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John Dunn
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John Dunn home page
Gathering
In 1946, Heidegger opened his reflection entitled What Are Poets For? with the following quote from Hölderlin’s ‘Bread and Wine’:
… and what are poets for in a destitute time? …[when] no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it … the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.
Such a default means that the world is bereft of a ‘ground that grounds it,’ and is left in the abyss.
‘It is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.’ However, it is one mortal above the others, namely the poet, who is able to:
…sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.
The ultimate destiny of the poet ‘in a destitute time’ is to reach out to the god who will save us.
The god stands for the Being and Time philosophy, the future authenticity of being that Heidegger hoped would be ushered in, under his personal cultural guidance, by a German victory in the war.
In the famous Der Spiegel interview of 1966, Heidegger said that ‘only a god can still save us’.
He added later in the interview:
I think Hölderlin is the poet who points toward the future, who expects the god, and who therefore cannot remain simply a subject for Hölderlin research in the literary historical imagination.
© John Dunn.
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Summoning and synthesis
It is only through the chance encounter with a fully human being that the slave will realise that he is being subjected to an injustice by a third party, otherwise he thinks the present state of affairs is the natural order of being.
John Dunn
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Quote every hour:
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them. Ezra Pound
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Coleridge - On the Constitution of the State and Church.
Through a combination of leadership and educing (Fichte’s terminology was translated as summoning, but had similar connotations), the ‘latent man’ would emerge from his former bestial and sub-human state.
John Dunn
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