Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant by Kevin Mclaughlin

Author:Kevin Mclaughlin [McLaughlin, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

Making Room for Reason

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room (Platz schaffen); only one activity: clearing away (räumen).

Walter Benjamin

A century and a half after the publication of the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Martin Heidegger made a declaration that seems to evict faith from the place Kant had granted it in philosophy: “Faith has no place in thinking (Der Glaube hat im Denken keinen Platz), Heidegger asserts at the end of his 1946 essay “Anaximander’s Saying” (Holzwege, 372; Off the Beaten Track, 280). The place of faith in this statement, however, is not without a certain ambiguity, which can be traced back to the passage in Kant’s first Critique to which Heidegger silently alludes.1 First of all there is the complication introduced by the paradigmatic analysis of place itself in section 22 of Being and Time (published a decade before the statement on faith is made): “When we do not find something in its place, the region of that place often becomes explicitly accessible as such for the first time. . . . Space is split up into places (Der Raum ist in die Plätze aufgesplittert)” (Sein und Zeit, 104; Being and Time, 138). Saying “faith has no place in thinking,” then, could also mean that the “poeticizing” force of thinking brings about or provides access to the region of a faith that is not merely a belief in a scientific authority. This possibility is not excluded by the immediate context of Heidegger’s statement. The declaration is issued at the end of the discussion of the epochal shift in the understanding of being that is said to take place in Western metaphysics as the ancient Greek energeia “is translated” into the Latin actualitas. “The Greek is shut away,” Heidegger maintains, “and appears, right up to our own times, only in its Roman guise. Actualitas becomes reality. Reality becomes objectivity” (Holzwege, 371; Off the Beaten Track, 280). The retranslation of Anaximander’s saying to which Heidegger comes at the end of his essay is meant to restore the dynamic power of being of which the original Greek speaks, and it is with regard to the validity of this authentic translation that the declaration about faith and thinking is made: “This translation cannot be scientifically established: nor should we have faith in it merely on the basis of some kind of authority. Scientific proof will not take us far enough. Faith has no place in thinking. We can only reflect on the translation by thinking through the saying. Thinking, however, is the poeticizing of the truth of being in the historical dialogue between those who think” (Holzwege, 372; Off the Beaten Track, 280). Banned from thinking, then, is faith in one sense: that which is upheld by the canons of Western metaphysics, of “scientific proof,” of the kind of “authority” specifically signified by the Latin and in particular Roman auctoritas (the choice of the word Autorität in this passage makes this clear). The question of

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