Preface: There are two distinct voices in
this essay. The first is that of Phrontisterion;
the second is that of a recent UCR graduate, Roland Bolz, who is currently
studying philosophy in Berlin. On offer, then, is a polyphonic reflection
surrounding the intellectual interplay between Martin Heidegger, German
philosopher of the 20th century, and Friedrich Hölderlin, German lyric poet of the
romantic period—two voices, together yet separate, in
the same Gestell (framework).
Phrontisterion
There
is no denying that the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger
thought about and was thoroughly bemused by Eros in all of its forms. Sometimes
eros came to him embodied by the feminine—in
the form of his wife of course, Elfride Heidegger, and, among others, Hannah
Arendt, Margot von Sachsen, Sophie Dorothee von Podewils, Marielene Putscher,
Andrea von Harbou, and Margret Magirus. Apparently, suffering a heart attack in
Augsburg at the ripe old age of 81, the still-bemused and ever-priapic Heidegger
even had to be removed from a current lover’s arms to be taken to hospital.
Hope was, seemingly, always springing eternal in that human breast.
However,
it is also clear that Heidegger’s infatuation with Eros was translated into more
than just the odd trifle, or the amorous grope, or the occasional longer idyll;
for he was also bewitched by German romantic Poetry, one of the many modern,
northern European descendants of Polyhymnia (Muse of Sacred Songs). Indeed, it seems worthwhile to consider the idea
that Heidegger interwove a new harmonic element into the German romantic poetic
tradition created by Hölderlin, which included his own personal perception of
himself as Lady Philosophy’s bard.
Here, then, is a fantaisie
impromptu about Martin Heidegger, der
Sänger, German Philosophy’s self-styled aède (from the Gk: ἀοιδός /aoidós—singer) in the tradition of Parmenides, or
Heraclitus, or the Latin Lucretius, and then the German romantic Hölderlin. The idea of
Heidegger as Sänger of Philosophy is
in fact inspired by a Hölderlin poem, Heimkunft (A Future at Home), which was used by Heidegger as preface to his
1944 Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry.
Das bereitet und so ist auch beinahe die Sorge
Schon befriediget, die unter das Freudige kam.
Sorgen, wie diese, muß, gern oder nicht, in der Seele
Tragen ein Sänger und oft, aber die anderen nicht.
[Once the music] is ready, so is also, almost, the Worry
Already soothed, which came in along with the Pleasure.
Worries like these must he carry in his Soul, a Singer,
Whether he will or not, often; but not any others. [Translation,
Aiken 2014]
It would
seem that the Sorge, the Worry or
Care, (a concept that will also occupy a significant place in Heidegger’s
thinking during the Being and Time
period (1927)), and which came in along with Martin Heidegger’s Pleasure in
philosophy, was to be reflected in a life whose romantic vision and philosophical
will was dedicated to singing into existence, and then safeguarding, the future
spirituality of the German People (Letters,
passim).
CAVEAT LECTOR: If one conceives
of poetry as an entryway into the kosmos
of the non- or the a-rational, what might it mean to use poetry as a gatekeeper for philosophical
thinking, which pretends to make claims to some degree of articulated clarity
or rationality? Given this inherent tension between poetry and philosophy, at
least in their classical forms, does it make sense to pursue philosophical wisdom
poetically, even admitting the oxymoronic nature of the question? Where might the
poetic path toward philosophical wisdom lead us? And do we want to go there?
So, when we discover a poem that moves Heidegger in important and fundamental
ways, what is it that we might also deduce about how that poetic “thought”
would weave its way in and through the thinking of Martin Heidegger the
philosopher? In August of 1918 the First World War is just 3 months away from
the armistice, and the 29-year-old Heidegger is a soldier stationed as a
weather observer on a German front in Lorrain, France. In a letter to his
recent bride, Elfride, dated August 30, 1918 [Letters to his Wife; Polity Press, 2008, p. 48], Heidegger writes
that he is experiencing Hölderlin as
if for the first time, and, following a partial quote from Hölderlin's Socrates
and Alcibiades, he writes: "Höld. is currently turning into a new
experience for me -- as though I were approaching him wholly primordially for
the first time."
