Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay

POETIC THINKING TODAY

An Essay

Amir Eshel

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

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You who live safe . . . from If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf, copyright © 1958 by Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A.; translation copyright © 1959 by The Orion Press, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eshel, Amir, author.

Title: Poetic thinking today : an essay / Amir Eshel.

Other titles: Square one (Series)

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: Square one : first-order questions in the humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005196 | ISBN 9781503608870 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503610514 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781503610521 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Arts—Psychological aspects. | Arts—Political aspects. | Thought and thinking.

Classification: LCC NX165 .E84 2019 | DDC 700.1/9—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005196

Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover photo: Amir Eshel, The View from Hudson Drive

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/14 Minion Pro

SQUARE ONE

First Order Questions in the Humanities

Series Editor: PAUL A. KOTTMAN

Contents

Foreword by Paul A. Kottman

Prologue

Introduction

1. Thinking Poems: On Paul Celan and Dan Pagis

2. Thinking Paintings: On Gerhard Richter

3. Thinking Sculptures: On Dani Karavan

Coda: Our Poetic Age

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Foreword by PAUL A. KOTTMAN

It would be a mistake to read the word today in the title of this book as if it were followed by an exclamation point, as if something utterly new and unprecedented were being announced about poetic thinking—Today! as opposed to yesterday. Quite the contrary: the word today is meant to signal that we should not expect this book to present a new theory of poetic thinking.

While this may disappoint some readers, I want to signal this as a chief virtue of Eshel’s book, which helpfully resists the idea that the humanities should be preoccupied with coming up with new theories. If the aspiration of the natural or social scientist is to make the history of science as irrelevant to contemporary scientific inquiry as the history of chemistry is to working chemists today, then poetic thinking starts by recognizing persistent meanings or needs, historical traumas or ethical ruptures, that we have not yet adequately understood. So it reminds us that we need to think about them some more, today.

This can easily be confused with a kind of perennialism, or the view that there is a set of big questions that do not go away and must be confronted again and again. Often, such perennialism tumbles into the view that we can institute a provisionally stable canon of works to which we might always turn for help in addressing such big questions—a view that lends itself, therefore, to a kind of conservatism that encourages us not to forget where we know wisdom already lies.

However, while Eshel does draw our attention to thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty) and artists (Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Gerhardt Richter, Dani Karavan, and Laura Poitras)—as what he calls perspicuous examples of poetic thinking—he does so in a way that is more essayistic and openly experimental than it is canon affirming. Eshel sees Richter reacting to the Holocaust instead of just bearing witness—art practices are participatory as well as testimonial. Rather than send us back to established classics, Eshel notes that we are living through an explosion of poetic activity—the digital-driven supernova of a star that was born with Romanticism. If we want to understand the implications of modern surveillance technology, for instance, we have much to learn from the diagnoses offered in Poitras’s 2016 Bed Down Location.

While attuned to today, the basic question of Eshel’s book is at least as old as Aristotle’s famous remark about poetic works being more universal than historical records. How can a particular work, indexed to specific historical traumas, bear any general significance? Can anything of general significance—some truth or insight, some inference or recognition—be intimated by a particular poetic work, painting, or sculpture?

Poetic works are often nothing more than illustrations or depictions, mirrors held up to reality. Such works need not show any meaning that is not already intelligible in reality itself. Put another way, artworks can illustrate or depict without necessarily making intelligible anything about the reality they depict other than the fact of their being a depiction of it. Aristotle refers to such mimetic works as eliciting a kind of childlike intellectual pleasure—the pleasure of apprehending a mimetic work as a mimetic work rather than the pleasure taken in the work’s sensible qualities.

