The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger 1350083674, 9781350083677

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
I
II
III
Chapter 1: The Poetic Rift
Questioning the exceptional
Being Shakespearized
Becoming song
Finding the Queen
Envisioning love
Discovering the reason
Chapter 2: Retrieving the Question
The most important part
The beauty [and horror] of the World
Guilt and the call of conscience
Free for death
Free for life
Chapter 3: Of Mortal Gods
A (not so) free relation
Human, all too human
Only a God can save us
A World elsewhere
Chapter 4: Before the Open
Godhead
Dimension
Measure
Restoration
Epilogue
Chapter 5: Imaginary Ethics
A strange beginning
Court of madness
The house of being
Time’s Soliloquy
Exeunt pursued by a bear
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Index

Citation preview

The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger

Also available from Bloomsbury Poetry and Revelation, Kevin Hart The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates Errant Affirmations, David J. Kangas A Philosophy of the Essay, Erin Plunkett

The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger Andy Amato The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright ©  Andy Amato, 2019 Andy Amato has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Maria Rajka Cover illustration: Ariel – on a bat’s back I do fly, there I couch when owls do cry / Louis Rhead (1857–1926), drawing: pen and ink and opaque, image 318 x 493 mm © Folger Shakespeare Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8366-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8367-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-8368-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface 1 2 3 4 5

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The Poetic Rift: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Origin of the Work of Art 1 Retrieving the Question: Hamlet & Being and Time 37 Of Mortal Gods: Coriolanus & The Question Concerning Technology 93 Before the Open: The Tempest & ‘… Poetically Man Dwells… ’ 129 Imaginary Ethics: The Winter’s Tale & Letter on Humanism 157

Notes Index

227 252

Preface

I Shakespeare and Heidegger? Nearly three centuries separate the death of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) from the birth of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Language, culture, nationality, and vocation divide them as well. Shakespeare was a successful English Renaissance poet and dramatist who has become ‘The Poet’ for the ages. Heidegger was one of the most influential German philosophers of the twentieth century who challenged many of the fundamental biases of the Western philosophical tradition. The playwright grew up in Stratford about one hundred miles northwest of London, the philosopher in Messkirch roughly one hundred kilometres east of Freiburg. William’s father made gloves, sold wool, lent money, and held local offices. Martin’s was a cooper and village sexton. Shakespeare’s family was more than likely Catholic (and secretly so during dangerous years of reformation). Heidegger had a strict Catholic upbringing in the land of Luther. The great bard knew some Latin while the charismatic teacher excelled with his Greek. Shakespeare relied on Ovid and Holinshed, Heidegger on Aristotle and Hölderlin. Shakespeare wrote for money, Heidegger for history. Shakespeare worked until he was more or less wealthy enough to retire comfortably to his hometown (where he had bought the second largest home) while Heidegger kept thinking and writing late into life. Shakespeare had a wife (to whom he famously left his ‘second best bed’) and three children (one of whom, Hamnet, died young). Heidegger too married and had a family. Both men had affairs. Shakespeare stood outside the circle of contemporary playwrights (ostensibly due in part to his provincial, non-university background). Heidegger did not keep step with most of his mentors and peers, but many of his students remained largely loyal. And though much has been written about the life and times of Shakespeare, precise details about him not found in legal documents or critics’ notes are scant. While his plays provide insights into myriad areas of human life, we do not know for sure what he himself believed about anything (though there remain well argued cases to the contrary). We do not know if he

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was religious or political, progressive or conservative. And his early adult years prior to London are also often considered a mystery. We know more than enough, on the other hand, about Heidegger’s personal life, education, influences, courses taught, writings, and so on. But no one knows – glaringly so – why he refused to speak about his time as an active member of the Nazi Party. We wish we knew with certainty that he felt ashamed, that he believed himself mislead or naive or flat wrong. We wish we knew anything that might help in whatever small way to understand his colossal failure to see sooner what was happening around him and his complicity in it. Frustratingly, he leaves us only his silence. We have too only our own research agendas. Still, we possess large bodies of scholarship on the lives and works of both. Academics continue to pour over their texts and find ever more to say about them: how to read them, what they mean, how they connect to a multitude of topics, how they undergird particular theories, how they further various research interests. We possess no shortage of biographies, intellectual genealogies, and critical responses. Writers have brought both men into dialogue with other poets and philosophers and have utilized their work in countless interdisciplinary projects. They have become, quite simply, institutions. And yet, no book to date that I am aware of has endeavoured to read these two important figures alongside one another. While Shakespeare has certainly intrigued philosophers for centuries (especially the Germans) and spurred various modes of indirect engagement, we have recently seen an increased interest in reading Shakespeare in a more direct and overtly philosophical fashion. A survey of the current landscape would uncover conferences, journal articles, anthologies, and monographs towards this end. The conspicuous absence of Heidegger here becomes its own spur. Given the widespread desire to read Shakespeare philosophically, it seems only fitting that an encounter take place between the English language’s most prominent poet and the philosopher widely considered central to continental philosophy. And it seems even more appropriate when we consider Heidegger’s many meditations on language and poetry. Thus, to redress this void, I have here ventured to interpret the plays of Shakespeare through the writings of Heidegger and the writings of Heidegger through the plays of Shakespeare. Structurally, this is accomplished by pairing select plays with select works of philosophy. In these pairings the themes, events, and arguments of each work are carefully unpacked and key passages and concepts are taken up and read against and through one another. As these close hermeneutic engagements and cross-readings unfold we find that the words and deeds of Shakespeare’s characters uniquely illuminate, and are uniquely illuminated by, Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses of being, language, and art.

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II This coupling does not arise without complication however. For despite his great influence, Heidegger, as mentioned above, easily remains one of the more controversial figures within the philosophical tradition due to his affiliation with National Socialism. In fact, his considerable influence exacerbates the issue. This is so much so the case that some choose, on principle, not to read him at all, and the release of his Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) only adds weight to this position. Others opt to read him regularly and closely. But that debate – as necessary as it is – is simply not the topic of this work. I have no intention of offering an apology on behalf of why one ought or ought not to read Heidegger, as there are other works that do so. I will, therefore, avoid any attempt to negotiate between the life he led and the books he wrote. What I will do, however, is read him alongside Shakespeare to see what insights they offer one another. And though it seems to be the case that Heidegger did not share his fellow countrymen’s love of Shakespeare – Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and others – I have nevertheless heard something in the works of these two men that convinces me they ought to be read together, even if only as a decadent exercise in aesthetic appreciation and philosophical curiosity. I will simply have to demonstrate this in what follows. Though this work proceeds largely from a genuine spirit of investigation, it does have other agendas. In addition to bringing Shakespeare and Heidegger into dialogue in order to discover what they have to say to one another, it attempts to demonstrate a dynamic and compelling interpretive method of cross-textual engagement and to offer a series of readings that ultimately develop a creative and contemplative sense of ethics. Though the first element of the project – reading these two particular figures through one another – is perhaps what will initially attract interested readers, the hermeneutically rigorous and playful interpretative style used throughout is itself an insightful and rewarding exercise in how two thoroughly different texts might be read together. Still, whatever the principal interest of the reader is, I feel the real reward of this book resides in developing a sense of contemplative ethics and the ethical imagination. It seems appropriate and preferable then, as a matter of procedure, to develop such ideas through the interpretation of texts as opposed to simply proposing them as theories premised solely upon rational arguments or empirical observations. Rooting claims and concepts in the interpretation of historical materials provides interlocutors with an authentic basis by which to critically engage those claims and concepts. The efficacy of this strategy is certainly one of the most basic premises of humanistic scholarship.

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In terms of organization, each of the five chapters of this book pairs select works by both figures. These readings are close, hermeneutical engagements that carefully unpack the key elements of each work – themes, arguments, characters, events, terms, and so on – and then apply those elements to the corresponding text paired with it. At its most successful, this strategy offers a series of interpretations that see Shakespeare’s characters discussing and instantiating Heidegger’s philosophy, while also finding that Heidegger’s analyses act as running commentaries on Shakespeare’s plays. Engaging the texts in this way offers readers of both authors an opportunity to see new possibilities of interpretation and research. Another aim that runs throughout this project is developing a manner of textual engagement that encourages ethical contemplation. Shakespeare’s plays are rife with moral dilemmas and ethical complications, and Heidegger remains one of philosophy’s most ethically problematic figures (although many scholars have gone on to do ethics based upon his work). As each play reveals its own ethical issues, the hermeneutic lens taken from Heidegger helps to unpack those issues phenomenologically, generating insightful questions for ethical examination. The aim here is not to answer those questions authoritatively or prescriptively, but to explore the complexity and ambiguity of those issues in such a way as to enrich and expand the manner in which readers might reflect on them philosophically and respond to them creatively. It should also be noted that much care was taken to compose this work in a lively voice and with an appealing tone. The voicing alternates between scholarly elucidations and something like poetic or polemic outbursts. Often this change in voice or tone occurs through critical and speculative ‘asides’, which function as both an apparatus through which to present variant (journalistic) readings and ancillary information, as well as creative engagements with the very structure of Shakespeare’s plays within a scholarly monograph. The goal of this strategy, along with the rhetorical register of the work overall, is to bridge the two very different types of texts – Elizabethan plays and contemporary philosophical prose – in a style that is dynamic and readable without sacrificing academic rigour.

III The introductory chapter, ‘The Poetic Rift’, functions as something of an overview of the project and the interpretive methodology present throughout the work. Unlike subsequent chapters, it opens with strong, preparatory claims

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about language, style, the imagination, and the relation of the exceptional to the ordinary (or the relation of Shakespeare’s language to ordinary language). The first chapter then proceeds to offer a reading of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art alongside Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this particular essay, Heidegger reflects on the nature of art and its close connection to the concept of truth, paying particular attention to the role of language. Shakespeare’s play, especially the feud between Oberon and Titania, provides a rich example of what Heidegger calls the ‘rift between earth and world’, a key concept in his assertion that art and truth are intimately connected through conflict. This concept is unpacked and further developed by reading Hippolyta and the Indian boy as characters concealing the reason (logos) of the play’s central conflict between Oberon and Titania, a conflict that eventually comes to encompass the court of Theseus as well. This chapter will also seek to situate, if not justify, this project within the humanities generally, and the continental philosophical tradition in particular. Additionally, this chapter will attempt to flesh out conceptions of language and imagination that will persist throughout the work. The second chapter, ‘Retrieving the Question’, engages Hamlet by way of Heidegger’s Being and Time. These two highly influential texts will move our investigation towards what is arguably the human being’s most essential and defining characteristic: the capacity to search for the meaning of being in the face of finitude. It quickly becomes clear that Hamlet’s soliloquies and exchanges within the play – which have often been remarked upon for their existential insights – provide a variety of poetic mechanisms through which to reread Heidegger’s analysis of being, and that Heidegger’s notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, guilt and conscience, and becoming free for one’s own death, provoke a reassessment of the prince’s asides. One of the principal ways this is accomplished in the chapter is by reading the Ghost, Hamlet’s father, as the ‘forgetting of being’, Claudius as the ‘murderer of the question of being’, and Hamlet as the ‘retrieval of the question of being’. This hermeneutic strategy allows Shakespeare’s play to comment on Heidegger’s project with a sense of narrative urgency within a dramatic milieu. Now when Hamlet asks, ‘To be, or not to be?’ we do not immediately assume he is contemplating suicide, but rather the possibility of an authentic existence in retrieving the question of the meaning of being. ‘Of Mortal Gods’, the third chapter, reads Coriolanus through Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. The play’s eponymous character is reconsidered in light of Heidegger’s notions of the evolution of indebtedness to

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causality, the enframing and transformation of the earth into standing-reserve, and the decline of poetic and meditative thinking in favour of an exacting scientific thinking towards the development of modern technology. Special attention is paid to the role of representation and image, and the concept of tragic efficiency is introduced. The basic thesis put forward here is that the enframing process strips the four causes – material, formal, final, and efficient – of their co-indebtedness and co-responsibility. This results in the four causes (or ‘occasions’, as Heidegger calls them) becoming one cause: the efficient cause. All other aspects of technological becoming are now subject to the will-toefficiency, signalling the utterly pragmatic nature of what has become a merely representational reality. Coriolanus’ relationship to the common people of Rome is read in such a way as to help demonstrate this shift from a poetic and co-responsible sense of technology (techne) and being (physis) to one that cares only about the accurate and efficient production and representation of reality, which inevitably terminates in tragedy. The chapter concludes by taking up Heidegger’s reconsideration of the realm of art and poetry. The idea being that a contemplative or meditative mode of thinking might act as a possible corrective to the rampant, negligent attitudes about technology. The hope presented here is to avoid Coriolanus’ fate by staving off an utterly efficient end. Chapter 4, ‘Before the Open’, continues the cross-reading with Heidegger’s ‘… Poetically Man Dwells-…’ alongside Shakespeare’s The Tempest, paying attention to the space of imagination. Heidegger approaches this space as one of poetic reception and mediation, using designations such as ‘the dimension’ and ‘the open’. Through his elucidations on the poetry of Hölderlin, he demonstrates how this space allows for meaningful discourse regarding God (or the gods, the godhead, the divinities). God here is not an agent acting in time and space, but rather something that arises at the mysterious intersection of language and our experience of the world; it is something that we catch a trace of in the act of poetizing. To help understand and explicate Heidegger on the role of imagination in the act of poetizing, as well as what he essays about the divine, we turn to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, wherein we find Prospero acting as poetmagician par excellence. As Prospero orchestrates revenge upon his usurping brother, Antonio, and his brother’s ally, Alonso, he simultaneously arranges the romantic relationship between his daughter, Miranda, and Alonso’s son, Ferdinand. Prospero’s magic and his speeches about magic are taken as vivid descriptions about language and poetry. We find that Prospero ultimately turns from his revenge to forgive his brother, thus granting both of them the possibility of freedom. This chapter lays some of the initial groundwork for our final

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concluding argument that there is an essential bond between imagination and ethics, and that reading Shakespeare can disclose and enhance this connection. The final chapter, ‘Imaginary Ethics’, reads The Winter’s Tale through Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. This last chapter aspires to squarely orient reading Shakespeare philosophically with the act of ethical reflection. It begins with an excursus concerning continental philosophy’s continued reliance on (if not fetishizing of) the ancient Greeks. This lengthy aside functions as something of an overview and critical reconsideration of the project. From here the concept of madness is taken up, which is a major plot device in The Winter’s Tale, as most critics agree that Leontes, King of Sicilia, loses his mind in a fit of jealousy resulting in the death of his wife, Hermione. Madness is then explored in two modes: poetic and political. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, which acts as a critique of existentialism and Marxism, provides the philosophical lens through which to approach these two senses of madness. What Heidegger offers is the recovery of thinking as an act of poetic accomplishment over overt political action. The former leads us to what Heidegger takes to be an essential element in dwelling authentically (or ‘originary ethics’), while the latter attempts to force the alteration or establishment of an ethos. Poetic madness here becomes a corrective to political madness. The chapter then explores at length one of the more notoriously ambiguous passages from the Letter on Humanism, wherein Heidegger claims that, ‘language is the house of being’. As this passage is closely examined, we find that while language is constituted by human finitude, it also contains the very possibilities of being – understood temporally – when it is freed from calculative and pragmatic ends. Here, Time, which is personified in The Winter’s Tale, is able to illuminate Heidegger, as we learn that ‘truth is the daughter of time’ (Veritas filia temporis). Perdita, the daughter of Leontes and Hermione, is then considered in light of her suffering and eventual restoration as an emblematic instantiation of truth. The language of time becomes the language of truth. We end with Hermione, who having died – like contemplative thinking in the modern age – is resurrected in the final moments of the play when poetic madness returns to supplant political madness.

1

The Poetic Rift A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Origin of the Work of Art

Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. —Emerson

Questioning the exceptional What marks the exceptional in language? In thinking? Ideas? Do such things truly stand out anymore? Remove quantifiable standards and how would we know? Without canons and criteria how could we measure them? And perhaps not immediately grasped as relevant to these concerns: How, if we desired to do so, would we emphasize what is most subtle and invisibly interwoven into the appearance of excellence, especially without misshaping it? Not mere fidelity of intention, what of style? Brilliance without the power to charm hides like a star overcast. Style carries its import into all areas: ‘One thing is needful. — To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art!’1 And when we broach style, taste inevitably becomes the topic and we have to start again from some other beginning, think another way, write some other essay or book. De gustibus non est disputandum?2 Claims of indisputability notwithstanding, how might we distinguish between the extraordinary and the ordinary? Separate the prosaic from the poetic? The everyday from the rare? Is it aim? Execution? A socially constructed force or a stranger quality not yet fully grasped? Perhaps we distinguish the exceptional according to roles? Each role offers something, performs something. Some roles stand out more than others, hence ‘stars’. Language arrives no differently; its roles – its parts, presentations, aspects – appear myriad. Some of its characteristics seem more central, more paramount. And what appears most central and paramount about

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language? Essential metaphorization. Language is metaphor.3 ‘All language’, Emerson tells us, ‘is vehicular and transitive’.4 At its very heart and in its every use and expression it carries contents over an otherwise impassable abyss of meaning. In truth, it lets contents become ‘contents’ in the first place. It names phenomena and relations, letting them become comprehensible to the human mind.5 Time and time again the poets have disclosed how language, properly conducted, serves as the philosopher’s stone squaring the circle. It turns the ordinary occasion into gold and the prized accomplishment into lead. It abridges, swells, darkens, colours, and gives contour and dimension to all things. Language allows the universe to radiate. It allows it to hide as well. It, most importantly, bestows upon us the potential to have an ‘intellectual’ or ‘spiritual’ relationship with the universe (and thus the potential to neglect that relationship as well).6 The gift of language: to have a relationship with what is. In this way, language preserves being’s solvency towards its human constituency. The value of this relationship, which we might think of as the ‘true commodity’ of language, arises as and for meaning (arguably the ‘essence’ of our being). Meaning being that which language, as naming metaphor, has ferried across that Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth, And time and place are lost.7

We discover boundaries and dimensions through language. It bestows them upon us. It gifts us as well with a terrible sense of contingency. And it is in contingency (as uncertain predications) rather than transcendence (as certain predications) that language reveals its ideational powers.8 When we think and speak we participate in another reality, one invisibly interwoven with, though distinct from, some original notionless reality. But we can only surmise that mythic world. It, like the gods, has ever fled before us until we draw down that other world by accepting what is otherwise absent (reason and meaning) without the gift of language.9 Our world here then becomes conceptually communicable and ideationally measurable. Not mere semiotic adornments, rather language ineluctable: a vital mode of our total being in the world. Being had and held by language in the most uncanny of ways until death, our world abides forever as one of words.10 Accordingly, the marriage of the image that appears (whether perceived or envisioned) to the word (the sound, sign, and discernable reason for what appears) occurs in every act of thinking and converse.11 By this coupling, ideas come into the world. We can enter into a relationship with phenomena,

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a relationship largely determined by our interpretation of their meaning.12 When real thinking and conversing end, conversely, ideas wane or become lost in that ‘Illimitable Ocean’. Or they devolve into less sublime ideologies, twist into dogmas. Thus when we dwell in the realm of ideas for any real period of time – at the intersection of reading, thinking, writing, discoursing – we come to realize their utter contingency. We learn that we could hedge everything we say by placing it in quotation marks denoting our awareness of language as fundamentally ironical and metaphoric: a performative exchange of essence for meaning, being for reason, mystery for mastery. Everything we say simply signals sounds, everything we write merely marks. Yet meaning would mean nothing without this conjugality (which includes ‘nothing’ too). We needed word (logos) and image (eidos) to be drawn together and bear the possibility of consciousness and knowledge. Thus we ever begin from imagined matrimony. Thus obligation. Hopefully love. Listen: HIPPOLYTA ‘Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. THESEUS More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger HIPPOLYTA But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. Enter lovers: LYSANDER, DEMETRIUS, HERMIA, and HELENA THESEUS Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth. Joy, gentle friends – joy and fresh days of love Accompany your hearts.13

Theseus says something critical here about imagination. He links it to madness (manike),14 particularly the madness of lunatics, lovers, and poets. The poet seems to make out a little better than the other two. Yet it only sounds better. Theseus still considers poetizing to be ‘tricks’. ‘How easy is a bush supposed a bear!’ Being a king makes him pragmatic by default, and neither humours nor occasional whimsy nor fondness can undo this. Hence, while he probably loves the young lovers, feels sympathy for madmen, and is at times moved by poets, he must always remember, like any good politician or leader, that madness – imaginary madness, erotic madness, creative-poetic madness, dementia – educes visions of the unreal.15 Mad persons, whether vocational, relational, or conditional, see that which is not apparent. Even if madmen do see something that is actually present (though obscure to the common eye) by way of their ‘god-gifted’ sight, such a point misses the point: Their vision ought to be defined by its seeing otherwise, by its naming and localization of airy nothing. Not as sensible perception, rather as creative, spiritual vision. That is, prophetically seeing what could be alongside what is. Parabolic vision. Yet, when it comes to counsellors, leaders prefer realists to madmen. Hippolyta shows a much more open mind. Maybe the strange tale is true? It works towards a ‘great constancy’. By witness and conviction – ‘minds transfigured so together’ – she surmises the strange and unlikely has occurred. In addition to poetic playmaking – parts, characters, representations, portrayals – the fundamental role of language is here disclosed (and done so with irony, which, at the deeper roots, might be necessary). The harsh and sceptical Theseus voices some of Shakespeare’s most well-known lines on imagination and poetic activity. But love changes him. Upon their return he finds the young lovers concorded. Their earnestness affects him. He sees how enemies can reconcile via love (magically induced or otherwise). Forget hunting: weddings for all!

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Still, it takes time. It takes wise counsel. No pragmatists or realists, rather those with respect for possibility. In this case, for a brief moment, it takes Hippolyta. While Theseus so perfectly elucidates upon imagination and madness, he does not find what is fitting and true until he graciously receives the lovers and the simple players. And it is reception – as respect for the possible (Hippolyta) and the possibility of reception (Theseus) – that indicates the different roles of language. We know the exceptional in language only contextually, only by rightly identifying the role: everyday talking with strangers or friends, formal etiquettes, open-hearted missives, essays, journals, speeches, sermons, news reports, scientific reports and papers, drunken complaining, and all other spoken and written modes appropriate for their occasion. We note the exceptional – or the exceptional becomes noticeable – by its simultaneous adherence and excession of what is fitting. We pick up on this indication when we consider how much different our usage of ‘exceptional’ is from ‘exception’. The adjective has wandered far from its nominal home. While ambiguity never abandons any word, in an everyday sense exceptional speaks of extraordinariness, specialness, of a positive uniqueness. But as a noun it hangs on to its Latin origin: barred, disallowed, excluded. When we therefore claim that the exceptional in language signals simultaneous adherence and excession of what is fitting, we pick up on its popular usage. The exceptional athlete does not become excluded from his team by his outstanding performances, rather noted, praised, and often rewarded. While becoming ever more integral to the squad, he concurrently exceeds it. Even our earth, wondrous as she is, finds her orbit star centred. And what centres language? Or thought for that matter? Or poetry? Not some unmoving foundation, rather, around what do they circle? From what course do they hold or veer? Surely things fall apart,16 yet it seems obvious that for us to see the exceptional we must already know the every day, the common.17 We only note the rare and exceptional due to that which surrounds them. Stars burn brilliantly when hanging in empty stygian space. Our sun does not centre the cosmos, rather only our modest community of revolving spheres. And celestial centres – and the centrality of our exceptional ideas – offer the possibility of illumination and life; until, inevitably, they swell, redden, and cease all assistance. Or they go supernova. Either end being now unknown, the question remains how to rightly consider the relation of the compass to the centre. Perhaps through what is shared? And what is shared? That which lies between us and is common, open, and free? The relation of the exceptional to the shared signals to us the depth of need that lies between us. We have always already been shown how much want lies

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between every single one of us, how much necessity and contingency stirs between the world and us. It does not even have to be a grandiose design of negative definition or necessary contraries. Space and distance – difference – are enough. We share in our being apart and having a part. We share in each of us having received our own portion and everyone else theirs. We share in the separating space. We all have equal claim to the airy nothing between us. In this shared distance the common arises. And that commonality becomes the unseen sun centring life’s movements. Language, more than anything else, perfectly reveals this unnoticed sun of shared distance. This inconspicuous star finds its home in the hidden dimension of language and thought. That is to say, it is housed in imagination. Imagination names both the meaning of the relational space between us, as well as our own intelligible apportionment of that space. This relational space between us finds its shape and place according to a merged – textually or performatively – socio-historic imagination that we inherit. We ever already know the stories and tragedies and villains and heroes and gods of our time: Ones that have endured to form our image- and narrative-rich milieu. And we are all apportioned our share of that imagination to do with what we will. We can remain default inheritors who merely daydream or suppose in quite uninspired ways, or we can arm ourselves and intentionally enter and abide ‘there’, in the space between (perhaps always searching for its centre and boundaries). Attempting the latter attests to the power of conjecture, ‘the ability to interpret signs and omens’.18 It is learning to see what is and what is otherwise. We should also consider how the word imagination – and imagination’s word – exchanges the phenomenon of interpersonal space for a linguistic signifier and concept. This gives us greater intelligible access at the cost of existential separation. We come to better grasp the possibilities and complications of the space between us (hence the power of conjecture and vision otherwise…), yet a greater subjectivity follows with a lingering loneliness and alienation. Accordingly, imagination signals both the difference to which we all have an equal claim (that vast relational nothingness shaped by a socio-historic imagination) and implies our own share of that difference (the vast space separating us not only from others, but from ourselves as well). We became strangers to ourselves long before any economic theory of class struggle or psychoanalysis articulated the phenomenon. We must now continually seek and get reacquainted with ourselves. As that young thief of fire, Rimbaud, told us some time back, ‘I is someone else.’19

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Being Shakespearized Concluding his examination of society’s perennial appropriation of Shakespeare, Gary Taylor, in Reinventing Shakespeare, tells us, ‘If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole.’20 He puts the centre and centrality of Shakespeare to question, largely by showing how the values of society – from the English Renaissance up till now – keep getting eisegetically read back into the Bard. We keep refashioning our idol to reflect us so that he might remain our idol or at least justify his status as such. Were we to dislodge Shakespeare from his throne, Taylor argues, we would still find him excellent, but certainly not the timeless poet par excellence. If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter – all pour ceaselessly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light from other stars – other poets, other dramatists – is wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us. He warps cultural spacetime; he distorts our view of the universe around him.

He continues, But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values.

Ultimately concluding that, Before he became a black hole, Shakespeare was a star – but never the only one in our galaxy. He was unusually but not uniquely talented. He was indeed singular, not because he surpassed all other writers, but simply because he was a unique and unrepeatable individual, living in a unique and unrepeatable time and place. He was no less and no more singular than anyone else. Shakespeare remains, like every other somebody, like us but not us.21

We might largely agree with this hypothesis and yet still argue that appearance outweighs truth (or that truth is only ever appearance). If Shakespeare seems to us the greatest poet of the English language, then he is. Yet how would we move past the limitations of this logic if we wanted to do so? We could consider how certain lines and characterizations of Shakespeare have taken on a life of their own apart from their original purpose (perhaps part of Professor Taylor’s point) and have, as Northrop Frye writes, ‘become, not simply familiar, but equipped with a

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relevance to hundreds of situations in addition to their original one’.22 According to this argument, we are not intentionally (or unintentionally) making Shakespeare relevant or representative of our values or concerns; it is, rather, an aspect of the phenomenon of the collected works of Shakespeare that they already contain the tension of the ‘divine ordering’ and eventual ‘existential disordering’ of society and the world. We might consider such scope to be the word – the logos – of Shakespeare, something touched upon when we speak of ‘Shakespearean proportions’. He was not the first or the last to see revolution in the cosmos and nature, nor in society high, low and common, but he was the first to show it in such a way that it refused to recede. His poetry keeps generating, representing, and disclosing. Along those lines: ‘Every age creates its own Shakespeare.’23 So opens Marjorie Garber’s major contribution, Shakespeare After All. Her reading seems to move along a similar track to Taylor’s, yet it hits upon something his does not. But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson’s word, ‘Shakespearized’.24

We might see the truth of Shakespeare’s influence upon us in how we remember history, see love and tragedy, think of time and ageing, anticipate children, and understand acting and writing. We do not choose this influence. No global affirmation took place culminating in the ‘plausibility and cohesion’ of Shakespeare’s characters.25 No universal suffrage enfranchising the poet’s works in perpetuity. We simply ever know them as they come to us; a given upon which we can rely. Shakespeare and the works of Shakespeare have become part of something much more generative than the works of critics and historians (though, without a doubt, they belong to and need one another). The dimension of language and thought that already has us (often invisibly so) contains Plato, Paul, Dante, Marx, Melville, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Rilke, Nietzsche, Arendt, and so many others – to say nothing of the many great works and writers arising outside of the Western tradition – and some, naturally, wield more or less influence at certain times among particular peoples. Do we here ignore a patriarchal and hierarchal reality? Some fact indicating that while some might take great pleasure and derive insight by reading Shakespeare, they do so only relative to their own conditioned taste, their own very occidental experience? The tyranny of long dead white men and the institutions that function as their phylacteries? Do we perpetuate an old unhelpful myth if we follow Ben Jonson’s claim that Shakespeare is ‘for all time’? If we think that

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his centrality and influence derive from some static constancy, then yes. Yes, if timelessness and universality of language can only indicate haunting imperialism and dogmatic fixity. And yes again, if our interpretations function as analogues of sixteenth-century culture and conceptions of the cosmos. But no, if we know that while words and thoughts are bound together, they are, strictly speaking, not the same. No, if we can see that the words themselves bear centrality and influence, not the long dead man. And no once more, if we understand that the power of his works derives from their perpetual mutability, beautiful variation, and ceaselessly reflective renovation. Again, listen: THESEUS Go, one of you, find out the forester, For now our observation is performed; And since we have the vanguard of the day, My love shall hear the music of my hounds. Uncouple in the western valley; let them go. Dispatch, I say, and find the forester. [Exit one] We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top, And mark the musical confusion Of hounds and echo in conjunction. HIPPOLYTA I was with Hercules and Cadmus once When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. THESEUS My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, So flewed, so sanded, and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew, Crook-kneed, and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls, Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells, Each under each. A cry more tuneable Was never holla’d to nor cheered with horn In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly. Judge when you hear. But soft: what nymphs are these?26

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Of this exchange Mark Van Doren writes, ‘Had Shakespeare written nothing else than this he still might be the best of English poets.’27 He believes that around Theseus’ fifth line something happens: Shakespeare’s poetry becomes musical. ‘The passage sets a forest ringing, and sets a play with the music it has deserved.’28 The words begin to sing when Theseus tells Hippolyta how his hounds will make music for the hunt, ‘And mark the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction’. The fierce and anxious sounds and echo of sounds of wellbred hounds underway of prey, taken within the contrasting serenity of the arboreal surround, asks for such descriptions as ‘musical confusion’ and ‘echo in conjunction’. Stephen Greenblatt agrees, hearing in this same play what Van Doren hears: ‘For the playwright relied not on elaborate machinery but on language, simply the most beautiful language any English audience had ever heard.’29 Also worth noting, just before the hunting party entered the faeries exited, rhyming in their egress. Shakespeare stops the rhyming, in part, to set a tone that marks the difference between spirits and mortals. Yet, though rhyming comes to a temporary caesura, the poetic composition actually deepens. The sound and flow and imagery of the language opens to our imagination. It calls us. Never did I hear Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

Does this moment of poetry bespeak some climatic scene? An entreaty of true love? Some speech to inspire soldiers? A show closer? No. It is Theseus bragging about his dogs. It is the poetry of the every day. Or, better put, the every day poetized. In this we find what makes Shakespeare resilient to the wear and tear of time. All readers and attenders find themselves welcome to hear tales of love, hate, mercy, jealousy, all manner of exchanges, misunderstandings, revengings, matrimonial and funerary resolutions; the stuff of life in detail and abstraction become poetized and performed. We see it all felt and contemplated, ignored and discovered, lived. Still, for this sort of reception, we latecomers and epigones must attune ourselves to the shape and sound of Shakespeare’s language. Perhaps it helps to remember that at bottom his language arrives as stylized Elizabethan English, the same basic stuff of the King James Bible. Recalling this might also provoke us to consider how it is, while masterfully composed and stylized, essentially still everyday language? Not in the sense of ‘merely’ every day, rather ‘essentially’ every day.30 Not some ordinary use of language or the way that

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people casually spoke to one another, rather language necessarily taken from at hand language and transformed. Common language and concerns are taken and returned renovated, offered back infused with novelty: a gift of degrees that all great poets seem to possess.31 The poetic-existential philosophizing we hear in the plays arises within concrete situations and life narratives, never within purely abstract theorizing and problem solving. They speak in human language – the language of feeling, misunderstanding, sincerity, inadequacy, excession – not in the theologian’s Latin or the philosopher’s Greek or the scientist’s mathematics. And by this human language we find Shakespeare’s characters coping with their tragic or comedic or romantic lot. HERMIA O hell! – to choose love by another’s eyes. LYSANDER Or if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’, The jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion. HERMIA If then true lovers have been ever crossed, It stands as an edict in destiny. Then let us teach our trial patience, Because it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs, Wishes and tears, poor fancy’s followers.32

Here his art, as it so often does, echoes life. Yet does so in such a way that its everydayness shines until it’s barely recognizable as every day: Hermia and Lysander are in love but her dad does not approve. A common tale told here poetically. And our late modern lives, undeniably (if unknowingly) influenced by his art, in turn become echoes of his art. We think our ruined romantic relationships through Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet and Ophelia, and our comedically complex ones through Midsummer’s Lovers or As You Like It’s Rosalind and Orlando.

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Let us here assert clearly that whatever might shine for us – move us, provoke us, reach us – originally stirs in the everyday.33 How in the everyday? Largely due to centrality not being something strictly separate from everything else. For centrality of merit and influence ought not to be understood as representative of transcendent ‘height,’ as something way up over our heads. Our sun, for instance, slowly rotates at the middle of our system. Elsewhere its light arrives already old and as one of billions. It is ‘no less and no more singular’ than any other star. Neither the sun nor we sit at the centre of the universe, true. But we, in an existential sense – a most human sense – certainly sit at the centre of the portion wherein we dwell and from which we observe. Determining (or finding) centrality in the arts, then, by analogic extension, would be best grasped by context and historicity. We receive canons as the sound of the de facto and the echo of the de jure. Hence, Shakespeare has not become a black hole. Too much light still proceeds from him. Too much literary and performative and intellectual photosynthesis yet occurs from his pages. Of course this fecundity works through us, but such has always been the case with texts actively interpreted rather than squarely observed.34 Like the epics of Homer or the Epistles of Paul, Shakespeare always already influences our socio-historic imagination and aesthetic registers (sympathetically or not). Thus when we read and witness him we always find something contemporary and relevant, yet archaic and elusive too. By the way of sincere attunement, to allow our imagination to meaningfully coalesce with his within the hidden dimension of language and thought becomes the only relevant provisional consideration. For without such aural and imagerich conjunction all questions come forward as merely academic and formal, or perhaps as stilted attempts to contemporize and disingenuously make relatable, never truly personal, authentically ethical, intellectually valuable. Along the lines of this given influence and an entreaty to allow his work the power to appropriate us, we might now best read Shakespeare as a secular bible.35 Many have been doing so for centuries. Not a canon of beliefs and laws and morals, rather one of language, artistry, dimensionality, something by which to become educated, humbled, and inspired; something that ever opens before us, thus revealing what is open.36 Leslie Fiedler, in The Stranger in Shakespeare, explaining why he wrote his book on Shakespeare, beautifully articulates these sentiments. It is primarily for myself, then, that I have written this book: to bind my past to my present and to refresh my soul by immersing myself for a little while in a stream of living words and images. I have grown desiccated on the long march

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through the arid flatlands of ordinary language: the language of law courts and committee meetings, of newspapers and demonstrations. And towards what Sinai I thought I was advancing I find it difficult to remember. Perhaps it was always Shakespeare, though I did not know it.37

Becoming song As part of this introductory chapter we will consider Heidegger’s ‘aesthetics’ – that is, his attempt ‘to overcome the concept of aesthetics itself ’38 – as an elementary frame for our ongoing interpretations of Shakespeare. We will also begin to develop a broader Heideggerian lens and lexicon. For those familiar with Heidegger this portion might read as something of a rehearsal, but for those unfamiliar with his thought, this part will hopefully provide a concise and lively reading of his original conceptions of art, truth, and language. [Aside. Why Heidegger? The answer most basically rests with how these two writers illuminate one another, which I will hopefully demonstrate in what follows. Still, the question of reading Heidegger and Shakespeare together remains somewhat complex. As he tended to work mainly with Greek and German poets and philosophers (being overly possessed by the notion of Bodenständigkeit and a subsequent linguistic and cultural chauvinism), Heidegger, unfortunately, did not have much to say about Shakespeare, and what little he did have to say seems far from adulatory. For example, in his lecture course on Parmenides (1942–3), Heidegger writes, If hardship and suffering are mentioned here as descendants of Strife [Eris], then precisely this origin in strife should teach us to avoid the modern misinterpretation and not attempt to understand pain and suffering ‘psychologically’ as kinds of ‘lived experiences’. Our usual interpretation of them in terms of lived experience is the main reason Greek tragedy is still entirely sealed off to us. AeschylusSophocles on the one side, and Shakespeare on the other, are incompatible worlds. German humanism has mixed them up and has made the Greek world completely inaccessible. Goethe is disastrous.39

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Nietzsche writes favourably of Shakespeare (and Goethe), it is clear that Heidegger takes from him the bias that the Greeks offer unique insights into the nature of existence and testify to long forgotten truths of being. He also gains the sense of modernity’s distance from the Greeks. We have simply become too influenced by the culturally

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embedded theories of psychology – and the sciences in general – to ‘hear’ what the Greeks ‘truly said’. We now only hear them through our own contemporary intellectual and moral matrixes; we interpret them only in light of the values and assumptions of modernity. If we genuinely wanted to know the Greeks, however, we could do so only in a ‘Greek way’. Of course we do not need to agree with Heidegger here to appreciate his argument, which ought to strike us most basically as a question of how readers approach texts (especially select Greek texts) in order to discover the wisdom concealed therein. It is a question of hermeneutics. And yet when it comes to making judgements about which texts we ought to read – in the pursuit of wisdom – it is also, whatever Heidegger might claim, a matter of predilection, of taste. That Heidegger places Shakespeare on the failing side of this distinction, however – unlike other poets of the modern era he chooses to engage – appears much more problematic, particularly given that he does not offer a word of explanation as to how or why he came to such a conclusion. As this judgement arrives merely posited and not satisfactorily argued, the underlying position of this project contends that Heidegger’s interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare falls terribly short. And I do not think I am alone. Both Levinas (Existence and Existents) and Derrida (Specters of Marx) appear to quibble with Heidegger’s dismissal of Shakespeare, if only by engaging the playwright to critique the philosopher. We have too the overall quality and quantity of German writers who have had much to say admiringly about Shakespeare since the eighteenth century: Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and others. And then there is the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, one of the world’s oldest literary societies, dedicated to promoting Shakespeare throughout German-speaking areas (which probably no doubt annoyed Heidegger). In any case, Heidegger had little to say (and nothing affirmative) about Shakespeare, so, again, why read the two alongside one another? In addition to believing Heidegger wrong in his assessment that Shakespeare could not affect the same sort of poetic power and original insights as Aeschylus and Hölderlin, I believe that when we take what Heidegger says about language and poetry, and then ‘truly listen’ to Shakespeare, we will find a harmonic correspondence, we will see essential elements of his philosophy sublimely instantiated. I can only ask that readers read along with me and decide if they hear this as well.] In The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–6) Heidegger writes, ‘Art is the origin of the artwork and of the artist.’40 He wants to move away from the ‘modern subjectivism’ that interprets creation as the activity of a ‘sovereign subject’s performance of genius’,41 a move similar in spirit to Nietzsche’s declaration that

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the artist is transparent.42 He wants to return to an archaic understanding of art as the ‘founding of truth’.43 Heidegger is neither alone nor the first in these desires. The English poet John Keats touches upon this at the end of his Ode on a Grecian Urn: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’44

The work of art reveals something more than information, facts, or pleasing visual sensations. It tells us that beauty is truth, that they are founded upon one another, that they are co-constitutive. It also tells us that the work of art travels through time and space differently – ‘Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’ – its beginnings and reasons lost to us save our imaginative engagement. The artist and the work’s ‘objective’ meaning must stand aside and whisper (if they say anything) as the interpreter begins her task. This means that the founding of truth, as the bestowing, grounding, and beginning of truth, arises in the happening of art – a perennial event requiring an imaginative and historically situated interpretation – rather than with the will of an individual artist or the objective conditions of an artwork. Put another way, the most primal activity of art – art as an event that we bear witness to – ought to be read prior to the subjective agency of the artist or the interpretive primacy assumed of art as an object that merely reflects cultural forces or simply contains its maker’s intentions. Otherwise, if we fail to think and to read art prior to its enmeshment in this artificial integument of intention, hollow subjectivity, and illusion of objectivity, then our presumptions cloud our ability to hear what the work wants to say. If we wish to understand what art is and what it means then we must begin with its origin as an active event, as a phenomenon always already happening when we encounter it. Heidegger pursues this particular path – art, truth, and language – after his well-known ‘turn’ (die Kehre), where the language of Being and Time eventually becomes the language of ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’. He largely abandons a highly technical lexicon to adopt a somewhat more lyrical, if ambiguous, one. The reason for this change in style more than likely lies in the development of his understanding regarding the topos of his ongoing project: being or the meaning of being. If we can describe his earlier work generally as an analysis of various modes and structures of being, then his later interests might best be described

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as an exploration of how being opens before us. That is, being as a somewhat passive and proper subject of investigation on the one hand, and being as the opening of what is on the other. That which is can only be what it is in as much as it opens up and comes to appearance. And art and poetry, as things that come into being, naturally lend themselves to this change in tone. To help affect this shift Heidegger returns to the linguistic roots of creativity, where he finds Greek poiesis. He finds that ‘the founding of truth’ plays off of Greek poiesis, from the verb poieo, ‘to make’, ‘to create’, ‘to bring-forth’. Poetic or artistic creation, as the primal activity of bringing-forth (or opening-up), is essential to any human sense of ground and grounding (der Grund, die Gründe, gründen, die Gründung), in that we ‘poetically construct’ the conceptual foundation upon which we erect any sense or system of understanding. Metaphysically stated, we begin with precepts. Existentially formulated, we begin with human existence. Even nihilism begins with a negation presupposing nothingness or meaninglessness. And we would do well to remember here that ‘truth’ for the Greeks was aletheia, which Heidegger, who rejects any marriage between truth and correctness,45 wants to translate somewhat more literally as ‘disclosure’ or ‘unconcealment’.46 This tells us that every instance of artistic-poetic creation acts as an event of disclosure, as an occasion of opening. Yet, if we have rejected the intention of the artist and the passivity of objective meaning of an artwork, what besides the image or the abstraction or the rhyming verse itself is disclosed? What opens? A rift.47 This rift exists between what Heidegger calls ‘earth’ and ‘world’.48 Earth designates the most basic and sensuous site of non-human being, the presence of the stone, the tree, the serpent, and the eagle, while world signals the dimension brought forth by human creativity and preservation, by our abiding and dwelling.49 We share the universe with all manner of things, but we only have access to our own peculiar allotment of it, we can only dwell in the realm given to us. (All else is theoretical and fantastical speculation.) In this sense, the world is ‘open’ to us and the earth is ‘closed’.50 These two realms exist simultaneously and near, and yet stand in opposition to one another. ‘Strife [between earth and world]’, Heidegger writes, ‘is not a rift (Riss), as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other.’51 Again we can hear Nietzsche’s Hellenic echo: ‘the Greek knows the artist only in personal struggle.’52 We hear too the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.53 This is the intimate conflict between what is essentially opposed: our own historical being (our own existence, our own worldliness) and that which is not historical as such, rather that which most basically is (the

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earth, the elements, non-human beings).54 Not humanity versus the earth, but the oppositional double nature of reality, of everything encompassed within both earth and world, of all beings historical and unhistorical, rational and non-rational. Heraclitus understood the essential nature of this rift: ‘One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict.’55 Informed in part by Nietzsche’s world of ‘monstrous energy’ and endless ‘will to power’,56 and Heraclitus’ conflictual cosmos, Heidegger reads the earth as becoming our world by way of this opposition, and yet does so without either realm becoming fully appropriated or diminished by the other.57 This oppositional mutuality happens by way of our creative activity upon the evergenerative earth.58 This creative activity, however, arrives ever contingent upon the non-incorporative simultaneity of the earth with our world. He does not see earth and world locked in some mere disorderly or destructive conflict (though it certainly can be disorderly and destructive). He writes, In essential strife, rather, the opponents [earth and world] raise each other into self-assertion of their essential natures. Self-assertion of essence, however, is never rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the provenance of one’s own being. In strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself.59

Their rivalry draws out their essence and pushes them towards new horizons. Their rivalry, more so than their singular assertiveness, allows for ever-new manifestations of their essential nature. [Aside. It might be helpful here to distinguish truth from fact.60 First, we must concede that truth (die Wahrheit, Greek aletheia), as something founded, is, like fact (die Tatsache more so than der Fakt61), always historical. Truth, however, as we approach it in Heidegger, is not the Platonic idea of truth or that which rests in the upper most reaches of the Order of Being (ordo essendi). Truth, like all else, including facts, happens in the world. Events occurring in a particular milieu, understood through interpretation, recalled by and subject to memory: such bespeaks our historical relationship with knowledge whatsoever. Yet if truth once bespoke a special kind of knowledge arising within the more uncanny modes of human activity (art, religion, philosophy), it has now come to reign most often as inflated fact, prestigious evidence, and the most vaunted principle of reality. Though to grasp the sense of it here, we must reclaim an understanding of truth that arises within both the regions of the everyday (where we feel most at home) and the uncanny (where we feel most estranged). This means that

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while truth is necessarily historical – contextual – it has little to do with facts or evidence or verifiable theories. For when we refer to facts we always already have an official account of them or their efficacy in mind, something seemingly ‘objective’. We employ them in scientific research, refer to them in courts of law, make use of them in business transactions, and twist them in political debates. But a declaration of truth originates between something’s essence (ousia, from einai, ‘to be’) and us, and not merely from an (often delusory) objective account of an aspect of reality (or reality as a whole). It not only speaks to what makes something what it is, it also invites us to wonder ever why it is and why it is the way that it is. In indicating what makes something what it is, a truth claim – when founded upon the most elemental and primal appearance of what is (aesthesis) – which occurs in language, opens up the possibility of meaningfulness, the possibility of something becoming saturated with meaning. Once filled with meaning an event or deed or happening possesses the means to exceed its original context. It becomes capable of trans-historical significance and near-universal resonance. Facts cannot do this (though when harnessed as propaganda, facts can prove quite effective). Even though they might warrant all manner of analysis and application, they can only attempt a provisional and ultimately dissatisfying sense of meaning, as they tend not to invite deep reflection. While truth, with its rich and permeating sense of meaning, invites us to consider – inexhaustibly – why something is what it is: a question and an answer forever riddled together. Truth accomplishes this powerful sense of meaning by accepting – utterly and essentially – the disclosure of reason (logos) for any event in that event’s very happening: the sun’s shining, the river’s flowing, and the wind’s blowing. This includes not only the event in question, but also our own happening (existence) and the happening of the intermediate dimension (metaxy) wherein all things come to appearance and intelligible encounters can occur at all.62 Truth does not arise from passive or disinterested observation. It is instead quite passionate, like words exchanged between young lovers in the middle of the night: She speaks. O, speak again, bright angel; for thou art As glorious to this night, being o’er my head, As is a winged messenger of heaven Unto the white upturned wond’ring eyes Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him When he bestrides the lazy-passing clouds And sails upon the bosom of the air.63

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It might even be more phenomenologically accurate at this point to say that truth claims us in a way that facts and evidence cannot. Finally, facts signify an account of reality that attempts to interpret world in an ‘unbiased’ way, while truth appears only when reality becomes transparent through ‘attuned’ interpretation. We have to ‘see through’ things, including ourselves, to find truth. Thus to know truth means to allow what is apparent (offensichtlich) to become transparent (durchsichtig) in the process of being brought forth. In terms of art, this means the process of being founded. Art is therefore an accomplishment best known through the work that accomplishes it rather than the accomplishment itself. For that reason we step away from observing completed, static ‘things’, and step towards seeing and thinking about dynamic ‘happenings’. This distinction takes us closer to the origin that Heidegger has in mind: phenomena considered as verbs instead of nouns, art taken as events instead of things.] Now, though a product of the human world, truth must be creatively brought forth from the earth and her elements. Yet a bond ever remains between our ways and the earth’s, a union that speaks to the intimate and ceaseless strife between earth and world. The intimacy or propinquity itself – as knowledge or relationship – of this opposition is the conflict that art manifests. The rift brought forth and accomplished through art shows simultaneously the merging and binding of opposing forces and energies; and yet, Heidegger contends, it conceals this opposition as well.64 How, if it makes the rift manifest, does it also conceal it? His assertion of art’s revealing–concealing nature regarding truth signals one of his most well-known double gestures: ‘The rift must set itself back into the heavy weight of stone, the dumb hardness of wood, the dark glow of colors.’65 That is, art – as constructive-poetical activity – founds truth (as rift) through the work of artists in the elementally or linguistically fashioned work of art. It opens and then fixes – fashions, fabricates, frames – what it opens. It is a literal ‘out-line’, a look, a shape. The earth yields herself (or is made to yield) to creators as materials and mediums: marble, light, clay, cotton, breath, cedar, gravity, ore, sound. And so we see or hear or feel shapes and sounds and colours and textures – the elemental stuff of the earth become otherwise than – yet what we see and hear and feel is not the truth of art as a mere construction or product, rather the truth of art as the opening of the elements and forces of the earth as world. As our world. And what was opened by art and fixed into form becomes concurrently and permanently hidden within it. It becomes object-ified: the rifting forth activity concealed in an object’s seeming intelligible proximity.

