The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger by Andy Amato

Author:Andy Amato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

4

Before the Open

The Tempest & ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’

Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not [to] be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination

—Blake

Godhead

For those raised without religion or much regard for divinity, it probably means little that some poets and philosophers come to find or rediscover God in and through poetry. For those who think that God does not exist and that poetry in the main bespeaks verse, rhyme, metre and varieties of metaphorization towards the aim of self-expression, this acknowledgement – we can find and know God in poetry – appears pointless. Of course, it would be foolish to assert that God was indeed extant or that poetry did not often step forward as metaphoric verse. Still, ‘divinity’, ‘God’, and ‘poetry’, as words, point to a history, a present, and a destiny of creation, worshipful events and meaningful relationships. And as we read ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ (1951) we sense that Heidegger mines this divine-poetic concord in hopes of restoring us to some sort of authentic dwelling, a way of dwelling in the decline, he believed, since the advent of modern technology. Further, when read with and against Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) we find this restorative relation already intuited and theatrically instantiated.

Beginning with God, Heidegger takes up the question directly: ‘What is God?’1 For insight he again turns to the poet Hölderlin.

What is God? Unknown, yet

Full of his qualities is the

Face of the sky. For the lightnings

Are the wrath of a god. The more something

Is invisible, the more it yields to what’s alien.2

God is not an actor in nature. Nor is God nature or its immanence (whether formulated as pantheism or panentheism). Nor does God name a transcendent being or principle outside of space and time. This unknown God, quite mysteriously, does not experience the world as mortals do. Indeed, not at all. All such rational propositions and anthropomorphizing proclamations ought to be read mythically, metaphorically, poetically. (The power of any ‘divine proclamation’ to stir us up usually being a matter of resonance puts the matter largely out of our hands.) Everything that flashes across the sky or moves through the lower heavens, every sound and scent, all colours, all textures, every arising and falling remains unknowable – alien – to the God. As God ‘himself’ remains alien to what is known. Alas, the more godly God is, the more God withdraws, abdicating the heavens to what is even more alien, strange, and uncanny. That is, us.

For better or worse, we are and are a part of what is. God, however, is invisible, the most invisible. Literally neither thing nor being, he is not. Along this apophatic gesture, looking elsewhere, Heidegger says:

The default of God and the divinities is absence.

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