But in addition to being mere depictions, fictional works can also generate new realities, not only the sense that their very existence alters, at least to some degree, the world in which they are made, but also in the sense that such works can intervene in the reality they depict. Artworks might also be considered a matrix for the understanding of such reality, unavailable in the same way without such works. Eshel’s way of putting this is to suggest that poetic thinking opens spaces of and spaces for open-ended reflection that invite us to step out of our daily, habitual manner of thinking. Like Northrop Frye before him, Eshel sees this as the motive for metaphor, which begins with the world we (poetically) construct . . . with the imagination, and then works towards ordinary experience. Frye, in The Motive for Metaphor, points out that this is what distinguishes the artist from the scientist:

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves towards the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. . . . Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he’s not as great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and . . . doesn’t evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they’ll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear.

So, asks Frye, Is it possible that . . . poetry is something that a scientific civilization like ours will eventually outgrow?

Eshel answers: Perhaps, but not yet—at least, not where thinking remains possible. Thinking in general, and poetic thinking in particular, is never separated from judgment, writes Eshel. In this book, poetic thinking is presented as an ongoing way in which knowledge is generated out of the interpretive judgment.

Prologue

This is an essay about disquieting feelings and my personal journey to make sense of them.

A few years ago, a book I had been writing for the past half decade finally appeared in print. I was delighted. The result of countless days of meticulous scholarly labor had finally taken shape in 350 pages. The front cover was adorned with a beautiful painting. The back displayed praise from colleagues I greatly admire. In the following months, my book received (mostly) favorable reviews. Colleagues from near and far expressed their admiration of the work.

But then I started to notice something: their compliments were often couched in vague terms that indicated, to my increasingly suspicious mind, a rather cursory reading. In teaching my university courses, I pointed my students to this newly published book when discussing relevant themes in class. I noticed, though, that like those of my colleagues, their reactions to the book were often a mixture of generic admiration and only an oblique familiarity with its details. Gradually, I had to accept an unsettling realization: I had written a respectable scholarly work, a book that followed a careful methodology, a book that was filled with countless verified details and a consistently rigorous argument. And I had written a book that hardly anyone actually read.

Or perhaps more accurately: hardly anyone read it from cover to cover as you would read a book that was enthralling. And even those people who did read it seemed to do so out of a sense of obligation rather than captivation.

I was convinced in those days (as I am now) that the book’s driving idea is valuable: When remembering traumatic historical events, contemporary literature acknowledges the pain of the past, but that remembrance is also an expression of futurity—it presents us with an opportunity to imagine a better future. In the months after the book’s publication I began to admit (mostly to myself) that this central argument had gotten lost in countless details—in the abundance of evidence that I was convinced was necessary to make a valid claim. This idea that I cared about so much was obscured by my desire for what Richard Rorty has called knowingness: a state of the soul which prevents shudders of awe . . . [and] makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.¹ To be clear, Rorty is not suggesting that we should replace our wish to know with mere romance and wistful sensations. He cautions that we should not study a novel or any other work of art the way that we would, say, a geologic formation or the spleen—as objects of scientific knowledge. Because when we do so, we lose sight of the great capacity of art: the way that art renders us sensitive to ourselves, and to our world, precisely by not committing to the scientific method. We overlook its ability to afford us insight and wisdom, which art is able to do because it remains free from any restraining system of thought, any rigorous method. Whether my book—or any academic book, for that matter—can be considered a work of art is debatable. Nevertheless, the more I thought about Rorty’s idea, the more dismayed I became.

The reasons Rorty gives for knowingness are the same that drove me to clothe my intellectual intuition with a thick layer of corroborated proofs: I was lured by the wish to be regarded as a rigorous scientist, capable of demonstrating to those in and outside my discipline the validity of my discoveries. Rather than offer a humanistic perspective on some of the novels I admire because they touch on memory and history and trauma, I wanted to be revered as a scientist is, emerging from the laboratory with an exciting new finding. I submitted my writing to the justifiable, yet often despotic, tendency in the sciences to follow a strict method, to present a systematically argued thesis and evidence, to base the analysis on rigor and logic.

