The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137547941
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Air

And yet, in the middle of all that there is something else that happens. In the midst of being as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lightning. … Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us, humans, a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not and access to those beings that we ourselves are. (Heidegger 1960/1971, 49/51)

With this passage from ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ Heidegger presents the elementals—the sky and the earth as well as the humans and the divinities—not as the components of a structural model held together by the operations of opposition and association but as the conditions for encountering the uncanny expressed as imaginary worlds in art. An access to these worlds requires a passage through an opening, a clearing, which is akin to a lightning, that is, a flash of realization. In this section I would like to take a short story by R. Kipling appropriately titled ‘At the End of the Passage’ in order to show how an elemental separates the humans from the divinities exposing the mortals to their fragile existence. In light of the theme of this chapter, I will be focusing on a particular elemental—air. Beginning with air is not an arbitrary choice, for in making it we follow Luce Irigaray’s title The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Although Irigaray mounts a formidable critique to Heidegger’s writings on the elementals, her own work itself is irrelevant here; suffice it that the title of her book discloses the nature of this elemental as the one most taken for granted.

Phenomenologically, this fact should be a sufficient reason to give air immediate prominence. Parmenides states: ‘Air is secretion of the earth’ (Barnes 1987, 87). This means that it is rising from the earth, striving out of the earth’s hold. According to Empedocles, air satisfies this striving by bringing in ‘height,’ creating a creative openness for both the humans and the divinities (it might be worth reminding there that divinities are also the elementals). Air fills this openness with substance. The substance can be wondrous. Take, for example, the experience we commonly have when encountering twilight, that is, become wrapped up in it. Twilight is wondrous because it obscures the separation between the earth and the sky, making people take things and even themselves for divinities or missing the appearance of the divinities behind the haze created by nature. Insufficient air does not only conceal; air can be deadly. Without air, claims Empedocles, strife takes over the earth and the sky, killing the soul, which ‘consists of all four elements,’ and therefore cannot survive if one of them is missing (Barnes 1987, 145). The lack of air is a passage to madness.

Madness on account of the missing air is the key theme Kipling pursues in his ‘At the End of the Passage.’ In a Himalayan folk poem that Kipling chooses as an epitaph to his story, he gives us an elaboration of air which, due

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