Now, just to be quite certain that there is in fact some justification
for the idea that there is a vital attachment to decrypt between Hölderlin, German romantic poet, and Heidegger, German romantic
philosopher, there are yet other letters that pick up the Hölderlin leitmotiv,
among which one dated from 11 October 1934
– “It’s difficult to be
alone with Höld – but
it’s the difficulty of everything great. I wonder if the Germans will ever
grasp that this was not a weakling unable to cope with life who took refuge in
verse, but a hero facing up to the gods of the future – without any followers,
‘rooted fast to the mountains for days on end’.—
But as I’ve told you before, this time I won’t yet
be a match for him in thought, for philosophically
he’s far beyond even his friends Hegel & Schelling & in a quite
different place which for us is still unspoken & which it will be our task
to say – not to talk about.—“
Then there is the quasi-Jungian language of archetypes in a letter dated
26 November 1939, where we learn that there are three ideal or ur-“figures” for
Heidegger: the ungrounded; the woman who, through Love, is the guardian of
nobility; and the poet-thinker.
– “These
three invisible and uniquely real figures prepare the ‘poetic’, upon the ground
of which alone the history of man is founded. To these three figures [1) those
ungrounded who, in acting out their life (e.g., through war), act for something
“else for which they’re willing to make the sacrifice, something they cannot
say, yet only create in the sacrifice”; 2) “women who out of an originary love
keep secluded spaces ready for the soarings of what is noble & by virtue of
this love are indestructible.” 3) “And thirdly we may count those who, running
on far ahead in their poetizing & thinking, belong to another history.”]
belongs the gift of Being [Seyn]—that it is given to them, each in their
different way, to be open to the coming of originary decisions & each in
their way protect it.
What the philosopher must always already know,
others too may now perhaps learn – that the invisible is more existent
[seiender] than the visible.--
Hölderlin: a succinct profile.
By way of giving a brief background:
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was a German lyric poet of the Romantic period, which
included the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hölderlin was
to have an important philosophical impact on his fellow seminary students,
Hegel and Schelling, in developing what was to become known to philosophers as
German Idealism. Part of the impact that Hölderlin’s poetry was to have on the
German imagination was its admiration of and fascination with ‘things Greek,’
or with the Greek way of thinking about men in the world. Hölderlin’s famous
tragic poem, for example, entitled The
Death of Empedocles, which was named eponymously after the Greek
pre-Socratic poet-philosopher, was to have such an impact, later, on
Nietzsche’s imagination, that this latter wanted originally to name his
Zarathustrian hero, Empedocles. It is also thought that through his study of
Heraclitus, another Greek pre-Socratic poet-philosopher, Hölderlin contributed
to Hegel’s development of the notion of the “dialectic.” So it can rightly be argued
that Hölderlin helped bring back into general vogue in German thought and
expression the thought-world of the ancient Greek poet-philosophers.
Hölderlin’s Poem: Socrates and
Alcibiades.
Warum
huldigest du, heiliger Sokrates,
Diesem
Jünglinge stets? Kennest du Größers nicht,
Warum
siehet mit Liebe,
Wie auf
Götter, dein Aug' auf ihn?"
Wer das
Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe
Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es
neigen die Weisen
Oft am
Ende zu Schönem sich.
Translation
(Aiken,
2014)
Why, oh divine
Socrates, do you revere
This
youth so? Know you nothing Greater?
Why, with love,
Why, with love,
As if
upon gods, does your eye look upon him?
Whosoever has grasped what is Most Profound, is in adoration of what is most full of life;
Whosoever has grasped what is Most Profound, is in adoration of what is most full of life;
Is in possession
of High Excellence, whosoever has gazed into the World;
And even the Wise, sometimes, bring themselves
To bend
their knee, finally, to that which is Beautiful.
Strophe I (free verse): Now there are three entirely different ideas to
consider at this point in our reflection, which we might call “profiles” of
Socrates. There is our first Socrates, contained inside Hölderlin’s poem, which
is his wondering at the type of attraction that could keep Socrates’s gaze
riveted on his decadent student, Alcibiades. Then there is a second profile of
Socrates, which is grounded in a consideration of Plato’s original representation
of the relationship between S and A in the Symposium–
because any worthwhile analysis of what it is that Socrates “saw” in Alcibiades
must include a consideration of the original Socratic profile found in Plato’s Symposium. Finally, there is the third
profile of Socrates, which is how Heidegger uses or mis-uses his application of
this particular Hölderlin poem in his letter to Elfride.