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Heidegger exemplifies this revealing–concealing incarnation of conflictual truth by way of a Greek temple. A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses a figure of the god, and in the concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple.66

The temple allows for the incarnation of the absent god. As a work of art, the temple both conceals and reveals. It conceals (or encloses) the figuration of the god in order to reveal (or let stand out) the imaginary presence of the god. Here, art founds truth – in this instance, a vision of the divine – which otherwise remains elusive, ethereal, essentially absent. We must, therefore, interpret any given work of art in light of the activity that brought it forth instead of the object alone, for the object alone functions merely as a thing pointing elsewhere. And as it is creative activity that most originally – nonobject-ively – engages what is pointed to, so it is that the activity must be principally interrogated and kept in mind as any given work is interpreted (though not to the neglect of interpreting the interpreter and the realm wherein interpretation occurs). Of course the work by its very creation becomes concrete and historical – therefore not to be dismissed as a ‘mere appearance’  – but the optic by which to read it must become a living, contentious, and open optic; an optic that is open to the opening that appears closed but in truth is ever opening; a lens that pierces the sculpted, painted, poetized rift between earth and world. [Aside. A thousand times over we could read and hear the Greek tragedies, yet until we have donned the mask of Dionysus and imbibed his ecstasies we will never really know them. Lacking such a participatory and celebratory communion, certain works will go unheard and unheeded. All to say, we must translate ourselves – give ourselves over – to any given work of art before we can ever truly interpret it. Giving ourselves over to a work might be the most essential element to any hermeneutic interpretation of that work. As Emerson tells us, ‘We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.’67 Most particular to this project, we must attune ourselves to the language of Shakespeare, assume his art, affect his rhythm, if we want to hear his words.] We have so far been following after Heidegger’s art-truth relationship. Here, however, we will conclude our preliminary reading of him by turning more

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directly upon language and poetizing, that which brings us nearer to Shakespeare or, perhaps, him to us. Near the end of The Way to Language, Heidegger recalls Hölderlin: Much, from morning onward, Since we became a conversation and hear from one another, Have human beings undergone; but soon (we) will be song.68

Immediately following this citation he recalls his own 1947 declaration that ‘Language is the house of being’.69 He then writes of radiance, of returning to language’s essence, of welcoming language’s embrace. These descriptions and occurrences refer to an eschatological event. Not the return of the Christian Messiah, or some mythical retrieval of original language and thought, but of language happening through us. The event of language. A mutual and merging occurrence: our enowning of language and language’s appropriation of us.70 The passage from Hölderlin speaks of a time when humans become song, bald sind aber Gesang (wir). Of a time when not only everyday language will sing, but humans, in their very being, will become song. Along this path, only a few years after the death of Hölderlin, Emerson writes that we find such a transformation into song – into eventful singing – in Shakespeare. This power of expression, or transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and had added a new problem to metaphysics. … He had the power to make one picture. … Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated.71

The new metaphysical ‘problem’ is the perfect representation – through poetic translation – of the world as song. Hölderlinian poetological eschatology actualized two hundred years earlier by the English playwright. Not, however, concretely, rather performatively instantiated in every attuned reading and production: the metaphysics of singing translation; or of bringing-forth as poetic representation; or of the transformation of the everyday world into a richer world of song. Heidegger thinks this transformation by our opening to the embrace of language.72 He too believes that it is an event anticipated and worked for by true philosophers and poets. In his Letter on Humanism, he avers: Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.73

While the visual and performing arts might also found truth, ‘language’, most pronouncedly through the activity of philosophers (as thinkers) and poets, ‘alone brings beings as beings into the open for the first time’.74 Language bespeaks the phenomenon – the activity – that allows for world, for dwelling. By its creativepoetic essence, language exchanges earth for world.75 It gives and receives. It brings us into the possibility of a meaningful relationship with what is. Language speaks truth. By it earth gains dimensionality for human being, the world opens. Though earth and nature seem to perdure by hiding and concealing, that we notice their hiding at all testifies to language’s power to alert us to that which secrets itself away.76 As Odysseus was able to hide his tears from all save Alcinous because he was too near, so language brings us nearer to what hides from us.77 However, until we become song – fully embraced by radiating language – we perpetually fail to hear the essence of language (which we earlier named metaphorization). We fail to hear its truth. For Heidegger the essence of language must be thought through the same rifting forth as art.78 And in its purest or most original mode it is spoken, it is saying, it is singing. Man would not be man if it were denied him to speak – ceaselessly, ubiquitously, with respect to all things, in manifold variations, yet for the most part tacitly – by way of an ‘It is’. Inasmuch as language grants this very thing, the essence of man consists in language.79

Were we here to merge our thought with Heidegger’s – that is, that language is essentially metaphor on the one hand, and that the essence of man consists in language on the other – then we can begin to see our essence in its essential metaphoricity.80 We can begin to become authentically transparent to ourselves – see through ourselves – to know ourselves as the site and activity of exchange and rifting forth. Yet as long as we make language serve us, instead of us language – keep our essence enslaved to an ignorant will and a failing design81 – we will remain ‘a sign that is not read’.82 We must first learn to read ourselves by listening to what language has been trying to say through us all along: being abides in and through language. Still, this listening that allows for singing only occurs eschatologically. Only at the end will we become song. But that end, as we have said, never fully comes. It remains always just out of reach.83 The time when humans heed language as their essence never actually arrives. ‘We’, collectively, never really catch the poets or the thinkers, only ‘you’ or ‘I’ do, or an ‘other’ elsewhere who is otherwise

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than us does. So while universal language as messianic song never returns to rebuild the temple for all peoples for all times, we – each according to our own lot (moira) – can attune ourselves to language, can be embraced by it, can become song. Still, how does language come forth – rift forth – through us? How does it claim us? We, like the figuration of the god, must allow language to enclose us as the sanctuary does the effigy. Instead of thinking as the builders of the temple, we can think of ourselves as those for whom the temple (as language) stands. By it enclosing us – housing our essence as a sign – we can stand out for ourselves. By language’s concealing us in its embrace, our metaphorical, symbolic, signifying essence can come forth. We, simply, though not without much effort and risk, have to accept language – as work, activity, phenomenon – as our most essential and needed origin. And this acceptance begins with the nearness of language, with its everydayness, with it being shared – with what allows for the possibility of the exceptional. Heidegger tells us this when he writes of the difference between artists and those who only technically or merely routinely use the same materials. Sculptors work with stone as masons do, painters with paint like everyone else, and poets likewise with the word. The difference – the exceptional difference – arises in artists not using up the material.84 The earth’s ingredients become medium for the rifting forth of truth is not used up in reaching some technical conclusion, but is rather set forth to show, shine, carnate. To sing. To be sure, the poet uses the word – not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them all up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.85

What sets the poet apart from the painter and sculptor, or even the dancer or the musician, remains the collective everydayness of her material. Everyone everywhere uses language every day. They greet, enquire, request, thank, take-leave, and express and indicate all manner of day-to-day affairs of life. But by thinning and wasting words, they use the word up. The exceptional poet, contrariwise, as shepherd, works to cultivate and preserve the word – to adhere and exceed – to assist its rifting forth as true saying, as a sign of the god’s singing.86 “Soon (we) will be song.” And Shakespeare? He is such a poet. His work stands as such a temple. When we enter into it (whether we are or are not always already Shakespearized),

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it encloses us and allows us to stand out. It makes us transparent to ourselves. It cultivates and preserves the word by beautifully rifting forth truth: giving imagined lives occurrence, proportion, and dimension. Still, as Heidegger says of language, Shakespeare’s language only does this when we truly hear it, heed it, accept its embrace, only when it becomes song for us and the sound of it surrounds us like ‘such sweet thunder’. Or so goes the hope and aim of this work.

Finding the Queen A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–6) begins in matrimonial expectation, an expectation connected to a memory of opposition – the conflictual courtship of Theseus and Hippolyta – as he says to her, ‘I wooed thee with my sword’. Love was forged between them in battle. Given the origin of their relationship (a hot blooded genesis), the time of their nuptials, from Theseus’ vantage, seems farther off than it is. O, methinks how slow This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires Like to a stepdame or a dowager Long withering out a young man’s revenue.87

He personifies the heavenly orb as ‘she’. The moon – the consort (or sister) of the sun, the ancient goddess of night, tides, and magic, the great lover, the favoured of poets – becomes the object of Theseus’ impatience. Hippolyta counters his impatience. Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, Four nights will quickly dream away the time, And then the moon, like to a silver bow New bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities.88

This reverse poetization, which subdues the moon as a witness to their impending marriage, seems to satiate her betrothed. So much so that he immediately orders the Master of Revels to start revelling. Here and near the end are the only times we see her clever poetic foiling. She was quite recently queen of the Amazonians, marking her exceptional among excellent warriors. Duke Theseus seemingly ‘tamed’ her by bettering her in combat. Now, while something of her dignity and her countering insight lingers, her outright radiation as a strong heroine has disappeared: Whither the queen of the Amazons? But before we can even get lost

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in that question, bilious Egeus enters and restarts the scene, not in recollected conflict, but conflict present and pressing (and one also love-heated). ‘Full of vexation’, he comes complaining of his wilful, if not ‘bewitched’, daughter, Hermia. He wants her to stop fooling around with Lysander and instead marry Demetrius, whom he has chosen for her. By law she belongs to her father. I beg the ancient privilege of Athens: As she is mine, I may dispose of her, Which shall be either to this gentlemen Or to her death, according to our law89

Given the context, we should not allow such antiquated patriarchy and absurd gender bias to surprise us (as when we read Antigone we do not fault Sophocles for Creon’s treatment of the eponymous character). Even given the varying portraits of prejudice and disenfranchisement Shakespeare presents, women often stand out and show us the exceptional. Here, however, Hippolyta remains strikingly silent. Egeus claims his daughter as property and the queen of the Amazons stands by quietly. Desirous to find her agency and greatness we might consider her silence in light of some virtue, some sort of deliberate silence: ‘[Aside] What shall Coderlia speak? Love, and be silent.’ A powerful bearing witness to ignobility that speaks through quietus? A rhetoric of silence towards revolutionary subordination?90 Perhaps she simply waits for Theseus to correct him. Yet then her betrothed speaks: What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid. To you your father should be as a god, One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it.91

Theseus speaks of a social and biological world intertwined, one in which children (daughters in particular) reveal the figuration of the father: all children are revealing–concealing incarnations. If, however, daughters do not yield to their father’s will, they are found guilty of imperfection and put to death, like ruined marble, muddied oils, or unmelodious tunes. At such a display of male arrogance we easily envision Hippolyta’s brow furrowing and her hand reaching for sharpened steel as she sets to revisit the violent dance she danced with Theseus when they first met. How easily could they have here returned to their oppositional origin: ‘Strife is not a rift, as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to

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each other.’92 But, no. Perhaps she cares nothing for this stranger, this young Hermia. Or maybe she bides her time, waiting for some opportune moment to arise. Yet all these options seem out of step with her insightful and responsive poetry, as well as with what actually occurs, or glaringly does not occur, later in the play. There seems no good reason for her to remain silent other than having been subdued, and thus won over, by Theseus. Now she, like Richard of Richard II (though obviously lacking his lines and scenes), embodies one without agency of action in the world of the play. They can only poetically respond to the world. While Richard gives us more to despise, he does rant gorgeously. O villains, vipers, damned without redemption! Dogs easily won to fawn on any man! Snakes in my heart-blood warmed, that sting my heart! Three Judases, each one thrice-worse than Judas! Would they make peace? Terrible hell make war Upon their spotted souls for this offence!93

Shakespeare does not give Hippolyta the same humour or centrality, and perhaps he does so to grant room to manifest Oberon and Titania’s rifting forth? Or time for the Lovers’ four-way crossing? It seems a pleasant thought to imagine Shakespeare finding it difficult to fully disclose Hippolyta’s dimensionality. He truncates her proportions, though he allows her language to hint at them, merely to allow the play forward. Otherwise the unifying, conflictual rift between her and Theseus would appropriate the entire play, probably transforming it into a tragedy, or at the very least a complex romance.94 In any case, she now lives life largely according to Athenian tradition, whereby daughters and wives submit to fathers and husbands. Such is the Hippolyta dealt to us. Though to imagine her here rising to her hinted at proportions does provoke numerous possibilities for where this play could have gone. Yet this vision is only revealed through concealment. Only by her absence are we lured to this Hippolyta. Simultaneously, only in her fixed outline and edges – what is textually or performatively present – can she be so drawn-out between Shakespeare and us.

Envisioning love Hermia enters less poetically. Responding to Egeus’ claim that ‘Demetrius is a worthy gentleman,’ her first lines attempt a defence: ‘So is Lysander.’ Both Demetrius

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and Lysander seem fine and ‘fairly ranked’ suitors, but she loves Lysander. Not due to crossing spears, rather with poetry, gifts, and songs did he ‘subdue’ her. And given this play’s close proximity to Romeo and Juliet, we can imagine Lysander’s poetic and romantic prowess as a light homage to weighty Romeo (meaning of course that Demetrius never has a chance). Hermia does, however, appeal to empathic imagination: ‘I would my father looked with my eyes.’ If so, he would obviously see how fair and worthy Lysander appears. If he would but simply walk a mile in her shoes he could finally understand. He only needs vision to see. Yet, Hermia does not recognize how such empathic, imaginative vision merely reduces difference – whether oppositional or not – to sameness.95 A dialogue becomes a monologue, an intersection becomes a one way only. Theseus points out the equally emphatic counter vision: ‘Rather your eyes must with his judgment look.’ Her appeal bespeaks deeply felt desire, Theseus’ an ethical obligation. She has a duty to her father, her family, and her people. He understands her fully well and her father probably does too. Still, feelings play but one part (if they get cast at all) in formal and institutional relationships and arrangements, even marriage. Without the near blindfolded safeguarding of their interests – usually through laws, customs, and traditions (varying modes of nomos) – institutions become vulnerable to excesses of love, envy, rashness, cowardice, ambition, lack of ambition, pettiness, vulgarity, lust, disenchantment, dissidence, and so forth. The bond of marriage, which Theseus calls the ‘everlasting bond of fellowship’, must adhere to something more stable and less caustic and changeable. Hermia’s fault lies not with her love for Lysander, rather her lack of adherence to her obligations. Whether Egeus has chosen wisely (or lovingly) is quite beside the point. In this moment the light shines on Hermia. Love Lysander or fulfil her filial obligations? The rift between father and daughter becomes manifest through and due to competing bonds. The more radiant persona would linger there until the end of the play. He or she would attempt to struggle through the conflict, allowing it to resolve itself instead forcing a resolution. Awaiting an Aufhebung,96 not constructing one. She could do – be – more: she could stay on the verge, dwelling at the limit of possibility. Doing more, verging in the rift, might mean cross-dressing, trans-gendering, double cross- or trans-gendering, lying only with the truth or telling the truth with lies, becoming a fool, remaining silent, gaining the power to destroy and restore then letting it go, dying (or doing what Shakespeare himself seems to have done).97 Such verging usually resolves itself tragically, though not always. Portia, Hamlet, Rosalind, Coriolanus, Cordelia, Prospero: degrees and variations and outlines of rifting radiance on the verge. In any event, she and Lysander decide to run away and marry, inverting the tragic brilliance of Romeo and Juliet.

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Now, the rift between Hermia and her father, Egeus, tells us more about weakness than beauty, though even that reveals truth. Truth, as poetically founded, is here concealed in her father’s enclosing her, cutting off her possibilities: we see who he is. And it again becomes enclosed in Hermia’s lack of imagination to find ways of wrestling through those limitations imposed upon her: we see her too. These characters show us our everyday sort of human finitude. They reveal how we simply make uninspired decisions, act impulsively, respond gracelessly and without vision, even when filled with great love. We find a similarly weak presentation of the rifting forth of truth between Helena and Demetrius. Lysander informs us of Demetrius: Demetrius – I’ll avouch it to his head – Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena, And won her soul, and she, sweet lady, dotes, Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry Upon this spotted and inconstant man.98

Theseus has already heard about this, and one would assume Egeus has as well, though it does not seem to bother him. In any case, we see what sort of ‘lover’ Demetrius is. And his savage treatment of Helena only enhances this portrait. While she chases him into the forest to win him with professions of love, he tells us everything we need to know: ‘For I am sick when I do look on thee’; ‘I’ll run from thee and hide me in the brakes / And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.’ Here he negatively distances himself from his male counterpart, the poetical Lysander. Harold Bloom thinks the two characters interchangeable,99 though Demetrius’ cruelty, taken with his inconstancy, make that point only mechanically true. True, Lysander turns upon Hermia, but only due to a mistaken, meddling faerie. Demetrius’ female counterpart, Helena, does not have much to recommend her to us, and in fact she bears some responsibility for the confusions that occur (and showing her failings in friendship) by telling Demetrius of Hermia and Lysander’s secret plans. Yet there also seems no reason for her rough treatment. And while Hermia generally appears lovelier in character than she, Shakespeare does gift Helena with some poetry. We hear it in her chiasmatic exchange with Hermia near the end of the first scene, and in what might be the most revealing passage of the play regarding a philosophy of love: Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity.

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Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.100

She says this as a soliloquy, thus it arises angled towards our direct hearing. And what does she say? What is said through her? Shakespeare here grants her some of the same stuff he granted Hermia and Lysander, the lyrical voicing of deeply felt love he originated with Romeo and Juliet (even if it is here contextually somewhat pathetic). She says what only someone who sincerely loves can say when that love finds no reciprocity: love changes the way things appear. It alters judgements. The rift between Demetrius and Helena, while all in all weak, brings forth an elemental truth about how humans really love: blindly. The eyes alone do not see, rather they allow for us – as complex, psychical, sentient beings – to visibly perceive. Forget ‘mere appearances’ when it comes to love: It is all vision.101 We could reduce much of Helena’s pleas to ‘If only Demetrius could see what I see, feel what I feel, then he would know’. Of course, knowing is loving. Again, we find the faults of projecting an empathic imaginative vision – be it affection or belief – upon another being. Not reciprocity assumed or accepted by someone, but reciprocity expected or anticipated (which just might be the basis of civilized society102). To clarify, it is not that Helena is in any way wrong to feel the way she does about Demetrius (for love holds her fast), instead it is that she hounds him. She responds not to what he says, only to how she feels. And after considering the persona of Demetrius, the question ever remains, Why? In searching through their minor rifting we find the reason for her love in the rift itself. An opening for us to see what love actually is: blinded, anarchical, deeply felt vision. ‘[and squeezes the flower onto Lysander’s eyelids].’ Cupid is an agent of chaos.

Discovering the reason Love reveals chaos. For the Greeks, love (Eros) testifies to the primordial abyss and the original rift from which all that is came to be.103 Love arises prior to all the gods. And Helena and Lysander’s division, like Hermia and her father’s, disclose this elemental rift, yet only in the limited fashion we have described. These oppositions, taken with the greater, though strangely silent, rift between Theseus and Hippolyta (which we mainly have to imagine), find something of a palinode in the very vocal and powerful strife between Oberon and Titania.

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The King and Queen of the fair folk have a history with Theseus and Hippolyta. Apparently Hippolyta was once Oberon’s mistress and Titania loves Theseus. Yet this romantic history, even if only ‘forgeries of jealousy’, occludes the actual cleavage between the spirits, as well as what that strife does to the earth and to the mortal world. Winds, rains, fogs, floods, failing crops; the earth disjointed, terrible to its inhabitants. Titania describes the situation. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrain flock. The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green For lack of tread are undistinguishable. The human mortals want their winter cheer. No night is now with hymn or carol blessed. Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound; And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world By their increase now knows not which is which.104

The elements have turned from their natural cycles and now work against nature and human society. The earth has become irregular and unharmonious. The moon (which Theseus earlier indicted) is here again personified and singled out. Humans now suffer – more so than usual – from nature’s new strangeness. While we always have an unknown and unpredictable component in nature, there usually remains something reliable. Not now. Why? The Faerie Queen discloses: And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.105

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She and Oberon have caused this unrest. They debate something other than Theseus and Hippolyta, something so important that they do not attend their duties as the sovereigns of Faerie: And never since the middle summer’s spring Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.106

It seems nature requires the spirits to dance and sing – together, harmoniously, accordingly. They ought to be the song we are to become. ‘Soon (we) will be song.’ The gentle folk dwell in the forest; dryads in the trees, naiads in the streams, sylphs in the air, gnomes in the earth. These imaginary beings are largely invisible to us. Indeed, within the play, only Bottom directly interacts with them. Yet we also see constant crossings between the spirits and the lovers (though this is unknown to the lovers), and the faeries later appear at Theseus’ court in Athens. When so inclined they leave their dales or hills or woods and stir up trouble or gift us luck. Consider Oberon’s agent Puck: Are not you he That frights the maidens of the villag’ry, Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, And bootless make the breathless housewife churn, And sometime make the drink to bear no barm – Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm? Those that ‘hobgoblin’ call you and ‘sweet puck’, You do their work, and they shall have good luck. Are not you he?107

He is. And Oberon and Titania meddle in mortal affairs too, though seemingly on a larger scale and with a greater sense of fate and ramification, as both their actions and the etymology of faerie indicate.108 While invisible to us, these beings should be, in a Heideggerian sense, transparent to themselves;109 they ought to know themselves for the sign and song that they are: metaphors of nature, symbols of the elemental. As metaphorization bespeaks the essence of language, and language denotes the essence of humans, and these spirits exist between pure earth and mortal world, so we find them as daemonic beings rich in elemental poetry. They represent

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earth’s primordial children and its gay shepherds. They carry the meaning of nature’s play and forces, for good or ill. A forest path’s leading or misleading, yeast’s rising or its refusal to ferment, a sneeze, a slip, a catch, a lucky stroke. On the grander scale: frost, floods, famine, yet also love and children and all that happens with and between those phenomena. When it comes to our relationship with the earth, the King and Queen of Faerie represent its inevitable excession into our world, and the reason for it: to become song. Our world counters nature with customs, technologies, knowledge, and art. And with language we perdure. We give agency to the air, the mountain, the beast, the storm. As Heidegger tells us, ‘The rift must set itself back into the heavy weight of stone, the dumb hardness of wood, the dark glow of colors.’110 Most essentially, for us, it must set itself back into word: into fundamental exchange. We blame the unseasonable upon greater beings or ideas, whether the ideas are religious or scientific or humanistic or rational or pragmatic. We personify and narrativize. But here, in this play, this rift occurs between two spirits beyond good and evil, beyond our condemnation. Primordial beings with great powers and unknown motives. Who are we to question them? But Shakespeare informs us through Titania that she and Oberon – earth’s imaginary divine signs – have become disjointed. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.

The playful opposition we would expect between them, the sorts of things for which faeries are known, has become something else. A rift itself in conflict. They have exceeded their own conflictual relationship and let the earth slip from her customary cycles and movements. From Titania’s tone we might infer the severity and irregularity of this occurrence. If she and Oberon do not reconcile soon – ‘dance [their] ringlets to the whistling wind’ – nature and humans will greatly suffer, perhaps even approach the apocalyptical. The poetic eschaton Hölderlin and Heidegger anticipated? Perhaps if Titania and Oberon had not eventually reconciled (through the latter’s trickery, of course) and the rift between earth and world run its excessive course, the time of imagined shepherds and fateful spirits would have ended? Perhaps then, humans would need to accept authentic responsibility – en-ownership, propriety – for the time and place allotted to them? Perhaps if we stopped attributing ethical agency to the invisible, we would have to become the song we have always heard elsewhere?

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Yet, for what reason do Titania and Oberon exceed their ordinary back and forth? Why do they allow their oppositional and loving relationship to flow over its limit? To turn away from the ancient harmony found in erotic and just conflict? An Indian boy. Why should Titania cross her Oberon? I do but beg a little changeling boy To be my henchman.111

Oberon desires for Titania to give him a changeling – a mortal child taken to live among the fair folk – that recently entered her retinue. She explains why this is not possible. Set your heart at rest. The fairyland buys not the child of me. His mother was a vot’ress of my order, And, in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossiped by my side, And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking the embarked traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind, Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following, her womb then rich with my young squire, Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him.112

A priestess devoted to Titania and her cult died giving birth to this child. She now raises the boy and will not give him over. She repeats, ‘for her sake’, telling Oberon and us that her rearing and refusal arises from a wish to honour her servant. He takes Titania’s reciprocation of her votary’s veneration as a personal injury. He wishes his due and proper, yet also to bestow a great honour upon the child. But she rejects his ‘gift’ and resists his authority (the former act seeming the more egregious to him). And so the conflict worsens. Oberon then plots against her with Robin Goodfellow (Puck). He recalls a time and place where they heard a sea-maid’s music.

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger ROBIN I remember OBERON That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid, all armed.113

Now, if we recall, Helena, in one of her brief allotments of true poetry, told us ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind’. This speaks not only to love’s visionary blindness, but also to our blindness to the vision of love. That is, we cannot see Cupid. We can see erotic images, engage in amorous and affectionate acts, feel love, but Eros himself is always occluded in those acts, images, and feelings that reveal him. Those manifestations enclose him. Yet we only find love’s trace and sign. Oberon here signals something of his metaxical nature,114 as being essentially between earth and world, when he tells Puck he saw Cupid. The invisible can see the invisible, the imaginary the imaginary. Mortals, like Shakespeare, must create (or accept) the opening for such an event. But the King has more to tell. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal thronèd by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon, And the imperial vot’ress passèd on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell. It fell upon a little western flower – Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound – And maidens call it love-in-idleness. Fetch me that flower.115

Again a votaress, again the moon. (And the moon makes yet another appearance in the Mechanical’s play.) Oberon tells us more here than most readers, attenders, and critics usually hear. The play flows comedically and erotically, as well as connivingly, and we rarely hear much malevolence. If we attune ourselves to the hints and silences, however, Oberon discloses religious devotion’s resistance to Cupid, to erotic love. Love missed the virgin priestess: ‘Cupid’s fiery shaft / Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon.’ The votary’s purity

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and resoluteness towards her bond made love, as a passionate agent of chaos, impotent. As the bond between him and Titania finds its root in such passion, in such chaos-making – in oppositional loving, in erotic strife – the very notion that she would choose to honour her priestess over him, and shun his honouring of the boy in the process, becomes something he cannot tolerate. He must take revenge. And so with Puck’s assistance he does. Yet, as his plan unfolds and he inevitably bears witness to Titania’s love for ass-faced Bottom, he begins to repent his revenging. When sight and vision come together in a work – even a work of machination, of betrayal, of retribution – we become undone. Such an intertwining of seeing and creativity make things transparent. With creative vision we remember who we really are and what our apportionment is.116 Or it takes us elsewhere. In this case, Oberon regains the transparency he seems to have lost. And so he sets to undo it and set right the balance not only of their conflictual eros, but of the world too. ‘May all to Athens back again to repair.’ It is restoration – as appropriate pairings and marriages marking Shakespeare’s comedies – that here offsets Oberon’s ignoble contrivances. What of the Indian boy? The changeling – the desire for the changeling – was the reason for the rift exceeding its boundaries and rushing over into earth and world. Still, this great object of desire – to be honoured, protected, nurtured – is invisible. He makes no appearance in the text and is most often absent from stagings and adaptations. Shakespeare’s work shows us another philosophical problem: undisclosed reason. Logos can be sought, desired, discussed, yet it remains ever essentially concealed. We can but attempt to enclose it in readings and theories, poetry and paintings. Within works comprised of the elemental and of language, reason secrets itself away, while being there for all to see. Here the Indian boy is the word of conflict, but we do not see him. A Midsummer Night’s Dream stands as the temple housing him. Only his imagined figuration – whatever age, colour, dress – gives image to the otherwise invisible logos of the play’s central rifting. Shakespeare composes all else, save this, for us to play our ideating part in finding the heart of the work, which is the origin of the conflict. Revealing that the authentic reason for anything – for everything – only ever arrives through interpretation as en-owned creative vision. Through such vision the word can begin to sing, we can begin to hear it, and we can, perhaps, begin to join in.

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Retrieving the Question Hamlet & Being and Time

This penetrates me, to my very bones, and cuts at me like a saw. The bitterest rebuke your ghost could bring me, could scream to me, at night, when I withdraw into my lungs, into my intestines, into the last bare chamber of my heart, – such bitterness would not chill me half so much as this mute pleading. What is it that you want?

—Rilke

The most important part In Book VI of the Laws, Plato writes, ‘For the Beginning that sits enshrined as a goddess among mortals is the Savior of all, provided that she receives the honor due to her from each one who approaches her.’1 Years earlier, in Book II of The Republic, Plato has Socrates tell us that ‘the most important part of any work is its beginning’.2 Both of these passages refer to institutional commencements. The importance of a beginning – its powers to direct and save – seems to rest with how we honour it. And the slightly equivocal use of the word ‘work’ (ergon) appears intentional, especially given that the text – The Republic – so cleverly manoeuvers between part and whole, between the character of the individual and a just society generally.3 Given the context of this passage, however, Socrates and friends are clearly referring to children and the education of children. Education here mainly, though not exclusively, means the development of character. They wish to cultivate character by way of censoring stories that wrongly portray the gods as doing evil and mischief, while only allowing stories that rightly show and praise the goodness

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of the gods. Socrates believed that we confuse children by telling them the gods were good, yet we then turn around and tell them stories about them doing all sorts of sordid, nasty, and petty things. And as Socrates thought an endeavour marred at its origin could never recover – most especially when it comes to children – such paradoxical, confusing stories were banned in the Just City. Still, though it most directly addresses children and the education of children, every time we come across this passage we should be tempted to flip back to the beginning of The Republic, as we cannot help but think he also means any and every work, all texts, all endeavours. There, at the beginning of that text, we find acts of anamnesis and kata-basis: ‘Yesterday I went down to the Pireaus with Glaucon, Ariston’s son, to offer my devotions to the goddess.’4 We find remembrance and descent in the name of genuine curiosity and ‘religious’ piety (taken with irony these two traits arguably represent comportments fundamental to Socrates’ philosophical approach). Religious piety or devotion not so much to the gods themselves, but rather to what the gods symbolize: Goodness, Truth, Justice, Beauty. Not agents acting in time and space, rather ideas and virtues. The second ambiguity of the remark also seems apparent: what constitutes a beginning? An arche? How flexible or exacting ought we to be in terms of beginnings? If we can apply this axiom to all things and not just children, then the beginning of a book determines the possibilities and failings of the book’s endeavour; easy enough perhaps with The Republic, but how about Being and Time? When it comes to contemporary texts, do we pay special heed to dedications? Frontispieces? Prefaces? Introductions? Propaedeutical materials whatsoever? [Aside. With any major work considered intellectually influential or culturally significant there arises and abides a variety of interpretations. And wherever we find a variety of interpretation we find also disagreement. It seems as though such works almost invite us to divide ourselves into parties distinguished from each other based upon our shared sense of what we think one – really – ought to carry away from the work. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Heidegger’s Being and Time clearly stand out as such works. Who cannot quote lines, even if only a few, from Hamlet? Of well-known lines put to parchment none approach ‘To be, or not to be – that is the question’ in terms of theatrical, literary, and cultural ubiquity; simply put, virtually everybody knows these lines. Yet what do they mean? How we hear these lines – or envision Gertrude or Ophelia or Horatio or hear the Ghost’s account and charge or Claudius’ prayer – determines staging, casting, timing, lighting, everything. If we think only in psychological or theatrical tropes we might only hear a suicidal contemplation, and then the tragedy becomes merely subjective and contingent (all about disposition and decisions) rather

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than existential and inevitable: ‘To attend to Hamlet’s psyche only is to trivialize Shakespeare’s vision.’5 By such a reading we would find ourselves asking, ‘When is he going to kill himself?’ or ‘Why hasn’t he killed his uncle yet?’ Such a reading does not recognize the true profundity of this most original philosophical question, one arising in different formulations throughout the play, and why the question cues us into the play’s meditative, rather than merely revengeful, nature. Enter Being and Time (a text principally concerned with the meaning of being) as a kind of key or register by which to hear the question anew – that is, primordially, originally – and Hamlet’s question quickly loses any reduction to being solely a contemplation of self-termination. It instead rings rather ontological. And as a serious student of philosophy, Hamlet would certainly have been familiar with the first and most enduring question of the ancient Greek philosophers, which Heidegger formulates as ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’6 Still, what about these notions of influence and disagreement as they relate to Heidegger and Being and Time? Now, within Heidegger circles specifically and continental philosophy more generally (and perhaps even more widely within other philosophical traditions and groups that read Heidegger), there remains a healthy, scholarly debate on how to read Heidegger’s Being and Time (or really any text by Heidegger). Our bias, as has been demonstrated already in the preceding chapter, lies with close examination of selected passages, while never letting slip away the overall context and aim of the work (in this instance, the meaning of being). This interpretive method – this constant piloting between part and whole – allows us the closest practical and philosophical proximity to the work. We might think of reading a text in this fashion as staying in a home with many rooms, passages, drawers, and closets. The only way to become familiar with the home is to walk around and take it all in, room by room. Then we can start to spend time in the different parts of the house. Perhaps in time or even immediately we prefer this room to that, or another to all others, so we stay here or there more often and longer. Perhaps we even discover a ‘secret’ room or a basement or an attic that most other visitors or residents miss. And of course the rooms and the hallways and all the assorted fixtures and features of the house are lines, passages, sections, and chapters of a text. And the visitors are the readers. Abiding readers find a home in the text. The phrases and passages that strike us as profound, mysterious, ambiguous, perhaps unguarded – something whatsoever (but not anything whatsoever) – become the ones that we read and reread towards building a larger, more inter relating interpretation of the text as a whole. We might call it a sense of the text.

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A sense only arriving after we develop a sense for the text.7 To be sure, within the hermeneutic tradition we would resist the urge to unnecessarily reduce the whole of a text, especially a large and multifaceted text like Being and Time, to a simple thesis or even a set of complex theses. But we can in time – after time – make comments generally about a text premised upon more detailed analysis and deep reflection of particular passages and sections. And it is in this manner that we will continue: we will slowly walk through and spend time with what seem the most important passages – particularly the beginning  – in order to say something about not merely those passages themselves, but also something relating to the text generally as a whole. This slow, attuned – attentive – interpretation of a philosophical work functions here in much the same fashion George Kubler suggested we approach a work of art: They are like gateways, where the visitor can enter the space of the painter, or the time of the poet, to experience whatever rich domain the artist has fashioned. But the visitor must come prepared: if he brings a vacant mind or a deficient sensibility, he will see nothing.8]

Being and Times’ epigraph, a quotation from Plato’s Sophist, presents to us as clear a beginning as we could hope for, and, as most prefaces intend to do, it appears to hold a degree of importance in initially calibrating us to the work. Therefore, towards developing a sense of the text, we will formally begin with the exergue before crossing the threshold of the Introduction. After providing the non-transliterated Greek, Heidegger begins by offering his translation of a passage from Plato’s Sophist, followed by his concise connection of the passage to his own work: For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed. Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting we should raise anew the question of the meaning of being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of being and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being. But the reasons for making this our aim, the investigations which such a purpose requires, and the path to its achievement, call for some introductory remarks.9

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Plato’s Sophist, which unlike most of his other dialogues has the Eleatic Stranger in the primary role of dialectical midwife usually reserved for Socrates, presents us with, among other things, the question of being. As Heidegger’s translation of a select few lines indicates, what being is exactly, when we genuinely try to think and articulate an account of it, remains quite difficult. In truth, not long after beginning to think about what being is – that is, what being means (meaning bringing us into our nearest possible proximity to being, at least for the time being) – it is easy to become perplexed (aporia). Is it nature? The totality of existence? A universal predicate for all beings in the universe? Is it even a distinct phenomenon? Given the inherent difficulties of beginning the investigation, Heidegger seems to sense the question’s enduring relevance and import. For how can we do philosophy if we do not even know what being means? He believes that we are now no better situated to ask the question or to hear an answer to it than the ancients were. ‘Not at all’, he says twice. Nearing two and a half millennia we are nowhere closer to knowing the meaning of being, we are in fact seemingly further from it. Herein lies the singular nature of Being and Time as a route and lexicon for retrieving this question. And it is for these reasons that a preparatory introduction, as he states, seems a well-advised addition to the investigation. Shakespeare can assist us here. Enter the GHOST of the Question of the Meaning of Being [as before] But soft, behold – lo where it comes again! I’ll cross it though it blast me. – Stay, illusion. [The GHOST of the Question of the Meaning of Being] spreads his arms If thou hast any sound or use of voice, Speak to me. If there be any good thing to be done That may to thee do ease and grace to me, Speak to me. If thou art privy to thy country’s fate Which happily foreknowing may avoid, O, speak! Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth – For which, they say, your spirits oft walk in death – The cock crows Speak of it, stay and speak. – Stop it, Marcellus. MARCELLUS Shall I strike it with my partisan?

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger HORATIO Do, if it will not stand. BARNARDO ‘Tis here. HORATIO ‘Tis here. Exit GHOST (of the Question of the Meaning of Being) MARCELLUS ‘Tis gone. We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence, For it is as the air invulnerable, And our vain blows malicious mockery.10

The Ghost (of the Question of the Meaning of Being) first appears on stage soundlessly, voicelessly. Our respective philosophical positions, name them soldiers and friends, want to confront it. Horatio, the truest of friends to Hamlet, begs it to speak. Other than interlocution he wants to know if there is ‘any good thing to be done’, he wants to know if there is some secret knowledge to be learned, or, seemingly less noble, some treasure deep below the earth. For all his interrogations he receives silence. They attempt violence on the revenant of the question and it vanishes. Their swords and pole-arms – their theories and facts, their sciences and world views, their postulates and axioms – reveal their inability to pierce or force into the open what lingers of the meaning of the question of being. Their questions and tools – our questions and tools, Heidegger would argue – lack the necessary correspondence to the Ghost. Unmoved, unfazed, it exits before they – we – learn anything. They wisely, if tragically, decide to inform Hamlet about what has transpired. If Hamlet is the son of the deceased sovereign (if that is indeed who the Ghost really is) he will (we hope) possess the proper association with the spirit of the question (a ghost of a question whose nature is as yet uncertain) in order not only to see, but also to hear. This line of thinking and analogizing by way of dramatizing the question – before anything can be shown to support it – makes Hamlet the rightful heir to the question of the meaning of being. It makes Claudius (a) related to, (b) usurper of, and (c) murderer of the question. Still, before we get there (or anywhere else), we must continue to pay heed to the beginning, to the most important part.

