The Poet as Phenomenologist by Luke Fischer

Author:Luke Fischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rilke and the New Poems
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2016-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

ThreeRilke as Seer: A Twofold Vision of Nature

The main task of the present chapter is to elaborate Rilke’s parallel practices to those of Rodin and Cézanne, and to show how Rilke’s seeing accomplished a non-dualistic vision of Nature. Although Rilke’s practices have already been implied to a certain extent in the discussion of his engagement with visual artists, the present task is to articulate Rilke’s vision more explicitly. This will bring the previous considerations of artistic vision to their culmination.

It is evident from Worpswede and his writings on Rodin and Cézanne that Rilke does not envisage the overcoming of dualism in philosophical terms, not even in terms of a phenomenological explication of what is implicit in the everyday life-world. Chapter 1 demonstrated that a phenomenology of the life-world in the mode of everydayness accomplishes a more adequate (experiential) overcoming of dualism than a metaphysical monism. Building on Chapter 2, the present chapter will show how Rilke’s vision transcends the everyday (and its phenomenological explication1) and opens up a distinctive horizon for a phenomenology of the “exceptional” or “extra-mundane.”

Attention was previously drawn to Rilke’s contradistinction of the artist from the ordinary adult in Worpswede. The artist for Rilke (as for the Romantics before him) shares a special affiliation with, and maintains a childlike openness to, Nature. In his writings on Rodin and Cézanne, Rilke more emphatically describes a fundamental active-passivity, Gelassenheit, and poverty, conjoined to a selfless vision, as constitutive of the artist’s manner of being-in-the-world. In the discussion of Cézanne, attention was drawn to epiphanic aspects of artistic vision. Thus, Rilke presents the artist as an exceptional figure and, more importantly for our purposes, the artist’s extra-ordinary manner of being facilitates a non-dualistic or twofold vision of Nature and the world. This highlighting of the exceptional or extra-mundane character of artistic vision, which includes a disclosure of the divine or spiritual, prompts the much-debated question concerning the relationship between Rilke and mysticism, namely whether, and if so, in what sense, Rilke should be regarded as a mystic. Due to the nature of the subsequent interpretation of Rilke, this question requires some discussion.2

In the contemporary context the words “mystic,” “mysticism,” “mystical” are often employed with critical or even polemical intentions. The “mystical” carries connotations of the “subjective,” the “vague,” the “unscientific,” or even the “muddle-headed.” That these predicates are inappropriate to Rilke’s ideal in the middle period should already be apparent. Rilke valued “exactitude,” “impartiality,” and “objectivity.” To recall Malte, “Er war ein Dichter und haßte das Ungefähre.” Thus, if the middle Rilke is mystical, it is not in the sense of being “vague” and “subjective.” That Rilke read and was influenced by authors in the mystical tradition is well known.3 The contemporary Rilke-reception, however, tends to distance itself from mystical interpretations of Rilke, whereas in the early part of the twentieth century it was common to regard Rilke as a “mystical poet.”4 In the “non-mystical” reading of Rilke there is the tendency to oppose the terms “poet” and “mystic”; according

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