The structural argument of Hölderlin’s poem makes it clear that Socrates
is the philosopher who “perceives” highest wisdom, and that it is Alcibiades who
represents the mysteries and attractions of the world—the Beautiful. Socrates
is the one who 1) “has grasped what is Most Profound,” and is the one 2) who
“Is in possession of High Excellence.” And it is because he has grasped [gedacht—thought] that which is most
profound [das Tiefste] about the
world, that Socrates adores that which is most full of life [Lebendigste], which is to say:
Alcibiades. And it is because he has gazed into the world, which is to say that
he has embraced Alcibiades in his understanding or knowing perception, that
Socrates is in possession of or understands High Excellence. Formulaically, the
argument of the poem would work like this:
·
Socrates the wise has grasped what is Most Profound, which is that he
loves a certain type of aliveness in Man, which we discover most fully in the
person of Alcibiades, who is, among Greeks, most wonderfully full of life;
·
Socrates is in possession of or understands High Excellence or Virtue, because
he has gazed into, and loved, the world, which is represented by Alcibiades.
·
Socrates therefore illustrates for us that the man who is most divine and
most wise, is so precisely because he understands how to admire that which is
Beautiful and Desirable, which is to say the World/Alcibiades.
So what do we discover about Socrates, or rather, what precisely are we
to understand about Hölderlin’s puzzlement concerning Socrates, through this
poetic interrogation? Situating himself as the Outsider to the relationship
between Socrates and Alcibiades, Hölderlin reflects on that relationship,
wondering what there was that attracted Socrates, the philosopher and wise man,
to Alcibiades, the dissolute but beautiful Athenian noble. To Hölderlin it would
seem natural and reasonable that Alcibiades would be drawn erotically to
Socrates the wise, the Seeker after high and permanent truths—after all this is
a classical Platonic metaphor for the natural eroticism of the human’s striving
after knowledge. What the poet finds mysterious, however, is that the wise man
could, in turn, allow himself to be drawn to simple, transient physical beauty,
performed in the person of Alcibiades. But then the poem seems to suggest that
it is possible, perhaps, that this is in truth the Deepest Truth of the wise
man—that his wisdom calls him out to a love of Life Itself in its most alive
and flourishing manifestations (das
Lebendigste), and not simply to revere some wisdom that is only
otherworldly, a dead or dying knowledge.
Strophe II (free verse): It is important to step away from Hölderlin’s
poem at this point in order for the Reader to reconsider Plato’s original
depiction of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium– because Hölderlin’s poetic
interrogation of the nature of that relationship is entirely, and finally, anchored
in and informed by the text of the Symposium.
We have seen that
Hölderlin’s Socrates and Alcibiades happens from the point of view of the
outsider-poet interrogating Socrates, wonderingly, about what draws him, the
wisest and most divine of men, to admire Alcibiades, decadent but beautiful
general of the armies of both Athens and her enemy Sparta. However, Hölderlin’s
interrogation is a poetic inversion of the dramatic mise en scène of the relationship that is offered to us in Plato’s Symposium.
A compendium of
speeches on the subject of Eros, the Symposium
can be divided into seven parts: six expected speakers + one unexpected
Alcibiades who gate-crashes at the end of the evening. From the first five
speakers we learn about almost every possible variation on the subject of physical
eroticism, ranging from what motivates heroic conduct, to love between men;
from self-love as the origin of desire for the other, to medical healing as a
harmonizing erotic art, to celebrity attractions. From these expected speakers we
learn about physical and emotional, about this-worldly eros. It is then Socrates’ turn to speak, and we begin to hear about
a higher wisdom—a more noble form of eroticism, which is the longing of the
soul for truth and beauty, an other-worldly eroticism of a philosophical sort,
which is enduring and therefore superior to the transient eroticism that is of
the natural world.
The gate is then thoroughly
crashed as Alcibiades makes his drunken entry into the soirée, arriving on the scene as
the unexpected seventh speaker on this evening of discourses concerning things
erotic. Alcibiades the polarizer; debauched whoremonger; often unruly; traitor
to his native Athens; talented orator, lisp notwithstanding, and general of
armies despite a tendency to transfer allegiances as regularly as we might
change socks; of imposing strength and great personal courage; sometime blasphemer;
and former student of Socrates.