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Heidegger quite clearly lays out the trouble with philosophy as a historic, academic discipline that operates far from its Greek origins, far from the most essential of all questions: the question of the meaning of being. This question has today been forgotten – although our time considers itself progressive in again affirming ‘metaphysics’. All the same we believe that we are spared the exertion of rekindling a gigantomachia peri tes ousias [‘a Battle of Giants concerning Being,’ Plato, Sophist 245e6–246e1].11

Heidegger thinks we have forgotten the question in favour of, and due to, certain metaphysical presumptions and commitments, as well as a ubiquitous mode of calculative (rather than contemplative) thinking. Being so enmeshed within a metaphysical conception and frame, whenever we use the word ‘being’ – am, are, is, be, been, was, were – we have no idea what the word truly signifies, what it means. He believes the journey and genius of philosophy, in as much as we find its roots in the investigation of the meaning of being (particularly by the great founders of philosophy proper, Plato and Aristotle) has, as an academic tradition and institution, allowed for the apparitioning of the question as it has travelled down through the ages to us. In so doing, he writes, What these two thinkers achieved has been preserved in various distorted and ‘camouflaged’ forms down to Hegel’s Logic. And what then was wrested from phenomena by the highest exertion of thought, albeit in fragments and first beginnings, has long since been trivialized. Not only that. On the foundation of the Greek departure for the interpretation of being a dogma has taken shape which not only declares that the question of the meaning of being is superfluous but sanctions its neglect. It is said that ‘being’ is the most universal and emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it. Thus what troubled ancient philosophizing and kept it so by virtue of its obscurity has become obvious, clear as day, such that whoever persists in asking about it is accused of an error of method.12

Heidegger sees the institution and practice of philosophy as taking for granted what being is, as if it were so painfully obvious to everyone that anyone choosing to investigate it at length must be using an inferior or faulty method of philosophizing. Those caught within this particular metaphysics see no need to seek out being itself, as they feel that the meaning of being is already universally grasped and, as such, in no need of being investigated in the manner of the ancients. When we say something ‘is’ this or that – the

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sky is blue, I am happy – we simply assume the apriority of what that means. Heidegger, like Plato and Aristotle, believes this to be the gravest and most hubristic of errors. Instead of taking up the question seriously, philosophers today would rather take up questions of invisible principles (metaphysics), questions of knowing (epistemology), or questions of behaviour (ethics). Like Claudius, they wish to proceed into things without right. But for Heidegger that being remains essentially uninvestigated means that we do not really know what it is. Being unknown, how and why would philosophy move on to some other subject to investigate? In addition to its metaphysical biases, he believes it is institutional or professional philosophy’s methodological and terminological tools that are in error, not the Greeks’. Thus, in order to retrieve the question – in order to speak to the Ghost – he modifies what he needs to and creates what he must. Before he can do so, Heidegger has to address the three prejudices he had already alluded to: (1) ‘Being’ is the most ‘universal’ concept; (2) The concept ‘being’ is indefinable; (3) ‘Being’ is the self-evident concept.13 He turns them aside most succinctly: (1) Being’s seeming universality makes it the most obscure of all topics; (2) Being’s apparent indefinability is its invitation for investigation; (3) Being’s self-evident nature is really an a priori enigma that has been accepted as comprehended while in truth it has not. Put most directly, the three reasons usually put forward for not investigating being, when reflected upon, in fact provide the three best reasons for investigating being. From here it remains a matter of how to proceed, how to formally structure the question, which is in large part what the remainder of the introduction seeks to do. To illustrate how reasons can turnabout and take on their converse meanings, such as Heidegger has demonstrated here, we look to the second scene of Act I. KING CLAUDIUS How is it that the clouds still hang on you? HAMLET Not so, my lord. I am too much i’ th’ sun. QUEEN GERTRUDE Good Hamlet, cast thy nightly colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st tis common – all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

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HAMLET Ay, madam, it is common. QUEEN GERTRUDE If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee? HAMLET Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’. ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passeth show – These but the trappings and the suits of woe.14

As most know, after the untimely death of Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, his father’s brother, Claudius, took the throne and married Gertrude, the Queen. Whether the regency fell to Gertrude by legal contract (1.2.8–9) and was then extended to Claudius upon the two’s over hasty marriage, or the kingship came to him by way of Denmark’s elective monarchial system (5.2.65–66), rather than a primogeniture successive system. The results remain the same: Hamlet is not king. Though that the crown does not rest upon his head seems of little importance to him. He rather cannot shake his father’s death nor face his mother’s fast following marriage to his uncle. Claudius and Gertrude try to talk him out of his dark mood, they try (somewhat poorly) to reason with him, to stir him from his gloom, but the depth and severity of the wound in his heart holds him beyond their comprehension, and them conversely beyond his. He hurts too much and too genuinely. When she tells him, ‘Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off ’, what does she really expect him to do? Feel better? By what tack does she say, ‘Thou know’st tis common. All that lives must die. Passing through nature to eternity’? Though she does it here, it is difficult to imagine a less absurd or grotesque scenario in which a mother would impart this admonition to her mourning son so soon after the death of his father. On top of that, her use of ‘seems’ insults his philosophical training and sends him into a minor rage. The way that he is – his bereaved being – is no mere appearance, no act, no game: ‘I have that within which passeth show.’

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Claudius tries his hand: KING CLAUDIUS ‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father; But you must know your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief.15

The mother and uncle diligently attempt to persuade Hamlet to see the death of his father as something from which he is overdue to recover. They themselves cannot proceed happily, we can easily presume, until Hamlet’s disposition improves. Others watch him and so his moods matter politically. The new King goes on to tell Hamlet to think of him as a father, and that he, his uncle, bears love for him as a son. And then, finally, he asks him to stay at Elsinore instead of returning to Wittenberg where he would resume his philosophical studies. The Queen wishes it too, and so Hamlet acquiesces. This scene helps us see how what appears obvious and universal can in fact occlude the matter at hand. The Queen and King want Hamlet to cease his moroseness, yet only superficially. Hence we can read all the talk of what is ‘common’, of his ‘stubbornness’, of his ‘unmanly grief ’ as appeals to how his behaviour appears to others and not how they are to him. And Hamlet knows how easily people play upon these sentiments in games, theatres, courts, and business. He desires no game-playing (at least not these games). Put another way, Claudius and Gertrude’s wish for Hamlet to stop seeming sad bespeaks that which his training endeavours to deconstruct: the way things seem. Not appearances as phenomena to consider – no, that he desires – rather seemings as self-evident universals taken as polite givens we ought not look into for fear of offence or wasted time. Yet Hamlet knows that these seemings – these forms and trappings – are themselves invitations for closer scrutiny: philosophical reflection upon the matter at hand, the thing in question. Those moods that ‘denote [him] truly’. For him, for the moment, this remains his sorrow. He reveals this more clearly when all exit and leave him alone. HAMLET O that this too too sullied flesh would melt. Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

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Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.16

His life and world have lost dimension and vivacity. Worse than merely prosaic, all has levelled out into uninspired uselessness. He cries out to the air, to God, to the walls. Existence has become a burden. The world has become a garden overrun. Now only weeds possess the world – ‘weeds’ being those who do not feel this weight of being, those who do not suffer in the knowledge of the tragedy transpiring before them. He goes on to rail at the fact that his father has been dead less than two months and his mother has already remarried, to his uncle no less! He knows his uncle to be far inferior to his father. He laments his ability to remember whatsoever as it only brings him grief. These events taken altogether in his life, he concludes: It is not nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.17

Though he feels that nothing good will come of his mother’s marriage to his uncle, nor his uncle’s reign as king, nothing can be done about it. And so he accepts the wound in his heart and chooses to remain silent publically. In choosing to remain silent Hamlet shows his preparedness to take on the very false outward appearance that he so loathes. Regarding seeming and appearing, we return to Heidegger’s terms and methods, as described in the introduction, where we find his reading of appearances and seemings when considering phenomena. He writes, The Greek expression phainomenon, from which the term ‘phenomenon’ derives, comes from the verb phainesthai, meaning ‘to show itself ’. Thus phainomenon means what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest. Phainesthai itself is a ‘middle voice’ construction of phaino, to bring into daylight, to place in brightness, that is, that within which something can become manifest, visible in itself. Thus the meaning of the expression ‘phenomenon’ is established as what shows itself in itself, what is manifest.18

He here sets up the basic proposition underlying his phenomenology, rooting it in the Greek conception of that which brings itself into appearance, that which

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‘shows itself in itself’. This is central to understanding Heidegger as it inevitably ties his phenomenology to his ontology: Sometimes the Greeks simply identified [phainomena] with ta onta (beings). Beings can show themselves from themselves in various ways, depending on the mode of access to them. The possibility even exists that they can show themselves as they are not in themselves.19

This association between phenomena and beings – the self-showing of beings – will uniquely mark Heidegger’s interpretive methodology. As to this association, he reads self-showing (phainomena) as the self-revealing or manifestation of the essence (or being) of all beings (ta onta ). To avoid the pitfalls of all previous metaphysical interpretations, ‘essence’ for Heidegger is understood not as something separate or distinct from beings, but rather as that which constitutes the fundamental characteristic of beings. Hence Heidegger’s mention of the Greek ‘middle voice’, or the phenomenological voicing he attempts to adopt in his analysis, which occasionally makes for the unusual and unwieldy turn of phrase, yet the hope and reason for it rests in allowing not only beings to reveal themselves, but being to do so too. Heidegger goes on, This self-showing is nothing arbitrary, nor is it something like an appearing. The being of beings can least of all be something ‘behind which’ something else stands, something that does not appear.20

We deal with things as they appear in their appearance and not as superficial or false appearances. In this way, unless we find ourselves dealing with deception, what shows itself to us – what offers itself to us – is, in that self-showing, the thing into which we question. To abuse a Latin phrase: res ipsa locutor.21 We would do well to remember here that in this association – phenomena and being – Heidegger never practices phenomenology without also doing ontology, and vice versa: ‘Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.’22 And we can also add to that hermeneutics, but before we do let us consider the implications of the last line of the citation before last: ‘The possibility even exists that they can show themselves as they are not in themselves.’ One of Heidegger’s strategies in Being and Time rests with setting terms against one another – ontic/ontological, factical/factual, existential/existentiell, and so forth – not to reduce his analysis to rigid binary constructs, but rather for the most basic purpose of distinguishing between specificities and generalities, or categories and particular (thus variable) instantiations of those categories. We might also extend this specific/general manner of categorization to what he calls (a)

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our authentic (eigentlich) modes and relations with the world around us and in which we find ourselves and (b) our inauthentic (uneigentlich) modes and relations with that world. The former would represent the specific (specific to each one of us in our own being), the latter the general (the rather superficial and not particularly specific to us in our own-most being). Considering the distinction this way proves useful when we remember that Heidegger believes the mystery and majesty of being generally – being itself as distinct from our own being – has been lost. The question of the meaning of being trampled under the feet of an inauthentic ‘they’, and only retrieved in authentic inquiry, which he would later call the ‘piety of thought’.23 [Aside. We should note too at this point that when thinking about the word ‘world’ phenomenologically we would do well to avoid conceptually conflating it strictly with a spatial container in which we find ourselves moving about from place to place, encountering objects and processes. Heidegger instead offers four meanings for world: (1) The totality of beings present in the world (nature, cosmos, universe, etc.); (2) A region wherein all the possibilities and realities of certain types of beings or principles or ethos abide (mathematics, biology, carpentry, etc.); (3) The world where this or that being lives, or where these or those beings live (public and/or private lives lived somewhere); (4) World as worldliness, as each and every being belonging to a world (or multiple worlds simultaneously) a priori, and, when understood in this sense, world signals something like the worlding of beings within the world (we will try to unpack this sense of world later).24 While Heidegger offers the first three senses for clarification of the various uses of the word, the last one initially sketches and points towards his phenomenological interpretation of world. The purpose of pointing this out here lies in understanding the manner in which we find ourselves ‘in’ the world and in which we relate to that which we find in the world around us. At bottom, he sees these relations as either authentic (eigentlich) or inauthentic (uneigentlich).] Here, if we glance past the introduction and into the early pages of Division I we find the following: And because Da-sein [or, a being] is always essentially its possibility, it can ‘choose’ itself in its being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only ‘apparently’ win itself. It can only have lost itself and it can only have not yet gained itself because it is essentially possible as authentic, that is, it belongs to itself. The two kinds of being of authenticity and inauthenticity – these expressions are terminologically chosen in the strictest sense of the word – are based on the fact that Da-sein is in general determined by always being-mine.

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger But the inauthenticity of Da-sein does not signify a ‘lesser’ being or a ‘lower’ degree of being. Rather, inauthenticity, can determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure.25

The authentic modes and relations of a being (Dasein) are won, owned, and truly known, while the inauthentic ones are lost, dispossessed, and occluded. Being authentic means owning up to something, taking it as our own. It means, for better or worse, accepting something as our responsibility. Inauthenticity, conversely, signifies not owning up to something, not accepting responsibility, and leaving some aspect of our lives, small or large (e.g. habits, choice criterion, tastes, convictions) up to others or no others in particular. The former represents our owning up to our historical situatedness, our possibilities and limits, our facilities and proclivities, while the latter represents our tendencies to go with the flow of things, our conditioning to accept notions uncritically and be thoughtlessly involved in affairs. We could distinguish here in terms of selftransparency and a lack of self-transparency. Authenticity certainly sounds more appealing to most readers, yet we should keep in mind that the inauthentic does not signify a ‘“lower” degree of being,’ rather merely a manner of being yet (or never) won as such. They are the parts of our life on break, not constantly watched-over, not overly involved in our quest to become our own selves distinct from other selves. This inauthentic self appears bound to what Heidegger calls the they-self (Man-selbst),26 a notion clearly derived from Kierkegaard, and secondarily so from Nietzsche.27 The ‘they’ of this ‘they-self ’ is not definite, ‘On the contrary, any other can represent them.’28 This they averages us and levels us down into common denominators, into knowable and quantifiable determinates. As Heidegger writes, This averageness, which prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore. Every priority is noiselessly squashed. Overnight, everything primordial is flattened down as something long since known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes something to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Da-sein, which we call the leveling down of all possibilities of being.29

Quite naturally our interests and activities can range from the rich and complex to the simple and dull, and all manner of combinations. Still, the distinction between authentic and inauthentic – my own self and un-owned they-self – remains important for Heidegger’s analysis as his questioning into the meaning of being has to account for all possible modes, relations, and attitudes of beings;

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to one degree or another, they all mean something. So when he writes, ‘The possibility even exists that they [beings] can show themselves as they are not in themselves’, we know that we reveal something about ourselves, perhaps something even essential or fundamental, in our day-to-day inauthentic deeds and words. And yet by the rhetoric he employs we cannot but feel as though Heidegger calls for each person to win him- or herself, for each of us to become a more ‘authentic’ being. Regarding this authentic/inauthentic distinction, we find a lovely example in Hamlet when Polonius (councillor to the King) gives advice to his son, Laertes, as he departs for France. And these few precepts in thy memory Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bear’t that th’ opposèd may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear but few thy voice. Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all – to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell – my blessing season this in thee.30

This well-known passage has one of the plays more vexatious and meddlesome characters offering some sage advice, advice presupposing the reality and importance of our authentic and inauthentic modes of being. If we consider our authentic modes as characteristically trans-parent, and our inauthentic modes

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as superficially ap-parent, we can sift through the precepts with a better idea of the modes to which Polonius alludes. Consider when he says, Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.

And Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

He appeals to appearance, not as transparent self-showing, rather as detached from and withholding his true thoughts and putting forward a superficial appearance, a mere seeming that occludes authentic thinking and feeling. Such advice plays upon our everyday social structures of interpersonal converse, our theatrical masks worn in order to ensure our safe congress with others. Polonius does not offer this with his son’s authentic self in mind, rather his inauthentic (and in some ways equally important) self. He does, however, do so elsewhere in the passage: Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched unfledged comrade.

This concerns Laertes’ heart, his genuine well-being as Polonius’ son. The admonition to bind himself to his true friends certainly has social, political, and economic benefit, yet the spirit of the advice strikes us with sincerity and concern for more than the merely practical. Friendships won through the trials of life ought to find an intractable home in our hearts for the good of our own being. Polonius ends his lecture to his son with perhaps his most famous lines, lines that seem entirely aimed at Laertes’ deepest sense of self: This above all – to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

To be true to his ‘own self ’ obviously requires that he know himself, and knowing one’s own self comes to us as an ancient philosophical entreaty.

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Such  self-knowledge certainly seems equivalent to self-transparency. That is, we have to discern our own-most self in order to know ourselves. Once we know ourselves we have the choice of being either true or false to ourselves. Polonius advises his son to be true so that he would never be false to any man – a mild contradiction with much of his earlier advice, but true nonetheless in that Laertes will not unknowingly be false to any man (assuming authenticity includes the possibility of deceiving another). In any event, both modes – the authentic and the inauthentic – are revelatory. Now, as we begin to conclude our initial entry into the intersection of these two texts, we look again to the Ghost (of the question) and to hermeneutics. Of the latter Heidegger writes, From the investigation itself we shall see that the methodological meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermeneuein, through which the proper meaning of being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are made known to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself. Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates that work of interpretation.31

He here informs us that his phenomenological analysis, which he has already associated with ontology, is also essentially connected to interpretation. The reason for this appears quite clear: any description for the sake of making something known requires that which is being described to first (or simultaneously) be interpreted. We do not objectively describe then interpret; we interpret in order to describe, to make something knowable. We could even more simply say that any description is an act of interpretation. Though we will look more closely at interpretation later, let us allow Hamlet’s interaction with his father’s Ghost at the end of Act I to demonstrate this association. HAMLET Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further. GHOST [of the Question] Mark me. HAMLET I will. GHOST [of the Question] My hour is almost come

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When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames Must render up myself. HAMLET Alas, poor ghost! GHOST [of the Question] Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold. HAMLET Speak. I am bound to hear. GHOST [of the Question] So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear. HAMLET What? GHOST [of the Question] I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fearful porcupine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, Hamlet, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love – HAMLET O God! GHOST [of the Question] Revenge his foul and unnatural murder. HAMLET Murder?

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GHOST [of the Question] Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.32

After Hamlet learns about the ethereal figure silently appearing from his friends he seeks it out. They told him it resembled his father, the former king. His friends worry that the spirit may lead the prince away, that it might deceive or destroy him. But Hamlet tells them that his fate cries out, that he is called. Hence he tells the Ghost that he will follow. When finally alone together the Ghost tells him that little time remains before it must return to the tormenting flames of the underworld. Hamlet feels for it, yet the Ghost responds, ‘Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold.’ The Ghost (of the Question of the Meaning of Being) wants to unfold itself, its plight, its story, though he – the question – requires ‘serious hearing’ in order for the tale to be heard. The apparition then tells him that he will be bound not only to listen, but to revenge. This unfolds the truth of hermeneutical interpretation: attentive listening as inescapable violence. Not the violence – murder – of definitive answering, rather the catching and the laying-out of the various possibilities of meaning that occur in acts of hermeneutical interpretation. Listening and revenge, ‘To be called’ and ‘to lay claim to’. Le mort saisit le vif. [Aside. If we listen to the language, the arc of our word ‘hearing’ touches on the attentive listening to evidence and pleadings in law courts (we will come to see that we all bear the possibility of becoming ‘guilty’). When we listen to ‘revenge’, which we read with retrieval, we find that it comes to us from the Latin vindicare, which means, ‘to lay claim to’. Hamlet’s hearing is a charge; his revenge is his claim and birthright.] The Ghost goes on to reveal his identity as Hamlet’s father. The departed question would tell him to what place he must return: But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fearful porcupine.

Were the Ghost (of the Question of the Meaning of Being) to tell Hamlet (the philosopher) the secrets of his prison-house, it would freeze the prince’s blood;

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even were he permitted to tell his son, Hamlet would be unable to hear it. Still, what the Ghost can tell the prince is that he must revenge his murder, a murder ‘most foul, strange, and unnatural’. Now murdered and confined to fire for his sins, he is ‘doomed for a certain term to walk the night’. King becomes revenant. Ghost. For our reading he appears as the murdered question, present only as a shade, heard only by way of ‘serious hearing’. For us this means the question might be found here and there in the oldest of passages in the oldest of texts (or in thought or in the morning sky or in the nearby and familiar). It begs us – us being Hamlet or the readers of Heidegger – to listen and revenge it. But how could we and against whom? It has already told us that the ‘lightest word’ of the tale of its prison-house would undo us, which ought to spur us to wonder where the best questions go to die? Yet, to the charge: who did the deed? And of course we know it to be the question’s brother, Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, the new King. Who wears this dramatic mask? Who is the murderer? What is it that always makes a ghost of the question? As we alluded to above: the answer. Our Claudius and King upon whom we must revenge the Ghost of the question of the meaning of being arises as the answer heretofore conditioning our inability to even rightly re-ask the question. Our revenge is our retrieval (Wiederholung) of the question. And our retrieval involves our death. Before we get there, however, we have other matters to consider. Such as, why would an answer – the answer – be ‘most foul, strange, and unnatural’? Certainly answers in and of themselves need not have the nature of strangeness. So why this answer to this question? Largely due to this answer ending the life of the question. Question ending answers do not open up hermeneutical possibilities. They murder them. Answers exacting this price within the realm and purview of the philosophical – the ever-opening world of wonder – are not natural, rather unnatural. Answers that move the horizon of thought, that refine and reinvigorate the question we call natural. Answers that work as ‘cursed hebona’ in the ears – ending the question ‘unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled’ – enter the stage horribly, foul, incestuous. Thus revenge: retrieval. Adieu, adieu, Hamlet. Remember me.    Exit 33

Hamlet soon swears his friends to silence regarding the Ghost’s appearance, an act that the Ghost not only endorses but demands as well. This silence complicates things. Why? Because Hamlet must now seek revenge, retrieve the question. But no one must know that he does so. [Aside. We could consider here that Heidegger’s rigorously analytical text has occasionally been accused of masking its quietistic or mystical underpinnings

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in order for those commitments to go largely unnoticed by the institution of philosophy;34 secrecy and distraction being key for successful revenging. Suggesting suspicion always seems preferable to bold biographical or doctrinal claims when wanting to foster suspicion.] He tells his friends that he will ‘put an antic disposition on’, he will feign madness to distract the court, the King, and his mother from his revenging. Horatio, ever the true and loving friend, hints at caution and unbelief at what even he himself saw, and Hamlet replies famously: HORATIO O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.35

Horatio interprets differently than Hamlet. His connection to the Ghost of the question is not deeply personal. Horatio would prefer to know; Hamlet needs to know. They have fundamentally different orientations towards the question. At arm’s length for Horatio, taken to heart for Hamlet. Perhaps for particular philosophical encounters Horatio’s sort of scepticism may be desirable, yet for this deed we do not need convincing, we need the ability to rightly hear what is at stake in the question. For the full breadth and implications of the question we need to hear what calls to us. A call, Heidegger writes, that ‘comes from me, and yet over me’:36 the call of conscience and the call for resoluteness. Calls we will soon consider. As for now, after all had sworn themselves to secrecy, Hamlet ends the first Act  – and our first intersection of these two texts – with words elegiac, admonitory, tragic, grateful: HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. – So, gentlemen, With all my love I do commend me to you, And what so poor a man as Hamlet is May do t’express his love and friending to you, God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint. O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let’s go together. Exeunt 37

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The beauty [and horror] of the World Heidegger uses the German word Dasein to name nature’s most peculiar being: the human being. Others elsewhere occasionally translate it as ‘existence’ or ‘presence’, yet since the word bears centrality for Heidegger’s analysis we find it untranslated in English editions of Being and Time. Though countless beings (or ‘entities’) populate the universe, Dasein denotes the being that each one of us is in our own being. And while we share certain aspects of our being with all other beings – principally that we are at all – we are unlike all other beings in that we can wonder about things and ask questions.38 We even possess the strange capability to inquire into the nature of our own being: Who am I? What does it mean ‘to be’? What does it all mean? What does meaning mean? This inquisitive, reflexive possibility – our curious engagement with what is and our bending back upon our own being – appears as an essential feature of our being. Heidegger adopts the term Dasein largely in an attempt to explore this essential feature by accounting for our pre-schematized possibilities and antecedent socialized predilections. He wants it to designate a primal sense of what and how we are (or could be) before we fall prey to any conception of self that discourages such inquiry, inevitably securing us in incurious dogmas or deluding us into delimiting inquiries. He also occasionally hyphenates it – Da-sein – to emphasize the literal meaning of its two constituent parts: being-there. Before we find ourselves fit into a frame that interprets the truest sense of being as something transcendent or psychological or biological (as a subject, ego, or animal), we exist free of – that is, otherwise than – those categories. We are. And we are right there where we are. Upon first hearing this it sounds tautological. Hence, in order to avoid the impression of mere circumlocution (periphrasis) – a risk we run every time we try to philosophize about being by employing the verb ‘to be’ – we should take a moment here to clarify Dasein; not only to avoid the appearance of a tautology, but due also to the significant role it plays in Heidegger’s exploration of being in Being and Time, as well as his understanding of ‘world’ prior to The Origin of the Work of Art. He explains this emphasis – being-there – in a couple of different ways. First, ‘The “essence” of [our] being lies in its to be,’39 or, put another way, ‘The “essence” of Da-sein lies in its existence.’40 Essence, as we noted earlier, bespeaks not a separate substance representing a truer or purer state of being, rather it signifies the happening – the act, the event, the occurrence – of a being. By locating our essence, Da-sein’s essence, in our existence, Heidegger locates it in our finitude, in our limits, in our mortality. Not an immortal soul or autonomous thinking

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mind, but our entire being in all its aspects standing out in the open of being for a time. Our terminal existence in a world that surrounds us. Retreating to scholastic language, we might say that our whatness (quiddity) is our thatness (haecceity) in as much as our thatness is known by way of the event of our being. That is, the there (Da) of our being (sein) – whether actively or passively considered – best shows us what our being is. The human being as something happening, not ‘a thing, not a substance, not an object’.41 Second, ‘The being which this being is concerned about in its being is always my own.’42 This means Dasein’s being cannot be objectively present for investigation, never taken as indifferent; instead, Dasein’s being, in terms of disposition, is always one way or another. And it always belongs to Dasein. Our being cannot be set apart, cannot be put under a microscope, cannot be fully contained by a theory or series of empirical observations. Our being’s union with, and appearance as, the there of our being – the Da – further reveals Dasein’s entelechial extremes: actuality and possibility. Contrary to Aristotle, Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenological reading of Dasein places possibility (Möglichkeit) above actuality (Wirklichkeit). In fact, he writes, ‘Dasein is always its possibilities.’43 That is to say, we live ‘through’ our possibilities. We find our decisive prospects in them and our most determinative moments. We discover our limits, our breaches, our promises. When we run out of possibilities we succumb to that which awaits us: nothing. We die. This strong connection of Dasein to its possibilities – distinct from actualities, though still conditioned by the concrete there of our being – continues to move the being of Dasein further away from something static and objectively present, and towards something happening, something happening right before us, something happening by way of us. And of course what lay before us and around us most often hides with the most proficiency. We therefore have to think about our being – the there (Da) of our being (sein) – with an added degree of comportment and resilience. Otherwise, the way in which our possibilities are joined with our particular there remains unknown. Here, thinking about our possibilities and our there, world enters. Our world does not find its fullest or best expression in terms of spatiality. It does not signify nature or the totality of beings. We ought not to understand it as the aggregation of our cognitive apprehension and calculative measuring of physical properties, processes, and relations. Nor does the world arise most basically for us as a thing or as a container for things.44 Phenomenologically, our world is no noun, no ‘it’. Our world – like Dasein, like truth – is better understood phenomenally as ‘happening’. Our world finds true expression as

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a verb co-belonging to Dasein. Dasein has no being without world and world means nothing without Dasein. Our world refers not only to what we have, but also simultaneously to what has us, as an active, variegated event to which we always already belong. We do not exist literally ‘in’ the world due to the world not being a vessel of containment. We are not things that extend into a larger thing. We rather find ourselves relationally surrounded and begotten by it. Being-inthe-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is really being-alongside-the-world. It is finding our home there. There, in the place given to us, the world opens and time begins. Time: the great revelator. And though many mysteries lie in wait around every corner, we live ‘in’ an ordinary world: a world of equipment, use, relationships, and historical particulars that individually comprise us. A world that, as we found in our reading of The Origin of the Work of Art, is the site of our creative and preserving dwelling. No scientific calculation or theoretical construction, but the world as the dimension of and for our being, by which we experience the every day. When writing specifically about de-distancing, Heidegger effectively describes what we have been saying generally about our world: We say that to go over there is a good walk, a stone’s throw, as long as it takes to smoke a pipe. These measures express the fact that they not only do not intend to ‘measure’, but that the estimated remoteness belongs to a being which one approaches in a circumspect, heedful way. But even when we use more exact measures and say, ‘it takes half an hour to get to the house’, this measure must be understood as an estimation. ‘Half an hour’ is not thirty minutes, but a duration which does not have any ‘length’ in the sense of a quantitative stretch. This duration is always interpreted in terms of familiar, everyday ‘activities’.45

Heidegger here denotes our world in terms of that which we experience in our everyday events, activities, and relations. Our comfortability in estimating, in using euphemisms, in conveying intents and interpretations through idioms and analogies reveal to us our everyday understanding of the world and what it means to dwell ‘in’ it. We do not live an overly exacting life wherein all our activities and associations find themselves precisely measured. ‘I’ll be there in a second.’ ‘You won’t believe what just happened.’ ‘I swear I thought I was going to die.’ ‘I’ll keep you in my thoughts.’ ‘Go up three blocks or so and turn right at the old yellow house.’ We can hear flexibility in our everyday experiences, which tells us something if we pay attention – if we heed – the language we use. We largely discover our possibilities in the ambiguities of our language, by our there, through our world. We see those possibilities bound to their ends, their limits; ends and limits, we ought to remember, always being set at our beginning.

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Recalling Aristotle’s Ethics here can help to illuminate this sense of the everyday world. In Book VI, he lists five modes by which we know truth (each mode dealing with and revealing different kinds of truth). One of these modes he names phronesis, translated as ‘prudence’, ‘practical wisdom’, even ‘common-sense’. Heidegger retrieves Aristotle’s analysis of this particular mode of knowing – this everyday practical wisdom about one’s own life and world – and it becomes a key mode for Heidegger in re-asking the question of being. Although each mode – nous, episteme, sophia (modes denoting knowledge of that which does not change), techne and phronesis (modes denoting knowledge of that which does change) – operates within the fundamental ‘care structure’ of Dasein,46 it is phronesis that shows us how best to be who we are. As Aristotle writes, What remains, then, is that it is a true state, reasoned, and capable of action with regard to things that are good or bad for man. Hence we think Pericles and others like him are prudent, because they can envisage what is good for themselves and for people in general; we consider that this quality belongs to those who understand the management of households or states. This is why we call temperance (sophrosune) by this name, on the ground that it preserves wisdom. It does preserve this sort of judgment. because it is not every sort of judgment that is destroyed or perverted by pleasant and painful experiences; not, e.g., judgments such as that the sum of angles of a triangle is or is not equal to two right angles, but judgments about what is to be done.47

The truths revealed through our practical wisdom – our wise, common sense judgements – about ‘what is to be done’ give Heidegger a path to being through our everyday world. He can approach the truth of being by a more accessible route: what is at hand, near, already known in a practical way. We see this in our everyday activities, in our use of tools, our decisions, our language. Our world, in its everyday handiness, shows us truths48 – not truths observed, exactingly measured and studied, rather circumspectly known by letting things do what they do when we take them into hand, when we allow idioms room to speak and estimations the right to guess. Not the truths the other modes investigate or reveal, but truths about us and for us nonetheless. Shakespeare shows us this as well: HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] What piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god – the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?49

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‘What piece of work is man (techne), how noble in reason (nous), how infinite in faculty (sophia), in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel (phronesis), in apprehension how like a god (episteme).’ Hamlet poetically articulates our modes of knowing, and for him they ultimately reveal the human to be ‘the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals’, the human as rational animal (zoon logon echon). These modes ought to reveal our stature and sublimity within the world, but he feels his submergence in mortality still too heavily. He sees the human as the purest essence of little more than dust, a corpse to be. Instead of seeing Dasein as the beauty of the world, he seems to find it – by way of the darker moods through which he currently interprets the world – the horror of a ‘foul, strange, and most unnatural’ world (to use the Ghost’s words). Yet retrieval as revenge must still occur, and right judgements must still be made. So though Hamlet sees only death and death to come (with some exception, perhaps, for Ophelia, Horatio, and his mother), he must yet rely on his angelic mode of right action, a wise course, on prudent decisions. He must rely on his philosophical training. ‘’Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.’50 The ‘more than’ indicates not the supernatural, rather an unfit brother, uncle and king in Claudius. Unfit for his lack of fidelity, his ambitions, his lying, his murdering. Hamlet, as retriever of the question, must find all this out of Claudius, who comes to us as the reigning killer of the original question. And what of our there and our world and our possibilities? What has Shakespeare’s Hamlet got to say about these things? Quite a lot. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] Ay, so. God b’wi’ ye. Exeunt [all but] HAMLET              Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in ’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?51

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When alone with no others about to influence or overhear his thoughts, Hamlet confesses his feelings of lowliness. He does not feel as a prince ought, rather quite removed from aristocratic heights. The actor – player – seems to him monstrous, that is, wonderful, strange, and horrible; humanity’s unique uncanniness (deinos) and un-homeliness (Unheimlichkeit) exemplified in the theatrical profession. With his eyes, his voice, his bearing and affectations he can give form to all manner of imaginary conceits and narratives. He can, quite marvellously, become someone else. For no real reason save the story requires it. ‘And all for nothing. / For Hecuba!’ The player puts on what the role requires to meet its desired aim. Not because it is ‘real’, rather for it to be ‘true’ in the moment. Both for no reason at all, and for imaginary Hecuba. Hamlet continues: What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.52

Hamlet wonders what the actor would do if he had the motive and spur that Hamlet himself had. ‘He would drown the stage with tears.’ By the power of the authentic performance, so to speak, the guilty would lose sanity, the innocent would become scandalized, the unknowing mystified, all witnesses would find themselves speechless by what they would see and hear. If only the actor had such a reason, such a plot. Or if only Hamlet were such an actor. But he is not. Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing – no, not for a king Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face. Tweaks me by th’ nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?53

Hamlet, though he has much to say, can as yet say nothing authentically. Even in his speaking, as it were, he speaks without a voice, lacking a sense of agency.

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Yet he has the most reason to act and speak. He wonders if he is a coward and longs for the power to revenge, to retrieve the question. Ha? ’Swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ’a’ fatted all the region kites With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O, vengeance! – Why, what an ass am I! Ay, sure, this is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon’t, foh! – About, my brain.54

He cannot yet think his way to his revenge – his father’s revenge – he only desires it and thinks himself a fool for his inability to do more than speak without the voice and deed of an agent of retrieval. But then something strikes him. I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play Have, by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If a but blench, I know my course.55

Here in a moment of prudence – phronesis – he gains an insight and a course of action. If he relies on the there of the play world, makes use of the possibilities of its imaginary settings, events and characters, a path opens. The spirit that I have seen May be the devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy – As he is very potent with such spirits – Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds

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More relative than this. The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.    Exit 56

The lure of conscience, which he believes Claudius still possesses – even (or especially) as murderer and usurper of the question – will draw out into the open the King’s dark deeds. The players will perform a scene to elicit this display of guilt. The genius of this plot lies in Hamlet letting loose the power and possibilities of the there of an imaginary world within the shared world of Elsinore’s stage. A plot equal parts authentic and inauthentic and difficult to distinguish between the two. These two modes of Dasein become blurred by both the artistry of the actors and the emotional investment of the witnesses to the play (whether goers or readers). In but a moment’s time the horizon of his vision expands and his authentic agency draws within reach. Though his resoluteness to see it through might still be in question, the possibility of revenging his father – retrieving the question – has finally stepped forward.

Guilt and the call of conscience Whether ever seriously or ironically considered, it remains the case that we never asked to be born. Nature and our procreators did not consult us, and as not-yet-being we were not around to ask; and what would we have said anyway? While each human life bespeaks various processes, decisions and relations, phenomenologically we were thrown into the world (Geworfenheit), into our ethnicity, our time and place, our socioeconomic status, language, religious tradition, DNA, everything. Having had no choice regarding the where, when and by whom of this coming to be, our inauthentic they-self easily succumbs to the averaging of the ‘they’ into a self that goes along with things the way they are (or seem to be) without trying to become our own self. Our authentic self, conversely, resists such averaging in order to win itself, to become itself, to find itself (Befindlichkeit). But this only occurs if we learn to hear what is calling us out of our inauthenticity into authenticity. Heidegger’s analysis determines that it is our own care (Sorge) calling to us, care here being the ‘being’ or ‘essence’ of our own being. Further, care reveals itself through the disclosing moods we experience – moods to which we must attune ourselves – in and by way of the Da of our Da-sein. The there (or here) of what calls us indicates our prepositional relationship with our own being (a here or there necessarily implies all sorts of neither here nor there). That is, our Da – the concrete there of our being that

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also bespeaks all the ways that we are, all the things and relations into which we are thrown (and excludes the ones into which we are not), and everything about which we might and do care (our own death being the most substantive) – indicates how we might find ourselves: we have to pay heed and listen for care’s call. A call that, ‘comes from me, and yet over me’. Heidegger writes, Conscience reveals itself as the call of care: the caller is Da-sein, anxious in thrownness (in its already-being-in … ) about its potentiality-of-being. The one summoned is also Da-sein, called forth to its own-most potentiality-of-being (its being-ahead-of-itself … ). And what is called forth by the summons is Da-sein, out of falling prey to the they (already-being-together-with-the-world-taken-careof … ). The call of conscience, that is, conscience itself, has its ontological possibility in the fact that Da-sein is care in the ground of being.57

We are the caller, the called, and that which is called forth. Our conscience (Gewissen), as the call of care, calls us into our own-most potentiality-of-being. We summon ourselves out of our fallenness, out of our immersion in and entanglement by the they and our inauthentic ways of being; yet only when care (Sorge) is voiced by conscience. Earlier in Being and Time Heidegger recounts the Roman myth explaining how care (Latin, Cura) created humans and how it was that she was given dominion over them all the days of their life.58 Only when we die are we free of cares and our bodies return to the earth, our souls to the heavens. So the story goes. Until then, care has us in our innermost being. We take care of things. We worry about things. Since things can be taken care of (including ourselves) and we can heed the call of care, Heidegger finds that we are guilty (Schuld, schuldig). Not guilty of a criminal act per se, rather guilty along existential lines. It all rests with hearing and heeding the call: The call is the call of care. Being guilty constitutes the being that we call care. Da-sein stands primordially together with itself in uncanniness. Uncanniness brings this being face to face with its undisguised nullity, which belongs to the possibility of its ownmost potentiality-of-being. In that Da-sein as care is concerned about its being, it calls itself as a they that has factically fallen prey, and calls itself from its uncanniness to its potentiality-of-being. The summons calls back by calling forth: forth to the possibility of taking over in existence the thrown being that is, back to thrownness in order to understand it as the null ground that it has to take up into existence. The calling back in which conscience calls forth gives Da-sein to understand that Da-sein itself – as the null ground of its null project, standing in the possibility of its being – must bring itself back to itself from lostness in the they, and this means that it is guilty.59

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Philosophically – essentially – we stand on nothing. Our life, our existence and the basis of that existence, is fundamentally empty in terms of value. ‘Null ground’, Heidegger calls it. And as uncanny, homeless beings, lost in the averageness of the they – lost in the thrownness of lives unasked for – we must confront this nullity and accept that we yet trespass upon this null ground of being. We are rather than not. For this, most simply, we owe being. This owing, this being-guilty, is not a debt to be repaid as such (although Nietzsche and the Greeks tell us that existence and indebtedness are identical60). Rather, a way of interpreting the call of conscience – the voice of care – for those who are always already with other beings. We decide to take responsibility for our own being and, simultaneously, accept that being a being-in-the-world includes being with others (both authentically and inauthentically). Each of us has the possibility to be our own-most being, a being who is both with and distinct from other beings. But doing so means heeding our own care, and in so heeding we summon forth ourselves, into ourselves, into the ‘possibility of [our] ownmost potentiality-ofbeing’. In this way we take possession of our being, the site and occasion of our being. We no longer leave it to others, to society, the herd, the they, to whomever and whatever. We embrace our ‘guilt’ for being – for being at all rather than not – in order to truly become ourselves, selves always with others, or even sometimes bound to others, yet most essentially – in terms of authenticity, of owning up – selves distinct from others. This being-guilty, we should remember, is not itself a default state of being. We are not always already guilty. Heidegger wants us to think this being-guilty as rather ‘one’s own-most authentic potentiality for becoming guilty’.61 When we listen and pay heed to the call of conscience, we have the possibility of choosing to answer that call, of becoming free. That is, we can become guilty beings who have a conscience, beings capable of freedom. And if we pursue this capability to become free? As Shakespeare will show us, wanting freedom means, for better or worse, choosing that conscience which calls to us. Let us consider Claudius. After the play within the play, wherein his reaction to the fratricide affirms Hamlet’s suspicions, we find the King alone and attempting prayer. O, my offence is rank! It smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, A brother’s murder. Pray can I not. Though inclination be as sharp as will, My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin,

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy But to confront the visage of offence? And what’s in prayer but this twofold force, To be forestalled ere we come to fall, Or pardoned being down? Then I’ll look up. My fault is past – but O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder – My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain th’offence? In the corrupted currents of this world Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above. There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults To give in evidence. What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state, O bosom black as death, O limed soul that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay. Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe. All may be well. [He kneels.] Enter [Prince] HAMLET [behind him]62

Claudius wants to pray and ask for forgiveness. He is guilty. He knows it and now we know it for sure (if we did not already). Yet, though he desires absolution for his brother’s murder, he cannot ask for it: ‘My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.’ The weight of his conscience, felt as guilt, seems too heavy. It outweighs his wish for remittal. Claudius – Killer of the Original Question of the Meaning of Being – though not as sly as Edmond or as brilliant as Iago or as a poetical as Richard II, does possess a keen mind and enough ambition to act. We clearly

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hear his acuity and self-awareness in his working through the problem of his guilt (which we ought not forget Heidegger understands as something discovered in heeding care’s call as conscience). Claudius appears to authentically wrestle with himself, transparently negotiating his conscience, his guilt, his deeds, what he has gotten, what it has cost. Then I’ll look up. My fault is past – but O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder – My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain th’offence? In the corrupted currents of this world Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above.

He works according to the earthly laws of princely courts: ‘Justice is the interest of the stronger.’ In the world of political and economic realities, strength, skill, intelligence, courage (or guile) to act, ever reign. Mercy, kindness, gentleness, and other such dispositions, contrariwise, generally fall within other realms of human activities. Claudius knows that if he were to ever gain the crown or the queen’s hand there was ever only one way. And most men, if we read Claudius by a light similar to the one we use to read Macbeth, lack the requisite ambition and resolve to act so. This might be the case due to fear of failure and retribution, or, perhaps more common, a most basic set of scruples when it comes to murder, especially of one’s own family. Still, some good questions for us: From a Heideggerian perspective, did Claudius act ‘authentically’ in murdering his brother and taking the crown? Did this murderous decision call him out of the lostness of the they into his own potentiality-for-being, while simultaneously acknowledging his always already being with others? Was Claudius becoming free when he killed the elder Hamlet? Given the influence of Nietzsche’s existential nihilism and re-evaluative thought upon Heidegger’s thinking, we ought not simply slough off such questions. After all, when writing on Nietzsche, he observes that ‘a “should” does not determine Being; Being determines a should’.63 Let us have another look at Claudius. He prayerfully soliloquies: ‘But ’tis not so above.’ If we read him hermeneutically, and not strictly within the metaphysical context usually assumed, this ‘not so

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above’ sounds very much like Heidegger’s call that ‘comes from me, and yet over me’. That is, Claudius in consideration of the ‘above’ is in fact listening for the call. But does he hear it? Could he – would he – heed it if he did? Does it summon him forth into his own-most-potentiality-to-be-himself? He goes on: There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults To give in evidence. What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state, O bosom black as death, O limed soul that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay. Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe. All may be well.