My unease about the book increased in the following months, exacerbated by the growing debate about the future of the humanities, particularly about the lack of interest in humanities scholarship and declining enrollment in humanities classes.² I couldn’t resist the thought that my book’s fate was somehow related to what I and many of my colleagues have observed in recent years: countless gifted students in North America and across Europe (the continents I am most familiar with) have started to avoid the humanities. Surely, I thought, these students’ choices are related to the ever-growing demands of the so-called knowledge economy. They must be driven by pressure to spend their precious time in college pursuing their dream careers or the paths their parents have charted for them. I still had to account for the fact that the students I was meeting on campus were not merely blind followers of their parents’ dreams or, worse, comatose slaves of neoliberalism. I couldn’t resist the thought that some of them would choose to attend courses in the humanities, and perhaps even read my writings, if only . . . if only what?

Contemplating this question with unease, I remembered a set of conference panels I had attended the previous year. The lectures were grouped under the title Poetic Thinking, a notion advanced primarily by Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. They described how some of our most captivating writers—Montaigne and Kafka and Ingeborg Bachmann were the examples given—cultivate intuitions, insights, and wisdom in the process of crafting their work, whether it is an essay, story, or poem. In other words, thinking proceeds in some of our most admired literary works not by systematically arguing the points of a thesis but by inventing a moving metaphor or a stirring scene. There was something delightful, something of Rorty’s romantic enthusiasm, in the literary works these lectures described and, not surprisingly, in the talks themselves. Both highlighted the imaginative, playful, and ultimately uninhibited exploration of ideas afforded in literature and the arts. They showcased words and images that illuminate our lives by not being subjugated to the hallmarks of scientific thinking, by remaining free of rigor, method, or the pursuit of Truth with a capital T.

Maybe, I thought, what humanities scholarship and education should be focusing on more attentively is precisely the cultivation of the very kind of thinking I experienced in those lectures. There is nothing wrong in striving for rigorous knowledge in the humanities. There is much value in finding out, for example, all we can about the life and work of Franz Kafka in the years before and after the First World War. Yet, shouldn’t presenting Kafka’s work also aim at fostering the kind of uninhibited thinking his aphorisms exemplify: The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope?³ Isn’t the value of humanistic writing and education not also, or perhaps even primarily, in the kind of free contemplation demonstrated in Kafka’s words—in the open-ended reflection on such questions as What is true? and What is the true path? Could the pursuit of the one true path be like walking on a tightrope? Or, Is it not actually like tripping over a tripwire?

These questions have led me on a journey, metaphorically and physically. First, I reread some of the most moving poetry I have studied in the past three decades to consider how this genre—arguably the most free genre of the written word—can foster uninhibited thought and wisdom. It quickly became clear that this kind of thought is not restricted to poetry. I branched out from the written word to visual art. I traveled to several exhibitions to experience and reflect firsthand on artworks I had only read about and to interview the artists who created them. The result of this personal and intellectual expedition is this essay, which explores the manifestations and the necessity of this thing called poetic thinking. At its best, an essay, Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno remind us, is poetry’s sister. Free of the demands of the academic guild, it has greater possibilities: it doesn’t strive for closed, deductive or inductive construction . . . [but] revolts against the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy.⁴ The following pages are not an attempt to present a theory of poetic thinking. Such an attempt would be, in my view, contrary to the free forms of reflection and creation at its core. Rather, I wish to illustrate several (for me, telling and deeply moving) examples of what poetic thinking is.

To be clear, I do not wish to suggest that all literature and visual art, across era, language, genre, and medium, engage in poetic thinking; nor do I wish to offer a comprehensive account of all cases in which they do. We begin along the path that I took, and with the artists I encountered, in the hope that each reader will further delineate and grow the immense promises of poetic thinking. He writes essayistically who writes while experimenting, notes the philosopher Max Bense, which is just what I aim to do.⁵ I begin by reflecting on the potential of poetic thinking, the way it can offer philosophical guidance in our lives, focusing especially on what I see as poetic thinking’s greatest offering to us today in the realm of politics and ethics. I believe that poetic thinking can offer us a crucial mode of reflection on how we treat the people we love and the people we don’t, and how we interact with life around us, with the world at large.⁶ I then describe specific works in literature and the visual arts that can invoke those shudders of awe that Richard Rorty describes: in other words, we see how poems, paintings, and sculptures can become manifestations of poetic thinking and how those manifestations can alter the ways we see the world.