Upon this unexpected
and surprising entry our gaze has been riveted for over 2,000 years, for by it
we learn what Plato wishes to teach us about this man, Socrates, in the Symposium. About eroticism we first
learn all the various forms of erotic conduct possible among natural men—and
that while some forms are arguably more worthwhile than others, all are
arguably good. From Socrates, though, we learn about a more noble form of eros, which does not concern the vagaries
of the body and the emotions, but flows rather from the noble longings of the
soul after knowledge and the beautiful. Finally, we learn from Alcibiades that
Socrates is, in fact, the absolute highest embodiment of eros.
Plutarch, 1st century AD historian and
biographer, composed a Life of Alcibiades
by means of which we may confirm the Platonic tradition concerning the
relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades (6.1):
“But the love of Socrates, though it had many powerful
rivals, somehow mastered Alcibiades. For he was of good natural parts, and the
words of his teacher took hold of him and wrung his heart and brought tears to
his eyes. But sometimes he would surrender himself to the flatterers who
tempted him with many pleasures, and slip away from Socrates, and suffer
himself to be actually hunted down by him like a runaway slave. And yet he
feared and reverenced Socrates alone, and despised the rest of his lovers. Alcibiades
"feared and reverenced Socrates alone, and despised the rest of his
lovers."
In the Symposium Plato
displays for our earnest consideration the erotic Socrates as seen through the
eyes of the clearly enamoured, and yet cynical Alcibiades. For, oddly enough,
of all the speakers in the Symposium
Socrates excepted, it is only from Alcibiades, a seventh and impromptu speaker
who came along to crash this philosophical “kegger” (with wine replacing a
modern’s more traditional beer) that we learn about eros and things erotic in the most absolute philosophical sense—the
soul’s eros for knowledge and
understanding and just action is far superior to simple bodily eros.
It is by means of a
juxtaposition—of the most physically beautiful and desirable man of Athens,
Alcibiades, who is also morally ambiguous to the highest degree, and of
Socrates, reputedly the ugliest man of Athens—that Plato will teach us that Socrates
is, in reality, the most erotic and therefore most truly desirable man of
Athens, because he embodies in his divine person what is most truly beautiful
to the highest degree—the beauty of the virtuous soul seeking the good and the
beautiful through a just and honourable life.
 |
| Raphaelo_School of Athens |
Strophe III (free verse): Finally, then, there is a third profile of
Socrates for us to consider, which is reflected in the manner in which Heidegger
interprets and applies this particular fragment of Hölderlin’s poem in his
letter to Elfride. In an aside: it is interesting to note that Heidegger
dedicates an entire book to Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry, (1944; ISBN 9783465041405), and
yet the particular short poem that interests us here, Socrates and Alcibiades, which was clearly important to
Heidegger in 1916, occupies no clear place in his later thinking about this
poet.
As a prelude to this final stage in our
reflection, let us review what we know about Martin Heidegger from the context
of his earlier letters –
In
a general consideration, and in reference to our
CAVEAT LECTOR from above, it was suggested that if one conceives of poetry as a gatekeeper for
philosophical thinking, as a vehicle for entry
into the kosmos of the non- or the
a-rational, as does Heidegger, this would seem to undermine philosophical thinking as a method for
questioning and organizing information concerning Man in his world. For while philosophy
classically perceived pretends to articulate clarity and rationality as a basis
for understanding the human condition, the space in which poetic experience
“happens” is oddly hidden, and this will remain relevant to our understanding
of Heidegger as he creates the “spaces” of his poetico-philosophical “song” (cf.
Letters, inter alia, 10/11/18; 18/05/40; 2/2/45; 17/2/45; 11/3/45; 8/4/46;
8/5/46). This means that there is an inherent tension between poetry and philosophy,
which Heidegger very deliberately tends to blur.