It seems as though he genuinely wants to repent. Does he desire to do so merely to ease his conscience or because he truly feels so compelled? We do find that he deals honestly enough with himself to see and admit there exists an incommensurability between what he has done and that for which he now seemingly longs: murder, marriage, and (subsequent) usurpation on the one hand, forgiveness and restoration while retaining crown and queen on the other. The rhetorical beauty and painful honesty of Shakespeare’s words lift Claudius from the cliché of merely having his cake and eating it too. Claudius, like all well drawn characters, reveals competing thoughts and complex emotions: ‘O wretched state! O bosom black as death! / O limed soul, that struggling to be free /Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay.’ He knows his mind and what he has done. It is all too impossible to reconcile. Perhaps most telling of all: his desire to be free. Yet, and key, not free to become himself, rather a soul free of the guilt from which he now suffers. He is no psychopath, he loves and hates, has fears, anxieties, doubts, and hopes, dreams, and joys; he relates and empathizes with others in the play. But he is not a good man. Still, does that even matter? Heidegger explicitly states that conscience – the call revealing our beingguilty – understood in reference to ‘good’ or ‘evil’ or as something that ‘reproves’ or ‘warns’ constitutes a vulgar interpretation of conscience.64 We are not looking for a psychology of conscience and guilt; rather, we look to discover and describe them phenomenologically. So the question remains whether Claudius is lost to the they or won from out of them. The question remains whether murdering

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his brother can be interpreted as an authentic act. Villain, hero, protagonist, antagonist, fool, bit player; it makes no difference in terms of Heidegger’s sense of authenticity. Or does it? At this point Claudius forces himself to kneel and pray so that ‘All may be well’. Here Hamlet enters and famously talks himself out of killing his father’s murderer (the Murderer of the Question). He reasons that if he kills Claudius in prayer that his perfidious uncle, being in a state of purgation and grace, will go to heaven instead of hell. So he waits. And then we hear Claudius’ sceneending lines: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.    Exit 65

If conscience is indeed ‘the call [that] comes from me, and yet over me’, then Claudius’ conscience becomes problematic. If the connection between conscience, authenticity, and freedom are as close and interrelated as they appear to be, then the fact that he seeks to be forgiven for murdering his brother gives us sufficient evidence to judge him as yet lost, not won, and spiritually imprisoned. His thoughts – the voice of care, his conscience – do not proceed over him. He speaks, he confesses, he pleads, he listens for the call, the ‘response’, but he hears nothing. He is unable to summon himself forth into his own-most potentiality-for-being. He is, according to Heidegger’s existential conscience – and ontological guilt – not his authentic self. Still, if we press the analysis further, where was Claudius expecting his thoughts to go? What did he hope to hear? Here we ought to recall that for Heidegger guilt is not something from which we seek absolution. It is the possibility of calling ourselves into the discovery that we owe being, and are thus able to act out of thankfulness. Additionally, and crucial to reading Claudius, Heidegger’s conscience ‘only calls silently’.66 It does not warn or prompt, it rather ‘comes from the soundlessness of [our] uncanniness’ and calls us to stillness, a stillness far from the ‘chatter of the they’. In that quiet stillness we can find our authentic and own-most selves. And in this potentiality-of-being we gain the possibility of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). Claudius gains no such resoluteness. While he listens, he does not hear. Not hearing, he cannot heed the call, the summons. Yes, he hears nothing, but nothing and the still silence that summons us into ourselves are not the same. Claudius never essentially separates himself from the chatter and chaff of the they. The nothing he hears is the impotent and voiceless ‘should’ or ‘should not’ of the they in matters of our innermost being. Heaven cannot help him. And so

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never catching the still, silent voice of his conscience – discovering his guilt, his potentiality-for-being, his resoluteness – he remains lost and principally inauthentic. Though bold and ambitious, he is thrown and falling. And Hamlet?

Free for death Although some have attempted to rehabilitate Hamlet, he remains infamous for his inaction.67 We will come to see that this is not the problem it has been made out to be. Despite coming to us as a theatrical-literary invention, part imaginary and ungraspable, part affectingly real performance, Hamlet may very well abide as one of the finest portraits of a modern soul – historical or fictive – struggling for authenticity in a troubling time. As A. C. Bradley observed: It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring.68

Hamlet haunts the tragic kingdom of the free. He negotiates an existential abyss rife with possibility and impossibility, feeling and thinking his way through in equal measure. Or, passionate thinking. And we will see why, hopefully, in these last two sections. In section 53 of Being and Time Heidegger writes, Anticipation reveals to Da-sein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern taking care of things, but to be itself in passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself.69

A few sections earlier, he told us that ‘death is a phenomenon of life’.70 Heidegger here explores something considered obvious, yet something not rightly thought or contextualized in most interpretations of being. Most fundamentally: death belongs to life, life to death. Death is that towards which all life proceeds. We ought not to take this pessimistically, rather think it as a basic and inescapable reality. If we desire authentic lives, then death must be confronted and we must become free for it. Heidegger reads the they-self – the inauthentic self lost among other lost selves, selves simply going along with the flow of things – as not free for death. Death neither thought nor anticipated, but instead pushed so

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far away into the distance that we could never face it as a possibility. Arguably worse, we interpret death metaphysically – as a transition and not as death, end, finite termination – and the truth of death becomes corrupted or goes missing. Those damned illusions of the they. Yet, the primordial moods of anxiety and fear disclose that we, in our innermost being, care. Ultimately what these feelings reveal to us is that we care about death, about our own death. ‘Care is being toward-death.’71 But we do not want to think about it. And of course the death of others concerns us (and we do not want to think about that either), but it is our own end that we must face and no one can do that for us but ourselves. Still, it is for this – our own death – that we become free. Becoming free for this, we become free to become whole.72 Becoming ‘whole’ being an ancient aim, as Plato wrote of the authentically just man, ‘he will have made himself one man instead of many’.73 To better understand what Heidegger says here we can turn to a passage a few pages earlier where he writes, ‘As anticipation of possibility, being-towarddeath first makes this possibility possible and sets it free as possibility.’74 This anticipation of possibility works towards our potentiality-of-being, towards an authentic existence. Meeting our death head on is anticipating its possibility as possibility. This anticipation is not expectation, nor death meditations. Our death is not a package that we have ordered and are now expecting at the door. It is, like us, not a thing. It is the event that reveals us to ourselves as finite mortals. Temporality. And this temporal finitude – this limitedness of our own there – thus becomes that by which we understand our own-most possibilities. It grounds and horizons them. Until we see that our end determines our possibilities we do not have our own-most, authentic possibilities to become who we are. It seems much like watching a game when we ought to be playing it. But when we do come into these possibilities – to be [ourselves] in passionate anxious freedom towards death – we become free of the herd-like listlessness of the they. What then? Heidegger later writes, However, death is, after all, only the ‘end’ of Da-sein, and formally speaking, it is just one of the ends that embraces the totality of Da-sein. But the other ‘end’ is the ‘beginning,’ ‘birth’. Only the being ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole we are looking for.75

This whole is what we are, yet also what we want to win. We are ‘[stretched] along between birth and death’, and, though ‘stretched along’, we somehow hold ourselves together.76 But Heidegger thinks we can do more than merely hold

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ourselves together as a totality. He here distinguishes between calendrical or linear time, and the time of moments, lived time. Chronos contra kairos. The former form of time and the history and future it ‘creates’ has us, like all things, as objects passing through it: objective time for the objective observation of objects. Scientistic, mechanical, commoditized. The other time, which signals both the times that come upon us – seasons, festivals, births, accidents, special and uncanny moments whatsoever – and the times we choose – yes to the race, no to the invitation, yes to the moment, no to the fear – is neither objective nor for objects. It rather remains for mortals. This does not deny chronological time, rather indicates a way of understanding Heidegger’s existential analysis towards the meaning of being in general: humans experience time differently than objects. We are born, we stand forth upon nothing, whiling for a while, then we die: existence as such. Still, in either sense of time, though primarily and fundamentally through existential time, we come to grasp better what we – as Da-sein – truly are. Heidegger explains, Factical Da-sein exists as born, and, as born, it is already dying in the sense of being-toward-death. Both ‘ends’ and their ‘between’ are as long as Da-sein factically exist, and they are in the sole way possible on the basis of the being of Da-sein as care. In the unity of thrownness and the fleeting or else anticipatory being-toward-death, birth and death ‘are connected’ in the way appropriate to Da-sein. As care, Da-sein is the ‘Between’.77

We find this in Nietzsche as well: ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.’78 Being-towards-death or a down-going, and being-stretched-alongbetween or a going-across; either thinker’s formulation points to our mortality and our betweenness. Nietzsche’s tightrope dancer from the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra endures as the exemplary image-parable (Gleichnis) for this interpretation of human existence (which, I would contend, has been one of the more vital, if invisible, inspirations behind much of Heidegger’s analysis heretofore). The artist dances between two towers – a history and a future  – with a herd of people milling about safely below him and the possibility of death before him: he steps into this between, he faces death. This choosing to be there – in the between, facing the possibility of his death – this is authenticity, wholeness, freedom (or at least as close as we can ever come to such things). Yet, when the performer inevitably falls, as we all do, and he lies dying, he begins to doubt his life, to question whether it meant anything. Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s philosophical protagonist, holding the dying dancer in his arms, tells him,

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‘You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands.’79 It is not that everything will be alright or that everything works out in the end or that it all meant something in the grand scheme of things. No. Instead, we all must die and we all exist between our birth and death, and, given this, how do we choose to live, to think, to dwell, to be? Ought not our calling be that by which we go to perish? That is, should we not live our lives in such a way that we despise nothing when we exit this world? Still, that wire seems thin and the ground looks far away. Enter our final constituent before returning to Hamlet: resoluteness. In section 74, The Essential Constitution of Historicity, Heidegger writes, The more authentically Da-sein resolves itself, that is, understands itself unambiguously in terms of its ownmost eminent possibility in anticipating death, the more unequivocal and inevitable is the choice in finding the possibility of its existence. Only the anticipation of death drives every chance and ‘preliminary’ possibility out. Only being free for death gives Da-sein its absolute goal and pushes existence into its finitude. The finitude of existence thus seized upon tears one back out of endless multiplicity of possibilities offering themselves nearest by – those of comfort, shirking and taking things easy – and brings Da-sein to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate the primordial occurrence of Da-sein that lies in authentic resoluteness in which it hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility that it inherited and yet has chosen.80

Once we free ourselves from the inauthentic world of the they in order to face our own death, we can interpret our existence through our finitude. All of the former possibilities of being begin to simplify, cohere, and take on greater significance as fate. Of course, Heidegger does not introduce this term – fate – in order to say anything metaphysical, rather, to gesture towards accepting our own limited possibilities. He uses the word fate in harmony with heritage and destiny, the former explicitly denoting the various events, persons, ideas, and ethos comprising where we came from, while the latter speaks to a people’s or a nation’s joint historical arc. Therefore, though connected to and perhaps conditioned by heritage and destiny, fate is all our own and appears the more important towards an authentic existence. As Heidegger uses the term, it means accepting that our concrete limitations determine our possibilities. Our factical existence, the particularities of our being thrown into a world with a past, decides what we can and cannot do. Caesar could not have done what Neil Armstrong did, nor Armstrong Caesar, factically speaking. Their world and time conditioned their possibilities. Herein lies the importance of resoluteness: giving ourselves to ourselves from out of ourselves, free for our own death, for our authentic

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possibilities. Doing so allows us an authentic future, one in which our decisions reflect our decisions: expressions and manifestations of our own-most being, not the mere tropes and follies of the inauthentic they. Heidegger goes on to say, Resoluteness that comes back to itself and hands itself down then becomes the retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been handed down. Retrieve is explicit handing down, that is, going back to the possibilities of the Da-sein that has been there. The authentic retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been – the possibility that Da-sein may choose its heroes – is existentially grounded in anticipatory resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle to come, and the loyalty to what can be retrieved.81

Right before and after this passage Heidegger mentions the Moment (Augenblick). The Moment, the ‘blink of an eye’, the ‘moment of vision’, the instant, the flash. The Moment makes resoluteness explicit. Resoluteness remains somewhat insubstantial before becoming instantiated in a decision, a deed, a word – one that occurs temporally, thus, containing heroic or mythic possibilities. Just like that – in an instant – resoluteness can manifest explicitly. Resoluteness here progresses, so to speak, from freeing us for our world82 and allowing ourselves to be summoned out of our lostness in the they83 for ‘an authentic potentiality-of-being-a-whole’,84 towards a temporally explicit event of retrieval (Wiederholung). A retrieval of what? Of our most authentic selves from out of a heroic past. We can again hear Nietzsche in these lines. In his On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche explores how we can appropriate history as material for our lives, much like the way artists – creators – use paint or marble or notes or words. They make use of their mediums in order to create what they will. Why not do the same with the past? Instead of traditional notions of history as a more or less faithful accounting of events, times, and persons, Nietzsche proclaims its interpretive nature, its potential for usefulness in service to life. But we must have strength in order to have this sort of relationship to history. And though Heidegger hits upon strength here – as resoluteness – Nietzsche makes it explicit: ‘history can be borne only by the strong personalities, weak ones are utterly extinguished by it.’85 Without resoluteness we will find ourselves utterly extinguished. Without a heroic retrieval we have no possibility of becoming free for our own life, for the lives of others, for some purpose or reason or destiny greater than ourselves. History and events will roll right over us and we will perish without notice or contribution. What works we struggle to bring forth – a

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life, a people, a work – will not be lent our hands, voices, or efforts. All our deeds and speeches will end without welcome whatsoever. And so here we return to the most primordial and pressing of all questions. Enter [Prince] HAMLET HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] To be, or not to be; that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep – No more, and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to – ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life, For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. Soft you, now, The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.86

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I have here presented the most well-known lines of the theatre, of arguably anything. And after reading and unpacking passages from Heidegger’s analysis of being, do these words not begin to bare added dimensions and possibilities?87 Let us look closer, one excerpt at a time: To be, or not to be; that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them.

‘To be, or not to be’ – if we only hear suicide in these words we quite under-read them. For clarity: we ought not exclude suicide from our interpretation, yet we ought not presume it exclusively either. Reading through Heidegger we know that being in an authentic sense is an option, as well as being in an inauthentic sense. Given the vast difficulties, the near impossibilities, confronting Hamlet, we would understand if he gave up and abandoned his revenge, opting for an easier route instead. Of course we do not want him to give up (he is our tragic protagonist, after all), but we would probably not need to muster too much empathy to forgive him if he did. So what begins and endures as the ontological question – ‘To be, or not to be’ (or ‘Why am I, or why is anything, rather than not?’) – can, if we let it, quickly become a question of Hamlet winning or losing himself. He can cease the struggle to revenge his father – retrieve the question – and merely take up a much less complex life, or he can press on into his uncertain and dangerous future. The aim of a won, authentic, resolute life, especially one tasked with retrieving the oldest and most pressing of questions, easily and often appears unattainable. Is it worth it? Will the struggle pay off? We can read his ‘sea of troubles’ as either the difficulty of trying to win himself, which would subsequently seem too difficult, thus suicide; or, not suicide, and rather a mind numbing descent into herd-like inauthenticity. If we proceed with the latter, we can contemplate the they world as a ‘sea of troubles’ – authentically speaking – one in which Hamlet could oppose that sea and end the listless allure of inauthenticity. That is, the troubles will cease, the noise will diminish into silence, and then he might begin to truly hear – or continue to hear – the call of care. He can continue the path towards his own self, free for death, free for life, free for the question. This less direct, more nuanced reading offers us more possibilities for interpreting the soliloquy. Let us see if it holds. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,

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For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause.

‘To die’ is ‘to sleep’. If resigning revenge – the retrieve – if quitting the struggles and troubles, then sleep can come. Heartache can end. How easily and devotedly might we give ourselves over to a way of life that goes along thoughtlessly? To live life as if sleeping? Then we can find meaning in dreaming. Not the existential dreaming to which Prospero testifies, rather something shallower, something like living without resoluteness for our own death, living through impossibly foolish wishes and glittering lives, all the while paying little to no heed to the life actually dealt to us. And ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’, the toil of becoming who we authentically are, ought to ‘give us pause’. Why? Why, if we want to read this passage in some other way than self-slaughter, why must we pause? There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life, For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

Authentic, struggled-for, won life remains undoubtedly more difficult and burdensome than a life given over to the they, that way of life in which institutions and others take care of things for us. Time wars against us, against our bodies, our loves, our expectations. Oppressors and proud men abide and flourish. The ‘bare bodkin’, a naked blade, could end it all – no more suffering – but not by plunging it into the heart or opening a vein. Rather, by cutting us free from any transparent correspondence with our own care, free of guilt and conscience. No wholeness. Merely a being numbingly given over to and subsumed in the inauthenticity of the they. Still, there is more: But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?

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Hamlet possesses too great an intellect not to see that should he decide for a life un-retrieved for the question, un-won – not en-owned – he will forever dread ‘the undiscovered country’. It is not that death transports us to the undiscovered country, but rather that in giving ourselves over to the world of the they we in fact miss the opportunity of discovery. Hamlet, as philosopher, knows he cannot bear to abandon such a project. Could Socrates have come back from the eternal (though non-existing) realm of forms? Could he have simply given up discourse? Seeking? Struggling? He would have rather died. And he did. Like a sweet water well a long walk away, its rewards warrant the time spent in ambulation. Lastly: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Conscience – the call of care – once heard in its silence and voicelessness, makes it near impossible to abandon this life for which we have (presumably) resolutely faced our own death in order to find our own-most possibilities to be who we are. Thinking – really thinking, really questioning – arises in moments and events that bring us into our own-most selves. The loss of action means not loss of decision or agency, it means abjuring the easier route. Hamlet has thought through a figurative and ‘essential’ suicide in which all the authentic possibilities to be himself, that ‘undiscovered country’, have been confronted and ultimately rejected. Put another way, he frees himself for the potential of true action by contemplating the theoretical and practical merits of a herd-like unfreedom (a spiritual death), but giving up his charge to retrieve the question of the meaning of being, to pursue his genuine possibilities, lies too firmly upon his heart. Thus he must become a hero like his father to ask the question, to retrieve it anew, to take his revenge. Yet, and of course, the heart is a complex metaphor: Soft you, now, The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.

For all his keen insights, for all his canny antics, if we had to find failure regarding any aspect of Hamlet’s plans, his treatment of Ophelia and the price paid for it easily takes centre stage. We see no sufficient reason or attempted explanation. We take only what the play gives us, explicitly, implicitly, or by way of silence, and

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we see that Hamlet knows she shares all with her father, Polonius, councillor to Claudius. He, therefore, cannot confide in her. Her position becomes untenable: fidelity to father and family on one hand, heartbreakingly sincere love for the forbidden lover on the other. A classic formula. Having neither a comedic (joyous) nor a romantic (restorative) aim, applying this formula within a tragedy provides the play with added tension, if not the tragic mechanism itself, such as in Romeo and Juliet, and arguably in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. (Prospero, endowed with as much insight as Hamlet, yet older and wiser, knew this and, accordingly, took the time to groom the romance of Miranda and Ferdinand, to facilitate a good beginning and fit.) We, sadly, must watch, as she becomes what Hamlet only performed: mad. She cannot bear his harsh words and unwarranted denunciation. She does not know he performs for those that hide, nor that he works for revenge. It remains one of the many encounters in Shakespeare in which we find ourselves saying, ‘It’s just too, too much.’ Ophelia is not weak; she is human, she is vulnerable. That feeling and thinking overlap and interconnect means her wounded heart traumatizes her mind. And then Hamlet murders her father and she becomes lost to us. [Aside. While Heidegger tells us authenticity and inauthenticity bespeak different modes of being, and that Being and Time, as an analysis of being, makes no valuative judgements for one over the other, it eventually becomes clear that the language of the text favours authenticity. Saying that, Shakespeare paints Elsinore as Hamlet’s tragic kingdom. Yes, there are hints of kindness, love, and humour here and there, yet we find the atmosphere poisoned with gloom, hate, betrayal, and slow-working vengeance. We see the appearance of a functioning court and castle, but ‘’tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed’. And this image of a dissolute world does not exist for itself, rather for Hamlet. It is the play world wherein the most dimensional of passionate thinkers yet drawn ultimately comes, tragically, into his own-most self, free for death. And one of the kinder portraits we find within these lines, Ophelia, is no less caught in this darkly imagined Denmark than anyone else (though a weak case might be made for Fortinbras). All to say, it was never going to work out. Tragedies remain insistent that way. Still, given our reading here of Hamlet confronting suicide and deciding on authenticity, should Ophelia’s apparent suicide – whether read figuratively or literally – indicate the opposite? In brief, no. Hamlet trusts her to be who she is, a dutiful daughter and a faithful paramour (probably), and he knows the difficulty with which she will bear the many harms his words will work upon her. He has accepted the summons. He sees little alternative. But, of course, that does not mean he does not make any mistakes. And Hamlet, all too

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human, certainly does. His treatment of Ophelia, though pretended, is arguably chief of these mistakes. Though it may contend with the reading above, it is not that Ophelia is more inauthentic than authentic, it is that she too is thrown and caught in the kingdom of Elsinore: Hamlet’s world. The time in which she finds herself is ‘out of joint’. And as Hamlet was ‘born to set it right’, all within that disjointed realm, whether they like it or not, will find themselves subject to his tragedy. Even, especially, and most uncannily, Hamlet himself.] Casual observers often think Hamlet did not love Ophelia. They should read more closely. Upon Hamlet learning of her death – at her funeral – he leaps into her earthen grave and wrestles with her brother, Laertes. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] Why, I will fight with him upon this theme Until my eyelids will no longer wag. QUEEN GERTRUDE O my son, what theme? HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum. – What wilt thou do for her?88

It becomes clear in this scene that Hamlet never stopped loving Ophelia. His love ran so true and intense that the decisive moment of resolute action – of revenging-retrieving the question – travels close upon her death. He cared for her. It so happens that at the end of this scene, this scene wherein Hamlet learns of Ophelia’s death, less than four hundred lines of poetry remain before he retrieves the question and all else becomes storied silence. She, quite unfortunately, reflects and bears the price of revenge, as did Polonius, and as will Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet himself. The play world’s principal players irresistibly and unwittingly join in Hamlet’s slow march towards retrieval of the question, some as witnesses, others as victims. The figurative price of philosophy? Of taking up the oldest of questions? Seemingly so for Hamlet. To which he would surely reply, ‘Seems, sir? Nay, it is. I know not “seems”.’ We should note the meditation that occurred just before Hamlet learned of Ophelia’s death, in which the difference between death as merely a fact of life and death as something that deeply affects us – horizons and determines us – are juxtaposed. Recall here the well-known scene in which Hamlet discovers Yorick’s skull and we listen as he remembers and imagines it – him – as he once

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was: ‘Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?’ Horatio plays the solid sounding board: HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole? HORATIO ’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it, as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O, that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw! But soft, but soft; aside.89

Life becomes something else when thought through death. When we acknowledge and consider that all of our possibilities find their grounding in our limitations. And, ultimately, that our life terminates and by that termination we ever visibly and invisibly find our determination, our boundary, our sentence, our conclusion – our decisive resolution towards our end. At this time, in the scene above, Hamlet has yet to fully accept and confront what Ophelia meant to him, nor by extension how those feelings deeply affected his relation to the question, to his ability and determination to reclaim that with which he had been charged: what is the meaning of being? Until her death and the effect it had on him reckoning himself to himself and his task – ever haunting him until Act V – irony, cynicism, and a touch of manic absurdity colour his contemplations on death.90 He here reflects on the implicit nihilism present even in the lives and deaths of Alexander and Caesar. Two of the world’s most famous and accomplished conquerors, still and ever: two more dead bodies returned to the earth to eventually become the stuff of loam and clay, beer barrels, and spackle. This implicit nihilism becomes explicit when we come face to face with death, with the deaths of our loved ones. Along with Hamlet’s droll exchange with the grave-digging Clown, this part of the scene perfectly sets us up – sets him up – to

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confront the nihilistic termination of life, his life, Ophelia’s life, his father’s life – our life – in order to see it anew. Originally and always: being(s) dies. The action and occasion denoted by the verb – to be – only finds meaning in the playing out of that verb. This bespeaks the difficulty and distance of the question. We only know running in our having run. Only after something has been done can we genuinely consider it. Yet, we cannot think on being after dying. True, there is a knowing in the doing of something – phronesis – but that knowing indicates only one mode of knowing. What about nous, episteme, sophia, techne? As the first three designate knowledge of that which does not change, Heidegger, strictly speaking, does not think of them as actual possibilities for us. But techne, like phronesis, in signifying knowledge of that which changes, perishes, has limits: being(s). The conundrum has a twofold rejoinder: We do not authentically know being – nor our own being – except through our attunement to the finite momentariness of a life felt and intentionally lived; and/or, only upon accepting and confronting, without irony, the null ground of our possibility to be who we are – that is, our death – can we then know being (and we would probably do better to say think being, rather than know being). The latter indicates the insights of Hamlet’s philosophizing upon the meaning of life by way of the apparent meaninglessness of death, the former the lived moment of resolution: ‘I loved Ophelia.’ Both demonstrate for us Hamlet’s representative movement from meaningless nihilism to meaningful course of action. Still we ought not forget that the discovered and chosen significance comes to us as an outgrowth of a resolute dying: a caring and determined living. As said above, life becomes something else when thought through death: authentic. If only we can achieve it at a lesser cost than Hamlet’s. [Aside. At this point in the readings let us quickly sketch the development of Hamlet’s resoluteness towards his death, and his subsequent freedom finally to ask the question anew: We first find the prince prior to his meeting with his father, the Ghost of the Question. After the encounter Hamlet dedicates himself to the task. Yet, though not quite inactive (consider the time and resources necessary to maintain his deception of the court, his rough dealings with Ophelia, his handling of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his staging of the Mousetrap, his murder of Polonius, etc.), we do sense that revenging does not come naturally to him. And so he sets up the play within the play to catch his uncle and once again find, or at least confirm, that first moment of resoluteness at the end of Act I. However, when he has the perfect opportunity to confront the question killer, Claudius, the Question’s brother, he reasons himself out of it (and reasonably so). Then, here, just above with the terrible loss of his lover,

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he finds a third and finally complete moment of resoluteness, from which he does not turn. Love – the highest and mightiest and most absent word from Heidegger’s analysis of being – changes things. Eros and Thanatos change things. Taken together life becomes more real, intensely felt, tragic. And when it all finally comes home heartbreakingly to roost, Hamlet proceeds to his fate within his world as Fortinbras does his. The prince at last makes good on his earlier Heideggerian reading of his situation: HAMLET [not yet Retriever of the Question] My fate cries out, And makes each petty artere in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.    [GHOST (of the Question) beckons HAMLET] Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen. By heav’n, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me. I say, away! [To GHOST (of the Question)] Go on, I’ll follow thee.91

When working through Heidegger earlier we recalled that, ‘Only the anticipation of death drives every chance and “preliminary” possibility out. Only being free for death gives Da-sein its absolute goal and pushes existence into its finitude.’ And what did Hamlet do for four of the five acts but contemplate death, whether read as death or inauthenticity or both? Such anticipating and embracing of the temporal nature of mortality allows our possibilities to become possible. Of all these possibilities, Heidegger considers becoming free for our own death the most important. For, in a moment’s time – at a moment’s notice – it allows us to become who we truly are, who we were ever fated to become. In that moment the question becomes asked and answered: what is the meaning of being? Hamlet learns this right at the end. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.92]

Hamlet displays his brilliance throughout the entire play. Yet only now, after Ophelia’s death, has he come to realize that the anticipation of and resolution towards death ground his action. ‘The readiness is all.’ If that moment when death comes is not now, it is yet to come, if it is not yet to come, it is now. Day to day, minute to minute, we know not the hour. We can only be ready. This is what Hamlet has painfully learned. To retrieve the question – to hear it in the first

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place – we have to know what we are listening for: the true phenomenological meaning of being. For such we must look to the origin. Origin?

Free for life Let us think the question of the meaning of being through the oldest fragment of philosophy: Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.93

Here we find an English rendering of Nietzsche’s translation of a Greek passage that the ancients attributed to the Pre-Socratic, Anaximander. Examining the Greek we find no static arche, rather an active ‘genesis’. Some have translated ‘Whence things have their origin’ as ‘But where things derive their coming into being’ or ‘But that from which things have their arising’.94 The translators want to indicate that the ‘that from which things come’ – that from which any and all things come – is no place or state as such. It is instead a twofold happening: ‘But that from which things have their arising also gives rise to their passing away.’ Anaximander tells us the reason for this rests with time’s ordinance, a law of necessity. Death: a non-negotiable truth for whatever is. We might say that the price of being is dying, or that life is a one-way ticket back to nothing. Accordingly, and however we state it, our origin is no place as such, but rather the creative-destructive event of being. To make it personal, our origin stirs as our own allotment of this event: death as an idea or far off fact of life distinct from my death, my end. If we ever wondered why retrieving the question of the meaning of being seemed so rife with troubles, this shows us why; if we ever wondered how Claudius could have killed the question, this tells us; if we ever wondered why Hamlet concludes in the fashion that it does, this informs us: The question of the meaning of being is bookended by silent ellipses and death, what Pindar calls ‘the empire given by the God’.95 And there remains only ever one way to know this empire, this undiscovered country. If for a moment we feel tempted to think this a Shakespearean – or Heideggerian or Greek – exhortation to die we should remember that we are going to die. Yet, only in a moment we know not of. ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.’ It is the moment

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of resoluteness for which Heidegger, Shakespeare – Hamlet – testifies. It is the moment of freedom for life. Life and death are herein joined: freedom for death is freedom for life. The moment in which the Ghost of the question no longer haunts us because we come to see that we are the question of the Ghost. Better put, the questioning which the Ghost has represented for us. We are not the ‘meaning of being’, but the questioning of the meaning of being, the questioning that haunts until ‘houseled, appointed, aneled’. That is, rooted and abiding in our very own ‘here’. Claudius murdered the question; he silenced it, causing a disjointure – ‘The time is out of joint’ – between inquiring and that into which we inquire. Original questioning became an apparition – fundamental ontology – that in time came to haunt philosophy (probably most distinctly in the guise of ‘metaphysics’, though definitely as spirits presupposing some genus of Cartesian epistemology). Yet this original questioning only became – becomes – a ghost for those Hamlets and Heideggers ready to follow the trace and hear the tale of being. If we desired to follow as well, we would need to accept ourselves as the sites and occasions of being’s creative-destructive nature. That is, embrace the essential twofold character of being as life and death, our genesis as entry and exit. In so doing the future becomes nothing uncertain to fear. We know how it ends. In addition to Anaximander we could here recall Heraclitus of Ephesus: ‘The way up and down is one and the same.’96 A shade clearer: ‘The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle.’97 Our honest orientation towards this – our mortality – in fact creates dimensionality that fills in with our own-most possibilities of being. Confronting death in the way that we have been considering it means confronting life, accepting the truth of death means choosing authentic life. And it means this even and most especially when life’s moment to exit arrives, as Hamlet’s does here. Before we address Hamlet’s end, let us address the true phenomenological meaning of being. In one radically nihilistic word: nothing. Being in and of itself means nothing. Meaning lies with us, those who use and allow themselves to be used by language. In one radically affirmative word: poetry. As death and nothing and meaninglessness mount on all sides, we sing, we build, we create. This is why for the Greeks, for Nietzsche, for Heidegger it remains imperative that we take up life with more care and artistry. If the call we heed is our own, claiming us from out of the mindless chatter that hides the existential abyss beneath us, then our powers to question, think, and poetize become absolutely vital. If we do not heed our poetic admonition to ourselves – become who you are – then a masked nothing is all that remains. Such an unmasking, listening, and poetic-philosophizing only becomes possible when we take up questioning into the meaning of being, doing so in order to ultimately stare down the abyss

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of being and leap. And not for nothing, but for anything whatsoever; for love, for life, for whatever is and will come. Now, to Hamlet’s end. Claudius has conspired with Laertes to poison Hamlet during their competitive, though presumably non-fatal, duel. Laertes believes Hamlet is responsible for his father and sister’s death. True, Hamlet is responsible, yet not fully. Claudius initiated this course of events by murdering the King, by killing the question. Hamlet’s attempts to overcome the subsequent disjointure that disarticulates any attempt to retrieve what had – has – been lost, appears an impossible task. Towards this difficult task he invents an almost entirely new lexicon premised in authentic self-reflection – which we often reductively misread – that some (a minority, granted) read as the birth of the modern human.98 Humans as robustly interior, thick, and dimensional in thought and feeling, and above all: complex. And the world runs out ahead of us, it too becoming more complex, enmeshed, entangled, upside down, confusing (so much so in fact that we seem to tend towards thinner and flatter representations of it, if only to see it less confusingly). Men and women as simultaneously fitted and ill-suited to the task of finding their way through this ever quickening labyrinthine text of a world, wherein multiple truths co-reign (and yet none are essentially ‘true’). Arguably, we can read Hamlet as the first, the first to wrestle with perpetual homelessness and a vague nostalgia for a strange question. His father, King Hamlet, actually had the question. Better stated, he asked the first and most primal of questions (at least he represents this for us). Then the killer – who cares not for questions, rather only inauthentic answers – silenced him with definitive treachery. Hebona: the poison that favours answers to questions, whatever the cost, whatever happens. What happens? All the principal players find themselves poisoned. Claudius inadvertently poisons the Queen, Laertes purposefully poisons Hamlet, Hamlet unknowingly poisons Laertes, Hamlet intentionally poisons Claudius. Death comes for all. Laertes, facing death, confesses his and Claudius’ treachery, asking Hamlet’s forgiveness, which the prince gracefully grants before charging Horatio with recounting the events that have transpired in order to set things ‘aright’. KING [CLAUDIUS] dies LAERTES He is justly served. It is a poison tempered by himself.

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Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, Nor thine on me. LAERTES dies HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee. I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu! You that look pale and tremble at the chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time – as this fell sergeant Death Is strict in his arrest – O, I could tell you – But let it be. Horatio, I am dead, Thou liv’st. Report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.99

The exchange of forgiveness instils hope that Hamlet will not end up a spectre like his father. He, like Heidegger, haunts us in other ways. Not so much as apparitions in need of revenge, but as retrievers of haunting questions. ‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’ or ‘What is the meaning of being?’ As stated earlier, Hamlet only really learns this near the end. ‘I am dead, Horatio.’ Now, resolute, having loved and lost, having contemplated the mystery and confronted the meaning, he dies. And as he does so he is free to say, ‘But let it be. Horatio, I am dead.’ He has found release for what is and what is not. A successful retrieve, a completed revenge. He has found the final answer to the undying question of dying. Not inauthentically as Claudius, that question-killing answer. Rather, as the consequence of asking the question piously, anxiously, genuinely, carefully. What is the meaning of being? There is no final answer that does not kill the question, only questionenhancing answers that allow the question to haunt us more marvellously. When the question of the meaning of being haunts us in this fashion a basic draft appears: I am finite and temporal. I am a mortal. I die. Yet, I care also. I care and I feel before I ever think. Prior to all categories, all cognition. And I care and I feel in different ways about many things and for some things more than others. The way I feel about things, when I pay attention to them – when I am deeply attuned to those airs and powers that come over me, to those humours and spirits that arise within me – tell me quite a lot about me. Truth be told, care seems at the heart of my very being. And if I face my mortality and learn how to listen to the various voices of care speaking to me through those moods and temperaments,

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But this line of inquiry, however great and yawning it appears, leads us only into the shallows of being: our own being. What is the meaning of being? Being is time? Enter Horatio: though loyal and steadfast, given the tragic unfolding of events, he thinks the meaning of being might be found in suicide, which Hamlet rejects out of hand. The prince – the retriever of the question – then asks a final favour of his friend and passes along his dying vote for Fortinbras as Denmark’s next sovereign. Let us see if we can find another question affirming answer in these last lines. HORATIO        Never believe it. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. Here’s yet some liquor left. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] As thou’rt of man, Give me the cup. Let go. By heaven, I’ll ha’t. O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story.     March afar off, and shout within       What warlike noise is this?     Enter OSRIC OSRIC Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland, To th’ambassadors of England gives This warlike volley. HAMLET [as Retriever of the Question] O, I die, Horatio! The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England, But I do prophesy th’election lights

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On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with th’ occurents, more and less, Which have solicited. The rest is silence.100

Hamlet lies dying and his dearest friend wishes to die with him. Horatio wants to drink the last of the poison, romantically thinking it a gesture of love and friendship, perhaps the only authentic act he can perform in the moment – ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.’ Hamlet says, ‘Give me the cup’, as suicide does not provide a way to affirm the question (although it certainly answers in its own way). What does? Hamlet, like Heidegger, leaves behind ‘a wounded name’. They do so for very different reasons. For the purposes of these readings, we will take their wounded names to be their lost or killed or corrupted question. And if it is to be revenged – retrieved – then only their closest of friends – readers – can help them by recounting their stories, their questions. All the while Fortinbras moves and creates tension within the background of the play and, like all earthly princes, marches towards temporal power. Princes, whoever they are and whatever their title, always come conquering. Ever so. Yet it remains Hamlet and Heidegger who incite us to think, to act, to question. Though Fortinbras has Hamlet’s dying vote, it is Horatio, his dear friend and fellow philosopher, that, as he has the questioner’s story, truly has his voice; the question’s voice. What is the meaning of being? To question, or not to question – that is the question.101 ‘The rest is silence.’

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Of Mortal Gods Coriolanus & The Question Concerning Technology

And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization,’ when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement. —Tacitus

A (not so) free relation In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Heidegger writes, In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking. All ways of thinking, more of less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary.1

In these few lines, Heidegger clearly tells us what he intends to do and how he intends to do it. He aims to question, not to answer. Philosophical wonderment in action: ‘Questioning builds a way.’ How so and to what? Questions move directionally and variably. Questions step in a direction, though not necessarily in the same direction. We can follow paths, take side paths, go off all paths, turn around, start over, choose a new one, have a guide, a map, follow the signs, trust our intuition, find our way home or elsewhere or become lost. If there is a clearing (Lichtung) in the woods wherein things can be seen in the light of the sun for what they are, then the journey to that place is one of questioning. Questioning not only builds a way, it finds a way. And we ought not confuse a questioning method as such with a questioning method as a precursor to the attainment

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of a specified goal. A goal – a word which comes to us from the Old English gal, ‘obstacle, barrier’ and gælan, ‘to hinder’ – restricts our movements and has us arriving at predetermined locations. In this sense, we become prisoners to our goals. Yet questions only fixed upon the way itself – thinking – take us to undetermined vistas. Places old, original, unexpected, unsuspected. Whether walking under wide open skies or at night by torchlight or under trees in the dappled light of the sun, the world’s places and happenings await us, there where they are, somewhere along this or that path we have yet taken or remembered, paths whose challenges and tranquilities we have yet to try. Our hope is simply to arrive and see, or, at the very least, to have enjoyed the walk. And the walk occurs in language. An extraordinary journey from beginning to end. This questioning path of thinking means, as we have already said, listening to language.2 Letting words speak and guide us with their mythic and poetic power to carnate – in lettered shape and phonetic sound – the ‘essence’ of the phenomena to which we find them affixed. Affixed as given. We find these phenomena doing what they do – being what they are – in a clearing reached through a thinking that questions. Thinking about them as questioning towards them. And, remarkably, the words are already there with them. And with us too. (‘How is humanity ever supposed to have invented that which pervades it in its sway, due to which humanity itself can be as humanity in the first place?’3) Yet words need to breathe. Breath, time, contemplation. When given these things they set phenomena free to speak for themselves as outlines opened within the distance – the rift – between being and beings, earth and world, others and ourselves, between things whatsoever.4 Heidegger calls this Der Aufriss, ‘rift-design’. We find that we, after learning how to listen to these outlines upon the rift, had in truth been following and listening to the words all along. Words speaking for an otherwise silent planet. Verbs adverbially adjoining nouns clarified adjectivally through prepositional relations, all syntactically arranged for sense, for rhetoric, for reasons – reason – each word alone and all together under or towards a topic, an experience, an event, an occasion: more than collocation. Heidegger warns us, however, that we would be advised ‘not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics’. We want to think through language, not get solipsistically trapped in it or carried off to tautological waters. Thinking through language is not merely a grammatical exercise or routine row under a set rubric. Words are not sounds to tune out, not scribbles to skim over. They are not merely tools. Words resound for hearing, linger for reading, they await decipherment and contemplation: they are gestures towards us and through us of the pure possibility of something’s meaning through a medium that merely awaits the vibrations and resonances

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of our breath and the time required to think them. Words have ever tried to mediate for us. And they are not originally representational (though in time words welcomed their typographic codification, codification or standardization being the condition that facilitates commoditization). Consider: we sang our stories long before we wrote them down or rationalized them. Accordingly, it is the words’ brilliance or despair, and not our own, that leads us to the open space wherein things are what they themselves tell us they are, using our very own breath, our precious time, and our meditative powers to do so. If we listen: all attuned usage of language is inspiration. A careful-listening-to and a being-breathed-into and -through. Being used by what is, through words, for meaning; true meaning being an inspired occurrence of mediation. Metapherein. Not us, rather the Muses singing through us. We proclaim the word of God. The way of revelation, then, is the logos. The logos is the reason bound up with the word. All words. The word Heidegger wishes to follow here: technology. Why? We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.5

He hopes by following the path of technology we can ‘prepare a free relationship to it’. What this implies he makes explicit: ‘Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.’6 Ringing of Rousseau regarding government,7 Heidegger takes a definitive stance at the outset: technology is not neutral and believing it so ‘makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology’.8 He asks us to take seriously the possibility that technology is no mere means. No mere mechanism. For as long as we regard it in the fashion we long have we will remain in an unfree relation to it. For ‘only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us from its essence’.9 To ‘hear’ that essence we have to follow technology through instrumentality, through ends and means, through causality. And causality draws us back to Aristotle. ‘What does “cause” really mean?’ Heidegger asks.10 We take causality – Aristotle’s fourfold causality – for granted, acting as though the causes had simply dropped out of the sky and landed at our feet. Causality: so obvious. Just like all things seen in hindsight. But then again, only Epimetheus would marry Pandora.11 Of course this only demonstrates the concealing and dissimulative powers of the conspicuous. The causes: causa materialis (material cause), causa formalis (formal cause), causa finalis (final cause), causa efficiens (efficient cause); or, the stuff out of which a thing is made, the shape of that thing, the purpose for it, and the agent

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of its creation. Heidegger’s meditation on a silver chalice illustrates each of the four causes, while also highlighting his desire for us to reconsider causality with a mite or more of wonder. Being an object used in religious ritual, it conveys sacredness as a vessel saturated with meaning for its sacrificial symbolism. It is designed and fashioned and purposed from certain materials for a worshipful act. As each cause plays its part in this vehicle of ceremonial piety, so too, Heidegger intimates, ought we to view all things that come into being by way of human art and science – technology. We instead seem to take it all very much for granted: goods falling from the skies upon the shelves, for sale or perusal or consumption. Easily. All things – products, services, ‘information’ – ever more rapidly found and rapaciously acquired, not a moment wasted in wonder. Still, what is a cause? Heidegger traces cause back to the verb cadere, ‘to fall’. Following the etymology back we begin to hear the word’s more original meaning: to fall, to befall, to happen, to occasion. Of a cause, Nietzsche asked, ‘Is it not the event itself?’12 Cause (German Ursache), called causa by the Romans and aition by the Greeks, also implies indebtedness and responsibility.13 That which comes into being is necessarily indebted to those elements and agents that bring it into being. Gifts necessitate, or at the very least imply, a giver. Gift giving, whatever we might think, creates or participates in an economy of debt and obligation.14 Each cause, therefore, shares responsibility, is co-responsible, with the other causes. They, as well as we, share in this economy of obligation and responsibility. When it comes to that which is made – techne – we speak of that which occasions, that which presences. And that which is brought forth – poiesis – includes physis (nature) as well. ‘Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense.’15 Our arts and crafts bring forth as nature does, and though Heidegger, like many of us, privileges the primordial originality, majestic elegance, and awesome complexity of the latter, he understands the revelatory creative strangeness of the former too. Techne, like physis, is an occasion, a happening, one with its own modes and relations and the ability to educate us if we so choose. Educate? Education as, or by way of, revelation, aletheia, truth. The awakening of the soul.16 And again, we ought not here confuse truth with correct representation.17 As Heidegger warns, ‘in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw’.18 That we tend to conflate and confuse the two now and have so tended for millennia – since the veritas of Rome – once again brings to bear Shakespeare’s relevance to our reading of Heidegger, as Coriolanus (1609) shows us the truth of Rome. The truth of Rome? The domination of truth to a correct representation whose function begins and ends with efficiency (even if to ironical excess!). Naturally then, this truth – veritas – makes use of any and all mechanism and structures of power efficiently serviceable. And people too.