The choice of genre and art forms is not accidental. Poetry is a literary genre I practice, study, and teach. All the paintings and environmental sculptures I discuss are artworks I have seen firsthand. My discussion is also informed by conversations on thinking in the arts that I was fortunate to have with some of these artists: the painter Gerhard Richter and the sculptor Dani Karavan. I believe that the ideas I develop here have a broader reach than the specific artists and works I discuss. I am confident that this essay can inform a broader view on other works of art and other artistic mediums. Therefore, in the Coda, I indicate how we may extend the scope of this essay beyond its intentionally modest range.

As with all journeys, my exploration of poetic thinking did not occur in a vacuum. I began writing this essay at a moment in which repressive, in some cases plainly tyrannical, political tendencies gathered momentum around the world. In some places—Russia and Egypt being the most obvious examples—those tyrannies presented themselves through the face of a single ruler, a self-proclaimed strongman who controls all the tools of power. Elsewhere—from Turkey to Hungary, Poland to Venezuela—governments have been democratically elected, yet once they assumed power, they began to exercise elements of tyranny: the excessive use of authority, merciless supervision, the repression of free thinking and expression, and the brutal clampdown of dissenting voices. Even established democracies, as we have seen during and after the 2016 elections in the United States, are not immune from tyrannical tendencies. Writing this essay, I became convinced that setting our gaze on poetic thinking and cultivating an uninhibited intellectual life are beneficial not merely for writing more effective books or for enriching humanistic education. Poetic thinking, this essay suggests, has the potential to counter the rise of tyranny: poetic thinking is no less than a means to defend political freedom and foster truly meaningful cultural expression.

It is thus no coincidence that all the literature and art discussed here touch, in various ways, on the experience of tyranny in our time. Given my scholarly interests, the works I discuss turn mostly to the fascist regimes of the twentieth century and their aftermath, specifically but not exclusively to Nazi Germany. The Coda shows that artists of all kinds, and the rest of us as well, have the ability to use poetic thinking—even if we don’t always name it as such—to understand any other occasion in which the freedom of thought, writing, and action is under duress. This essay suggests that the freedom encouraged by poetic thinking serves to counter the tyrannical tendencies we experience today. Two ideas drive me in this essay: the wish to promote poetic thinking as a path for renewing the writing and teaching of literature and the arts; and my conviction that cultivating poetic thinking will help counter the forces that strive to restrict our cultural and political freedom.

Introduction

A CRUCIAL PROBLEM

Tyranny is often considered an outdated political form, a crass distortion of governance that will slip into irrelevance or, at worst, something that happens in other countries but not in our own. None of these things are true, however much we might want them to be. Tyranny is here to stay. It appears, as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, in the form of the tyrant or absolute rule, who amasses absolute sovereignty and employs oppressive, unjust, and severe government. Tyranny may also describe other oppressive but far less obvious forces. These are often even more insidious, but at the same time more damaging, and thus require equal vigilance.

Today, more than half a century after the collapse of Nazi Germany and three decades after the implosion of the Soviet Union, Hannah Arendt remains one of our most perceptive observers of modern tyranny in its various forms. With The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt began a lifelong examination of various aspects of this oppressive form of rule. She argued that tyranny is not found in governance alone; she believed that thinking, specifically Western thought, is imbued with tyrannical tendencies. Shortly before the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt reflected in her Denktagebuch (which roughly translates as Thinking diary) on the affinity between philosophers and tyrants. Since Plato, Western logic has been by definition tyrannical—fixed on principles that are considered the outcome of pure thought and reason.¹ The idea that understanding and sound judgment depend solely on logic, method, rigor, and system poses a constant threat to freedom. If in a political tyranny the sovereign alone decides between right and wrong in all realms of life, the Western notion of thinking is