As a method of
articulating un-rational thought, the tendency to cloud over the distinction
between poetry and philosophy seems, unavoidably, to be a significant agenda
item to the Heidegger of 1916, and there is no reason to believe that he ever
deviated from that agenda; for in a letter to Elfride
from Freiburg (March 1916) he writes
– “today I know that there can be a philosophy of vibrant life [des lebendigen Lebens] – that I can declare war on rationalism right through to the bitter end –
without falling victim to the anathema of unscientific though – I can – I must --& so I’m today faced by the necessity of the problem:
how is philosophy to be produced as living truth & as a creation of the
personality valuably & powerfully. The Kantian question is not only wrongly put – it fails to capture the
problem; […] …but I take deep pleasure when I see before me that I have a
living philosophy to be lived -- & it is no coincidence that yesterday I
worked out & wrote down my theory of consciousness so felicitously, purely
intuitively –“
In addition to a deliberate
anti-rationalism in his approach to philosophizing, Heidegger also seems to
become progressively clearer and more confident about this very particular
anti-rationalist path, as he writes (ca. May, 1917):
“I cannot accept Husserl’s phenomenology as a final position
even if it joins up with philosophy – because in its approach & accordingly
in its goal it is too narrow & bloodless & because such an approach
cannot be made absolute. … it’s a question of discovering the liberating path in an absolute articulation of
relativity.”
It is reasonable to suggest, however, that
the “articulation of relativity” is the wrong role for Lady Philosophy, and is not
even within her repertoire. On the other hand, such an “articulation of
relativity” perfectly corresponds to the role of a philosophically minded but
not necessarily theory-driven poetry, of the sort composed by the pre-Socratic
poet-philosophers, by Hölderlin, and, I would suggest, by Heidegger.
So, forging onward to our
specific consideration of Heidegger’s reference to “He who has thought what is
deepest, loves what is most alive,” from Hölderlin's Socrates and Alcibiades… To be sure, (grammar being what it
is), Heidegger is necessarily using the Hölderlin reference metaphorically,
where one reasonably and unmistakeably assumes that he reserves the beau rôle, namely Socrates, for himself,
and Elfride is Alcibiades.
The protracted context
of the citation, however, which puts one in mind of Carlin Romano’s enduring epithet for MH: “the pretentious old Black
Forest babbler,” might open up interpretative doors for us… so Heidegger waxes
on thusly:
–“knowledge of one’s
innermost & absolute belonging with the most beloved person among the
living – above all the absolute, simple pleasure in this possession in the
midst of the destruction, primitiveness, harshness & impoverished meaning
of one’s surroundings has a deeply invigorating effect & latently so,
moreover – not merely upon the base of expressly summoned up acts of memory
& attitudes of longing from the daimon of love – also, today, the knowledge
of the coexistence of this love with one’s most
sacred life’s work [emphasis mine]– of the mutual interpenetration of the
two & the advance towards the greatest fulfilment possible – ‘He who has
thought what is deepest, loves what is most alive’ we read in a poem by Höld.--
"Höld. is currently turning into a new experience for me -- as though I
were approaching him wholly primordially for the first time.
This whole configuration of moods & emphases
will specifically influence my own – I hope, as soon as things are running
properly, to make real progress.”
So another possible interpretation or supplement to the complexity of
this first reading, although it seems more remote given the immediate context,
is that whatever Heidegger means by the third party in the
Martin-Elfride-‘sacred life’s work,’ triad, whether by this he is referring to
his marriage, which is distinctly possible given the general tenor of the
letters, or else, which is more likely, to the philosophical destiny that he
believes yet attends him as the German poet-philosopher of the future German
Volk… it could be this third triadic element that plays of role of Alcibiades.
What remains constant and unveiled, though, is that Martin Heidegger is always cast
in the role of the great Socrates—for our viewing pleasure.
da
* * *
Roland
Bolz
And yet I do not know, whether I [...] will be able to
ascend to the true religion, in which, instead of the holy, a great human
appears, whom I can only embrace with the enthusiasm of true love, and exclaim:
my friend and my brother! And to be allowed to say such things confidently to a
great human! – If only I could be Alcibiades for a day and a night, and then
die! –
(Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Johann Gottfried Herder, 1771, my translation)
To ask the
question regarding LOVE is to turn towards asymmetry: the TWO which are not
measured by a common ruler. No need for treatises on aesthetics to
realise that juxtaposition is the art of making two different arrows
point together. And does love have to be beautiful and pointy!
But who fashions the madness of
claiming to “understand” such an asymmetry? Those who “share” their lives,
marking the progress of this sublime collaboration “silver” and “golden,” if
death does not “Do Them Part” before..? The sovereign dancers who know chaos
well but joyfully align their rhythm from time to time? The communicator who
does his “best” to share his needs and to accommodate yours truly? The
traveling one who makes waitresses and other lonely souls laugh through
anecdote before vanishing into anonymity?