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In only a dozen lines the citizens of Rome – All – decide the fate of Caius Martius. They name him ‘chief enemy’ and call him ‘dog to the commonalty’, they believe him to be over-proud and self-serving. ‘What he hath done famously, he did it to that end.’ He had not fought Rome’s enemies for Rome or for Rome’s people, rather only to attain the ‘altitude of his virtue’, the empyreal air and fragrance of valour for its own sake that so easily intoxicates its agent towards excellence and the masses towards admiration. Consider that at one point he takes on Rome’s enemy, the Volsces, entirely by himself: ‘He is himself alone, / To answer all the city.’ And when he had finally won the day and the city he took no plunder. COMINIUS Our spoils he kicked at, And looked upon things precious as they were The common muck of the world. He covets less Than misery itself would give, rewards His deeds with doing them, and is content To spend the time to end it.19

Martius fights not for profit, rather honour and excellence. Not money and treasure – ‘The common muck of the world’ – but deeds themselves worth doing. Marks of a rare soul, as many of the people know. Yet the people ’s response to his quite customary request for their suffrage, by which he may rise to the consulship – a process troubled with some cunning prodding by the Tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius – shows them quickly and easily degenerated into a strange loathing: ‘Down with him! down with him!’; ‘To th’ rock, to th’ rock with him!’; ‘He’s banished, and it shall be so!’ Why? They do not know what to do with a person like Martius, nor he them. People, in the main, aspire to comprehensible goals; things that bring joy; appetitive titillations and long-term securities: food, shelter, sex, children, and other pleasures, desires, needs or – here more emphasized and important – the means by which to obtain them. That is, money. And when money, or wealth as representative medium of exchange, becomes the sole vehicle by which life’s essential needs and desirable pleasures are obtained – instead of words and deeds themselves – then the foundation for valuing that vehicle above all else is set. As Jean-Pierre Vernant writes, Wealth had replaced all the aristocratic values: marriage, honors, privileges, reputation – wealth could win them all. Now it was money that mattered, money that made the man. But unlike all other ‘powers’, wealth admitted of no limit: nothing in it could set a bound, restrict it, or make it complete. The essence of wealth was excess, which was also the shape of hybris in the world.20

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Martius, however – like a Bronze Age hero out of Homer’s epics21 – resists this world of exchange, this privileging of the economic vehicle of obtainment (which we must admit seems easier to do when we possess a surfeit or scarcity of it) in favour of an untimely, non-remunerative set of ‘aristocratic values’. What does this mean? Money becomes the most efficient and universal of measures.22 The measure of what? Power. But not the primal power to accomplish what we will (which is poetic power), rather the dubious promise of Western power: the power to possess the mechanism – and thus the right (or the illusion of authority) – by which to obtain our needs and desires. We forget that ‘a man is the prisoner of his power’23 and that ‘by power we really mean weakness’.24 This empty and delusive possession creates the conditions by which all of nature and human life become devalued from within themselves.25 How so? We cannot often give a reasonable or coherent account of why we desire and prefer the things we do, but we implicitly comprehend and encourage the acquisition of the mechanism that grants us the power and privilege to obtain whatever we want. This leads to expansion without growth, inflation without prosperity. The fall becomes inevitable. We should note that the trouble in Coriolanus begins not with a lack of food per se, but the price of it: ‘We’ll have corn at our own price.’ When Martius still seeks the people’s voice for consul, one citizen tells him the price for his vote: ‘The price is to ask it kindly.’ A price of exceeding cost for one such as he. Paris vaut bien une messe?26 Though this reading is not about money, it – as a very old, a very much concrete and abstract technology – nevertheless acts as a telling symptom. Of what? Our relation to our world is not free.27 Neither can we say is our relation to each other, to the idea of excellence (arete), or our very own selves. Things cannot be what they are. Or, rather, they can only be themselves inauthentically as exchangeable representations of themselves. Life as marketplace. And this most fundamentally indicates a technological issue. To be sure, there are additional avenues of approach we might explore, but it is our techne – the penultimate aim and purpose of which is efficiency for its own sake – that reveals itself as the arche and means (and end) of our lack of freedom. Tragic efficiency. Tragic efficiency? This concept comes of our concurrent condition as masterfully technological and definitively mortal, driven to live socially and – ultimately – rationally. To trace this idea we would follow from the Greeks to the existentialists (no doubt through their romantic precursors) to the critical theorists and (some) philosophical anarchists. As Jacques Ellul notes, ‘In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at having absolute efficiency

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(for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’28 This comes with tragic consequences. We were already destined to die and to live with that knowledge: our own small tragedy to act out in fear and trembling. Now, however, the path to that death becomes something else, something so efficient, so banal – because it is no longer our own uncanny end – that we only imagine it through commoditized entertainment or retirement planning. Until we come up with a ‘cure’, of course. The cost of life has become yet another thing priced. All our fearful awe for it stirs below the surface of our superficial thoughts, there down below where ‘darkness secretes holiness’.29 A holiness no efficiency, price, politics, or morality can truly bring to light or subdue. Returning to Heidegger’s most basic question here, we ask: ‘What is modern technology?’30 Only when we learn to see and hear modern technology for what it is – ‘allowing our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic’ – does its distinction and newness from technology as such reveal itself to us. Heidegger calls what is newly revealed through modern technology a ‘challenging’ (Herausfordern).31 A challenging that ‘puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such’.32 He tells us that this demand bears little resemblance to that of former technologies. A windmill waits for the wind to stir, but not the power plant. The former exemplifying an older, more ‘poetic’ type of technology that waits for the earth to offer itself. Like the poet awaiting the word of the Muse. Conversely, the latter goes and takes from the earth, it sets upon it, challenges it, and changes it. Heidegger succinctly describes the process and its self-regulation: The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the revealing that challenges.33

Modern technology arises before and around us as a challenging and transforming mode of revelation, of truth. It confronts nature and us as a deputized band of highwaymen overtaking pilgrims en route to a shrine. It happens with such regularity that we in time forget we were ever pilgrims on the way somewhere

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sacred. Yet more than deeds of greed, modern technology is a system and a rationale (that certainly appeals to and makes use of that rapacious disease). It ‘reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course’. It shows itself to itself, reveals its parts and procedures. We are ‘free’ to see how it works. How does it work? Most efficiently. How does it show us? Our participation. Our part pays the price of admission. Modern technology shows itself to us – and at all – through its very operations and mechanisms, of which we are a part. It does so to itself, for itself. It regulates and secures for its own truth, as its own truth. The parts of an engine mean nothing alone. When we take into account the fuller picture – and not merely the immediate frame – modern technology does not serve us like tools or instruments; it rather requires and justifies itself through our service to it. Washing machines, dishwashers, driers, and the like do not actually save time or money, they only regulate and secure a type of domesticity from which escape seems impossible and to make no sense. Such technologies concede nothing and take everything. What occurred to the land and indigenous populations of the North American continent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never ended. It only got smarter, subtler, more invisibly and intractably systemic. It got colder with the power to feel warmer. This character of the technological – ever-new techniques, devices, systems – offers no olive branch, makes no time or room for harmony, unless of course to do so permits a scintilla of marketable profitability. Or by chance humility and harmony appear terribly efficient. It seems monstrous. Monstrous?

Human, all too human Recall Sophocles’ Ode to Man:       Numberless wonders terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man – that great wonder crossing the heaving gray sea,       driven on by blasts of winter on through breakers crashing left and right,    holds his steady course and the oldest of the gods he wears away – the Earth, the immortal, the inexhaustible – as his plows go back and forth, year in, year out    with the breed of stallions turning up the furrows.34

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The greatest of the Greek tragedians describes humans here as to deinotaton. Fagles translates the word here as ‘great wonder’ and links it to ‘terrible wonders’. Heidegger, like Hölderlin, translates Greek deinos into German as Das Unheimliche, adjectivally as unheimlich, which most directly means ‘un-homely’ or ‘unfamiliar’, yet arrives in English as something like ‘strange’, ‘monstrous’, or ‘uncanny’.35 Much can be (and has been) said about this word deinos, particularly its usage here in this passage from Antigone, more than would here be germane to explore. Let us simply, though not unimportantly, note that upon perusing various translations of deinos we would, in addition to what we have already mentioned, find it rendered as ‘awful’, ‘awesome’, ‘terrible’, ‘marvellous’, ‘dire’, ‘powerful’, and still more. In a world filled with strange and fearful creatures and events, humans reign supreme: we are the most fearful, powerful, and inhabitual.36 This great agency and mastery of the world, when bound to our mortality, leaves us inhabitually and strangely and uncannily the master of a home not truly ours. Or put another way, our home is dangerous and we are the most dangerous creatures in it: dangerous to the other creatures in it, to ourselves, and the home itself. Whichever sense we mull, our being – when viewed through our techniques and technologies – is nothing simple or simply benign. Our monstrousness – to deinotaton – as modern technology has come to reign supreme over all of nature in a way the uncanny Greeks, with their sacred groves and enchanted trees, with their holy days and shrines, could never have imagined.37 Spirits and gods dwelt in nature, travelled as strangers. The imperiously cosmopolitan Romans on the other hand could imagine such subjugation and transformation. The latter colonial powers certainly could. And we already have. For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.38

On this modern technological note of power: cause becomes truth. Once a cause has little to do with occasioning, and nothing to do with indebtedness or co-responsibility, it becomes power only. Merely and utterly. Agency undiluted by other agents. Power to whatever without partners. Such power comes to be considered its own veracity, its own legitimacy. And this veracity inevitably appropriates the place and name of truth: truth not as aletheia, not as un-forgetting or un-concealing or revelation or the poetically founded, rather truth as veritas, truth as correct representation or conception.39 Correctness,

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of course, being something entirely determined by use and those that use. Us. But only after we come to incarnate rational principles and give all measures over to rationality. Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. Penultimately, truth becomes one cause. One cause creating one reality. What is this one cause? Efficiency. Truth, in this calculative-schematic sense of correspondence, can now only be considered as causa efficiens. Materials, shapes, reasons? All folded into and under efficiency. Now nothing can even seem reasonable if it lacks efficiency. Even the gigantic, luxurious, and excessive can only be so if they serve some expedient purpose. Even God, Heidegger tells us, sinks to the level of efficiency, losing all mystery and holiness.40 Efficiency has become the most unquestionable criterion in determining the ingredients, forms, and functions of anything. Any other answer seems simply idealistic or deceived or innocent. Yes, we were an efficient agent through whom technology stepped forth, until that causal power, like an ocean, swept over us too: ‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves also are this will to power – and nothing besides.’41 This strange song, this tragedy, occurs between the fundamental and secondary structures of human civilization – that space between beings whatsoever and mechanisms whatsoever, wherein means touch their ends and whys their hows. A tragedy without Dionysus however, for it is Modern (even if it began millennia ago). A tragedy permitting no genuine warnings by choral odes, yet a tragedy not without an unreasonable supply of rationality and ersatz. Tragic efficiency sans Bacchic reversals. Holy days for shopping, not silence or salvation. Whither leisure? Hallmarked for sale, for sure. Efficiency. Often as or with profitability, it now ascends to the station of the circularly self-justifying, in no need of apologia. Obvious, common sense, rational, practical – valuable – wise, economic, dynamic, useful. While whatever we cannot reduce to the causa efficiens – those few arts and activities remaining – acquires inverse characteristics. Hidden, abstruse, irrational, impractical – unimportant – imprudent, wasteful, impotent, useless: a taxonomy that devotees of the Liberal Arts and the Humanities might find all too familiar. No surprise then when Rome stands against Coriolanus for his resistance to the all-consuming agency of efficiency that she represents, for his resistance to becoming mere resource, a sheer killing ‘thing’. Though, as with all great tragedies, resistance to fate leads only to futility. After Rome gives heroic Caius Martius the name ‘Coriolanus’ – taken from the Volscian city gate he took and held alone – he cannot bring himself to capitulate to a custom of clearly false and very public humility in order to become consul. A custom wherein he must

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display his war wounds and give an account of them to gain the people’s consent for the consulship. He finds it beneath his honour. CORIOLANUS I do beseech you, Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage. Please you that I may pass this doing.42

With the (largely unnecessary) prompting of a couple pestiferous Tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, Rome’s plebeians – all – take offence. Then the world turns upside down. Coriolanus, doing as he has always done (militarily at least), takes matters into his own hands and, in a powerful scene we will later consider, renounces Rome and joins his rival, the Volscian general Aufidius. Yet, inevitability, the omnipresence of the singularizing force of will-to-power – causa efficiens – welcomes him there among his enemies as happily as it would have in Rome. Cominius and Menenius describe Coriolanus thusly after he changes sides and takes the field: COMINIUS If? He is their god. He leads them like a thing Made by some other deity than nature, That shapes man better.43

A little later: MENENIUS This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing.44

And just after that, When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.45

Coriolanus’ fate changes little to none among the Volsces. We find it only juxtaposed. Successful in battle, loved by his men (now the Volscians), feared by his enemies (now the Romans), excellent beyond excess, and yet he has still become ‘like a thing’, ‘a creeping thing’, ‘an engine’. As he nears the walls of the Capitol all seems lost for Latium and dread and dissolution grow. He has in fact become even more terrible than Rome could have imagined. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eyes, talks like a knell, and his ‘hmh!’ is a battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done

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is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.46

But he cannot escape efficiency. For all his uncanniness and power, he is – as all Romans, as all Volsces, as all of us – still an agent and a resource of efficiency, still only a subordinated part that can be played out and upon modern technology’s stage. A stage built of human uncanniness and power. A stadium erected in our blood, realized as modern technology, become a virtual coliseum in which we cheer on our own amusing deaths. Bread and circuses like never before. All for a singularizing, rationalizing causality. Even – especially – Coriolanus. Or any other uncanny power – Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, and others – victimized and ultimately defined by tragic efficiency and its myriad modes of violent and compellent regulation. Consider the possibility that Coriolanus’ fate was sealed the moment his mother placed a sword in his hands in defence of the Roman war machine. Nietzsche: ‘Beauty is unattainable to all violent wills’.47 Heidegger explains this modern technological fate as follows: All that is has become standing-reserve (Bestand).48 The cosmos become a changeable resource standing by to be used in whatever fashion we unthinkingly – banally – see fit: the push of a button, turn of a key, flick of a switch, sweep of a screen, sound of our voice; to change the temperature, to activate or deactivate or alter the lighting, to use the device, to access the system. Everything. Even us. All that is become resource for use, for consumption, for sale. It is the fate of the marriage of modern technology to the causa efficiens and the latter’s divorce from responsibility or bond to the other causes that dooms us (though Heidegger never explicitly says this, we find it the most evident consequence of his reading). What prompted this marriage forward? Like Coriolanus and Virgilia or any good pairing of patricians, the bride and groom probably had little say: rationality paired them for their families’ mutual benefit. Who or what could now stand before them and have any hope of turning them aside? Rationality gives eyes and a rack through which to see and store the world as that which awaits conquest, opening up, transformation, storage, distribution – for use whenever wherever whatsoever. Heidegger names this all-seeing curio of modernity enframing (Gestell).49 ‘Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.’50 Gestell in German names racks, bookracks, shelves, frames, stands, stages, skeletons, and more.

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The English word rack bears a not too dissimilar note of functionality and eeriness when we think of all the ways we can and have used the term. The functional and eerie equivocality of the Gestell that racks and skeletonizes the world into Bestand tells us how will-to-power, when considered rationally, sees (even if will itself – as physis, mood, nature, intuition, id, etc. – is irrational). It observes the world and its waters, vistas, valleys, mountains, greeneries, creatures, and its peoples not for what they are, only as resources. Setting aside absolution in nothingness, this may well be the most fitting fate awaiting us. For if we consider the serpent wise – friend or not we do not know51 – the cost of eating from the Tree of Knowledge appears not to be our obvious death, rather our rise to a kingship and a dominion by such tools and knowledge that those very tools and knowledge take dominion for themselves. Not for lust and ambition, but because it makes perfect sense. Why ought things not run themselves? It is efficient for them to do so and all we can do ‘outside’ of their operations simply complicates matters, unless of course we ourselves become simple. Simple, if we recall, comes to us from the Latin simplex meaning ‘onefold’, ‘a single part’, ‘plain’, ‘unmixed’, ‘uncompounded’. It is therefore most efficient for us each to become – or to remain ever – one-dimensional. Heidegger does point out that we never completely succumb to ‘mere standingreserve’, since ‘man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing’.52 Though he quickly adds that the unconcealed itself – the revelation of modern technology, the truth that is and is concealed in and unconcealed by modern technology – is no human handiwork.53 We play our part, nothing more, nothing less. Still, we seem destined to become stock, to become resource. It appears already to have occurred. Not ‘mere standing-reserve’, rather the crown jewel of the world’s working inventory. Regulators, managers, technicians, bureaucrats, administrators: wherever our place in the hierarchy, whatever our job title, we function as subordinated helpmates suitable – by nature and training qua ‘education’ – to the task of handling a set of allocated ‘responsibilities’. The degree of exactitude, scrutiny, and oversight expected usually varying according to ‘compensation’. All determined from the rationally determined perspective of and for the efficient transformation and regulation of all that is. Again: for the sake of a rationally determined efficiency ‘– and nothing besides!’ Of all the ‘manifoldly interlocking paths’ that this way of seeing, thinking, and relating us to ourselves and the world (Gestell) as resource (Bestand) signals, the most consequential seems our very pragmatic restriction to the realm of tragedy: a satyr-ic song and dance in which we all compete for a goat.54 At the conclusion,

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win or lose, we die all the same. And we wonder, goat or no goat, what was it all for? The tragically efficient? Yes. Jung articulates this fate as follows: Finally, to add comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp his dignity as worthless and turn his autonomy into an absurdity. All his achievements and possessions do not make him bigger; on the contrary, they diminish him, as the fate of the factory worker under the rule of a ‘just’ distribution of goods clearly demonstrates.55

Does freedom remain a possibility for our calculative world? A world that by all accounts appears destined for utter tragic efficiency? To become or remain standing-reserve? Enframed as resource? Seen, thought, and related to only as representative commodity? Perhaps Dostoyevsky was right and ‘consciousness is a disease’? Freedom having only ever comprised merely one of many historically captivating delusions – justice, beauty, truth, goodness – symptomatic of the disease. A disease that however contracted ultimately welcomes rationality and efficiency with open arms as the ends and means of human life. And though subtle enough to give place and lip service to contemplative leisure (scholia),56 in time it only comes to devalue and marginalize what cannot be brought under the umbrella of the rationally efficient or the amusing management of serotonin (the latter still really only serving the former). Or there remains a way of seeing, thinking, relating – dwelling – that resists these harsh, if diversely nerfed, realities. These merry, medicated, managed realities seeming harsh only to those who long for their time spent in study, contemplation, and worship to matter. To be somehow justified. Or, at the very least, not misguided elitism, romanticism, or blinded idealism. To have read and considered and been stirred by Keats or Dickinson or Rimbaud or Rilke or Yeats or Eliot or Celan or Szymborska or that all the novels and the plays and the essays and the histories and the criticisms – mattered. Not for nothing. Those experiences, though sometimes appropriable as marketable commodities in one field or another, were – are – largely valuable precisely for their lack of marketability, their lack of practicality. They round out that dimension of thought that otherwise loses – or never gains – its shape, that otherwise never becomes complex. That is all to say that, quite distinct from the institutional realms of the economic, sociopolitical, or juridical, the dimension of thought reserved for meditative and imaginative purposes offers us the only authentic path to freedom. Though certain types of communities and conspiracies might act as excellent contexts and facilitators for this most personal experience of freedom, we ultimately experience it alone.

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And yet, as with any pharmakon possessed of healing power, it is, in any prefatory analysis, more dangerous than the normative and singularizing domain of existential unfreedom. Swimming is safer, for instance, in shallow waters or with the provision of floatation devices. To do so strikes us as less daring and therefore less fun for able swimmers. And any act made safe becomes less capable of delivering itself over to the possibility of play. This is not insignificant: play carries us into the realm of the free.57 It does so in as much as art in its truest form plays, it frees. If we ever wondered why philosophers at some point in their considerations keep turning to poetry, music, and art, this ligature of the arts to liberty tells us. It is a freedom to find the truth of our very own being, to sing the truth of the universe. ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself.’58 Yet, to sense or experience this ligature we must cease seeing  – and thinking and relating – according to the pragmatic lens and rational measure of tragic efficiency. Towards this liberating retrieval, and using the sort of near-religious language it requires, Heidegger tells us we have to open our eyes and ears, unlock our hearts, and give ourselves over to meditation, entreating, and thanking.59 We must become ready ‘to be astounded before the coming of the dawn’.60 If we do not become ready to see so again, then the modern dawn now dawning will signal a final twilight in which our vespertine requiem will cease. Our descendants will not even understand their loss of our sense of loss.

Only a God can save us The world cares only about representation. The Roman commonality’s concern about the lack of corn, as earlier indicated, can only really be expressed through concern for its price. Coriolanus cannot stand this break with reality, a reality wherein he understands physis only through arete and arete only through physis, the two interpenetrating one another in what constitutes his world. This difficult if not hopeless sense of the world serves as his measure of mortal activities, a measure of which the plebeians fall trivially short. They do not fall as far as he perilously rises and the reasons for such dramatic movements radically differ. They hold and are held by the centre – status quo – while he is led elsewhere. Why? Whatever something is is what it ought to be, or at least that for which it should strive to know, and in so knowing, become. Pindar: ‘You have learnt what kind of person

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you are: now become that man.’61 Coriolanus believes this. He lives thusly. ‘Brave death outweighs bad life.’ But all the commonality sees is what we see: prices. Representations and symbols of representations imbued with power. When all that is becomes known only as representation of what it is and that representation becomes something unquestioningly exchangeable – a reserve of interchangeability, whenever, however – then a representational exchange reality intractably arises. ‘O brave new world!’ Veritas overtakes and appropriates aletheia.62 Accuracy and correctness evolve, and we with them, so that occasions as such cannot even be what they are, rather only what they represent. What does this mean? It means, ‘The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture.’63 It means worldviews consume truth. Of course, they only do so after binding truth upon a rack (Gestell) that exsanguinates its unwieldy dimensionality in favour of readily comprehensible – consumable – thematic remnants. Fragmented areas we consider to signal more than they do or out of which we fashion our ‘truths’ about the world and ourselves. It also means that meaning does not arise from seeing and thinking the world, but from squaring images of the world – laws, principals, theories, statistics, facts – with each other, including the image of ourselves. This squaring of all the images keeps everything in frame, it puts everything in ‘harmonious’ relation to everything else: foreground, background, edges, subject matter, palette, style, references, and so on. Upon inspection this work strikes us as awesome in scale, complex in detail, and – above all else – haunting. This haunting conceptual reality subsequently becomes modern technology’s fetch for nature, the spectre of the world. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society, devoted to maximal material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into part of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling.64

This spectre – this collective of spectres – haunts those who see them for what they are rather than as the truth for which the commonality takes them. Such perception bespeaks the modern pathology of the humanistic sciences. The ghost of die Geisteswissenschaften vexing die Wissenschaften. Vade retro satana? 65 Our occidental pathology of thematic remnants: schizophrenia. An inevitable pathology accepted as ‘worldview’ by those always already estranged  – to

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deinotaton – when they become subjected to a representative and rationally ordered world of use and efficiency, a realm wherein non-rational and free spontaneity are either dissuaded by ethos, suppressed by nomos, or appropriated by and sublimated through the mechanistic-institutional structures for use or profit: state, religion, medicine, academy, markets whatsoever. This results in both treatable and incurable schizophrenia: our fundamental alienation by way of techne allowing for the possibility of wonderment at and within our own being become a materialistically contingent and conceptually preconditioned state of confusion in which we hallucinate our existence and the cosmos as a picture, an image, a representation. An experience we seem to have no reason whatsoever to question. Until, the lights do not flick on, the car fails to turn over, an important document gets lost in the mail, there is civil unrest, a war lasts longer than a decade: the systems and relations – taken as foundational or superstructural – upon which reality stands or hangs fails and we temporarily notice things are not what they seem or how we might have wished them to be. Like the price of corn.66 Or anything else. Until the trouble ends or we reinterpret it or we become habituated to it, then the prices stabilize, the debt gets consolidated, we medicate: a ‘safely’ levelled equilibrium of some sort at all costs, at any price. All in the name of happiness. All in the name of a dubious happiness that can never deliver what its peddlers promise. This schizophrenic pathology – a de facto state conflating what is with a representation of what is and a subsequent substitution of the true with the accurate – sets the conditions for the already dangerous to become fatal. Yes, our condition has been terminal from the start, but the fashion in which we face it has ever mattered. And while our uncanniness (deinos) has always been tied to our techniques and technologies, they have more clearly become the harbingers of our demise since the time of Rome’s cosmopolitan veritas: the representationally ordered, traversable, economically appropriable world of the West. As we have already suggested, when we think in terms of representations imbued with dynamically affective and socio-cognitive frameworks feeding back into our basic biases, interpretations, and conceptions of reality, we could locate this ultimately destructive genesis earlier than the tightly correspondent correctness and rationale of Roman veritas. We do not, however, want to forget that it was – is – this conception of truth that functions as the precursor to the extreme pervasiveness of the calculative thinking (ratio) privileged by us Moderns, early and late, over the meditative thinking (intellectus) of the poets, mystics, and philosophical thinkers.

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Heidegger elucidates upon this distinction in thinking during his memorial address celebrating the 175th birthday of composer Conradin Kreutzer: Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.67

He goes on to say that these two types of thinking – calculative and meditative – are ‘each justified and needed in [their] own way’. Yet our contemporary age does not see this, it finds little use for meditative thinking. We tend to consider such contemplations out of touch with reality. ‘It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs.’ Heidegger writes that meditative thinking is akin to farmers caring for the land, practising their craft, and exercising patience for seeds and seasons, for sowing, growing, and harvest; a different game than the rigid play of exactitude at the press of a button, the expectations of a dissimulated memo, the remainder of an equation. ‘At times [meditative thinking] requires a greater effort. It demands more practice.’ It requires greater effort and more practice due to the desolate time of impatience in which we live, the time of tragic efficiency. An age of meticulous methodology without caring why. Everything becomes a procedural question, no riddles of thought, no mysteries for contemplation. Fewer and fewer of us sowing seeds of thought or awaiting the ground so sowed to yield up – in its own time – its bud and fruit. And this meditative mode of thinking requires no special place or time or training. Anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditative being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be ‘high-flown’. It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what lies closest; upon that which concerns us, each of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history.68

Still, are we not closed off from this sort of consideration of what lies closest, of what is here and now in the present hour of history? In this moment of the world? It now seems so impractical, profitless, and inefficient. Or, it only seems so when we concern ourselves solely with practicality, profit, and efficiency. Money chiefly exemplifies this fundamental compromise, this concession that structurally threatens and bargains in order to negotiate. Yet money only

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demonstrates will-to-power via representation (concrete or otherwise). And though quite challenging in its own right, this all-appropriating representation of will-to-power (money) is itself not the challenging force to our structural integrity (privately and collectively) in the effort to rightly know and negotiate life. What is? Not the phenomenality of representation itself per se, rather its earliest calculative movement attempting to grasp the ungraspable. But being so uncanny – the uncanniest of the uncanny – we jeopardized the ungraspable’s ungraspability. ‘Never’ and ‘cannot’, like permanence, have now become only words of degree. Our arts and sciences permit no refusals. Or, ‘What You Will’. Meaning? Idolatry. Idolatry? Yes. Before taking on their significance as statuary and false, idolatry and its idols originate from eidolon, ‘appearance’, from eidos, ‘form’, itself from eido, ‘to see’. Taken all together, conveying something like, ‘the shape of that which is seen’. Idols share this Greek genesis with Ideas, with Plato’s eternal Forms, which we can only behold with our ‘soul’s eye’ (if we possess the right disposition, education, and intellectual capability). Yet, to turn the invisible – the unseen, the non-appearing – visible by way of representation is, curiously, idolatrous. That is, though idols and ideas arise from the same Hellenic waters of fascination for seeing and beholding, the former comes to profane the latter by making sensible and calculable what was originally hidden, pre-logical, and imperishable. (The truth of ‘the nothing’ and the fall of metaphysics into ‘the standard of the idea of science?’69) Still, that we in so many and various ways long for golden calves – functional, symbolic, resonant images of that for which we yearn – ought to inform us of idolatry’s uses, limitations, and tendencies towards conflation. Now, whether considered psychoanalytically, socio-politically, economically, or even existentially or religiously – or any combination of these regional, vestigial, remnantal approaches – our individual and collective sense of wholeness finds itself primordially conflicted by our attempts to reconcile our own very private thoughts and feeling with the vast world(s) in which we exist. We wish to receive, to consider, and to project these two realms – the private and the shared – in such a way as to affirm both what is and what is our own experience of what is, namely ourselves as beings-in-the-world. This, it seems to me, is the basic problem of being and representation, truth and image, universality and subjectivity. We desire this double affirmation – whatever its articulation – for stability as well as the possibility of change (change seeming beneficial from time to time). But, whether in terms of reason or experience, we cannot affirm either realm (our own private world or the vast shared world) or our desires for stability and the possibility

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of change through simple negations or through easily rejected accounts. Put another way, whether considered constructively or negatively, theories or beliefs – whatever their merit – never retain their persuasive charm, grounding weight, or radical pressure indefinitely.70 The explanation for this inevitable search and failure never arises monolithically. Though, for reasons we will not explore here, we tend to lean towards one (some form of idealism) or the other (some form of materialism), or we wish to find some nuanced equilibrium between the two, be it an ancient approach (like Aristotle’s) or a more modern one (like Kant’s). In any event, money, like all representations and schemes dynamically imbued with (or ceded) affective, social, and cognitive power – as the art and religion of the ancients clearly demonstrates – might best be considered one of many alienating idols. Idolizing consequently – post factum – arises as that most vital and dangerous activity enlarging the rift between the earth and us. That rift we find within our own selves. That rift which is the possibility of a world. Yet, imagining some mechanistically ever-expanding placeholder, we might wonder what happens when only nothingness fills the space? When only seemingly ‘free images’ and ‘calculative schemes’ hold sway without meditative meaning? Nihilistic idolatry? Empty idols? Yes. And this occurs even though idolatry – religious or scientific – has the converse hope of drawing down saving powers by placing gods into sensible forms. Let us consider Hosea’s admonition: Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.71

Asshur – Nimrod, hunter, builder of cities, idol – will not save us. Idols, it seems, cannot save us. At least not in the way the ancients thoughtfully believed (or in the way we thoughtlessly assume). The prophet tells us we must no longer look to ‘the works of our hands’. Techne – instruments, systems, views, exchanges, human made things whatsoever – can no longer be our god. Even if we – you or I or anyone else – were not thinking of these things as ‘gods’ per se, or even if we deride divine terminology as romantic or superstitious. Whatever our biases, we must, each in our own private way, still come to say: What have I to do any more with idols? I have heard him, and observed him: I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit found.72

Instead of locating ourselves in our idols of modern science and technology, our gods of systems and worldviews – all of which in the end reduce to the

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efficient and the economically profitable (unless radically resisted) – we, Hosea prophesies, ought to hear and regard what is as it is. (I AM.) In so hearing and beholding, we can come to be in our own way like all else that is in its own way, and we do so in order to be free and to bear fruit. The bird flies, the flower blooms, the sun shines, and the human does rather than being made to do. A being free to be itself. [Aside. Why did the serpent really want Eve to eat of that tree? For her – our – own freedom? Or to enslave her – us – to one interpretation of the world? (Would the ring of Gyges liberate us to be whom we really are or would it deprive us of an unmediated will?) Were her eyes opened and her soul born at the cost of an unbridgeable rift? Or does her story locate the origin of something more essentially lost than gained or traded?] To be free and to become generative? Representational pictures of what is (which we use to construct an exacting conceptual reality we can control) and their interchangeable parts (as theories, machines, programmes, systems) cannot accomplish this potential freedom and its harvest. Freedom and harvest not as political liberation and automated production, but as an authentic seeing, thinking, and relating to the world and others in such a way that we reclaim our mythic investiture and call to dwell fruitfully, prosperously, prudently. A worthwhile endeavour without regard for representational profit, rather profit itself. Not an idol of the goddess ever-present at hand, rather the goddess herself arriving when she chooses. Like the starlight, the rain, the breeze, the freeze, the thaw, the birth, or love, lust, joy, anxiety, calm, fear. She, unknown, walks among us when she chooses. When she happens. This fruit of original beholding and meditative thinking, however, often eludes us in our capacity as calculative thinkers. It seems foolish. Foolish Bottom hits upon it: – I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.73

[Aside. Of course those that see and attempt to overcome this deeply embedded idolatrous tendency of our calculative thinking do so at the expense of near-

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universal ridicule (another begrudgingly admirable quality of the world’s tragic efficiency). Prophets, poets, philosophers, artists, revolutionaries, cynics, sceptics, and rebels whatever their ilk or cause or reason – Dorothy Day, Che, Tolstoy, Jesus, Diogenes, Socrates – find themselves in web comics, appearing on t-shirts, advocating for this or that brand, appearing in footnotes and as allusions (as I employ them here) and, all in all, becoming cultural icons with all manner of economic and propagandist capabilities. Their lives, philosophies, works, however contrary to the products or services in question, become appropriated for marketing purposes. For witty or chic or ironic branding. For use. For efficiency. For profitability. Dying does not spare them this indignity, only moves their image into the public domain.] So far it seems idols of efficiency – economic ‘viability’, political ‘pragmatism’, social ‘reality’ – always gets the last laugh and makes fools of us all. All the while castigating (or appropriating) any hint of foolishness. Time and its ordinances, on the other hand, do not care what we do with our lives. Death welcomes all: all fools, all sages, all radicals, all moderates. But the one great cause – causa efficiens – subordinates us all prior to dying. It wants systemic accountability. It wants every part in its place. Reason matters little, unless it is the reason rationalizing all regulating. We critics of the world engine and its cosmic rationality, sadly, have only our imperfect approaches – humanistic, liberal, critical, and so forth. Sciences largely incomprehensible to The Sciences. The difference here, for example, falls between something like beauty as an elegant equation and beauty as a wound induced by the trauma of a sublime experience. We programme our programmes and conduct experiments to find the former; we feel haunted by the latter. We universally apply the one equation; we find ourselves at the other’s mercy. According to the former, beauty can be manufactured, marketed, purchased. According to the latter, beauty bears the holiest name given to love’s manifold madness; it cannot be bought or sold or traded. Such an imperfect formulation of something as significant as beauty seems more than a little foolish. It seems so very human. Yet, how can anyone in good conscience deny the idols of efficiency? Fail to bend the knee before the golden calves of practicality? Disobey the watchword of reason and good sense? Is Coriolanus’ sin chiefly his denial of the new veritas? We will see. But before we do let us see something else, something that better situates us to what we have said and anticipate what we will say: let us take a moment to consider arete as efficiency, highlighting the difference and distance between our conception of arete as efficiency and the Greeks.

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Late and soon arete remains a question of excellence. The criteria we use to determine our modern notion of excellence, however, radically contrasts with any Greek sense of it. True, there remain deceptive similarities between the two, but they do not hold up under scrutiny. Let us recall two Greek understandings that, while at odds with one another, both nevertheless demonstrate this contrast between the ancient and the modern. First, arete for Plato, like all else in the world, finds its being in a transcendent, timeless ideal. Like justice, truth, and goodness, as well as trees, horses, and humans, arete – as virtue – possesses its own form to which all earthly instantiations of it must adhere. It signals no pragmatic concern, but an otherworldly absolute for which to strive, a universal measure for all contexts, all times, all peoples. Prior to Plato’s streamlining of arete into a form perpetually afloat in the higher heavens – an idea by which all accounts of it necessarily shared and found their meaning in that one universal design74 – excellence arose always in connection with a who, a what, a deed, a decision, a skill.75 This older arete, closer to the spirit and understanding of Homer, Pindar, and the Sophists, indicates the other conception. Classicist and philosopher W. K. C. Guthrie explains: Arete then is a word which by itself is incomplete. There is the arete of wrestlers, riders, generals, shoemakers, slaves. There is political arete, domestic arete, military arete. It meant in fact ‘efficiency’.76

This older arete did not automatically imply anything ethical, virtuous, or ‘good’ in the wide or lofty sense we now tend to assume. It rather bespoke excellence as effectiveness – efficiency – regarding any given task at hand. The arete of the shoemaker and shoemaking will look quite different than the arete of the wrestler and wrestling. Socrates and Plato’s interest in excellence itself and in excellent living came to occlude this original equivocality of arete. Prior to this development, context, community, and aim always determined what was considered good, desirable, fitting. That is, efficient. The efficiency of modernity, I am here arguing, is neither the grand idea of excellence as virtue proposed in Plato’s dialogues, nor is it this older, more original sense of excellence as situational effectiveness, even though it does take on elements of both: It is one and it is relative. How? The modern conception of efficiency, which I have suggested throughout this chapter, is the inevitable result of deinos become the largely autonomous and all enfolding cause – causa efficiens – determining (through dominating) all materials, shapes, and functions by way of the very mode – techne – through which our own uncanniness (deinos, unheimliche) had been revealed to us in the first place. So, while the look of

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efficiency will certainly vary from context to context, we can now only find its meaning – and all meanings – only through unending functionality for the sake of functionality. Efficiency remains forever bound to the goal of ‘good sense’, speed, and ease. In a word: practicality. (The overwhelming majority of the time this means money; the most powerful of the idolatrous mechanisms of power.) Arete no longer signals excellence, virtuousness, or goodness in themselves or towards those particular aims; rather, merely – tragically – the only way in which those terms can be understood at all, in any context. The virtue of any given thing can now only be seen in light of its value as an effective participant (passive or active) towards the end of efficiency itself. Quantifiability at all costs. The reason for any rhetoric, the material of any chalice, the purpose of any system, the shape of any machine: nothing determined by what ought to be or could possibly be its particular and fitting excellence – that which is really in its interest, that which honestly serves it, that which truly reveals and fulfils it – it is instead ultimately determined by whatever serves best to bring it about most efficiently. Cheaply, quickly, easily, simply. And so the heroic and fitting excellences of the Greeks lose to this monstrous progeny of our own monstrousness. As do we. This deus ex machina – the now autonomous collective of idols and idolizing – contrives against our own respective possibilities of excellence in all things save efficiency; the one cause determining all causes, all reasons, all relations, all materials, all shapes, all sizes, all functions. The tyranny of The bottom line and the autocracy waiting At the end of day. Hence, though we exist so late in history, centuries after the commencement of the Enlightenment, discovering authentic freedom has never been more challenging, more pressing, more dangerous. True collectively, individually, emotionally, intellectually, imaginatively. Heidegger’s articulation of this assessment: Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in a realm of where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself.77

As we have already seen, this all-encompassing subservience not only threatens our relationship to and understanding of the world and ourselves, but it also ‘blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth’.78 Technology itself ought not take the blame however – it is not ‘demonic’ – but its essence is ‘mysterious’.79 And therein lies the danger.80 Danger? The danger of the strange god’s strangeness?81

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The threat of the idolatrous god’s mysterious uncanniness? Not the machines and systems themselves, but the alien affliction always already within ourselves that the god represents? That the god is? Heidegger turns to the poet whose language ravels such riddles upon which he can meditate and confront the danger: But where danger is, grows The saving power also.82

These early lines of Hölderlin’s Patmos prompt the philosopher to wonder first what it means, ‘to save’.83 Most directly to save is to seize and secure against a threat, yet also, and more importantly for Heidegger, it means, ‘to fetch something home into its essence’.84 In this case, if not all cases, the cure is pharmakological.85 The essence of modern technology – considered both mysterious and as enframing – threatens us and offers us salvation. As technological utopia or dystopia? Heidegger thinks not. Those literary and political fictions largely secret away little we would call mysterious. Technologically engineered and supported visions of society – whether dream or nightmare – take either the salvation or the danger of modern technology, rarely both together with a mysterious essence.86 We cannot, according to his reading of the poet, circumvent the danger and ‘lay hold of the saving power immediately and without preparation’.87 We would do well to mark and retrieve here the ambition of Heidegger’s essay: a questioning into the essence of modern technology for the possibility of a free relationship to it. This necessitates the unlocking and opening up of not only technology’s essence, but ours too. If we do not behold and think techne or ourselves essentially – through our respective essences (essence considered phenomenologically as ‘unfolding’, not academically or metaphysically as ‘quiddity’88) – then no authentically free relationship between us can happen. In terms of technology’s happening and our contemplating that happening, we must open to one another. And, most difficult of all, we must honour and secure our mutual mysteries, not explain them away, not subordinate them to strict rationality; a difficult dance to be sure between operations often at odds for thinkers: critical rigour and joyous contemplation, artistic creativity and academic erudition, historical situating and purposeful forgetting.89 Failure to follow this requisite preparation – towards the possibility of a free relationship to modern technology – leaves us afloat in the world of tragic efficiency, leaves us with little to no hope of even realizing we are so stranded. Failure to follow this requisite preparation also negates the efficacy of otherwise great men and

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women who, though they might awaken to the fallen – utterly efficient and idolatrous – nature of this technologized world, have not prepared themselves for a free relationship to it. They cannot escape and there is no salvation. How do we prepare for the possibility of salvation? Salvation espoused to danger? With untimely gratitude, piety, and a renewed or originative consideration of art.90

A World elsewhere If we have yet failed to grasp it, this thanksgiving and originary thinking requires vision. Seeing things anew by seeing things again for what they are and might be. Seeing what is as it truly is means seeing how it ought to be, and how it ought to be can only be seen through its possibility to be what it is. Or, the work of the ethical imagination. Therein lies the saving power. We must first cast off the ensnaring frame (Gestell) – as interpretive lens and logic – of an objective reality simply ‘standing by’ (Bestand) awaiting comprehension and use, and we must do so in order to see the world for what it really is, in order to contemplate its revelation, in order to become celebrants of its mysteries by becoming creative participants of its truth. Creative participation of the world’s truth? The founding of truth through art. Art being techne (skill, craft, technique) as much as poiesis (creating, making, building) indicates both the (largely forgotten) shared origin and the (usual, though not absolute) current estrangement of art and modern technology.91 It also presages Heidegger’s last manoeuvers in his essay. How does this help us? Heidegger attributes our failure to catch the essence of technology to our wonderlessness: we merely gape at the technological.92 We upgrade our homes correspondent to our income, trade in our cars every few years (or drive them into the ground), we go through computers more quickly, phones and other portable devices more quickly still, and system and software updates as quickly as possible: acquiring, using, exchanging, discarding, replacing – an introductory moment of prolonged euphoria, perhaps pride, at the moment of obtaining, followed by a countdown to indifference and the technology’s relative obsolescence. To say nothing of how we power these things. Between those initial sensations and the next procurement or replacement, we gape at the newer, the cooler, the larger, the faster, the more variable, the sleeker, and the smaller. We wish only to get and to have, and as long as we consider technology merely as instrument or device or system – in addition to whatever idol of status we believe it to deliver – we

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will remain thoughtlessly transfixed by the idea of it and moments of its arrival as novel.93 When not so momentarily transfixed it thins us out and dulls our receptivity. Thus we remain both enchanted and dulled by its proclamations and promises, and subject to its law. Unless, Heidegger argues, we can begin to see again, to see originally. How do we see again and originally and hope to overcome the technological? To be saved? A retrieval (An-denken) in order to twist free (Verwindung)?94 If there awaits a ‘morning philosophy’ that frees us, then we must confront the ‘lofty ambiguity’ of the essence of technology which, Heidegger believes, ‘points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth’.95 The double meaning of the essence of technology as danger and saving power: (a) The view of the cosmos through the all-framing optic that challenges, subordinates, and transforms everything (Gestell) into resource (Bestand) and that blocks all experiences of truth as an authentic event, while (b) allowing humankind the opportunity to endure, to have a future, and – possibly – to be the ones ‘needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth’.96 As Hölderlin poeticized, the saving power grows in and among the danger. Wo aber Gefahr ist, wachst / Das Rettende auch. Some translate these lines in a way that brings forth their pharakological connotation. Accordingly, ‘the saving power’ (Das Rettende) bespeaks rescue from the very danger (Gefahr) just mentioned: ‘But where danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows.’97 Not a general salvation growing in an unsafe place, rather salvation from a very particular danger growing in the same place the danger does. A pharmakon. A vital rivalry. Or, a rivalry for vitality. And if this conjunction between danger and salvation bears any relation to that of greatness and tragedy – as the Greeks fully understood and Shakespeare time and again demonstrates – then, as Emerson essays, we cannot fall into an either-or: It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.98

The two simplest responses: we live alongside other people and do as they do or we leave, free to think what we will – si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi? 99 An easy either-or. Not easy, however, is being with others and being oneself. It requires daring to think deeply within a largely thoughtless society. It requires resoluteness to genuinely contemplate in a subordinated society, a society with deceptively little indication of either

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its thoughtlessness or its subordination. To stand before what is as it is and to look for the possibility of meaning within a culture ruled by absolute efficiency requires vision. Daring, resoluteness, vision, thinking, contemplation: greatness. That is, authenticity. Greatness as authenticity? Before greatness ever meant excellence, it dealt with dimensionality, specifically with viscosity and thickness.100 As we take up ownership of our lives – in an essential sense – we take on larger proportions. Shakespearean proportions. Not theatrically or dramatically, rather the fabric of our own thoughts and sentiments gain folds and stitching. Quality without price. Now while the efficiently organized world uses an occasional lexicon of complexity and diversity, it aims, as we have seen, to reduce everyone and everything to one simple dimension of representation. That singularizing realm shows us a comprehensible image for everything and demonstrates according to certain laws how everything corresponds to that image (or soon will). Our solipsistic monolith simply waiting at the end of time to testify to our representative reality. Greatness, on the other hand – recovered through deinos and thick dimensionality – grants us other possibilities. Not the overcoming or harnessing of modern technology, which would only ultimately serve the causa efficiens, but the hope of authentically twisting free within the realm of thought and contemplation.101 This turning movement is the retrieval of wonder. It is the beginning of true thought. What spurs this thinking? Art. At the end of The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger reminds us that ‘the poiesis of the fine arts was also a techne’.102 Long ago the Greeks believed – not naively – that technology and the arts were not separate spheres of human activity. Poetry, painting, song, dance – all technes. Though today we still readily concede the element of craft and technique in the arts, we tend to think of them as categorically different. As ‘not science’. We mark-off their forms, modes, claims, occurrences – what they show and bring forth – as creative, titillating, sublime, perplexing. Modern technology, on the other hand, we see as the product or partner of modern science.103 This means it comes from exacting research with verifiable application, happily subject to efficiency. ‘Not art.’ We can often identify art by its lack of efficiency, its utter excessiveness, its unbearable restraint, its strange syncopation, its apparent uselessness. Uselessness? Heidegger, however, wants to face and reset this fiat of efficient thought – without pretending to directly counter or banish this ‘danger’ – by retrieving through reflection technology’s origin as the means by which the true was brought into the splendour of the

