegger's analytic and the Nietzschean project of genealogy. In order to investigate Heidegger's account of Dasein's historicity properly, then, it would be necessary to discuss its relation to the post-Kantian hermeneutic that has formed the focus of our discussion here, and in particular to ask whether Heidegger represents another instalment in the crisis of redemption.
But answering that question involves looking at poetry too. Hölderlin's most obvious successor in post-1945 German lyric, Paul Celan, produced a poetry haunted by the tragedy of German history in the twentieth century: the place in that history of Heidegger and his work has been one of the major questions underlying engagement with modern German thought. Celan's own definition of poetry, famously provided in his speech on Der Meridian, emphasizes precisely that 'creaturely' dimension which Heidegger's account seems to lack:
Sind diese Wege nur Um-Wege, Umwege von dir zu dir? Aber es sind ja zugleich auch, unter wie vielen anderen Wegen, Wege, auf denen die Sprache stimmhaft wird, es sind Begegnungen, Wege einer Stimme zu einem wahrneh-menden Du, kreaturliche Wege.7
[Are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But at the same time, among how many other paths, they are also paths on which language becomes voice — they are encounters, a voice's paths towards a perceiving you, creaturely paths.]
As in Heidegger but with a difference, the coordinating terms here are 'where from' and 'where to': Celan's poetry is defined by its journeying, its often despairing ('oft verzweifelt') and certainly profoundly difficult quest for encounter, for dialogue — and for the epiphanic self-disclosure of 'the Other' ('das Andere'), which emerges from the address that poems utter, and to which a poem turns (becoming 'das Gedicht eines dem Erscheinenden Zugewandten' [the poem of one turned towards what is appearing]), yet which is always, inevitably, other than poems, near and hard (perhaps impossible) to grasp.8 The poetic turn towards the Other is borne of a deep consciousness of the fate of historical bodies, of what Celan calls the creaturely.9 Dialogue, meeting, and journeying: if these are the keynotes of Celan's Hölderlinian poetics, then they are also always the potential markers of their own frustration, of the voice meeting only blank silence, of the journey leading to anti-encounter. Written through Celan's poems as a negative converse to Patmos or Little Gidding is another locality: Todtnauberg, the site of Heidegger's mountain retreat, the path to which Celan trod in the (forlorn) hope of 'eines Denkenden | kommendes | Wort' [a thinker's word that was to come] (Celan, 'Todtnauberg', 11. 12—14). Yet in his insistence that the necessary task of his poetry lies in a response to the historical events on which the philosopher-prophet at Todtnauberg kept his secluded silence, and in which the logic of disembodiment had extended far beyond the pages of Sein und Zeit, Celan perhaps represents a supremely urgent example of the attempt, common to other poets in the line coming from Hölderlin, to counter the steely gaze of Zarathustra.
Understanding poetry after the Modernist period by means of the fate of Spirit in philosophy from Heidegger onwards would be the task of a study beginning where this one ends, and extending our approach would thereby expand the focus of recent attempts to read Celan in the context of Heidegger and post-structuralist responses to him (especially theological responses, such as that of Lévinas).10 Celan himself would open the discussion up to include recent poets writing both in German and English. The contemporary poet Durs Grünbein has provided reflections on the recent German past which seek to understand a historical turning point, the moment of 'Wende', through the turn of breath — the 'Atemwende' — which, for Celan, is the point between words where words become possible ('Dichtung: das kann eine Atemwende bedeuten' [poetry: that can mean a turn of breath]).11 Furthermore the space inhabited by Celan's poems, in which the reversal or counterpoint, the turn towards disclosure ('Erscheinung'), is compressed into its impossibility, into restriction ('Engführung', which comprehends all those meanings), is the ambivalent space of narrow expanse that is revealed too, perhaps, in the turn of Larkin's gaze to attics and high windows, and in Heaney's clearances (what Heidegger called 'Lichtungen'):12
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
('Clearances' VII, 11. 10-14)
This pure change, evoked by Heaney in a very personal poem on death, is an expression of the transfiguration spoken of by Hölderlin in 'Patmos' ('daß an der Gestalt ein Wunder war'), and of the penetrating power of the gaze emanating from Mörike's Christ-child, moving through time and space to their end ('durchdringend ew'ge Zeitfernen, grenzenlos'). In the new perspective of those sudden clearances, personal life (and death) take on that universal — symbolic, metaphorical — aspect which makes them, in the post-Kantian sense with which we began, historical. And if history, the fate of Spirit, and the flickering between realization and absence are the terms necessary to take us from Heidegger and Lévinas to Celan and Heaney, then this suggests that the near and distant God, turning always away from us and towards us, flashes in further moments, down to the present day.
1. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber, 1989), p. 132.
2. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 19th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), pp. 184-85.
3. Sein und Zeit, p. 135.
4. Translation in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans, by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM, 1962), p. 174.
5. See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 383—84.
6. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1971), p. 142.
7. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, 3 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), in, 201.
8. See Celan, Werke, 111, 198, and Krzysztof Ziarek, inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutic of Nearness: Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 139-40.
9. On Celan and creatureliness, see Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 37.
10. See Ziarek, Inflected Language, and Michael Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
11. Celan, Werke, III, 195. See for example Michael Eskin, '"Risse, die durch die Zeiten führen": Zu Durs Grünbeins Historien', in Durs Grünbein, Der Misanthrop auf Capri: Historien/Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 107—21.
12. See the discussions of Celan and Larkin in John Bayley, Housman's Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).