This asymmetry is the asymmetry of
philosophy too, the abyss between love and wisdom. “If only I could be
Alcibiades for a day and a night, and then die!” writes the 22-year-old Goethe
to his friend Herder after intensely reading Socratic dialogues. What is it
that makes us despair in love?
“"Humans are not equals."
And they should not become so! For what would be my love to the Overman, if I
would speak differently?” spake Zarathustra. ("Von den Taranteln" in Also
Sprach Zarathustra, p. 81, my translation)
Philosophical love indeed lives off
difference, both between the Two and between the present and the future.
Socrates loves Alcibiades for what he “will have been”; Zarathustra loves his
disciples for the “Übermensch” that might grow out of them – our beloved is a
possibility, not a thing...
* * *
A reflection on
Socrates and Alcibiades will make us consider the asymmetries between lover and
beloved, teacher and student, and philosophy and poetry. This time we look at
another German poet's homage to this duo, namely Hölderlin's 1798 poem
"Sokrates und Alcibiades," and will concern ourselves with
Heidegger's interpretation thereof. Here is the poem:
"Warum
huldigest du, heiliger Sokrates,
Diesen Jünglinge
stets? Kennest du Größers nicht?
Warum siehet mit
Liebe,
Wie auf Götter,
dein Aug' auf ihn?"
Wer das tiefste
gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Jugend
versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die
Weisen
Oft am Ende zu
Schönem sich.
["Why, holy
Socrates, must you always adore
This young man? Is
there nothing greater than he?
Why do you look on
him
Lovingly, as on a
god?"
Who the deepest
has thought, loves what is most alive,
Who has looked at
the world, understands youth at its height,
And wise men in
the end
Often incline to
beauty.]
(translation from What
is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger, trans. J. Glenn Gray)
The poem opens
with a rather vulgar question posed to Socrates by an unknown interlocutor,
which, however, contains a crucial clue regarding Hölderlin's reading of
Socrates. For it is concerned with the fact that Socrates has turned his
"eye for gods" towards a human, which is the cause of outrage masked behind
a naive question here; it was Socrates after all who was sentenced to death for
impiety: for inventing new gods. Socrates' trial is thus already foreshadowed
in his question. However, we can also see a certain German reinterpretation at
work here. In the Apology, the charge is as follows: "Socrates is
guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the
city believes, but in other new spiritual things." (24b, trans. G.M.A.
Grube) In the Hölderlin poem, the two charges seem to have become confounded
into one; the tendency of the German poets to turn the divine to the realm of
humans, perhaps culminating in Nietzsche, for whom this becomes truly
axiomatic. For Nietzsche, if the concept of god has a purpose, it is to
designate a human of high remark.
The second stanza of the poem gives
the answer to the question posed in the first, telling us what juxtapositions
his love for Alcibiades involves: deep thought – liveliness; high youth –
having seen the world; wisdom – beauty. And yet again we get a subtle hint at
the nearing end of Socrates' life: "am Ende ...". But this life phase
of old age is also the moment of deep reflection for Hölderlin, not at all
characterised by a stifling fear of death, but rather by a rare lucidity. It is
this poignant insight into the asymmetry of love that holds us, that the old
Socrates offers us.
But how to decipher these lines? Who
can the two people really be? How can we possibly know what exactly stands on
each side of this bond? And: what can we learn from it apart from a lesson in
the history of philosophy?
We have learned to interpret
Socratic/Platonic eros by looking at dialogues like the Symposium or
the Phaedrus, where we get a wealth of information on how one can engage
in such love, what ethics underlie it, what it does to our body and mind, what
its relation to thought is, what feelings accompany it, what makes it shameful
or honourable, and even speculations regarding its origin. Let us focus on some
of the explanations given in Socrates' speech in the Symposium, where he
retells the explanation once given to him by the wise woman Diotima of
Mantinea.
According to Diotima, and this
explanation seems wholly endorsed in the Symposium, the spirit of love
(Eros) is the son of the gods of plentitude (Poros) and lack (Penia). Being
love, he combines desire/lack with resourcefulness. Love is thus the desire for
beauty, neither fully having it nor fully lacking it – a wholesale abundance of
beauty would not inspire desire; neither would a complete lack, which would in
fact mean ignorance of that lack. Again: love as an in-between figure of
asymmetrical poles. A lover, as such, is one who does not possess beauty but
has grasped its existence. His lack dialectically drives him towards a cunning
resourcefulness. What truth!