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beautiful.104 Of course we cannot change the order of the world, but we can learn to live in it, marvel at it, take up responsibility for it. Again, how? Again, art. Heidegger tells us that it is a matter of destiny: At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They illuminated the presence [Gegenwart] of the gods and dialogue of divine and human destinings. And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth.105

If beginnings still have any bearing on their ends, then modern technology – despite its exclusive and alienating alliance with efficiency – as nevertheless still techne and wayward cousin of the arts, abides as the presence of the gods. All techniques and technology do: ‘a single, manifold revealing.’ Although the divine and the true have fled our modern perceptions of the world, they continue to presence and resound in all we design and build. We simply do not notice them anymore. We lack vision. How do we gain such vision? Such awe-infused perception? Perhaps by recalling another ancient teaching: ‘Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’106 Or, vision is fidelity. Fidelity to what? To the hope that the world is more than mundane and explicable and credible? To the hope that the cosmos is filled with mysteries and is an inexhaustible source of inspiration? To the hope that what we make and do and think brings us closer to these mysteries, to the divine, to the gods? Not take us further away? A rare comportment for these few centuries since the Enlightenment, much less for this, our twenty-first. And yet, this vision – this fidelity to wondrous hope – is the retrieval that allows us to twist free without the delusion of escape or the unfounded assent to a separate spiritual reality. And yet we – including the uncannier among us – do not always twist free. Many of us take up idols and illusions of reality over reality itself. We therefore find the decision to escape what is a routine feature of tragedy. Consider Coriolanus. After all Coriolanus has done for Rome, his indifference to the price of corn and unwillingness to capitulate to the commonality – as well as the unhelpful, if unnecessary, machinations of the Tribunes – leads to the turning of public sentiment against him. And does so to treacherous effect. Let us recall our contention that Rome’s mechanisms of power, ‘Rome’s mechanics’ – those instruments, structures, and systems of the will to efficient nihilation (which modern technology radicalizes) through the guise of individual autonomy and collective action – could not contain Coriolanus. His greatness exceeds the state’s

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powers to restrain him. Yet efficiency never loses, it instead accepts. It allows uncanny powers, like Coriolanus, the (apparent) liberty to seek their own ends. This is not to suggest tragedy is simply a matter of choice as such, rather one of the various possible accounts of our inevitable destiny, a destiny begun at the outset of the West. Yes, he chooses exile – after being banished – but that decision does not cause his calamity. That movement signals only one of many en route to his undeniable destiny. Coriolanus possesses no more or less freedom than anyone else in this regard (freedom here contradistinguished from any false, deceptive, inauthentic sense of liberty). The freedom available through the saving power, however – if we have yet to make it clear – is the freedom for us to authentically encounter ourselves. An encounter that takes place through reflection on art and arts’ truths, through contemplation of the mysteries of being that art educes. An encounter that gives us to ourselves. An event by which we come to possess ourselves, to propriate. And yet, poetically, ironically, tragically, Coriolanus – for all his singular devotion to honour – never appears to fully encounter himself and what is most his own eludes him. Possessing nothing therefore that cannot be taken away or lost – for even honour can sour, as his does – he attempts to save himself, such as he understands himself, by going away, by going elsewhere. To see this fateful downturn in the arc of Coriolanus’ life, let us consider the scene wherein the people – unwittingly executing the state’s will – attempt to banish him: BRUTUS There’s no more to be said, but he is banished, As enemy to the people and his country. It shall be so. ALL THE CITIZENS It shall be so. It shall be so. CORIOLANLUS You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate As reek o’th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air: I banish you. And here remain with your uncertainty. Let every feeble rumor shake your hearts; Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes, Fan you into despair! Have the power still To banish your defenders, till at length

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Your ignorance – which finds not till it feels – Making but reservation of yourselves, Still your own foes, deliver you As most abated captives to some nation That won you without blows! Despising For you the city, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.107

An impressive polemic. He has time and again bit his tongue and held his peace (or attempted to), but can do so no longer. He sees little reason to hem his speech now. He now says without reservation what he has always thought. Despite his friend’s counsel ‘to answer mildly’ and his mother’s advice – and his promise – not to speak from ‘extremities’, he detonates. ‘I banish you!’ The straight trek of his honour and excellence has no truck with the crooked course of political capitulation. For all their collected wisdom (as pragmatic compromise) he cannot hear or heed it. Rome – her people, her politics, her policies, her customs – had gone too far. Having the power ‘To banish [their] defenders’ seems like madness to Coriolanus. It is indicative of their ignorance, their sense of entitlement, and their fickle nature: everything that corrupts his empyreal air. We get the clear sense from the scene that if he could he would gladly drown them in their own blood then and there, yet even the greatest of warriors have their limits. And so he takes the only other course open to him: nullify Rome’s banishment by exiling himself in order to seek ‘a world elsewhere’. There is, however, no world elsewhere unless we look to the realm of art. And even then the realm of art abides here as much as elsewhere: the latter predicated on the former, the former liberating the latter. How? In as much as an imagined, constructed elsewhere provides the possibility to make here truly ours: temples, towers, frescoes, statuary, performances, novels, games – worlds enriching the world. These places and activities and works – these worlds – that come to presence do not entirely or exclusively represent our here, they rather contain a touch or more of elsewhere too. Elsewhere, intentionally equivocal and a password for creative possibility, does not necessarily imply anything new, instead a swerving of what already is. Clinamen?108 No new colours or patterns or ideas; instead the possibility of seeing and experiencing anything anew. Of things arriving in unexpected ways, ways never witnessed before. Still, such swerving and twisting possibilities, such imagined realms, abide nowhere concretely or materially. A kingdom found otherwise than in being. Realms of dreams and utopias? If we try to leave here to go dwell there – without understanding what and where the elsewhere ‘is’ – we go only to another here, or we go nowhere. If we

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go to another here, some other place, and have yet to come into possession of our own-most selves, we go there with false faith. Thinking another place to be otherwise than it is, we have only delayed or double-downed on the damage the ordinary world waits to deal out to us, for we cannot escape the crime of being who we are, whether we know who that person is or not. Or we go nowhere at all while believing that we have, with no better results. Consequently, Coriolanus, with his magnificent maledictions, takes his leave for a place that does not exist. What happens? Without much complication he joins his rival, Aufidius, and together they march on Rome, conquering city after city on their way. (A corrupted rivalry? A profaned pharmakon?) And, as we have already noted, Coriolanus – though godlike and draconic – yet finds himself become a comprehensible, useable, efficient part of the machinery of state. He has simply traded in Romans for Volsces. Rome now trembles at his approach ahead a newly inspired and indefatigable enemy force. They wisely, if desperately, attempt to sue for peace, an attempt to which he pays no mind. He would not even answer to his own name: COMINIUS Yet once he did call me by my name. I urged our old acquaintance, and the drops That we have bled together. ‘Coriolanus’ He would not answer to, forbade all names. He was a kind of nothing, titleless, Till he had forged himself a name o’th’ fire Of burning Rome.109

Though he did not realize it yet, Coriolanus fled Rome for some other place that is no true elsewhere. He consequently cannot enter the quixotic world of poets, lovers, and madmen. He instead becomes a ‘kind of nothing, titleless’, nameless. His only reason for being: to see Rome burn. All loves and affiliations, responsibilities and relations, reasons and aims: nothing. Any other place is really no place to heal from wounds of dishonour. Only our own here infused with something else, through nature’s poetry or our own: the hiking path, the hilltop view, the games at the lake, a walk around the neighbourhood, a long drive, the song of the city and the countryside at night, the music of the church house, the tangible silence of the playhouse, the solitary movements through the museum, returning to the thick of a thick novel, all the rituals of morning and evening, alone, with family, friends, children. Life lived in a place, at a time, for a while.

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Uncanny Coriolanus has severed his tie to his here however to revenge himself against those less noble than he. ALL. So everyone and everything must burn. No more negotiations, no more restraints, no more mother’s counsel. ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not.’ Now, nameless and placeless – save the temporary surrogacy of the Volsces – no place awaits his arrival: Hades. A god and a realm of uncertain origin, whose name means literally, ‘invisible’. It remains no small irony then that had Coriolanus sought elsewhere where he was, in what he had and what had him – meditated upon the invisible meanings of and relations between things – he may have twisted free of the all-levelling world instead of tragically attempting to overcome it. Not to avoid his tragedy, rather to meet it with a different comportment: bearing towards excellence, bounded by contemplations of the mysterious and the every day.110 And so as its destruction becomes imminent, Rome, as a final measure of desperation, sends Martius’ mother, wife, and son to petition on its behalf. To no avail they had already sent his friends Cominius and Menenius. Though ever the friends and gentle exegetes to the protagonist’s barbed proclamations, these men – who might very well be the most beleaguered and relatable characters in the play – cannot reach into Coriolanus’ heart with their words in Rome’s greatest hour of need. Neither can Coriolanus’ wife or son. Virgilia inherited a man from Volumnia that she does not fully understand and is unable to cooperate with as an equal. And while the young son breaks our heart with his two lines – ‘A shall not tread on me! / I’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight’ – he, like his mother, has no pivot in the narrative. It all stands with his mother to move him and ‘save’ Rome. Pulling on every nerve of honour, fidelity, and greatness that she instilled in him, she succeeds. VOLUMNIA Thou know’st, great son, The end of the war’s uncertain; but this is certain, That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name Whose repetition will be dogged with curses, Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroyed his country, and his name remains To th’ ensuing age abhorred.’ Speak to me, son. Thou hast affected the fine strains of honor, To imitate the graces of the gods, To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o’th’ air,

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger And yet to change thy sulphur with a bolt That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak? Think’st thou it honorable for a noble man Still to remember wrongs? … Down ladies. Let’s shame him with our knees. To his surname ‘Coriolanus’ ’longs more pride Than pity to our prayers. Down! An end. This is the last.    [The ladies and YOUNG MARTIUS kneel]       So we will home to Rome, And die among our neighbors. – Nay, behold’s. This boy, that cannot tell what he would have, But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship, Does reason our petition with more strength Than thou hast to deny’t. – Come, let us go. This fellow had a Volscian to his mother. His wife is in Corioles, and his child Like him by chance. – Yet give us our dispatch. I am hushed until our city be afire, And then I’ll speak a little.       [He] holds her by the hand, silent

CORIOLANUS O mother, mother! What have you done?111

What has she done? She raised her son to be who he is – ‘pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame’ – encouraging and advising him at every turn. And she has now helped him to see his folly, to see the ignobility, dishonour, and faithlessness of his course. Not to mention the absurdity of it all. Surrounded by his Volscian soldiers and a train of conquest behind him, his Roman family kneels before him begging for their very life. Their crime? Conspiring circumstances. They themselves have done nothing except ever love and honour him. Yet he has always known this. Their presence and his mother’s words only make it shamefully clear for all to see and impossible to deny. He is the only guilty party present. It is his own refusal – his own inability – ‘in the midst of the crowd [to] keep with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude’. The self-release and enfranchisement – the freedom – simply to let others be. Or, for he himself to conform to custom if he genuinely desires the prizes awarded adherence to tradition. Like the consulship. Lacking acceptance

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and negotiation, however, he only knows how to fight and speak directly, how to win unambiguously. But his foes are not ones he can conquer: custom, the commonality, circumstance. In a word: Rome. In another word: himself. And now his family begs of him their life and all of Rome’s. He holds his mother’s hand in a moment of silence after her words have breached his heart. His blinding hate turns to undeniable shame. Where generals, friends, and his wife have failed, his mother succeeds: he corrects his course towards peace and spares Rome. Coriolanus does not benefit from his own benevolence. He must by necessity continue downward. His reward for making peace? Joyous Romans, displeased Volsces. Betrayed, Aufidius conspires to kill him as a traitor. After Aufidius, rival turned brother in arms, finishes his febrile rotation to renew his original animus, he formally accuses Coriolanus of treason before Volscian lords and heads of state. Why did Martius do it? ‘For certain drops of salt’, Aufidius says. Tears. Tears caused him to break ‘his oath and resolution’. Coriolanus’ response? To his credit Caius Martius Coriolanus remains consistent to the end, an end beginning with his inviting the god of war to bear witness. CORIOLANUS Hear’st thou, Mars? AUFIDIUS Name not the god, thou boy of tears! CORIOLANUS Ha? AUFIDIUS No more. CORIOLANUS Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart Too great for what contains it. ‘Boy?’ … Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads, Stain all your edges on me. ‘Boy?’ False hound, If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles. Alone I did it. ‘Boy’!112

Level-headed Volscian lords call for peace, but neither man can hear them. The tragic engine has been wound up too tightly for any other release.

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Only one way remains. Coriolanus’ life being one long invocation: the god arrives. The conspirators fall on him and, though we easily imagine and stage the scene with spectacular violence on both sides, he falls. A Eucharist for Mars. Aufidius immediately regrets his rage and calls for Coriolanus’ body to be taken up and buried with ‘a noble memory’. In death, Coriolanus finally arrives at the gates of a world elsewhere. Only, we can imagine, not the one for which he had hoped. Not the one for which any of us hope. And though the age in which we now live might have little use for the contemplation of art, if Heidegger is right, such contemplation might indicate the possibility of our salvation, of finding a world elsewhere not in death but here. In the very time and place we find ourselves. A contemplative possibility, he tells us, that only opens for us when we begin to question. ‘For questioning is the piety of thought.’113 We will see that such piety – faithful and dutiful love – indeed invokes a god, but one named neither Mars nor Pluto. No god named allows us to twist free of the world’s techniques and mechanisms, to turn from its absolute efficiency. No known god can save us – only one unknown.

4

Before the Open The Tempest & ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’

Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not [to] be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination —Blake

Godhead For those raised without religion or much regard for divinity, it probably means little that some poets and philosophers come to find or rediscover God in and through poetry. For those who think that God does not exist and that poetry in the main bespeaks verse, rhyme, metre and varieties of metaphorization towards the aim of self-expression, this acknowledgement – we can find and know God in poetry – appears pointless. Of course, it would be foolish to assert that God was indeed extant or that poetry did not often step forward as metaphoric verse. Still, ‘divinity’, ‘God’, and ‘poetry’, as words, point to a history, a present, and a destiny of creation, worshipful events and meaningful relationships. And as we read ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ (1951) we sense that Heidegger mines this divinepoetic concord in hopes of restoring us to some sort of authentic dwelling, a way of dwelling in the decline, he believed, since the advent of modern technology. Further, when read with and against Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) we find this restorative relation already intuited and theatrically instantiated.

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Beginning with God, Heidegger takes up the question directly: ‘What is God?’1 For insight he again turns to the poet Hölderlin. What is God? Unknown, yet Full of his qualities is the Face of the sky. For the lightnings Are the wrath of a god. The more something Is invisible, the more it yields to what’s alien.2

God is not an actor in nature. Nor is God nature or its immanence (whether formulated as pantheism or panentheism). Nor does God name a transcendent being or principle outside of space and time. This unknown God, quite mysteriously, does not experience the world as mortals do. Indeed, not at all. All such rational propositions and anthropomorphizing proclamations ought to be read mythically, metaphorically, poetically. (The power of any ‘divine proclamation’ to stir us up usually being a matter of resonance puts the matter largely out of our hands.) Everything that flashes across the sky or moves through the lower heavens, every sound and scent, all colours, all textures, every arising and falling remains unknowable – alien – to the God. As God ‘himself ’ remains alien to what is known. Alas, the more godly God is, the more God withdraws, abdicating the heavens to what is even more alien, strange, and uncanny. That is, us. For better or worse, we are and are a part of what is. God, however, is invisible, the most invisible. Literally neither thing nor being, he is not. Along this apophatic gesture, looking elsewhere, Heidegger says: The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. … Since Being is never the merely precisely actual, to guard Being can never be equated with the task of a guard who protects from burglars a treasure stored in a building. Guardianship of Being is not fixated upon something existent.3

He goes on to say in that personal missive that ‘guardianship is vigilance and watchfulness for the has-been and coming destiny of Being’ and a little later ‘that [guardians] listen gladly and attentively’ to things that allow for the ‘possible advent of world’. Such a possible advent – in the humblest and most inconspicuous of matters – reaches into the opened-up realm of man’s nature.4 Heidegger here mildly elucidates upon his more famous passage from his Letter

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on Humanism (which we briefly considered in our first chapter and will explore at length in our final one) where he writes, Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.5

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. The thinker, Heidegger’s later and seemingly preferred title for the philosopher, and the poet are the ‘guardians of the house of being’, which he tells us is language. These guardians (die Wächteren) bring forth a manifestation of being when they, in Heraclitean fashion, ‘listen in to the being of things’.6 When thinkers and poets (and perhaps ‘we’, when we conduct ourselves as such) attune themselves to listen in to the most ordinary and otherwise inconspicuous of things – the jug, the tree, the stove, the path, the water – those things, those phenomena, become ‘advents’ that proclaim a world, our world, the world to which we belong. Not creatures alive and merely living, but beings who have a realm of time, of possibilities and limitations, of future and history and an elusive present. These other beings and these phenomena themselves, however, are ‘poor of world’: things and creatures and happenings merely. Thus, they have no language, no voice, no fine articulation, no artefactual memory. They show-forth, they appear, they come into being – what is our relation to them? What ‘are’ they in their being? How do we measure them? How do we, when thinking and poetizing, take in dimensions, boundaries, occasions, times? Heidegger turns to language itself for answers. For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man firsts speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, may help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first. Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end, toward a thing’s nature.7

He speaks not of the measuring accomplished by geometry or astronomy or economics or chemistry or physics; rather, the ‘special kind of measuring’ of poetizing – in whatever mode that might take – which measures the dimension that has been ‘dealt out’.8 This measure, he tells us, has its own metron, its own measure. We ought not to confuse it with scientific measures that have their own respective bases and biases. This poetic measure signals something more archaic, phenomenal, original: humans are mortals, they live knowing they will die, thus they have and are had by time, by their stay upon the earth, and so they

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measure that time and the breadth of their own being and the being of all things when they truly think and poetize. Still, Heidegger wonders: What is the measure of human measuring? God? No. The sky? No. The manifestness of the sky? No. The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as such by the sky.9

He admits it is a strange measure.10 Yet, it seems, the best way for us to understand this measure, as well as the dimension that it measures, is first to comprehend firmly what Heidegger understands God – the god, the godhead, the divinities – to be. Here and elsewhere he speaks of God in terms of absence, alienness, and as unknown. Not as something existing. Does God then become something like Tillch’s symbol of humankind’s ultimate concern?11 Such does not appear the case. God seems rather to indicate something about the nature of truth and art, in as much as we understand truth and art in their disclosing and concealing activities. As The Origin of the Work of Art tells us, truth is founded by way of art: the image of the god concealed within the temple allows for the presence of the god. Still, what ‘is’ God? If we return to Hölderlin’s poem we find this: As long as Kindness, The Pure, still stays with his heart, man Not unhappily measures himself Against the godhead. Is God unknown? Is he manifest like the sky? I’d sooner Believe the latter. It’s the measure of man. Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth. But no purer Is the shade of the starry night, If I might put it so, than Man, who’s called an image of the godhead. Is there a measure on earth? There is None.12

What does this tell us? While the poet would like to believe that God is manifest like the sky – the lower heavens being the most primordial gauge and expanse by which mortals have measured themselves – he is not. He is unknown and without being. God is not ‘the unknown’, he is merely and purely ‘unknown’.13 Events happen all around us in manifold fashions and with various degrees of distance. What do they all mean? What do they mean in their essence? How do things

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stand before us? The thinker and the poet – when they listen in and are faithful to their vocations – do not merely describe appearances and calculate formulas that encapsulate and correlate what appears as yet more units of knowledge; they rather ‘hear’ what remains concealed in every event of disclosure. They wrestle with that whichever hides and prevails unknown. God ‘is’ the work of the thinker and the poet when they bring-forth the essence of what is concealed, what is essentially absent. The abyss of meaning and reason (or that which is unknown) into which being holds each mortal for a brief moment (that is, our little mortal life) is given image by, while remaining concealed within, words. We will never ‘have’ God because there is no God as such to have, as commodity or principle or object. Simultaneously, we give image to God and conceal God, as the invisible manifests in the sky, by way of the sky. And whatever this image and concealment shows (and concurrently hides), it is most essentially a union of what language would have us say of things (through listening to those things themselves) and what we carry in our hearts. Without kindness and without attentive and glad listening, no God abides in and for our poetic creations, no trace of God lingers by which our poetic measuring can take the measure of what is in its being. Without this unknown divinity we cannot truly know anything for what it is or for what it means or should mean. Heidegger thinks Hölderlin tells us this, and I think Shakespeare shows it. In The Tempest, the first time we meet Miranda she reveals her compassionate disposition, her kindness. Speaking to Prospero, her father: MIRANDA If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, But that sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek, Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere It should the good ship so swallowed and The fraughting souls within.14

Miranda had been watching the spectacle her father magically created (a powerful tempest causing a ship to wreck) and she suffers for those aboard,

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pleading with him to spare them. She does not know them, but their cries of despair, which only her empathy and kindness would allow her to hear, knocked against her heart, spurring her to imagine having the power to save them. Prospero responds, Be collected. No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart There’s no harm done.15

The tempest and the sinking of the ship were only illusions and those aboard are unharmed. Prospero’s magic – by way of the spirit Ariel – produced an elaborate vision, yet still only a vision, a showing. The truth remains concealed from all save the magician and his spirit, because they created the work. Miranda, like the crew and passengers on board, does not know the ‘truth’, yet she was attentive and attuned to what she could see, and could thus ‘hear’ the very real cries of desperation by those sailors who believed they were drowning. In an essential sense, it matters only slightly if what we see is real or not, if it is true or shadows. What matters more must remain the manner by which we receive that which presents itself to us. The reason for this lies with having virtually no agency regarding the things that appear to us. Our world – whatever it might be for anyone, anywhere, at anytime – is given. Even in our making and participating it is still given. And what we learn when we dutifully attend to our watching and listening – to things real or spectral – is that in either case language gives us the words and our heart our interpretation. Miranda sees a shipwreck for a shipwreck and interprets it through her kindness. We could here easily lose ourselves in a play of image and magic that would take us far afield of Heidegger, but such seems unnecessary and unhelpful. If we return to the question, ‘What is God?’ and we ask that question of this Shakespearean passage, ask it through these words, what do we find? God is unknown and invisible, and it is God’s concealment that allows God’s presence. When we seek something unknown and invisible must we not ask what is concealed in and by what is showing itself? Truth, as Heidegger has told us, is founded. God is not founded; rather God is absent. We only catch God’s trace in words and creations, in creativity. Prospero’s sorcerous construal creates an opportunity – an opening – for such a trace to be traced, to be suspected or caught. And with kindness in her heart, Miranda catches the genuine despair of the suffering men. Would they have suffered had they known the truth? No, not in the particular way that they would; not in the way that would walk them through peril towards restoration; not the way Prospero – Shakespeare – envisions and

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orchestrates. And why, really, does that matter when truth is founded? When it is created? Plato, if we recall, has Socrates explain the usefulness of employing myths in education, even when – especially when – those being educated do not know they are merely myths and allegories.16 That something is ‘literally factual’ either accounts for little in and of itself or it is in truth diminished by being so. This helps us to understand why the word ‘God’ abides with power. This helps us to understand how even though what Miranda sees is nothing but a magical fabrication, it yet conceals and elicits something vital. Its showing hides what is unknown and elicits kindness. Is this kindness lessened or without meaning or merit if its origin arises from fiction? In fiction? In poetry or play? Is not something of ‘the god who remains unknown, [as] revealed as such by the sky’ also revealed as such in the vision of the play? The play of the vision? And what is this space of reception? This dimension or realm wherein lightning might flash, visions appear and gods are traced? Heidegger speaks of the sky – what of the page or the stage? What of the dimension of imagined and envisioned events?

Dimension Heidegger writes, The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth. This between is measured out for the dwelling of man. We now call the span thus meted out the dimension. This dimension does not arise from the fact that sky and earth are turned toward one another. Rather, their facing each other depends on this dimension. Nor is the dimension a stretch of space as ordinarily understood; for everything spatial, as something for which space is made, is already in need of the dimension, this is, that into which it is admitted. The nature of the dimension is the meting out – which is lightened and so can be spanned – of the between: the upward to the sky as well as the downward to earth. We leave the nature of the dimension without a name. According to Hölderlin’s words, man spans the dimension by measuring himself [with] the heavenly. Man does not undertake this spanning just now and then; rather, man is man at all only in such spanning.17

While it seemed pressing that we first consider what Heidegger means when he uses the word ‘God’ (or gods, godhead, or the divinities), his use of ‘dimension’ (die Dimension) and ‘measure’ or ‘measurement’ (das Maß, der Maßstab, die Messung, die Vermessung) seem no less integral to understanding the text. He here ties dimension to our ‘upward glance’ at what is ‘between’. That is, ‘measure-taking’.

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But what is this dimension? ‘The span thus meted out?’ Heidegger claims that it is nothing spatial as space itself is in need of dimension, in need of this primal spanning. It comes before anything spatial. It does not arise, rather it allows for things to arise. It is the always already …between… this, that and everything. The original distance and separation of all that is not ‘one’, which is all things. For the mortal, the glance up towards the sky and downward towards the earth surveys what has entered into, and by way of, the dimension. This dimension allows the sky to face the earth, the earth the sky: the ‘up there’ and the ‘down here’ find and belong to one another due to the dimension. It is that which allows a place – a placing – of space. Yes. But yet quite abstruse and still far off. Returning to Shakespeare to help us read Heidegger, we find in The Tempest that Prospero orchestrates everything. Of the many events that he composes, Miranda’s encounter with Ferdinand shows us something about placing and belonging. At the beginning of Act III we find Ferdinand, prince of Naples, bearing logs. Prospero has put him to work in order to prove himself, ostensibly to prove that he has not been sent to the island to spy. In truth, the young prince and the wizard’s daughter have fallen in love at first sight in the first Act. Ferdinand effectively proposed to her the moment he laid eyes upon her. Love again revealing itself as a matter of vision and an agent of chaos. And so Prospero, unwilling to trust unearned love, sets out to make Ferdinand earn it. PROSPERO [Aside] They are both in either’s powers. But this swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning Make the prize light.18

Love, like restoration we will learn, ought to be earned, ought to be – or perhaps is best – when it is won, when it prevails after travail and labour. Thus he puts Ferdinand to work. FERDINAND The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead And makes my labors pleasures. Enter MIRANDA, and PROSPERO [following at a distance] […] MIRANDA If you’ll sit down, I’ll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that; I’ll carry it to the pile.

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FERDINAND No, precious creature. I had rather crack my sinews, break my back, Than you should such dishonor undergo While I sit lazy by. MIRANDA It would become me As well as it does you; and I should do it With much more ease, for my good will is to it, And yours against it. PROSPERO [aside] Poor worm, thou art infected. This visitation shows it. MIRANDA [to FERDINAND] You look wearily. FERDINAND No, noble mistress, ’tis fresh morning with me When you are by at night.19

We learn much about these two here. Miranda offers her assistance; Ferdinand balks at it. Certainly, given the imputation of Elizabethan protocols into the young prince, the idea of a young woman engaging in arduous physical labour bothers him. Still, more than that, that he would rest while another did the work allotted to him – rightly or wrongly so – makes accepting her generous offer an impossibility. Despite being unable to accept her help, he nevertheless finds himself enlivened by her presence. During this exchange he finally learns her name and proceeds to share how he has never met a woman like her. FERDINAND Admired Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration, worth What’s dearest to the world.20

Moreover, of all the women he has ever met, she possesses the ‘fullest soul’. But you, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created Of every creature’s best.21

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Miranda responds, ‘I do not wish / Any companion in the world but you.’ Ferdinand furthers the exchange: Hear my soul speak. The very instant that I saw you did My heart fly to your service; there resides To make me slave to it. And for your sake Am I this patient log-man.22

At this Miranda ups the ante: Do you love me?23

And of course he does: I, Beyond all limit of what else i’th’ world, Do love, prize, honor you.24

Witnessing this, Prospero reveals more of his heart on the matter: PROSPERO [aside] Fair encounter Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace On that which breeds between ’em.25

Prospero’s commentary prompts a move towards thinking the dimension by way of what occurs between the young lovers. Ferdinand and Miranda have become joined by love. But not just any love – Shakespearean love: the sensuous, irresistible fabric woven tragically for Romeo and Juliet, comically for the lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and romantically woven here. It is a gathering and binding love, born of eros, a love that allows for Ferdinand and Miranda to face one another, to see one another. It reveals a dimension that is not spatial, rather relational and given. Most of us do not fall in love at first glance, but that doesn’t stop Shakespeare or his imaginary agents. In many ways his poetic intuition tells him that tying love to a moment – a mere ‘upward glance’ – rings more phenomenal; that is, it bespeaks both the phenomenon or occurrence of love and the extraordinary or remarkable appearance of such love. Prospero, however, as wise father and masterful conductor, must play upon this phenomenal love, upon this dimension – dimension as unbidden, ineluctable lure – that has revealed itself in the play of the lovers; to leave it alone, untested, unproven, leaves too much to chance. And so the lovers earn the love that

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has already possessed them, the power that has already placed them with one another. All seems to go as Prospero hopes: MIRANDA I am your wife, if you will marry me. If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant Whether you will or no. FERDINAND [kneeling] My mistress, dearest; And I thus humble ever. MIRANDA My husband then? FERDINAND Ay, with a heart as willing As bondage e’er of freedom. Here’s my hand. MIRANDA And mine, with my heart in’t. And now farewell Till half an hour hence. FERDINAND A thousand thousand! Exeunt [severally FERDINAND and MIRANDA] PROSPERO So glad of this as they I cannot be, Who are surprised with all; but my rejoicing At nothing can be more. I’ll to my book, For yet ere suppertime must I perform Much business appertaining.   [Exit]26

In addition to Prospero making them earn what had already been ‘meted out between’ them, the dimension as chaotic love – as undeniable feelings already measured out to Miranda and Ferdinand – discloses another intriguing development: the relation of bondage to freedom. Miranda shows us this first when she says that she will serve him either as wife or maid, but one way or another love has her. Ferdinand reciprocates with ‘Ay, with a heart as willing / As bondage e’er of freedom. Here’s my hand.’ Bondage for freedom, slavery

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for liberty. This particular expression of chaos-born love binds freedom to obligation. And whether we dislodge this understanding from Christendom or not, it discloses an archaic insight: opposites and contraries are bound together; they – perhaps through privation or their very differences – give definition to one another. While servitude and sacrifice within the Christian tradition might be cloaked in all manner of loving language, the purpose was never love in and for itself, rather salvation. Of course we could always approach and unpack love as a mode of salvation, but only if, in the context of The Tempest, salvation bespoke not mere spiritual deliverance, but rather a full restoration. This is revealed in any close reading of the text or attentive attending to the play. Love catches and obliges towards restoration. Miranda never ceases being Miranda, nor Ferdinand Ferdinand, just as the sky and the earth retain their differences, yet come to face one another in and by way of the dimension. This was apparent to Greeks who poetized the relation of Earth to Sky by way of Love that resulted in the birth of the gods. Gaia and Ouranos faced one another and belonged to one another through the dimension as Eros, resulting in the origin of the Greek divinities. When we first encountered the dimension in Chapter 1, ‘The Poetic Rift’, it was hidden and thought through imagination. Here we can read it in another light: love. Not just any love, but chaos-born love (also introduced in the first chapter); Shakespearean love. We are, in a sense, getting behind or before those readings in order to comprehend the dimension in its most primordial showing. Can we bridge these senses of dimension? If we recall an earlier Heidegger we might. In his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, wherein he reads the first critique through the pre-turn lens of Being and Time, we find Heidegger reinterpreting Kant’s imagination. For any finite creature, beings are accessible only on the grounds of a preliminary letting-stand-against which turns-our-attention-toward. In advance, this takes the beings which can possibly be encountered into the unified horizon of a possible belonging-together. In the face of what is encountered, this a priori unifying unity must grasp in advance. This a priori unified whole made up of pure intuition and pure understanding ‘forms’ the play-space for the letting-stand-against in which all beings can be encountered. With regard to this whole of transcendence, it is a matter of showing how … pure understanding and pure intuition are dependent upon one another a priori.27

He goes on, trying to unpack Kant’s transcendental language phenomenologically, to associate the pure understanding arriving ‘from above’ and the

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pure intuition ‘from below’. These faculties meet and are united by and as ­imagination, functioning as a ‘unifying middle’. We have here one of the early and highly technical origins of what we later find in the more lyrical and analytically less bound works, works such as ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’. ­Succinctly put, the pure understanding foreruns the sky, the heavens, as the pure intuition does the earth. They are joined by way of imagination, the dimension. Within and by this dimension things can be encountered – encountered at all. Things, beings, events can stand-against and play. But how does this link imagination to love? It is in the articulation of the letting-stand-against, and the possibility of encounter, of facing. Imagination opens up a realm of possibility for things to be and to be known, while love – always already beforehand – generates the bond that allows for the relation whatsoever. Eros precedes Gaia and Ouranos, earth and sky, and places them into a facing relation with one another. Between them the dimension as choral imagination spans, and gods – as ideas, as events, as words, as dramas – emerge dancing and wrestling. The earth and the sky, just as Miranda and Ferdinand, come to face one another and belong to one another by way of love: dimension as love. Once in relation with one another – once separate yet belonging together – creation can occur. This creation can arise in various modes and take many forms: art, children, insight, virtues, and yet also destruction, death, misapprehension, vice. Creation occurs in the dimension as imagination or love, in either case love precedes imagination, even if it is a work of imagination – The Tempest – that shows us this. The stage and the page are manifestations of the dimension as imagination, whether revealing the original dimension as love or not. Such works manifest – discover, disclose, show – the fruit of the upward glance, of the poet measuring his- or herself with and against the divinities. By way of imagination we can see back to the origin, we can creatively envision how events came to be such as they are, and mean what they do. As we found with the changeling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We should remember here that Heidegger circumspectly wanted to ‘leave the nature of the dimension without a name’. Without a name it cannot be placed. Utopos. We have, however, twice named it. We have done so not to define the dimension as something it is not, rather merely to lay some claim to it, for it. In order to know it by way of what it appears to be when we notice it. Still, the question remains, what does it mean to measure by its spanning, its placing? How do the divinities and the dimension stand with the measure? With measuring?

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Measure FERDINAND This is a most majestic vision, and Harmonious charmingly. May I be bold To think these spirits? PROSPERO Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies. FERDINAND Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wife Makes this place paradise. JUNO and CERES whisper, and send IRIS on employment PROSPERO Sweet now, silence. Juno and Ceres whisper seriously. There’s something else to do. Hush and be mute, Or else our spell is marred.28

Ferdinand here responds to Prospero’s magical vision. The fantasy had been orchestrated on behalf of the young couple, in order to bless their marriage. It consists of three goddesses: Iris, a divine messenger and goddess of the rainbow, Ceres (or Demeter, played by Ariel), a goddess of agriculture and of mystery rites, and Juno (or Hera), who was queen of the gods, as well as patroness of women and marriage. The majesty of the vision moves Ferdinand to praise it and its conductor, but Prospero silences him before he ruins the spell. Spell. It comes to us as one of the more fascinating words in both English and German (Das Spiel, Das Spielen, spielen). Its everyday use now denotes ways of ‘spelling’ a word, of putting letters from the alphabet into the correct order so as to properly signify whatever word is in question, and to distinguish that word from another. Yet it also means magic, putting particular words into certain orders to accomplish extraordinary effects or to appeal to divine sympathies. It can even connote an indefinite period of time: ‘Let’s sit a spell.’ In German we find that it can mean a play, a game, or a gamble. From this we can easily infer that something about language – the phenomenon of words, of spelling and arranging words – is playful, is venturesome, and is, perhaps, in

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some way magical. Not magical in a supernatural sense, rather in a metaphoric sense, a poetic sense. And at its foundation, language – as a most fundamental mode of human exchange – brings us into the open of being, brings us into discourse with each other and the world. That it all rests upon air and sounds and scratches and scribbles bespeaks something quite astounding: a gambling game premised upon nothing essential (or essentially nothing). And the best games have a curious combination of both sensible and illogical rules, just like language. Still, the spell requires silence. Prospero tells us of the necessity for silence in the practice of magic: ‘Hush and be mute, / Or else our spell is marred.’ In theological circles it has been asserted that the word (logos) is coeternal with silence, and that they, in a sense, belong to one another. Like heaven and earth they give definition to one another. By this understanding silences become not only as important as words, they must be observed and offered place in order for words to be distinguished, comprehended, truly heard. For Heidegger this means listening to language’s appeal, an appeal that gives voice to the essence of things.29 This means being quiet. Language – spelling – requires silence. Whether attempting a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis or a Shakespearean poetizing: merely and purely listening to things, events, texts, artworks, ideas, situations, happenings, phenomena whatsoever abjures prattle and thoughtless description or expression, and instead beseeches patience and stillness, begs silent listening – silently listening to the silence. Only then can we hear things speaking to us through language, only then can spirits and goddesses bless us. Now, after Prospero’s gentle admonition of Ferdinand, Iris summons nymphs and reapers (spirits all) to dance and ‘to celebrate / A contract of love’. This does not last long however as Prospero suddenly remembers – unhappily so – that the time of Caliban and ‘his confederates’’ plot to depose him is nigh. Prospero starts and the vision hastily and noisily ends. Ferdinand and Miranda note his change in demeanour, and to reassure them, and simultaneously teach them, Prospero delivers some of the more well-known, ironic, and existential lines in Shakespeare: PROSPERO You do look, my son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.30

We find Shakespeare at his best here. We know this not only by the beauty of the language, but by his ability to accomplish trifold meaning and relevance: Prospero explains what has just occurred with the spirits, the vision, and its end, while also concurrently describing Shakespeare’s own life and career (hence Prospero as Shakespeare, magician as poet). And thirdly, it offers an interpretation of human existence; one that appears equal parts romantic and nihilistic, or poetic and essentially mortal: dreaming and dying. Everyone and everything stands forth as part of a vision or dream for a short while then returns to the nothing from which all emerged. Prospero – Shakespeare – here takes the measure. He has listened and seen the arc of life, its sublimities and gaieties, its gorgeousness and ephemerality, its baseless foundation, its dissolution, its sleeping end; yet moreover and especially: ‘be cheerful.’ Shake off the gloom of mortality and create. Shakespeare has Prospero poetically speak an insight both ancient and modern. From the Greek poets and Pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and Heidegger: life has no inherent value or meaning, and it is for this very reason that it requires affirmation through creative activity and thinking. Still, it all begins with listening. Again, what is the measure? How has Shakespeare taken it? Heidegger writes, This measure-taking not only takes the measure of the earth, ge, and accordingly it is no mere geo-metry. Just as little does it ever take the measure of heaven, ouranous, for itself. Measure-taking is no science. Measure-taking gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven and earth, to one another. This measuretaking has its own metron, and thus its own metric. Man’s taking-measure in the dimension dealt out to him brings dwelling into its ground plan. Taking the measure of the dimension is the element within which human dwelling has its security, by which it securely endures. The taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling. Poetry is a measuring. But what is it to measure? If poetry is to be understood as measuring, then obviously we may not subsume it under any idea of measuring and measure. Poetry is presumably a high and special kind of measuring. But there is more.31

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Before we approach the ‘more’, let us unpack what we already have. The measure and this measure-taking ought not to be confused or conflated with ordinary measuring, with scientific measuring; it is special, it is poetic. It bespeaks the human who takes in the dimension of what has been dealt out – that vast heaven, that distant horizon, that expanse between sky and earth and all that enters into it or is revealed through it. Humans – as poets – do not use words to catch whatever appears by way of the dimension, they do not size things up with some exacting science and then proceed to describe appearances in order to accumulate or disseminate meanings.32 Poets listen, they let come what has been dealt out, what appears, and they let the words themselves speak for things. And then poets sing – they put to singing words – those mysterious and unknown truths concealed in the familiar appearance of things. In this way, they give image to what is not merely apprehended empirically or in a strict ocular sense. They are, according to Heidegger, imaginings in a distinctive sense: Not mere fantasies and illusions, but imaginings as visible inclusions of the strange, beheld in the sight of the familiar. The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and echo of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of the strange. Through such visions the god’s strangeness surprises us.33

Or as Shakespeare has Theseus masterfully articulate it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.34

Poets listen to the silence, and in and through the silence language speaks to them, they then allow language to manifest in and through their poetry. They take the measure with an upward-downward glance – ‘from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’ – and allow imagination, as a force or a power, to give shape, form, appearance, and dimension to what is unknown and alien. In and through this activity ‘nothing’ gains a name, the unknown and not yet (or ‘never’) gain a home, they are placed and made playable by players. When such works are well worked and played – attentively, carefully, with kindness – we catch sight of the surprising god. The unknown and invisible god approaches.

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This is the ‘more’: Humans exist as mortals before the unknown. Poetry takes the measure of this mortal life and all the things appearing and not appearing in it, all that happens and does not happen, all that may or may not happen. God as unknown becomes the unknown one, the invisible metric of this poetic measure.35 God, as manifest mystery capable of educing awe, founds poetic measuring through poetic activity. In this way, the divine – divining – creates ‘truth’ as something itself foundable and findable in poetic acts.36 The mysterious one manifests as the sky, as the heavens – as some non-human power against which the poet measures herself – thus the necessity of the upward glance. ‘Is there a measure on earth?’ Hölderlin and Heidegger ask. ‘There is none.’37 It arrives from heaven – unknown and invisible – for those listening and waiting for it. And it comes as the shining word put to song by the poetic art. ‘Spirits, which by mine art / I have from their confines called to enact / My present fancies.’ And when this occurs, the known and unknown of being is housed and well-guarded.38 And such activity – poetic measuring – admits mortals into dwelling on the earth.39 And still ‘more’: Poetic measuring is phenomenal and original naming. We can here recall that aside from keeping the earth, humanity’s first task was naming, phenomenologically the precursor to spelling: differentiation, nomination, appointing, calling. To do so at all indicates taking the original measure. We might here worry about poets’ ‘fancies’ and ‘imaginations’, fearing that interpretation or taste or improper comportment might, like the lack of silence, ‘mar the spell’. Put another way, in this late contemporary age, wherein all modes of knowing have been subordinated into strict subject/object relations and compelled to adhere to various dogmatic and exacting scientific methodologies (regardless if any given inquiry is best served by such subordination or compellation), it might strike us as too imprecise or indefinite – or too mystical – to rely upon what poets ‘hear’ in the silence or ‘see’ in the nothing. When the heavens make manifest the unknown, why ought we to trust a poet’s reading of phenomena? Would it not be wise to remain sceptical regarding anything touching upon fancy and imagination? Cannot the hidden dimension of language and thought, while so essential to interpretation and understanding, mislead? Misapprehend? Mar what ‘is’ by overly fantastical envisioning? In no way can we completely mollify such concerns. Yet it seems helpful to point out that fancy, like imagination, is much more than mere whim. Older forms were spelled ‘phansy’ or ‘phansie’, more clearly showing the words decent from phantasia and phainesthai, indicating an original sense of ‘showing’, ‘appearing’, and of ‘vision’. In its oldest sense, vision meant ‘to know’. So while Prospero

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might merely mean that he had summoned spirits to enact his will, we ought not rule out that his will – as fancy – derives and is bounded both to what shows itself at all and how he caught whatever shows itself in an act of vision. An act of fancy forged in seeing at all (not only empirically, but in the broadest metaphorical sense), born by letting things appear merely and truly. The magician’s fancies – in this instance, goddesses and nymphs witnessing and blessing the institution of marriage and children in general, and the union of Ferdinand and Miranda in particular – are meant to educate as well as entertain, to amuse as much as inspire. For such reasons readers keep returning to Shakespeare, to hear and learn from his works, to be educated, enlightened and charmed by the fancies manifest in the language, be it through asides, exchanges, or grand orations.

