Ellipsis - Of Poetry and the Experience of Language After Heidegger, Holderlin, and Blanchot
What is the nature of poetic language when its experience involves an encounter with finitude; with failure, loss, and absence? For Martin Heidegger this experience is central to any thinking that would seek to articulate the meaning of being, but for Friedrich H?lderlin and Maurice Blanchot it is a mark of the tragic and unanswerable demands of poetic language.
Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency toward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth, and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience
Heidegger has been accused of being many of the above things, including mystic, psychotic, and poet, and sometimes even a philosopher. Some of us like to think of him as all of the above. But there is a pervasive trend in particularly modern philosophy that would like to bracket out such things proper subjects for philosophy. For example, many Anglo-American analytic philosophers tend to think Heidegger is simply sloppy, perhaps a charlatan, but certainly not a philosopher in any traditional sense, and perhaps they have a point. Heidegger would have been the first to admit he was no philosopher in the regular sense, as a matter of fact he often disdained that sort of thinking.
Heidegger towers above this century as a thinker able to wrest insights from ancient texts (Plato, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) while simultaneously opening distinctively modern perspectives for contemporaries (Sartre, Tillich, and Arendt). With admirable erudition and sophistication, Safranski recounts the evolution of this giant from a cautious Catholic seminarian to a daring explorer of the depths of anxiety and alienation. A different kind of subtlety--more psychological than philosophical--comes into play in the analysis of why Heidegger veered from his quest for truth to serve Adolf Hitler.