But what is this beauty that has
been grasped, but not yet attained by the lover? That, of course, is the
question of philosophy! For Plato, Beauty is something eternal, a truth and
ideal at the same time, which transcends an individual life, and also allows
the lover to transcend his finite life: "Love must desire
immortality." (207a, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff)
According to Diotima, there are
those who are pregnant in body and those who are pregnant in soul. Whatever is
"pregnant" strives to create an offspring most beautiful. Those who
are pregnant in soul thus strive to create what is most adequate to a soul,
which is, by definition, "wisdom and the rest of virtue." Now this is
precisely done through contact with other minds:
Since he is pregnant,
then, he is much more drawn to bodies that are beautiful than to those that are
ugly; and if he also has the luck to find a soul that is beautiful and noble
and well-formed, he is even more drawn to this combination; such a man makes
him instantly teem with ideas and arguments about virtue—the qualities a
virtuous man should have and the customary activities in which he should
engage; and so he tries to educate him. In my view, you see, when he makes
contact with someone beautiful and keeps company with him, he conceives and
gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages. (209b-c)
But what role does
the (sexual) body play in this? Plato's answer is clear: immortal beauty is
only ever reached by starting with lower level beauty. One simply has to be
exposed to all that the human body has to offer in terms of beauty in order to
later progress to appreciating the beauty of "laws and activities,"
then knowledge, and then divine Beauty itself (infinite, unchanging and beautiful
in every respect). According to Plato's philosophy, lover and beloved
asymmetrically aid each other by sharing bodily beauty (which is a step towards
divine beauty) and by sharing insight regarding divine Beauty. Here we can
detect another shift in emphasis in Hölderlin's rendition. For, in the poem,
the turn to things young and beautiful ("neigen zu Schönem") happens
late in life ("am Ende"). However, as I summarised Socrates' speech
from the Symposium, the turn towards beautiful bodies purportedly happens
early in life, effectively enabling the turn to "Beauty" at a later
stage, by taking the required steps from appreciating the beauty of (many)
bodies, then laws and activities, then knowledge, and finally Beauty itself.
As much as Plato's affirmation of a
sexual component to philosophy might surprise us – Plato spends more time
explaining the underlying theory of the soul in Phaedrus –, it has
become clear that there are other modalities of philosophical love equally
mysterious: the teacher-student relationship, the different gazes upon the
world and discursive modes of young and old, and the temporal difference
between lover and beloved.
All of this is further complicated
by the fact that "thought," which is supposed to be one pole of the
equation, is by no means an available "thing" or "event"
anyone can comprehend just like that. Much to the contrary, it is thought which
is ultimately rare and not marked by any inward or outward signs, never ready
at hand for us to identify. Indeed: what youth would be able to recognise a
"modern Socrates," a true thinker? The mysterious
precariousness of the activity of thought is the very starting point of
Heidegger's lecture series Was heißt Denken?. [What is Called
Thinking?] He stresses that just because thought is one of humanity's possibilities
(as animal rationale), that does not mean that a human can think,
like a human can swim, eat or speak. For, to think means to learn
to think. And to learn to think is to become sensible to that which is to be
thought ("das Bedenkliche"). But unlike, for example, water,
which is readily available for those who can swim, that which is to be thought
withdraws from the one who tries to think it. "We learn to think by giving
our mind to what there is to think about." (WiCT?, 4) According to
Heidegger, that which is to be thought stands in a peculiar relationship with
the time or epoch in which thought operates and is not a trans-historically
fixed entity. Rather, it strongly concerns the stance humanity has come to take
towards its own Being. He announces his affinity to Nietzsche's struggle
to create a higher human when he announces and often repeats: "Most
thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not
thinking." (WiCT?, 6) Thought, which stands on one side of our
asymmetry, is a precarious category.
It is entirely in keeping with this
Socratic stress on the precarious nature of true thought and insight that
Heidegger defines the relationship between teacher and student, which I would
like to propose to read as one of the modalities of philosophical love:
The teacher is ahead of
his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they–he
has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more
teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground
than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the
taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of
the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official. (WiCT?, 15)
Indeed, with
regards to knowledge, it would be a gross misreading of the asymmetrical love
relationship to think that on one side stands a person with more knowledge.