Restoration This chapter’s title, ‘Before the Open’, alludes to a phrase found neither in ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ or The Tempest. It is rather gathered from Heidegger’s Wozu Dichter? – translated as Why Poets? or What Are Poets For? – a work similar in spirit, style and aim to the one we read here. As we might read ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ as a sustained meditation on Hölderlin, so too might we consider What Are Poets For? regarding Rilke. And while that work deserves its own reading, we will here only briefly discuss why our chapter title derives from it before moving on and connecting the notion to restoration. One of the various issues arising when reading certain philosophers is terminology, and Heidegger abides (according to some) as one of the more egregious violators on this front. Readers can spend years learning Heidegger’s language and developing defensible interpretations of his works. One such term is ‘the Open’ (das Offene), an idea discussed at length in What Are Poets For? He explains the word thusly: Rilke likes to use the term ‘the Open’ to designate the whole draft to which all beings, as ventured beings, are given over. It is another basic word in his poetry. In Rilke’s language, ‘open’ means something that does not block off. It does not set bounds. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured draw on one another as they are drawn, so that they variously draw on one another and draw together without encountering any bounds. Drawing as so drawn, they fuse with the boundless, the infinite. They no not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.40

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Heidegger then recounts a letter written by Rilke: By the ‘Open’, therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are ‘objects’ and thus ‘opaque’ and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human being sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation toward God.41

According to Rilke, consciousness excludes us from the world and places us ‘before the world’, before the Open, and not purely or merely in it like animals, plants, or other beings. Heidegger disagrees, with all seeming kindness, and articulates a reversal whereby we possess a richness of world, a world in which other beings have little to no share. The daring that is more venturesome, willing more strongly than any selfassertion, because it is willing, ‘creates’ a secureness for us in the Open. To create means to fetch from the source. And to fetch from the source means to take up what springs forth and to bring what has so been received.42

Humanity’s creative and protective powers – our willing from caring – secures the Open in a manner that creatures cannot. Mortals are mortals because they die and they know it. This fundamentally orients the human in a fashion converse to the animal. As Rilke writes in The Eighth Elegy: With all its eyes the creature sees the open. Our eyes alone are as if turned back, and placed all around, like traps, encircling its free escape. What is outside we know only from the animal’s face; and even twist the young child around and force it to look at created things, not at the open deep in the creature’s face. Free from death. But death we alone can see: the free animal always has its demise behind it and God before, and when it walks it walks into eternity, like the flowing of a spring.    We never, not for a single day, have before us the pure space into which flowers endlessly open. Always it is world,

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and never nowhere without the no: that pure, unsurveilled element one breathes and infinitely know, without desiring. As a child, one may lose oneself to it in silence, and be shaken back. Or die and be it.43

For Rilke, the creature sees the Open and we, who could catch it in their face (were we attuned to the task), fail to see the Open as we train our gaze to focus on things – institutions, objects, structures, processes – instead of the Open. This realm of human created and cared for concerns signals the world. And our world separates us from ‘that pure, / unsurveilled element [we] breathe and / infinitely know, without desiring’. We could perhaps know the Open through some childlike wonderment, or ‘die and be it’. Again, death, mortality. Our worlding awareness and conditioning keeps our death out ahead of us, bounding us, defining us. But not the creature; death does not define it. The creature proceeds as if God and infinity were ahead of it. Every action and response for the creature reflects a pure procession into and through the Open, the infinite, the ‘unsurveiled element’; that which, due to our world, we can only ‘experience’ in death. This tells us why silence remains so important: quietude and silence turn the volume of the world down so that poets can listen, and in listening see. And yet for Heidegger, this means we are the stewards and guardians of the Open. In truth, it seems as though for Heidegger our thoughtful, poetic sojourn through the ‘unsurveiled element’, through the Open, makes the creation of our world even possible. Accordingly, to stand before the Open means not to be outside of the Open, or in any way less purely in it as the creature does, rather it allows us to secure it poetically. The worldless creature wields no securing power, it merely is. By this power to surveil the unsurveiled – to surveil at all – the poet finds his or her poetic agency to attend the Open with language, to secure the world by way of words. We should recall that surveil, though most directly coming by way of the French surveiller, comes to us more archaically from the Latin vigilare, from vigil, meaning ‘watchful’, later connoting attentive religious observations on the eve of a festival. And as Rilke originally used the German Unüberwachtes, which has also been translated as ‘unguarded’ or ‘unwatched-over’, the use of ‘unsurveiled’ seems richer for its intimation of such religious attentiveness. This brief glimpse at the Latin origin of the translated German also suggests to us, even if only lightly, notions of redemption and restoration – keeping vigil as a mode of sacrifice en route to festive celebration, a celebration of the redeemed and spiritually restored life. As Heidegger writes, ‘They redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.’

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Let us here move to read the Open – that usually unsurveiled element – as the primal pre-spatial dimension that allows for placing, for appearing, for concealing, for poetic measure-taking. As such, the Open welcomes the sky and the earth. The structures and systems of our worlding and creating can certainly hide the Open away from us, as Rilke asserts. Still, it remains language and thinking and poetizing that even allows us to name the unnamable, to know the unknowable, to surveil the unsurveiled. Our allotment of the Open, of the dimension – our original loving and imagining – allows for such essential impossibilities. After all, navigating the abyss into which we find ourselves thrust requires such necessary, if illogical, metaphors; our lot requires such invisible gods, such imaginary agents, such Ariels. With such airy spirits assisting our spelling, we – as poets – stand in and before the Open, that vast dimension allowing heaven and earth and each of us to face one another, wherein we take the measure. Poetic thinking prevails towards this end. Yet and ever: Why and in what way? The Tempest offers us insight. PROSPERO Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou Performed, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring. Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated In what thou hadst to say. So with good life And observation strange my meaner ministers Their several kinds have done. My high charms work, And these, mine enemies are all knit up In their distractions. They are now in my power; And in these fits I leave them, while I visit Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drowned, And his and mine loved darling.    [Exit]44

Prospero’s enemies ‘are all knit up’, ‘they are now in [his] pow’r’. He has used his magic to put everyone in place – Antonio, Alonso, Sebastian, Caliban, and Ferdinand and Miranda too – to receive his or her due. For those who betrayed him and his daughter: vengeance. For the innocent: benefaction. As for himself: indulgence. That is, freedom. Is it possible that these are all modes of restoration? Or ways that make restoration possible? Perhaps it is more important to ask how possessing the power to enact or grant such things as vengeance, benefaction, and freedom relate to one’s own possibility of finding redemption and restoration? [Aside. Were we to search for this play’s cipher, its coded character by which to find the logos of it, Caliban and Ariel seem the two most likely

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candidates. Ariel’s metaxical nature and role within the narrative grants him (or her) no small degree of agency. Yes, he serves Prospero, though the spirit appears the very medium of much of the magician’s power. One could read Prospero as impotent without Ariel (or any of the spirits he might call forth to enact his designs). And next to Prospero himself more ink has probably been spilt on Caliban than any other character in the play. How the director and actor choose to make up and costume the character, how to play and affect him, ranges widely – from the comical to the tragic and everything in between. How one understands this play’s movements and rhythms, its events and meanings, might very well derive from how one found Caliban (or potentially Ariel). I would argue that if a reader-attender of the work both laughed and cringed at him, felt moved and uncomfortable, sensed something relatable yet monstrous in him, that the full romantic powers often attributed to The Tempest would be affirmed. And by such affirmation Caliban’s tragic– comedic lot – his romantic state and destiny – signals the reader’s possibility of deciphering the work’s less manifest lines, relations and implications. They would see a tale in which no one was actually innocent (with, again, the possible exception of Ariel), and that all the characters were in need of forgiveness and restoration.] Now, towards concluding our interpretations of this play with, against and through Heidegger’s text (now expanded by his reading of Rilke and the Open), we turn to Prospero’s change of heart that leads to his forgiveness of Antonio and Alonso, and in a lesser sense of Caliban. The first thing we find in the final Act indicates that Prospero’s revenge plot proceeds according to plan: PROSPERO Now does my project gather to a head. My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time Goes upright with his carriage. How’s the day?45

The day goes well. Everything unfolds as Prospero planned. He has complete control of the isle, of its inhabitants and visitors. His will to vengeance plays out exactingly. Efficiently. And yet, as Ariel informs him of the King and his followers’ madness, of Gonzalo’s sorrow, something shifts within him. ARIEL Your charm so strongly works ’em, That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender.

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PROSPERO Dost thou think so, spirit? ARIEL Mine would, sir, were I human.46

This last line appears simple, but carries such power. We know Ariel as a delicate spirit, unable to serve the witch Sycorax in her dark endeavours. But he is nevertheless a spirit, a supernatural being without the usual mortal concerns or ability to empathize. We should read (or act) his compassion as either affected or vestigial – as something somewhat analytically noted – not as deeply personal or ‘spiritually’ convicting. When read in one of the former ways we can better understand why Prospero so suddenly changes course. PROSPERO And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel. My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, And they shall be themselves.47

His unbroken charms and well-laid plans have in a single moment been radically altered. Whether the spur signals shame or a moment of free reflection – ‘My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time / Goes upright with his carriage’ – Prospero’s plans fundamentally change from vengeance to forgiveness and restoration. We can imagine a very long caesura before he responds to Ariel. How easily we see him close his eyes and feelingly – empathically, humanely – begin to think other thoughts. A long moment of reflection on how it had all come to this, of wondering who he truly was and was going to be? All those years on the island doing what exactly? Dwelling? Perhaps he recalled how he had educated Miranda, what and who he hoped she would become due to that education? Perhaps a memory of her mother awoke in that moment?

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Perhaps he wondered why he felt betrayed by Caliban? Did he hope that giving him language and presumably a rudimentary education ought to accomplish something more than it did? What, in the end, was his revenging going to accomplish? A Robert Mezey poem comes to mind here: The eyes close gratefully as the moment ripens, The tongue searches out its desire in the darkness. And the arms reach to embrace their own rib cage And a red absence flashes on the walls of the heart. You’ve read a thousand books and what do you know? Was there some membrane between your eye and the page? You rummage through the alphabet and the blood For one word through which the world can be seen. The odor of women, eyelashes, breasts Drift now in the starry smoke of memory. Your eyes were open, but then, so are a blind man’s. So are a dead man’s.48

If all we have learned and seen and experienced does not awaken or cultivate another way of being – of being other than merely or creaturely – then we see blindly or as the dead. Being ones that will die is quite different than being ones that are already dead. Ariel’s vestigial compassion strikes Prospero at the centre of his being and in one powerful moment the course of the entire play turns – an antistrophe or epode towards a palinode. Prospero, as an educated poeticmagician, yet carried something with his heart: Charis – grace, graciousness, kindness, goodwill, gratitude, a sense of being favoured or blessed. As Heidegger recalls from Hölderlin:       As long as Kindness, The Pure, still stays with his heart, man Not unhappily measures himself Against the Godhead.49

With grace and kindness dwelling within our heart a reason to measure ourselves against the immeasurable, against the impossibly vast, remains. It remains as kindness calls – in and through poetizing – us to correlate our heart with the great openness of the sky, with the vastness of god’s face. And when this reason and calling remains, the poet, or the poetically inclined and committed,

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strives and struggles to bring-forth ever more daring works of kindness, grace, gratitude. As we recalled from Heidegger earlier: The daring that is more venturesome, willing more strongly than any selfassertion, because it is willing, ‘creates’ a secureness for us in the Open. To create means to fetch from the source. And to fetch from the source means to take up what springs forth and to bring what has so been received.50

Poetic creation – primally born with kindness and gratitude – secures us in the Open. It ‘fetches’ more vastness, more godliness. It moves Prospero from vengeance to forgiveness:              – Most cruelly Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter. Thy brother was a furtherer in the act. – Thou art pinched for’t now, Sebastian. [To ANTONIO] Flesh and blood, You, brother mine, that entertained ambition, Expelled remorse and nature, whom, with Sebastian – Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong, – Would here have killed you king, I do forgive thee, Unnatural though thou art.51

Between the maddening visions Alonso has experienced on the island and the sight of Prospero alive and well, his being forgiven becomes too much to bear. The King of Naples promptly resigns his subjection of Milan and abdicates his own throne (unknowingly but gladly to Ferdinand whom he quickly learns yet lives). Though the company sans Gonzalo does not deserve it, Prospero grants forgiveness. Otherwise the whole orchestration remains a power fantasy (even if it is a justified one). Accordingly, forgiveness plays a vital role in the manner in which Prospero gets restored to his throne and by which Miranda becomes queen of Naples. Forgiveness and piety of thought – or the piety that comes as a result of poetically thinking and dwelling, as the accomplishment of seeing and listening – restores them to their original place as a way of being. Once restored to where (as how) they belong, the possibility of freedom is inaugurated. And it was forgiveness – born of Prospero measuring himself against the god (the face of the vast unknowable) and kindness abiding with his heart – that made such a restoration itself possible. Though it does seem to have a cost. After recounting many of the sorcerous effects he has accomplished, including the raising of the dead – Sycorax for secrets? Miranda? – he seems ready to move on, as though he realizes that such power is itself a hindrance to true freedom:

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      But this rough magic I here abjure. And when I have required Some heavenly music – which even now I do – To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.52

‘Rough magic’, strength of will, self-assertion – name your power – cannot catch what passes through the heavens, it cannot let be what appears within the Open, it cannot see otherwise, it cannot forgive. Being unable to forgive, nothing can be restored, and without restoration to our original – our most elemental and essential – way of being, there arises no possibility of freedom. Without it we find ourselves inescapably subordinated to the powers of tragic efficiency. Regardless if he had escaped the island or not, Prospero would have always remained a spiritual prisoner there had he not resigned his magical power. He would have inevitably shared the fate of Faustus and forfeited his soul.53 So too power always confines us if we do not give it up.54 And poetry signals a power too – a magical power – one requiring release. We are here reading and thinking and imagining Shakespeare four centuries later and his greatest insight stirs as the ability to listen quietly, to be silent and let the words come, rather than imposing them upon the world: ‘The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry.’55 Accordingly, as Shakespeare-Prospero has listened and been of service to poetry, the ending bears little resemblance to the beginning in this regard (save Miranda’s kindness). Towards it Prospero recognizes Caliban as his responsibility, and though such seems slight and passing, the recognition matters for both of them if they are to become free. And, as promised, he sets Ariel free. Once these necessary acts of forgiveness have occurred, restoration begins – before and within the Open, before and within the receptive dimension of loving and imagining. Now, there, freedom becomes an authentic possibility: Exeunt [all except PROSPERO]

Epilogue PROSPERO Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own,

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger Which is most faint. Now ’tis true I must be here confined by you Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.    [He awaits applause, then] exit56

5

Imaginary Ethics The Winter’s Tale & Letter on Humanism

For by the measure by which you measured it will be measured back to you. —St. Luke

A strange beginning Enter CHORUS CHORUS Into what regions have we strayed? Between Shakespeare and Heidegger we have considered the relationship of art to truth, the question of the meaning of being, finding a world elsewhere here, the need of forgiveness for restoration – to say nothing of our many questions and tries towards authenticity, freedom, excellence, and ever again: language and thinking. There remains too our many implicit critiques of prescriptive action, cold epistemological schemes, thoughtless technological development, and all the many areas and issues afflicting – haunting – individuals in contemporary mass societies in the names of progress, security, and benefit. And lest we forget, this has all arisen from reading. Not reading simply, rather attempting to read well by reading closely, critically, imaginatively. Still, imagination bereft of historical awareness bears out little of import to academic domains wherein knowledge of related discussions presented through scholarly apparatuses is a requisite for admittance. And although an awareness of materials and processes, of historical and contemporary references, of the theoretical and methodological terms en vogue might often find general appreciation within the inner-circles of cultural practitioners and critics, it remains timely novelty through innovative variation and marked strangeness that grants creators a place at the table of relevance. From time to time these two worlds – the academic and the creative – even converge and a poet learns his

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Latin and a philosopher hears more in metre than treatise. Nevertheless, before we set our imagination loose upon the world to intuit what it will from what we read (or misread) or before we allow it to hold court and make sovereign ethical judgements, we ought, in each and every case, to root it in its historic situation. Otherwise, art bears little relation to truth, the meaning of being becomes an answer instead of a question, our here becomes something sought in dreams and nightmares of elsewhere, and we only wish to forgive after we have been restored. In short, the unmoored imagination falls prey to all manner of metaphysical conceits and ideological devices: mind-body dualisms, strict subject-object distinctions, perception of time and space as chronology and container, kind kinship between freedom and equality, creativity without cost, higher planes of absolute being, learning as information acquisition, truth as transferable commodity, will as intention, price as predicated on inherent value – and on and on go the errors of unschooled and ill-schooled fancy. Plato would call them alethos pseudos, ‘true lies’.1 That is, falsities we whole-heartedly believe to be true. We cannot see past them or think in any way that does not reflect them. Because of them all other ideas – including the most beautiful ones – seem wrong, foolish, even inconceivable. Gods and men hate these lies above all others. Hence the ‘drive for truth’ and the imperative ever to interpret well in order to help safeguard against deeply embedded deceptions and hallucinations. We carry this out by anchoring our imagination to the earth and mortal finitude, and by awakening it to its purest and most genuine possibilities. Being so anchored – through the primal bond of words and ideas originally thought and historically wrought – allows the poetic, airy soul to take her stand faithfully upon life’s abyss and begin her walk home, a home from which she was thrown long ago. Or, the art of dying. An art exclusively reserved for those who dwell. Heidegger tells us that mortals dwell in that they ‘save the earth’, ‘receive the sky as the sky’, ‘await the divinities as divinities’, and ‘initiate their own nature – their being capable of death as death … so that there may be a good death’.2 He immediately adds that death and nothingness are not themselves the goals, rather that these activities – saving, receiving, awaiting, and initiating within the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals – allow for building and thinking. Building and thinking in the most original way, according to the most original measure: the care-filled cultivation and safeguarding of growing things, and the thoughtful construction of things that do not grow. Helping the world into the free. A manner of being in a place, at a time, for a while, in fidelity to the earth, with divine mysteries above. Wondrously letting things be what they are, cannily constructing what is to come. Or, Building Dwelling Thinking.

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[Aside. It does not require much of us to see why Heidegger’s critics accuse him of pastoralism, romantic nostalgia, Greek fetishism, Ludditism, ethnic territorialism, even mysticism. And the list could be longer and more detrimentally detailed, as has been and will continue to be done by others whose scruples or research interests lead them to do so. For dedicated readers of Heidegger – who accept the thinkers’ ambiguities, idiosyncrasies, poor judgements, and sins alongside his brilliance and originality – some accusations and facts are more easily turned aside or answered, others not. There is no defending the indefensible, no glory in championing lost causes, save perhaps the most beautifully foolish ones, which we will consider below.] Heidegger’s remarks here and elsewhere, at moments seemingly off the cuff, about the many defaults of the West – chiefly its inability to think – might best be grasped if followed to their root. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man’s subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation.3

Our fault rests with applying language – strictly or loosely, logically or illogically – to our experience of phenomena in an attempt to describe them while assuming that that description accurately bespeaks whatever those phenomena truly are. The use of language by those presuming the role of ‘shaper and master’. While this might sound absurd to many, it indicates one of Heidegger’s most basic positions: when we think of and use language as if it were a tool of our making and under our control we prove ourselves unfaithful to the event of language in our experiences. We play a debilitating game, a game that inevitably strains genuine relationships and occludes what is. However much our biases and perceptions cry otherwise, that sport of knowledge does not cohere with our phenomenological experience of language. Language instead has us first. We learn the world through words and names and the manifold senses they indicate. We only become estranged when language – due to our fundamental misunderstanding and misuse of it – carries us far from home. (Given the uncanny nature of the life of the mind, we might consider this estrangement compounded, the self-estrangement of those already strange.) We ought rather to let language tell us what things are, mediating significance through our attempts to listen to the senses it alerts or whispers, listening for its ‘voice’ in whatever key it might be singing. Such mediation requires the aforementioned historical moorings of the imagination, as well as attunement to those moorings.

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Does this mean that meaning comes to us only relative to culture or a priori? No. At least that is not the thrust of Heidegger’s argument. Instead, it means being is always already near for our questions, for our meditations, for the entry of meaning and truth as language. It means we are ever enmeshed in language. It means that language holds not only us but the measure of meaning and truth too. Not us. Protagoras and Sartre were wrong; man is not ‘the measure of all things’. We might indeed found truth through creative acts, yet those acts require spiritual materials – existential stuff – not of our making. Shakespeare, for all his innovation, did not create English, nor for all his neologisms did Heidegger German, or anyone his or her own tongue. Nor do we find the meaning and truth of all things like commodities simply acquired for the right price. Though the measure secreted within the hidden dimension of language and thought does have a cost: faith. ‘In the beginning was the word.’4 Faith, from Latin fides and Greek pistis, most basically implies trust or confidence. The term finds use in philosophy as far back as Parmenides and has a precise technical place in Plato’s epistemology (though not the most flattering one). The heart of it might very well rest with degrees of justified belief, expectation, even hope. The author of Hebrews famously describes it in the book’s eleventh chapter: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the proof of things unseen; for by it our forebears were attested. By faith we understand that the ages were formed by the word of God, so that what is seen did not come from things that appear.5

‘The proof of things unseen.’ While there may be no ‘apple’ or ‘snake’ or ‘love’ or ‘gravity’ as such, only those phenomena, those feelings, those nameless events themselves – and all the relations and contingencies surrounding them – we still feel the impress of their occurrence. The ‘things themselves’, however, remain essentially unknown. We initially have no angelic sense of them (sophia), only for them (nous) – a receptive, intelligible capacity – when they give themselves to us (we can only crave what they do not have, after all).6 But even then these phenomena give no deeper sense of themselves through themselves save by the intercession of language.7 By that intercession we have and are had by words, by it we dwell in the ‘house of being’, by it we witness the world happening all around us. Yet these words, which give voice to this cosmos of particles and events and relations and all the ages and dimensions keeping them, did not ‘come from things that appear’. Words do not come from the things they signify. Nor, as we have said, do they phenomenologically originate from us.8 The

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origin of the word as logos is instead quite divine and mythic, co-present with the gods at the beginning. This makes it unreachable by conventional empirical methodology. Still, though mythopoetic in its divine dawning, this comes nearer the phenomenological beginning of language and our existential experience of words. We are always already surrounded by words’ reasons – if we care to hear them. But it takes faith to speak the names of things and believe those words are not non-sense and rather give sensible delimitations for things, set boundaries for being. It takes trust to speak without implicitly advocating either word’s congruence with eternal ideas or conversely that it is all mere nominalism. It takes assurance to stand in the rift between words and phenomena, to take what we have a sense for and welcome it as a sense of. That is, the potential for a relationship with what is becomes an actual relationship. Or, knowledge. We should note that this faith that can lead us to wisdom is no subjective mental state or attitude, but is rather a reality attested through the experience of others. ‘By it our forebears were attested.’ The nature of such testing and the reliability of such experiences still ever begins with interpretation, which, of course, like any judgement, can be done well or poorly, informedly or ignorantly, with or without style or grace. Moored or unmoored. Then there remains the issue of this faith’s verifiability lying with criteria and metrics belonging to a world elsewhere, a dimension between the things that are, the metaxy. The space of pure possibility received by our own allotment of it: imagination. Language, faith, imagination? We work here towards an exchange that indicts all other exchanges as attenuating and profane: corruptio optimi quae est pessima.9 Before we outline that exchange let us quickly distinguish between religious faith and philosophical faith: religion believes in answers, philosophy believes in questions.10 The former faith finds expression in formulated creeds or sets of dogmatic positions, ones that define and identify one community or group from another. The latter never resolves so cleanly. Dogmas, presumptions, and circular arguments are all positions philosophers tend to avoid. If philosophy does anything, it questions always. (Or it should do so, if only to show its love.) Adherents to epistemological methodologies held together and defined by Gnostic platforms and unquestioning worldviews all carry the capacity, if not propensity, to claim possession of – or the means for possessing – absolute truth.11 ‘There are no surprises and no unknowns.’12 And even if unknowns and surprises arise, the doctrinal scheme provides an explanation for the faithful. The faith of philosophy, conversely, thrives on surprise and has its roots in awe of the unknown. It has ever seen certainty in systems and traditions as impediments. Impediments not to truth itself, for truth itself – as the structure of being or

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as a poetically founded disclosure of reality – needs no consent or assistance. Any obstacle to experiencing truth instead lies solely with the individuals who wish to claim it. The seekers find themselves occluded by the weight and distractions of epistemological and material possessions and commitments. Or they find themselves freed from such concerns by way of a superficial apathy towards any greater significance whatsoever, like Wellsian children of the future. It is they who are shut up and off. Not truth. Poetic language and art tell us: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’13 Contrariwise, those of religious faith – even if they claim no god or they mistake their faith for facts – believe they possess a unique key that unlocks truth. Those that do not possess the key – their key, whatever they believe it to be – simply suffer from faithlessness or an imprudent disposition or an inability to think rationally or the grave misfortune of having been born at the wrong time and place. So it goes. This distinction between these two ‘faiths’ reminds us that philosophy’s history and the history of the world contain uncounted victims of thoughtlessness, ideology, and blind faith. Not all religious, political, and ideological faiths proceed thusly, but enough have and do haunt this world to the present day and all the days yet in view of this one. Where did it all go wrong? Of course even to ask such a question belies a belief that it was once good or, at the very least, better. Not in a total, absolute, or universal sense, but rather in those terms about which we have here been circling: being and language, faith and imagination, truth and meaning. Philosophically speaking, why read old books if they shed no light on the most fundamental issues? We that do read old books have a strong bias towards the practice. As Gadamer famously remarked, ‘I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.’ And if we continue the tradition of beginning with the Greeks, we do, at the very least – whether we read Heidegger or not – have a useful narrative of evolution within both the social and private spheres of human life. A narrative in no small way associated with, if not defined by, the rise of rational schemes and methods, political and governmental sophistication, civic and cultic religious complexities, and largescale economic developments. These transformations commenced the movement away from views and practices premised upon older poetic logics and traditions. Beliefs and customs as yet adulterated by the process of institutionalizing – or the indefinite securing and ordered safeguarding of – certain values arrived at, in part, through the preclusion of whatever contests those very values. But is this more than merely a narrative? Is a Greek origin anything more than an intellectual preoccupation enticing one generation after the next? Let us unlade this further.

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When we undertake the study of the ancient Greeks – in particular their mental life and social practices as expressed through their literature and philosophies – two insights become apparent. First, we easily recognize that the many arts and disciplines at our disposal today, and our own sense of culture and values – in terms of ‘Western Civilization’ – owe a great debt to the Greeks (a widely acknowledged point). And, second, when we keep at the study, we eventually come to see how far away and alien those ‘giants of the old world’ are when compared with our own sensibilities. That is, if we keep up the study, we no longer so easily see ourselves in them. Though writers often gloss this latter point, some have taken note of the Greeks’ epic idiosyncrasies. Nietzsche counts among their numbers, and from him Heidegger wisely takes his cue. In response to the images of hate, violence, war, arrogance, and agony present in their great works, Nietzsche writes, ‘I fear we have not understood these in a sufficiently “Greek” way, and even that we would shudder if we ever did understand them in a Greek way.’14 Why? We find ourselves confronted with a monstrousness in which they revelled and from which we shrink. It comes concomitantly with their beauty. On the one hand we praise the classical masters for their genius and rationality, on the other we do not know what to do with their savagery and deeply embedded, and seemingly puerile, theology. We tend to rationalize what we find in response. But while their poems, plays, philosophies, histories, and sculptures lead us up to Olympian summits of original art and thought – Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Phidias, and others – they nevertheless simultaneously lead us down through an inescapable labyrinth of brutality, slavery, misogyny, tyranny, pederasty, racial and cultural chauvinism, exiles and executions, and a whole host of cultic and civic practices most today would find alarming, offensive, and surprisingly ‘irrational’. At the outset, from our place late in history, it all seems contradictory and puzzling. Hence our desire to smooth out what we perceive as rough and we shrewdly attribute any cultural unevenness to their civilization’s ‘youthfulness’. After all, they lacked millennia of history and its lessons, lessons that we today so enjoy and take for granted. As we forge ahead into our readings, however, we come to find out that the Hellenes were not as young and naive as to explain away our difficulties. They had Egypt and Babylon behind them, Persia alongside them. At their pinnacle – the ‘Golden Age’ – they already possessed a mythic Age of Heroes and had passed through their own Dark Age. They had weathered the influence of the Minoans and migrations and invasions by the Mycenaeans and Dorians. And, taken altogether, if we precluded their Stone Age, we could say the glories of fifthcentury Athens only arrived after two and a half thousand years of preamble.

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The Greeks were no upstarts. We are therefore ill-advised in attributing a lack of experience to their extraordinary strangeness. They had histories and wars and empires and world-changing intellectual innovations and discoveries already behind them long before they produced those works that continue to move and baffle us. This leaves us no option but to wrestle with their peculiar genius, and not mistreat it – or them – with contemporary sensibilities, biases, and agendas. The narrative of the Greeks also provides us with a way of understanding the power of exchange and valuation, and how immoderate rationality ultimately corrupted those practices. Even brief forays into these matters reveal that our contemporary understanding of such notions as economy, equality, freedom, and reason, are both indebted to and challenged by the Greeks. The work of M. I. Finley, for instance, demonstrates the range of strangeness found within our Greek inheritance. On one hand he shows the problems of using modern economic principles and theories to understand how the Greeks viewed money and markets (hence a challenge to our contemporary understanding), while on the other he offers evidence that suggests the very idea of freedom, as we understand it today, might not even exist without them (thus a debt we owe them).15 With no speculative markets or diverse portfolio investments, no abstract sense of commodities or assets, no extreme divisions of labour or sectors, and no rules for pursuing wealth devoid of pursuing the ‘good life’ (eudaimonia), the Greeks simply had no recognizable economy as such. The exchange of gifts (doron), the taking of plunder (leia), wealth (ploutos), necessity (ananke), household management (oikonomos), practical wisdom (phronesis), and virtue (arete) are all better terms and activities for thinking about ancient economies than the technical lexicon deployed by contemporary economists. And, of more direct philosophical interest, there exists no word for freedom (as Greek eleutheria) in other ancient Near and Far Eastern languages.16 If words wield the power over our interpretations of experiences and phenomena that we believe them to, then the implications of this linguistic insight ought not to be taken lightly. Put less delicately, the Greeks were the first to be free.17 That is, they were the first to be capable of the existential and political burden of freedom, as well as the first to experience the responsibility of its subordination. We hear something of this when Herodotus recounts an exchange between some Spartans and a Persian general: You know well how to be a slave, but you, who have never tasted freedom, do not know whether it is sweet or not. Were you to taste of it, not with spears you would counsel us to fight for it, no, but with axes.18

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The burden (freedom) of this responsibility (freedom’s delimitation) naturally arises for the individual as a philosophical possibility only through the societal institutions and practices that allow for it as a possibility. Once world-measuring reason – as calculative rationality – entered the world of Achilles and Odysseus the ancients could view themselves politically through the lens of equality (isonomia).19 Not just anywhere, but rather before the sacred fire in the heart of the polis, that place of exchange, that space of speech where they could be equal. There. There inequality became possible too. And where equality and inequality both become institutionally recognizable, freedom becomes both an existential and a political possibility. Jean-Pierre Vernant frames the development of Greek thought through mathematical reasoning and the cultic mysteries.20 The emergence of these two intellectual – spiritual – activities had a radical influence on the Greeks. The makeup of the polis, how Greeks related to one another, understood themselves, worshipped their gods, and the very purpose for worship, changed forever. The Greek Enlightenment stands between the earlier Homeric beginning (before the geometrization of the world and private religious experiences) and the loss of those mythic roots through the process of empire building. This process, which began its (ultimately nihilistic) termination in the name of ‘Hellenism’, and which was perfected by Rome in the name of ‘civilization’, persists in the ethos of ambitious nation states to this day. Though the ancient geometers and celebrants had little indication of what the future held, their contributions to Greek thought have provided the theoretical underpinnings that became the political and religious materials used to construct state machinery. Machinery that safeguards, delimits, props up, holds back, and commoditizes ideologies, beliefs, hopes, fears, and ‘worth’ whatsoever. To say nothing of what it does – what it has done – to the earth itself. The introduction and aim of dike, or ‘justice’, into the city-dwelling world of the ancient Greeks, Vernant tells us, was civic equality. Why? ‘As Hesiod would later observe, all rivalry, all eris presupposes a relationship of equality: competition can take place only among peers.’21 As a concept of justice that presupposes equality took hold of the Greek soul and fostered a social identity (or a shared sense of ‘sameness’), a small place for the Greeks to gather and around which their activities could turn and their families settle – the city’s hearth and sacred fire – replaced the practice of arranging dwellings about the homes of the aristocracy. The rise of the agora, the ‘open space’, the ‘place of equitable assembly’, is part and parcel to this narrative. The stasis, or ‘civil discord’, that had ensued from centuries of aristocratic privilege and excessive wealth, provided the catalyst and

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target of this political conception of justice. And by it the rich and powerful lost the centre of the world. ‘The idea of sophrosyne took shape in contrast to the hybris of the rich.’22 Moderation, fairness, and the golden mean overtook excess, the right of strength, and gold’s prerogative. Isonomia towards eunomia. Behold the polis become a unified city whose laws and customs guaranteed an equitable distribution of rights, honours, privileges, wealth, and responsibilities. But people are not numbers, nor can equations capture them. The new rationality that emerged from their early scientists, particularly the formulation of numerical values and the principles of mathematical operations – perfected centuries later in Euclid’s Elements, particularly his ‘Common Notions’ – provided the reformers and revolutionaries of Greek society with a conceptual outline by which the polis and its citizens could be redefined. When applied socially the numerical beauty and self-evidentiary nature of this logic – later encapsulated by such maxims as ‘Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another’ and ‘The whole is greater than any of its parts’ – created a new political optic that would eventually colour all areas of human life. No dimension was safe from the terrible sublimity of this new equilibrium, this new justice. For at the same time the Greeks used this calculus to reinterpret time and space and the meaning of the political, the cultic practices celebrating and appeasing the mysteries of the gods were also put to use towards evolving society. While performing rites and conducting ceremonies according to thoroughly ancient traditions – traditions about which we still possess only an imperfect picture – ‘the mysteries’ allowed communities and households to worship the hidden gods of the earth and to pay reverence to the sovereigns of the underworld (forces of life and death, seed and harvest, spirits and seasons, a tapestry that included nymphs, daimons, and the heroic dead).23 In so honouring these forces, ghosts were purified for rebirth and soils prepared for planting.24 And these gods they worshipped originally had no affiliation with those latter Olympian emigrants, those sky gods of the heavenly acropolis. These primeval Cthonians were older, in some ways harder to comprehend, and more difficult to appease. Esteemed classicist, Gilbert Murray, describes this divine milieu as follows: [The] Olympian gods are not primary, but are imposed upon a background strangely unlike themselves. For a long time their luminous figures dazzled our eyes; we were not able to see the half-lit regions behind them, the dark primeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from which they drew their vitality.25

The power behind Olympian symbology lies largely with the irrational passions and incomprehensible forces at play in mortal existence. The world pulsed with

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unknown mana and its horizons cloaked a near absolute penumbral dread. This older world comprised the stage upon which mortal existence played itself out, doing so in awe of primeval phenomena, in fear of night and tempests, in reverence of the earth and the heavens. The pre-Olympian gods imagined for these forces bore little likeness to their votaries, save pragmatic, charm-bearing composite images upon which the Greek mind could focus its attention. It took special men and women to honour these great spirits.26 And the spiritual disposition needed to worship these fantastical forces properly – that is, according to their due – would naturally come to be, like all things, appropriated by the new equalizing rationality, as the eventual arrogation of the Eleusinian Mysteries by Athens testifies. In time, this turn of events led to the mysteries emphasizing spiritual escape (ekpheugo) from the world through strict self-discipline (askesis) towards personal salvation (soteria), rather than the necessary appeasement of the primeval, non-rational forces of nature. How? A demand had been placed upon men and women to surrender totally any original experience or adherence to the ways of the old gods (physis unadorned) to the new power and all-consuming frame of civic law (institutionalizing nomos) and, as a result, the fluidity that had existed between the divine and the natural slowly began to concretize into inelastic distinctions. This signals the eventual loss of both the purely phenomenal dimension of experience and any awe for that dimension. The poets and tragedians mined this affair for all its theatrical worth, which means the Greeks possessed some awareness of what had occurred, even if it could only find articulation in poetry.27 Why? No vote taken, no line drawn in the sand, no formal account, rather, from a historical perspective, a seemingly sudden, glorious rotation of happenings rightly named revolution: a series of movements so grand and so strange that only those capable of imagining themselves to be more or less – or otherwise – than they actually were could even be caught up in it. They got caught in their own net. As have we. How did this happen? Through the procedural agency of mathematical transactions: the exchange of an uncertain world for a certain empire. A system set on replacing justice as necessary conflict with justice as legislated peace. Yet this rational truth only held firm in a theoretical realm far removed from the simple flame of the hearth. In time Pythagoras, Plato, and others would come to believe – rationally – that this realm had always existed, that it was eternal, and that the divine, cosmic principles housed ‘there’ foreran all human experience. That it was and always had been the central flame around which not only humans, but all things, came to be. Accordingly, we did not invent these rational

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principles; they instead simply needed time – and civilization – to awaken fully in us in order that we might see them at work in nature. Aristotle would later say that the philosopher embraces this rational capacity and takes from it his highest happiness. Regarding the demands of philosophy and the virtues of its pleasures, he writes: But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him.28

Aristotle is not alone in this assessment. Although later thinkers might avoid the term divine, we can easily find the sentiment that reason (logos) names the highest of humanity’s faculties throughout the history of philosophy. And rightly so. Yet, what happens when glorious and generative reason births a rigid rationality capable of appropriating or eliminating all critiques and counter points? Or when that rationality and its logics devise all manner of techniques able to execute its will to efficiency? What effect does this ‘equitable transaction’, this ‘exchange’, have on the very human freedom it seemed to have made possible? What was perhaps meant to enhance or grant freedom as a possibility  – that is, equality at the centre of a state, sameness before the sacred flame – simultaneously became the possibility of slavery (in terms not strictly political). A Pre-Socratic philosopher or wide-thinking dialectician or open-eyed critical theorist might readily see the two as needing one another. If freedom is to be a ‘real’ possibility, must not slavery be one as well? Perhaps the life of the mind and our existence as political creatures requires these two poles. Which sounds more enticing to those nearer freedom than slavery. Unless, of course, we admit that there exist two categories or experiences of freedom. One fundamental, elemental, and difficult to articulate; the other borne out historically and precisely defined in terms of social, political, and economic liberties. On the one hand, an ‘ontological freedom’ allotted as a judgement to all mortals simply by virtue of having been born, and, on the other, a ‘political freedom’ conditioned not by merely being or being capable of enquiring into the meaning of being, but rather by historical and institutional determinants. The former simply, though not unimportantly, signals the curious life of conscious beings whatever their social or cultural situation, while the latter indicates those contingent historical particularities, whatever they might be. Both can bear the weight and label of ‘existential freedom’, hence signal all the burdens and hopes of our limits and possibilities, but it is the former that retains inviolable contemplative priority, and the latter that must in each and every case wrestle free of any enslaving forces as we take up authentic responsibility. Certainly liberation in social spheres – being

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‘free’ from (or within) social constraints, political obligation, and economic restrictions – and all the opportunities subsequently arising from those liberties influence our contemplative life – being ‘free’ for (or towards) leisure – but not enough to dismiss the distinction or deny original freedom. Still, in either sense, imagination remains crucial. In the first instance, it provides us – whoever and whenever we are – with a primal dimension that allows for the formation of words and images, with the creative possibility of self-awareness, and knowledge as such whatsoever. Imagination, like the old Greek hearth, names the central place and creative flame around which our faculties and feelings can take shape and ideas can occur. It allows for the sharing and exchange of one soul’s experiences with another. And it is this fundamental conception of exchange that carries us into our secondary or political powers of conjecture, our ability to throw ourselves forward and backward and sideward into the world. Though this latter sense of imagination more clearly demands it if its suppositions are to have any congruence with our socio-historical limits and possibilities, both require attuned moorings to the world. Otherwise our imaginings never achieve a status higher than flights of fancy and the freedom it accomplishes (in either sense) never more than a dream. Exit CHORUS

Court of madness As we move to a direct engagement with Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, we will consider two courts: the poetical and the political. We employ ‘court’ here to indicate, in part, a sovereign space. It is meant to draw out something slightly different than our previous use of realm or dimension. That is, a space both open and enclosed in which councillors and companions attend a ruler, and in which he or she hands down judgements. ‘Poetical’ here continues to signal the creative and imaginative, and ‘political’ the concrete social and historical situation. Our reading will take us to the intersection of these two courts and reveal the role of madness therein, as both a constructive and destructive force. We will find that the fecund and liberating powers of madness, as well as those that disable and enslave, largely reflect the attending elements we carry with us before these courts. The courts simply acknowledge these claims or they do not, they legitimate them or they do not, offering welcome or exile. And for better or worse, these attending agents we carry, these representatives of our hopes and fears and desires (our

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aggregate selves) were – in one way or another – birthed by these sovereigns we seek, touched by their madness. We arrive as and with proper heirs, distant relatives, the dispossessed, sycophants, malcontents, well-wishers, politicians, revolutionaries. Who we are arrives from what and who made us who we are (at least for now). The two courts. The world and our dream of the world. Do they touch? Will one acknowledge the other? What happens when our imaginations fly free of the world? If we desire sovereignty for ourselves, then we will want to see if we can work towards these questions and bring all the foregoing readings and reflections to bear on the authority of these two courts, in negotiating their respective procedures, and if we can find our voice and vision there and take up our rightful inheritance – even if we are attended by bastards and distant cousins, strangers and commoners, paramours and radicals. Let us begin in the court of Sicilia. The Winter’s Tale opens with two noble courtiers, Camillo and Archidamus, merrily discussing their respective lands and courts, as well as young prince Mamillius, heir of Leontes, King of Sicilia. The King of Bohemia, Polixenes, and his attendants have been visiting his old childhood friend, Leontes. Archidamus, a lord of Bohemia and attendant of Polixenes, informs Camillo, his counterpart in Sicilia, that should he and his King come visit them (which they indeed plan to do) they will be given ‘sleepy drinks’ to dull their senses so that they will not notice the court’s ‘insufficience’. ‘Wherein our entertainments shall shame us, we will be justified in our loves.’ Archidamus feels as though Bohemia lacks the riches and splendours of Sicilia’s court, populated instead with simple countryside folk. It is a rustic and pastoral land. He thinks Bohemia ought to get the visiting Sicilians good and drunk so as not to mark this difference in courts, or, perhaps even better, not to care. Were the Sicilians to observe their surroundings closely, he says, it would become an occasion to ‘accuse’, not to ‘praise’. Camillo reassuringly counters, ‘You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely’ – a line that might act as an augury for the whole work (and perhaps much else). He goes on to say that Sicilia (Leontes) and Bohemia (Polixenes) share a close bond. ‘They were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now.’ (Another line ironically presaging what is to come). Given their history and close connection, their fraternal love has no choice but to flourish. ‘The heavens continue their loves!’ The nail in the head of the ironical herald found in this opening scene goes to Archidamus’ emphatic statement about the Kings’ relationship: ‘I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it.’ As we will quickly see, when the political and the poetic intersect in the court

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of madness, nothing is safe. Along these lines, we find insult added to injury when he mentions what ‘unspeakable comfort’ the court takes from Mamillius, Sicilia’s son, who is a young gentleman of the ‘greatest promise’. Camillo heartily agrees, adding that if the prince were to die, the King and Queen would have little desire to live. And with that, in less than fifty lines, we have received a look backward and forward, indications of what inexplicable tragedies are about to unfold. Shakespeare nevertheless affords us another hundred lines before this becomes so. Enter the kings with Hermione, Mamillius, and lordly attendants. Quickly we see the affection each man has for the other, and how warmly Hermione accepts Polixenes as her husband’s oldest and dearest friend, indeed more than friend. The kings refer to one another as ‘brother’. Before the floor falls out we witness what appears as a warm exchange in which Polixenes attempts to take his leave of Leontes’ court, but his old friend resists his departure. He wants him to linger a little while longer. Polixenes’ stay in Sicilia has reached ‘Nine changes of the watery star’, or nine months (an understated point that will soon have more bearing). Given this length of time and that he has ‘left our throne / Without a burden’, vacant, his time away from Bohemia has become not only impractical, but also imprudent. Not wanting to risk any regrettable developments at home, nor overstay his welcome abroad, he remains steadfast in his desire to return to Bohemia. He must ‘Go hence in debt’ if there is to be any possibility of repaying Sicilia’s gracious hospitality. Polixenes stands as a ‘cipher’ – a zero – surrounded by an abundance of riches and sentiment. To stay longer only increases his sense of debt and his concerns for his throne. For now, he can only offer his sincerest thanks. Leontes, however, does not let up. ‘Stay your thanks a while / And pay them when you part.’ But he cannot convince him. He cues Hermione. LEONTES Tongue-tied our queen? Speak you. HERMIONE I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until You have drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir, Charge him too coldly. Tell him you are sure All in Bohemia’s well. This satisfaction The by-gone day proclaimed. Say this to him, He’s beat from his best ward. LEONTES Well said, Hermione.

