Out of the experience of poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This contribution to phenomenological aesthetics takes inspiration from Martin Heidegger’s idea that poetry arises out of the experience of thinking and thinking out of the experience of poetry. The mutual nourishment of philosophy and poetry is put into practice here through a presentation of three poems and the reflections they provoke. The poems are the work of a contemporary Lithuanian-American poet, Rita Malikonytė Mockus. The reflections derive their basic orientation from Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy of art. This philosophy is phenomenological inasmuch as it views art in terms of what Being and Time characterizes as the preeminent phenomenon, the one bestowing presence on beings while itself receding from presence. This phenomenon, for Heidegger the one and only phenomenon in the strict sense, is Being as bestower of presence. For Heidegger, art in general and especially poetry might “awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which bestows.” Such vision and trust correspond to the ancient attitude of reverence for what has been bestowed, versus the hubristic attitude of modern technology. The goal of the paper is to appeal to poetry in order to help awaken this reverential attitude which Heidegger sees as the antidote to the thrall cast over us by the things of modern technology. At the end, reverence is brought into relation with Kant’s conception of the beauty of nature as purposiveness without a purpose.