One should compare this to the famous remark of Socrates at 21d of the Apology:
"So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is
likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows
something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I
know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not
think I know what I do not know.”" In fact, the character of "having
thought deeply" is dissimulating of positive wisdom, which tends to be
exactly what the young and lively are after. The coming-to-age of the
philosopher is ideally an abandonment of authoritative knowledge, thus a
largely negative movement. It is this tenet that was embodied most intensely by
Socrates, whom Heidegger praises for not being a philosopher-writer, for having
stood fully in the "draft of unsheltered thought."
But Heidegger's actual
interpretation of the Hölderlin poem Socrates and Alcibiades draws in
yet another asymmetry that requires our attention, which stands between thought
and poetry. Responding to the (self-posed) question of why he had drawn upon
Hölderlin's poetry in an earlier stage of the lecture series, Heidegger
responds that it was by no means to adorn and enliven "the dry progress of
thinking." Much to the contrary, Heidegger supposes poetry to be a
privileged passage, through Beauty, to that which is to be thought ("das
Bedenklichste"):
Its statement rests on its
own truth. This truth is called beauty. Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence
of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed.
The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of
truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore
invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance. We are compelled to
let the poetic word stand in its truth, in beauty. And that does not
exclude but on the contrary includes that we think the poetic word. [...] What
is stated poetically, and what is stated in thought, are never identical; but
there are times when they are the same–those times when the gulf separating
poesy and thinking is a clean and decisive cleft. This can occur when poesy is
lofty, and thinking profound. Hölderlin understood the matter well. (WiCT?,
19-20)
Heidegger seems
to suggest that Hölderlin understood the productive asymmetry between Socrates
and Alcibiades to be similar to the one between thought and poetry! As much as
this may be a stretch in terms of interpretation, there is nonetheless
something fascinating in this thought, for it suggests nothing less than the
possibility of profound contact between otherwise heterogeneous
discourses of truth, in this case thought and poetry. For each approaches
"that which is to be thought" in its distinct, individual way, yet
shares a historical situation, a relation to world, a human predicament, a time.
Is this not also a modality of love: a difference in discourse, a difference in
access to the same world?
There is much to be made of the idea
that the love of philosophy entails a love of heterogeneous discourses.
Philosophy has always stood at a productive intersection between science,
religion, poetry, politics, and individual existence. At times it has limited
itself to an intense interaction with one of these, rendering the others
derivative or subordinate (as, for example, analytic philosophy has done with
mathematical logic). Yet on the whole, events in any of these domains will call
for the attention of philosophers time and again, as Plato was well aware; but
the philosopher's task is not to "explain away" what happens in
poetry or science by reference to systematic philosophies. Rather, the point is
to adopt its own discourse to accommodate and think the connection between a
number of contemporary discourses. In closing of this essay, I want to draw
attention to Alain Badiou, who fittingly calls himself a Platonist, and who has
contributed greatly to generalising Heidegger's above insight. For him,
philosophy is indeed defined as the attempt to think its time by
creating a discourse which aims to connect various discourses like science,
politics, and art. He also calls this the "compossibility" of various
"heterogeneous truth procedures."
Is "philosophical love" a
relationship between two live people? In concluding this essay, I would answer
this question with a perhaps frustrating "yes and no." It has become
clear that multiple modalities of love can be thought just like that, as two
people, lover and beloved, teacher and student, wise and youthful, etc., meeting
and exchanging from the perspective of difference. Yet there is also the
tendency in philosophy to extend the love relationship, to stretch its
temporality, to include the reception of writers and discourses from other
times or situations. Goethe's desire to be Alcibiades was prompted by a reading
of Plato; Heidegger's attempt to think through poetry was inspired by a reading
of Hölderlin. Philosophical love is just as much a face-to-face phenomenon as
the hearing of a distant calling, signed by an ancient author.
What belongs to philosophical love by
right is the moment of recognition of a productive asymmetry between
thinkers, discourses, situations. It is at that moment that the other lights up
our world as the possibility of another world to come.
Works Cited
Badiou, Alain, Manifesto for Philosophy.
Trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press; 1999).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, An Johann
Gottfried Herder. Letter, 1771.
Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe Band 8:
Was Heißt Denken? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann; 1954).
Hölderlin, Friedrich, Sämtliche Gedichte.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Also Sprach
Zarathustra. (Köln: Atlas Verlag).
Plato, Complete Works. Ed. John M.
Cooper. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company; 1997).
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