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HERMIONE To tell he longs to see his son were strong. But let him say so then, and let him go. But let him swear so, and he shall not stay, We’ll thwack him hence with distaffs. [To POLIXENES] Yet of your royal presence I’ll adventure The borrow of a week. When at Bohemia You take my lord, I’ll give him my commission To let him there a month behind the gest Prefixed for’s parting. – Yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar o’th’ clock behind What lady she her lord. – You’ll stay? POLIXENES No, madam.29

Hermione advocates well for her husband. Like a cunning force held in reserve, she waits to speak up until Polixenes has sworn to leave. She says if Polixenes sorely misses his son, they, empathetically, will let him return home without a word of complaint, indeed – should he swear to that cause – they will ‘thwack him hence with distaffs’. For equity’s sake she adds that when her husband goes to visit Bohemia she will allow him to stay on an extra month. Polixenes remains unmoved, but not for long. HERMIONE Nay, but you will? POLIXENES I may not, verily. HERMIONE Verily? You put me off with limber vows. But I, Though you would seek t’unsphere the stars with oaths, Should yet say ‘Sir, no going.’ Verily You shall not go. A lady’s ‘verily’ ’s As potent as a lord’s. Will you go yet? Force me to keep you as a prisoner, Not like a guest: so you shall pay your fees When you depart, and save your thanks. How say you?

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My prisoner or my guest? By your dread ‘verily’, One of them you shall be. POLIXENES Your guest then, madam. To be your prisoner should import offending, Which is for me less easy to commit Than you to punish. HERMIONE Not your jailer then, But your kind hostess. Come, I’ll question you Of my lord’s tricks and yours when you were boys. You were pretty lordings then?30

Her ‘“Verily” is / As potent as a lord’s’. As the queen her ‘truth’ bears no less virility than the king’s, as a woman her ‘reality’ holds no less than a man’s (until the court turns mad). So Bohemia must honour her request either as guest or captive, instancing an etymological, if not phenomenological, curiosity that Derrida would later pick up on: ‘host’ from the Latin hostis means both ‘one who receives guests’ and ‘enemy’.31 Though presented in jest, her rhetorical strategy works and Polixenes relents. ‘Your guest, then, madam.’ Lest he change his mind if they tarry upon the subject, Hermione deftly turns their talk to Leontes and Polixenes’ early years. POLIXENES We were, fair queen, Two lads that thought there was no more behind But such a day tomorrow as today, And to be boy eternal. HERMIONE Was not my lord The verier wag o’th’ two? POLIXENES We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’other. What we changed Was innocence for innocence. We knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed That any did. Had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher reared

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger With stronger blood, we should have answered heaven Boldly ‘Not guilty’, the imposition cleared Hereditary ours.

HERMIONE By this we gather You have tripped since. POLIXENES O my most sacred lady, Temptations have since then been born to’s; for In those unfledged days was my wife a girl. Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes Of my young playfellow. HERMIONE Grace to boot! Of this make no conclusion, lest you say Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on. Th’offences we have made you do we’ll answer, If you first sinned with us and that with us You did continue fault and that you slipped not With any but with us.32

In this oft remarked upon exchange Polixenes perfectly captures the disposition of youth: ‘to be boy eternal’. What lay behind and up ahead of them plays out seamlessly in an unending summer, in an infinite present. This take on youth’s possibilities prompts the queen to wonder if her husband was the more mischievous one, ‘The verier wag o’ the two.’ No, Bohemia assures her, they ‘were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun’. In their innocence they ‘knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did’. Had they continued on this way into their adulthood heaven would find no fault with them. ‘Not guilty.’ Hermione picks up on what this suggests: they eventually lost that innocence. ‘Tripped’ here tokening sexual intercourse. Polixenes readily admits as much, though he points out that this happened long before either his wife or Hermione were of age or known to them. His response ambiguously implies, intentionally or not, both that the boys had not yet been unfaithful to their future queens as they were unknown to each other, and that had the young queens been of age and known to them that they might very well have been the sources of those early venial transgressions. ‘Grace to boot!’ She kindly and playfully takes the frank topic of the two kings’ early sexual experiences and says that she and her Bohemian

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counterpart will negate any implications of their husbands’ guilt by claiming they were their husbands’ first. With that she gracefully softens a flirtatious exchange that might have quickly devolved and given others cause to wonder. In relatively few lines, Hermione demonstrates why she represents for us the poetic court. Her poetic power reveals itself as grace. The political shows itself in its most obvious manifestation, the king, and alternatively revealed as exigent. Both step into madness, both are capable of disproportionality, but the former does so to generate appreciation and strengthen bonds, the other to excise all ambiguities and doubt. The turn and distinction occurs unexpectedly. LEONTES Is he won yet? HERMIONE He’ll stay my lord. LEONTES At my request he would not. Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok’st To better purpose. HERMIONE Never? LEONTES Never but once. HERMIONE What? Have I twice said well? When was’t before? I prithee tell me. Cram’s with praise, and make’s As fat as tame things. One good deed dying tongueless Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages. You may ride’s With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere With spur we beat an acre. But to the goal. My last good deed was to entreat his stay. What was my first? It has an elder sister, Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace! But once before I spoke to the purpose? When? Nay, let me have’t. I long. LEONTES Why, that was when

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger Three crabbed months had soured themselves to death Ere I could make thee open thy white hand And clap thyself my love. Then didst thou utter ‘I am yours for ever.’

HERMIONE ’Tis grace indeed. Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice. The one for ever earned a royal husband; Th’other, for some while a friend. [She gives her hand to POLIXENES. They stand aside]33

Pleased, Leontes praises her, ‘thou never spok’st / To better purpose’ (doing so after he pointed out that Polixenes would not stay at his request). ‘Never?’ she asks. ‘Never but once’, he tells her. If these words were her second best, she wishes to know which were the first:          One good deed dying tongueless Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages.

No remuneration for love and loving deeds, no trinkets, no money: only praise. However lightly meant here, praise nevertheless expresses the ancient currency of heroes and heroines. And so he tells her it was years ago when she took his hand and said, ‘I am yours for ever.’ She then takes his hand once again, in that moment, reenacting and reinforcing the original moment in which she pledged herself to him. All appears well. Then something happens. Hermione repeats, with a touch more transparency, what Leones had already said of her:       I have spoke to the purpose twice. The one for ever earned a royal husband; Th’other, for some while a friend.

She then lets go of Leontes’ hand, takes Polixenes,’ and ‘They stand aside’ (some directions read ‘they walk apart’). These words and this gesture, which seem only in keeping with Sicilia’s relationship with Bohemia and only an affable continuation of what her husband desired, twist in his mind. In addition to the practice of good exegesis, part of the purpose in citing these early exchanges at length has been to demonstrate how odd this twisting movement seems in its

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theatrical context. By showing how charming, capable, cooperative – how full of grace – Hermione is, it highlights the incomprehensibility of Leontes’ turn. LEONTES [aside] Too hot, too hot: To mingle friendship farre is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, But not for joy, not joy. This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent. ’T may, I grant. But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practiced smiles As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere The mort o’th’ deer – O, that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows. – Mamillius, Art thou my boy? MAMILLIUS Ay, my good lord.34

The political and the poetical have intersected and the mad court has revealed itself. ‘Too hot, too hot.’ The king has lost his grip on reality, a much-needed grip for those who wish to wield power justly or wisely. The poetical requires its moorings as well, but should it lose its way its agency possesses little direct authority over the lives of others. Not so of the political. Yet, why now? After years of seemingly harmonious matrimony, how has Hermione’s poetry and Leontes’ power only now come to trespass upon one another in the realm of madness? ‘I have tremor cordis on me.’ It is as if he has appropriated her poetical grace and with no period of maturation seen it inverted – in total – into baselessly jealous conjectures. Her elegant ease becomes his unhinged clamouring to act, to act on nothing more than his most unfounded suspicions. She remains connected to the world as he begins to cut all cords. He sees all of Hermione and Polixenes’ glances, touches, and words as evidence not of dear friendship – of which he is the cause – but as evidence of infidelity. It goes so far so quickly with him that he even asks his son, Mamillius, ‘Art thou my boy?’ How can we understand this radical reinterpretation of reality? This rupture of sentiment and bond? This rift? [Aside. What of the relationship between court and theatre during Shakespeare’s time? Perhaps if we consider it for a moment we might find some assistance as we head towards the impending crisis in Sicilia. Stephen Orgel,

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in The Illusion of Power, tells us that the spectacular machinery of court theatre of England’s Renaissance ‘made their audiences living emblems of the aristocratic hierarchy, and their costly scenic wonders constituted a prime instance of royal liberality, exemplifying the princely virtue of magnificence’.35 The manner in which the monarch saw him or herself – in which the age saw itself – was no small matter. Why? The great sweeping changes of a medieval world becoming a modern one coloured the gaze and tinged the air of the time. Long held certainties – theological, political, scientific – were upended by the reason and plasticity of the new (and very old) humanistic spirit. Huizinga’s grand work on the Middle Ages frames this shift well: The Middle Ages had always lived in the shadow of Antiquity, always handled its treasures, or what they had of them, interpreting it according to truly medieval principles: scholastic theology and chivalry, asceticism and courtesy. Now, by an inward ripening, the mind, after having been so long conversant with the forms of Antiquity, began to grasp its spirit. The incomparable simpleness and purity of the ancient culture, its exactitude of conception and of expression, its easy and natural thought and strong interest in men and in life, – all this began to dawn upon men’s minds. Europe, after having lived in the shadow of Antiquity, lived in its sunshine once more.36

And yet the structures of power – temporal and spiritual – were interwoven with, if not predicated upon, the enduring stability of ‘truly medieval principles’. Claims to power only found strength in time, in time reaching backward. Such roots offered the promise of a prosperous future. But to go back to the origin and begin again – conceptually or in spirit – signals danger. An arche. Having thrown off the millennia long ‘shadow of Antiquity’, to ‘live in its sunshine once more’, exposes rulers to a ‘new’ threat. Rivals for the throne were nothing novel, but now the people, inspired by ideas previously cloaked or misrepresented, might take it upon themselves to alter their way of life. For kings and queens this meant the image of the world – in theatrical terms – needed recasting, more opulent costumes, elaborate staging, and ever more displays of power. Not simply for peers or the people, but for themselves. For, as Orgel points out, ‘What the noble spectator watched he ultimately became.’37 How? Dramatists and divines had long endowed their poetry and religion with the vitality of imagination, but what of things political? Rulers too have long known of the efficacy of creating images, structures, events – statuary, architecture, state sponsored celebrations, and so forth – but not for the sake of art or faith, rather in order to manage how the public would perceive them and history remember

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them. Yet something else appears to occur during this time than the mere erection of a shrine or commission of a marble. Distinct from the limitations of the democratic theatre available to the penny paying public, the private theatre of the Renaissance monarch, with its elaborate staging, visible and invisible mechanisms, lush costumes, extravagant sets and props, established a more direct psychological link between stage and sovereign – the players played for him or her alone. While there might be courtiers and diplomats in attendance, the show was for the sovereign. This directed attention of such grand orchestrations accomplished a level of immersion into fantastical worlds as yet not experienced by kings and queens (much less anyone else). This link and this immersion – taken with the wondrous productions and beautiful poetry of the theatre – passed along the power of the playwright to the potentate. The ruler found himself baptized in the poet’s imagination. With this regeneration comes a reawakening of that original sense of freedom, a dreamlike sense of the ‘free-doom of be-ing’. Those already possessed of political power, however, experience another sort of dream: autonomy. Not simply reveries of escape confined to the life of the mind, which anyone might experience, but inspiring visions of physical and social autonomy, visions that can become, more or less, reality.38 As the poet at the pinnacle of Renaissance Theatre, Shakespeare’s art had become a ‘sphere of radical freedom’.39 A sphere of ‘pure plenitude’.40 Free and plenteous in itself, it could, in the estimation of Greenblatt and others, appropriate and swerve from discourses of political power.41 Yet if such free art chose to kneel before the king – for anything truly free cannot be coerced (to say nothing whatsoever for the playwright and his players) – it participated and augmented the king’s ‘privileged visibility’. It altered the world’s view of him, his view of the world, his view of himself. And for those already invested with either poetic or political powers – artists and kings – those views can become visions, those visions artistic or social realities. Realities both contingent upon and susceptible to what initiated it in the first place: madness. A madness that fuels poetic vision and drives political power, a madness capable of marring the life of art and the art of life.] Holding the reason for this madness in abeyance a moment longer, we find Leontes’ delirium – directed through jealousy – runs out the remainder of the first Act. Some critics see him becoming incomprehensible at points, ‘developing every idea until it is grotesque’,42 or that through him Shakespeare ‘intuited the nature of schizophrenia, in its modern diagnosis’.43 While we will avoid offering a clinical diagnosis of Leontes, we can certainly cede his madness’ poetic inversion of Hermione’s grace. His thoughts become wild, his judgements irregularly

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formed, his manner and speech take on all odd proportions: he indeed warps into something grotesque. Leontes quickly goes from singing Hermione’s praises to losing all trust, not simply of her, but all womankind. Yet they say [Mamillius and I] are Almost as like as eggs. Women say so, That will say anything. But they are false As o’er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters, false As dice are to be wished by one that fixes No bourn ’twixt his and mine, yet were it true To say this boy were like me. Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye. Sweet villain, Most dear’st, my collop! Can thy dam – may’t be? – Affection, thy intention stabs the centre. Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams – how can this be? – With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing. Then ‘tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost – And that beyond commission; and I find it – And that to the infection of my brains And hard’ning of my brows. POLIXENES What means Sicilia? HERMIONE He something seems unsettled.44

Women have suddenly become licentious and faithless, fickle as weather, ‘false / As dice’. As his heart twists he observes his wife walking hand in hand with his friend, his son nearby, and jealous doubts begin to cut at the centre of his being. He begins to question the very nature of the passions, of their hold on reality. ‘How can this be?’ The unreal and incredulous has overtaken credulity and the real. His brains have become infected. He knows this is happening; yet he has no desire or capacity to annul it. And though Polixenes and Hermione pick up on ‘something’, they really have no idea. Macbeth: ‘But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer.’ The Queen and Bohemia exit to the garden and Leontes tells Mamillius to go play so that he might continue his descent.

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Thy mother plays, and I Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave. Contempt and clamour Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been, Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is, even at this present, Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th’arm, That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence, And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour. Nay, there’s comfort in’t, Whiles other men have gates, and those gates opened, As mine, against their will. Should all despair That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves. Physic for’t there’s none. It is a bawdy planet, that will strike Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful. Think it: From east, west, north, and south, be it concluded, No barricade for a belly. Know’t, It will let in and out the enemy With bag and baggage. Many thousand on’s Have the disease and feel’t not.45

He sees himself cuckolded, ‘sluiced in’s absence’. His loving partner has become ‘his pond fished by next neighbour, by / Sir Smile,’ by Polixenes. No longer a lady of potence comparable to his own, but a thing, a piece of property, a tool. A ‘gate’. A gate Bohemia has opened and entered. He believes if other men felt the anguish as he now feels it, those ‘that have revolted wives’, then a tenth of all men would commit suicide. And there is no ‘physic’ for this condition, no medicine. Licentiousness infects all of history and circles the earth entire. Cuckoldry is a global pandemic. And let us not forget Hermione’s pregnancy. Accordingly, the only path before him that he can see is death, theirs or his. But as the sin belongs to them, so too ought the penalty. The king confides his fears in his councillor, Camillo, who attempts to correct his lord’s perceptions, but to no effect. At first Leontes wants Camillo to admit he already knows of Hermione’s faithlessness, for, in his mind, surely others must already know or suspect something. (He probably would have seen the ‘truth’ sooner had he not been blinded by his ‘naive’ affections.) Yet Camillo, like the rest of the court – and the king until only moments ago – adores the queen and believes her utterly worthy of that adoration. So he speaks up.

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CAMILLO I would not be a stander-by to hear My sovereign mistress clouded so without My present vengeance taken. ’Shrew my heart, You never spoke what did become you less Than this, which to reiterate were sin As deep as that, though true. LEONTES Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh? – a note infallible Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift, Hours minutes? noon midnight? And all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings If this be nothing. CAMILLO Good my lord, be cured Of this diseased opinion, and betimes, For ’tis most dangerous.46

Camillo tells his king, ‘You never spoke what did become you less / Than this.’ But the mad turn has already occurred. The jealous courtiers (competing paramours) attending Leontes’ imaginings have come to comingle with their political counterparts (military tacticians and legal strategists) in the court of madness. That is, his feelings for his friend and his wife have stepped into the realm of his temporal authority, a realm of applied theories and pragmatic considerations, of tax collection and troop movements, of measured diplomats and definable social agendas, a realm usually ill-equipped to accommodate ambiguities not in service to the crown. The political court has no inclination and little ability to entertain the morally complex, often irrational, likely prurient – always authentically authoritative – forces of love. Hence lords tempt fate and challenge sense when they allow lovers to attend court or lawyers the bedroom. Moreover, fate is challenged and sense tempted – into madness – when the court

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and the bedchamber become the same space: the space in which Leontes now finds himself. In what is perhaps Leontes’ most well-known (if notorious) fit, his Learlike descent into absolute nihilism, he addresses a series of unasked questions originating from his own jealously ridden suspicions: ‘Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?’ If whispering and sighing and wishing for time to pass more quickly are nothing, then all is nothing. ‘The manifest irony here’, Garber points out, ‘is that all these things are nothing.’47 He rails against a reality that does not exist. There appears no sound reason for his cynical leap into mistrust unless, of course, we spend a few more moments confronting the madness that has come upon him to uncover its true cause. Though Hermione’s poetry has graced Leontes’ political world for years, the two courts have seemingly existed and thrived together. Yet two developments have occurred: Polixenes and pregnancy. The most obvious and touted cause – both inside and outside the text – is Leontes’ outrage at having been cuckolded. Hermione has slept with Bohemia and now carries his child; an outrage that explains without excusing Sicilia’s descent, if it were true. Yet, not as obvious, or rather hidden in plain sight, is Leontes’ love for Polixenes. More than friends, they were lovers in their youth.48 ‘Twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun.’ Their innocence ended not when they discovered women, but one another. Their ‘weaker spirits’ and ‘stronger blood’ led them from sinless youth to heated sexual explorations and discoveries in adolescence, to inevitable ‘guilt’. Given the tradition of courtly male friendships and the romantic, often homoerotic, idealization of male to male intellectual affinity – Antonio’s Bassanio or Macbeth’s Banquo or Hamlet’s Horatio, ‘my true heart’s core’ – it makes more sense that madness takes root in Leontes if Polixenes were more than his friend: he was once his lover. Now the imagined duplicity compounds beyond his heart’s capacity. His former lover has stolen his current lover and the two have conceived a child that will forever bear witness to this multilayered betrayal. More than merely a friend or a spouse, these are the two people he has loved most in his life. And now this. ‘Is whispering nothing?’ Not if hurt and suspicion have taken over our minds. Polixenes’ prolonged presence and Hermione’s pregnancy – paralleling one another at nine months – create the conditions of a perfect storm in which Leontes becomes a tempest. No magic to raise the dead, but a crown to swing the sword. Still, while we might now better understand the conditions – the causes – precipitating his madness, it does not seem clear that he had to lose his mind. Leontes’ imagination could have taken him anywhere, could have explored all

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manner of life-affirming possibilities, played out all types of reasons. And yet he interpreted events without Hermione’s grace or Polixenes’ goodwill, without Camillo’s counsel, without the best interest of his son, his kingdom, or himself in mind. Continuing in the language of ethical agency and responsibility, we could say that the king allowed his basest vices to attend his court – those jealous and suspicious impulses usually kept at bay by Hermione’s grace and poetry – and, now, finding that overlapping space between the political and the poetical, that special region of madness and material agency, his vices make their move and initiate a successful coup d’état. [Aside. We will never unlock the mysteries of madness fully, at least not the divine madness (manike) that takes possession of poets, prophets, and lovers, and which, for better or worse or otherwise, lies in wait around all corners of life, in lighted rooms or darkened corridors, open fields or by the hearth. We cannot improve on the German classicist Walter F. Otto’s articulation: The elemental depths gape open and out of them a monstrous creature raises its head before which all the limits that the normal day has set must disappear. There man stands on the threshold of madness – in fact, he is already part of it even if his wildness which wishes to pass on into destructiveness still remains mercifully hidden. He has already been thrust out of everything secure, everything settled, out of every haven of thought and feeling, and has been flung into the primeval cosmic turmoil in which life, surrounded and intoxicated with death, undergoes eternal change and renewal.49

Why have we ‘already been thrust out of everything secure’? For renewal?] Whether we ought to consider Leontes’ madness ‘negatively’ as a rupture in his psyche precipitated by a particular confluence of events real or imagined, or ‘positively’ as a necessary Dionysian catharsis for anyone with political power remains to be seen.50 Whatever the case, he – we – now works towards renewal and restoration, which, as we learned in the last chapter, comes only after forgiveness. But we can only forgive when we know where responsibility lies: did the madness come by necessity, chance, consequence? Heidegger will help us here (and perhaps we will help him). Before we move to the Letter on Humanism, however, we must finish rounding out the play’s early movements. Leontes wants Camillo to poison Polixenes, whom instead he warns before they both flee to Bohemia. Their escape adds fury to fury, suspicion to suspicion. He proceeds to formally accuse Hermione of adultery and treason. At first she thinks it all ‘sport’, yet soon realizes otherwise. He sends her to prison. She asks the attending lords to measure her as their ‘charities best instruct [them]’.

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She does not realize that only the complicit courtiers of the king’s mad mind now hold sway and the others simply stand silent or have fled (or she does realize this and yet hopes against hope). As Paulina – the queen’s true friend and the play’s heroine – said of these servants earlier: ’Tis such as you, That creep like shadows by him, and do sigh At each his needless heavings, such as you Nourish the cause of his awaking.51

His ‘awaking’ names his madness from which she seeks to give him rest. His courtiers, with the arguable exceptions of Camillo and Antigonus, nourish the cause of his madness with their disproportionate obsequiousness (a common fault within the political court). Before she is led away with her own attending ladies, she tells her husband ‘I never wished to see you sorry; now / I trust I shall’. Though he has unjustly accused her, she still loves him and does not wish to see him suffer as he now suffers, as he will come to suffer, and worse still. We can, therefore, in addition to Leontes’ mania, see too the particular powers of Hermione’s madness – love – that peculiar attendant of the poetic court. In prison she gives birth to a daughter, Perdita – fittingly from the Latin perdere, ‘to lose’, ‘to throw away’, ‘to squander’ – whom Leontes orders burned alive, a deed too dark for even his silent attendants, who only now find their voice (for what purpose we ought to remain suspicious). Antigonus, however, husband of Paulina, rises above the rest and pledges his life for the child’s, a pledge the king accepts (as does fate). The king then consents to let her live (temporarily), but only for calculative, technical reasons. In order to avoid the pollution that might accompany the most egregious sins – the murder of guests under one’s roof or the slaying of one’s family members – Leontes decrees that the infant be taken far away and left to the elements so that she die by exposure. Antigonus, though deeply conflicted, swears an oath to perform this deed. We learn that the king has sent away for a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi to confirm Hermione’s guilt. It seems appearances still matter. The Queen, contrariwise, trusts in the oracle for her deliverance: ‘I do refer me to the oracle. Apollo be my judge.’ Then the word of the god arrives: OFFICER [reads] Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.52

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Predictably, Leontes refuses to heed it: ‘There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle.’ He plans to set it aside and proceed with Hermione’s execution, for the mad court – though twisted and upturned – rules with all the persuasive vision of poetry and the material mechanisms of political power. Yet the god has spoken and destiny runs on despite our agency, mad or otherwise. He then receives another word: his son, Mamillius, has died for fear of his mother. This, understandably, awakens the king from his madness. But it is too late. Hermione falls. Her advocate speaks. PAULINA This news is mortal to the queen. Look down And see what death is doing.53

She dies. Her dead son’s lighthearted remark from but a short while ago now hangs hauntingly upon the air: ‘A sad tale’s best for winter.’54

The house of being In response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known address, Existentialism Is a Humanism, French philosopher Jean Beaufret wrote to Heidegger in 1946 and posed three questions: ‘How can we restore meaning to the word “humanism?”’ ‘How does ontology relate to ethics?’ and ‘How can we preserve the element of adventure that all research contains without simply turning philosophy into an adventuress?’55 While it becomes clear that Heidegger finds the desire to rehabilitate ‘humanism’ somewhat misguided and the notion of ‘ethics’ largely misapprehended, he nevertheless uses the occasion to comment on these ideas – offering critiques of scientism, Marxism, and existentialism along the way – and to give a succinct, impressive account of the basic underpinnings recurring throughout his own oeuvre.56 We will here work through Heidegger’s response to the first of Beaufret’s questions, holding the other two in reserve for the time being. Heidegger begins his essay with a critique of Marx’s emphasis on action, an emphasis that had come to permeate widely within philosophy. We find it present in Sartre’s thought, in existential literature, in critical theory, in economic theory, and in political and moral philosophizing throughout various epochs. We find it present in much philosophizing still. Yet, as we only tend to consider action in terms of ‘causing an effect’, we fail to grasp the true essence of action.

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This thinking – or lack of thinking – relegates all deeds to the domain of utility, wherein their social value becomes determinable according to their ability to meet a serviceable end. Or, all actions become merely social functions. ‘But the essence of action is accomplishment.’57 How does this differ from causing an effect? ‘To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere.’58 To accomplish, from the Latin accomplere, which means ‘to fulfil’, thus ‘to complete’. Complete what? That which already ‘is’ but is nevertheless incomplete; that which is already occurring and underway, but yet to arrive: a rose still unfolding into its fullest bloom and starlight racing through oceans of dark space towards it and a man on a path set to pass leisurely under the latter and pause contemplatively before the former. Not the effect of a cause, rather the dynamic play (or playing out) of being. As Heidegger writes, ‘Therefore only what already is can really be accomplished. But what “is” above all is being.’59 And how do we relate to being? To what ‘is’ above all? To something so seemingly near and obvious and yet so far off and imprecise when pursued? Here we find one of Heidegger’s better-known passages, one we have briefly touched upon in earlier chapters: Thinking brings this relation to being solely as something handed over to thought itself from being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking being comes to language. Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying. Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks.60

All of the emphasis placed upon philosophy to ‘do something’, to join ‘correct perception’ (epistemology or theory) to ‘appropriate action’ (ethics or politics), indicates a failure on the part of those who advocate such to grasp the true nature of philosophy. What is the true nature of philosophy? Thinking. Thinking spurred by wonder. Thinking that questions. ‘For questioning is the piety of thought.’ But when philosophers and theoreticians take action – cause an effect – as the proper aim of philosophizing, they rob thinking of its power to manifest being. A power of accomplishment, Heidegger tells us, occurring in and through language. Not theories applied in the construction or reconstruction of an empirical reality, rather being fulfilled through heeding its play and call. While the poet and (poetical) philosopher await this silent call patiently, the theoretician and

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technician devise tests and technologies to determine how best to capture being (as if it were a being). More broadly stated, ‘Science does not think.’61 It calculates. It acts. Philosophers and theoreticians who consider themselves scientists or who utilize rigidly rational – not flexibly reasonable – methodologies, act upon the world. They conceptualize their thoughts as chemical algorithms performing an evolutionary function: problem solving (the more efficient the better). Not thinking. Hence all of their techniques, instruments, and systems betoken merely modes by which theories and concepts extend into and influence reality. The reason for desiring theories to touch the world? To validate or falsify, initiate or conclude, sustain or change a function, an operation, an explanation (the latter literally meaning ‘to make flat’); rarely, however, to wonder at the phenomenal world, never to marvel before being, never to become more dimensional. They treat language and conceptions as mere tools for utilization. Poets and philosophers who comport themselves towards being, on the other hand, seek to be of service to it through thinking. In thinking being comes to language. This means that when such poets and philosophers think – truly think – being speaks to them through language. Not to calculate, solve problems, or act, but to dwell: ‘Language is the house of being.’ And ‘those who think and create with words’ do not merely harness rhetorical methodologies, cognitive concepts, and social critiques in order to enframe being as some accurate or desirable representation of the world – as ersatz housing – they rather place themselves in the service of language in order to participate as witnesses and celebrants in the mystery of its fulfilment. As Heidegger writes, ‘thinking lets itself be claimed by being so that it can say the truth of being.’ In this way poets and philosophers serve being as the guardians of its house. Their saying accomplishes being by establishing its truth.62 Instead of verifying theories, they fulfil a destiny. The destiny of being. So while politics acts and science tests and both theorize, philosophy thinks. And ‘thinking acts insofar as it thinks’. To stand before being, and by thinking to hear its call in language – to fulfil this destiny and to speak the truth – requires the capacity to accept a gift and to love. The capacity to accept gifts and to love denotes something greater than the ability to conceptualize in the fashion that nominalization implies (whether in words or numbers). It rather portends the power of the possible, a power not reducible to the mere genesis of actualization (wherein actualization becomes privileged). It rather indicates, principally, contemplative receptivity. Thinking as an accomplishment of imaginative reception of the gifts of being, not as a ‘process of deliberation in service to doing and making’.63

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Said plainly, thinking is the thinking of being. The genitive says something twofold. Thinking is of being inasmuch as thinking, propriated by being, belongs to being. At the same time thinking is of being insofar as thinking, belonging to being, listens to being. As the belonging to being that listens, thinking is what it is according to its essential origin. Thinking is – this says: Being has embraced its essence in a destinal manner in each case. To embrace a ‘thing’ or a ‘person’ in their essence means to love them, to favor them. Thought in a more original way such favoring means the bestowal of their essence as a gift.64

A few lines before this Heidegger recounts Beaufret’s first question: ‘How can we restore meaning to the word “humanism”?’ He immediately signals his bias, wondering if it is necessary to retain humanism. He sees ‘–isms’ in general as a problem.65 Whether broadly construed in sociopolitical terms (liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, etc.) or methodological approaches and intellectual commitments (historicism, scientism, scepticism, etc.) or anti-social attitudes and behaviours (racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc.) or cultural schools and movements (romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, etc.), we can, at best, take some ‘–isms’ as practical or regional ontologies, or, at worst, as splintered derivatives of genuine thought, thus worthy of suspicion.66 In loose association with ‘–isms’ Heidegger even explicitly mentions such time honoured disciplines as ‘ethics’, ‘logic’, and ‘physics’.67 Still, however we take them – fractious or focused, honoured or suspect – he notes that ‘–isms’ will continue to appear as a matter of ‘supply and demand’ in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. Such auxiliary thinking can only flourish ‘when originary thinking comes to an end’.68 And none better exemplifies originary thinking for Heidegger than the Greeks. For at the height of their greatness, he tells us, ‘the Greeks thought without such headings’.69 And what is ‘humanism’ but the largest of rivers into which an endless profusion of ‘–isms’ flow, carrying us faster and further away from ‘originary thinking’? For this reason Heidegger wishes to distance philosophy’s concerns from merely ‘humanistic’ endeavours that do not possess – nor aim at – the potential to receive the essence of being through thought. Humanistic projects or interests can only think and utilize language according to sets of predetermined engagements and prescribed standards, engagements and standards already coloured and caught within the structure of a metaphysical ideology. When – if – we truly think of being, then our thinking can belong to being. And when our thinking belongs to being it can then be said, as the genitive case indicates, to derive from being itself. At this point it becomes more phenomenologically faithful – or poetical – to say that when we think of being

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we ‘listen to being’. Hence, as listening – or receptive disposition – thinking finds its essence and origin in being. In this sense, thinking indicates a grateful return, a warm welcoming back. Within this arrival being emanates and thinking finds its reward in being’s endowment. What is this endowment? A destiny. While the thinking of being signals the origins of philosophy by demonstrating the philosopher’s love (philo-sophia), it more fundamentally illustrates being’s ‘love’ through its bestowal of a destiny upon us, by it favouring us with the gift of its essence. This means that when we think of being we receive the gift of its essential destiny: being’s fulfilment in the house of language. The house of language – erected by thinking of and for being – offers us being’s possibilities.70 For being, Heidegger tells us, is the ‘quiet power’ of the possible (das Mögliche). The possibility of what may be. We might say that the power of ‘what is’ can be found in the granting of ‘what is possible’. The possibility of what may be, however, only comes after we have learned to let things be (die Gelassenheit), only after we have learned to listen to being and hear its voice in language. Being, accordingly, ‘arrives’ and ‘finds a home’ in language. Yet, this possibility only opens for us after we have given ourselves over to it as a possibility. Clearly, though Heidegger refrains from saying so, such comportment requires a certain amount of philosophical faith. We can trace Heidegger’s interest in this comportment of ‘releasement’, this ‘letting be’, back to the medieval philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart: Begin, therefore, first with self and forget yourself! If you do not first get away from self, then whatever else you get away from you will still find obstacles and restlessness. People look in vain for peace, who seek it in the world outside, in places, people, ways, activities, or in world-flight, poverty and humiliation, whatever the avenue or degree; for there is no peace this way. They are looking in the wrong direction, and the longer they look the less they find what they are looking for. They go along like someone who has missed his road; the farther they go the more they are astray.71

We also hear something of it in Rilke’s advice to a young poet: Young man, it is not your loving, even if your mouth was forced wide open by your own voice – learn to forget that passionate music. It will end. True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.72

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Forgoing any usual sense of understanding and all the typical means of action or articulation, and instead turning our will towards the abandonment (rather than the utilization) of conceptions, desires, and self-defining deeds – and doing so in a way that seeks not to merely imitate (or mock) the meditative masters of the East or the medieval mystics of the West – appears a near impossible task in our contemporary age. There glitters and flashes all manner of distractions and amusements. There persists all manner of fantastical escape. To say nothing of the totalizing world of work which reduces all things to an end.73 Yet, Heidegger tells us, to hear being’s voice and to discover the possible requires that we do so. It requires that we find our way back into the nearness of being where we ‘first learn to exist in the nameless’.74 It requires that we once again rediscover that pre-conceptual, un-amusing, non-utilitarian, mystery. Finding ourselves there – there – we can be claimed by being. As Heidegger tells us, ‘Only thus will the pricelessness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon humans a home for dwelling in the truth of being.’75 A concern arises here that abandoning ‘humanism’ and simply ‘letting things be’ will lead us into the ‘inhuman’ and ‘inhumane’.76 This well-meaning concern assumes that humanism grounds our journey in something fundamentally decent or empathetic, or, at the very least, capable of such behaviour: a consequence of cognition or conscience or sociability. If, however, humanism deals largely with humans becoming free for their humanity – as both Marx (Marxism) and Sartre (existentialism) seem to indicate, as well as Christianity in its own way – then what we mean by humanism will differ according to our conceptions of ‘freedom’ and ‘nature’.77 What does it mean to be free? How can we become free? What is human nature? In whatever way we proceed, when such questions and conceptions become our focus – prior to any contemplation of being itself – we enter into the realm of the metaphysical. A realm, Heidegger believes, that encompasses all such conceptualizing, acting as the cause, root, and limit of freedom, nature, and will. Caught within such pursuits we no longer stand ready to receive the truth of being. Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of the human being that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking the truth of being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical.78

Marxism, existentialism, Christianity, Darwinism, modernism, postmodernism, and so on – all take for granted or presume to have authoritatively answered (or deemed unanswerable) and rightly categorized (or problematized) the human,

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the venture of life, freedom, that for which we ought to struggle, to act, to do. Yet, Heidegger tells us, to ‘think’ and ‘act’ within these metaphysical ideologies and networks – whatever they happen to emphasize – results conclusively in the forgetting of the truth of being.79 We simply see no use in contemplating being and possess no means of doing so if we did. The ‘truth of being’ sounds like some poetic or religious sentiment (or a phrase a cosmologist might use to play upon those sentiments for rhetorical effect), so we can only make light of it. Instead, we happily (or disgruntledly) consult the therapist, priest, appropriate administrative bureaucrat, corporate technician or manager in an effort to obtain more ‘freedom’ from our anxieties, fears, and, above all, our boredom. Even though our constant desire to escape our suffering or the prospect of our suffering through various modes of consumption would seem to arouse our suspicions that the over hasty pursuit of freedom (whether emphasized as private or public) is somehow really a retreat into oblivion, it seldom does so as our very desire to escape is both catalysed by and the result of this metaphysical entanglement. Due to this entanglement we cannot see past the situation containing us, so all moves otherwise possess no authentic possibility and bear only unflattering labels: mystical, naive, obscure, irrational, impractical, poetical. Put another way: metaphysics closes us off from our essence.80 It prohibits our existence, our ‘standing-forth’ in the ‘clearing of being’. This makes authentic dwelling improbable, if not impossible. Concepts – especially those considered dynamic and flexible – restrict, channel, and distort existence into a particular operation of a more generalized enterprise: managing the unruly elements that challenge cognitive and civic organization. Or, control. When we consider it critically, conceptuality ultimately aims at a pragmatic existence (amusingly) guided by those occluding metaphysical principles that spurred the need to conceptualize in the first place (which in the end conclusively reveal themselves as nihilistic delusions of control). Thus when followed back through its appointed or conceded conceptual apparatuses, ‘essence’ becomes the underlying metaphysical theory of a phenomenon’s efficient function in this general enterprise, thereby losing whatever possible claims being might have made upon it. Whatever it is in its essence remains unknown. This helps us to understand how humans, like all beings, become mere ‘objects’ or ‘things’ – to be rightly perceived or saved or dismissed or managed – as their possibilities transmogrify into absurd or levelled ‘opportunities’. Freedom then, thought in this fashion, becomes merely the opportunity to act. Existence ceases to be a standing-forth in the clearing of being and becomes instead a biological

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term limit for achieving or failing to achieve certain effects and imperatives. Now analogies and metaphors of functionality overtake the human experience as ‘accurate descriptions’ of purpose or meaning: ‘the mind is a computer’, ‘knowledge is information’, ‘information is power’, ‘the body is a machine’, ‘everything is part of a system’. If we do manage to twist free (Verwindung) from the lenses and enmeshments of metaphysical thinking to see and stand before the clearing of being (Lichtung) – before the Open (das Offen) – what would we find? To say exactly what we would find, of course, would only serve to deliver us once more into metaphysics, would only result in re-establishing an ontological foundational-ism, would only work to refer others to yet more metaphysical concepts, would only risk contributing another piece of easily dispensable currency in the economics of intellectual and ideological commerce. Though not to do so leaves us feeling stranded on the borders of the insecure and inhuman. What are we to do? Perhaps if we remember that our uncanny being ever roams the wild regions within and around ourselves we need not linger upon prosaic or fantastical lures seeking to draw us even further from home, lures that only exasperate our already acute (though often sublimated) sense of homelessness and alienation. ‘The soul is no traveller, the wise man stays at home.’81 Yet even in remembering such we still have questions, we still have concerns: the modern world has so conspired against us that we do not know who we are. Taken altogether, the edifice of metaphysics – by whatever ‘–ism’ or field or dogma we find it arranged – obstructs any authentic vision of what is, including ourselves (though we never lack access to an ‘accurate’ or ‘correct’ aspect of being or human existence believed to represent its subject with all due verisimilitude). Lacking open eyes, being remains unknown and we remain strangers to ourselves. And humanism and existentialism, Heidegger argues, like all other ‘–isms’, do not acquaint us with being or ourselves. They, along with the great plurality of metaphysics’ venues, lack the ability to do so in that they preclude the open comportment of meditative receptivity. They find or miss only that for which they look. Language and thought subordinated to particular criteria, and all essences to objectified substances (static or active). Since metaphysics reduces all essences to substances – in that it can only conceive of meanings as functions that derive from what is materially or theoretically ‘present’ or ‘available’ for comprehension – and both humanism and existentialism operate from within this ubiquitous and reductive meta-methodology, the true essence of being and of our own being, neither of which is a ‘substance’, cannot be unearthed or authentically articulated by them.82 That is, all our cognitive tools fail us – by

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deluding us – when we attempt to take up the most pressing and forgotten of questions: the question of being and the meaning of existence. And it is precisely this interest in the meaning of human existence that lies at the heart of Sartre’s philosophy. His thesis, that ‘existence precedes essence’,83 first appears as a synthesis of Marx and Heidegger. This synthesis appears with pith in lines like, ‘Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.’84 We hear within it Heidegger’s confrontation with nothingness and Marx’s materialism and call to action. The humanism of Sartre unsurprisingly rejects outright any a priori theistic or theoretical commitments.85 No god, no masters. This makes humanism seem a logical starting place for his existentialism, which finds us all alone, forlorn, and ultimately responsible for determining the meaning of our own existence. There is no essence as such; only the implications of actions and choices ‘retroactively’ read back into the centre of our being. To his credit, Sartre wants to resist the reification of this process, writing, ‘The existentialist will never consider man as an end because he is always in the making.’86 He wants to prevent the absolute completion of this venture into essence – or, the meaning of existence – so that it does not become (or remain) a static, fixed thing. Yet, as Heidegger indicates, Sartre’s failure comes not as the result of the fixity or dynamism of his articulation of essence, but in his arrogant assumption that essence is something determined by us at all. For whatever intriguing and well-played manoeuvers he makes, Sartre still strands human essence in conceptuality. He replaces the old Western metaphysics (the true order of being) with a new metaphysics of action (subjective material existence). Prioritizing action over essence changes little, for he leaves us nevertheless with a conceptual ‘substance’ of our own making. Language contracts into our service while we force it upon being – through the privileging and guise of the centrality of our own existence – and demand that it speak to us, about us. This means we merely end up talking to ourselves about ourselves as the quiet power of being – the possible – goes unthought and unheard because language ceases to speak on its behalf. Language now only says what we want it to say. We have too Sartre’s atheism. For him God represents a doctrinal or foundational hindrance to humans taking responsibility for themselves, for their self-estrangement, for their sense of homelessness. Contrariwise, for Heidegger, nearness to being – and not merely self-awareness and actualization – discloses the dimension of the holy. The holy signifying the ‘dimension of the gods’ wherein a non-spatial encounter with being can occur. As technological scientism and ideological metaphysics exactingly carve up and divide being, making an encounter with being as such impossible, originary thinking – as

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meditative, poetological thinking – allows for an encounter with being; being as yet unmarred or classified, and rather being as preserved whole, intact, not transgressed upon or violated. The mystery of the fullness of being. Metaphysics, whatever its form, restricts our inquiries into being by implicitly fitting being into an ordo essendi or explicitly by reaching for being according to the correct ordo cognoscendi. But it is not the case that divinity itself – as ‘heralded by poetry’ – holds us back from being. On the contrary, Heidegger tells us, we ‘find’ the gods as we draw near to being. After clearing the way – clearing the ‘–isms’ of metaphysics, and the maxims, logics, and dogmas of ideologies – we discover that the holy still radiates in a purely imagined dimension, a now foreign court into which the divine fled long ago, the consequence of being forgotten.87 How did this happen? How did metaphysics come to stand between being and us? We placed a value upon the gods. We subjected the entire world to valuation. In so doing we took from the world and the gods their authentic worth and exchanged it with something else: our own estimation. Heidegger writes, It is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as a ‘value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for human estimation. But what a thing is in its being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let things: be. Rather, valuing lets being: be valid – solely as the objects of its doing. The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one proclaims ‘God’ the altogether ‘highest value’, this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against being. To think against values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the valuelessness and nullity of beings. It means rather to bring the clearing of the truth of being before thinking, as against subjectivizing beings into mere objects.88

The God to whom Sartre responds has, in one form or another, long upheld the Western metaphysical tradition as its ultimate cause and ground. Heidegger deconstructs rather than dismisses this metaphysical god. This de-structuring leads him back to a god – or ‘gods’ – who evinces something more original than value: a poetic measure.89 Not a ground, not a value, not a substance, not an agent – the unfamiliar one. We discover this other de-metaphysicalized god in poetic language – the ‘language of god’ – speaking the truth of being. This other god abides as an inexhaustible mystery and ambiguous metric disclosed in nearness to being. This god ‘speaks’ only in the silence and stillness of being,

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the silence and stillness for which poetry listens and sings. When we draw near – right there where we are – this god helps us to see ourselves as mortals standing before a groundless abyss. Though surrounded by countless things and many ‘possessions’, we find, in terms of the meaning of our mortal existence, that a vast nothingness encompasses us. We then realize that to make our way through this life we must walk an imaginary meridian.90 We require imaginary guides and measures. We need a god. Not simply any god: we need a god that illuminates the paths and boundaries and metrics of being.91 We need a god that can save us. Not as a value or the value of values or the ideality of actuality, rather as the measure of the possible. [Aside. Marx and Sartre’s emphasis on action clearly correspond to the political court, while Heidegger’s contemplative dimension marks out the poetic. Value makes itself right at home in the materials and methods of the political court, while the possible that lacks commensurability with function and actualization stirs in the court of poetry. Clear use or something else. Vita activa or vita contemplativa. When the two courts intersect and madness visits, however, neither remain safe. Insanity, insight, preservation, revolution, life, death – political or poetic power gone mad ensures nothing save that all surety becomes lost. We do not know what course the mad god will run. We can only keep faith and keep our eye on time. And though this work has attempted to recuse itself from biographical commentary, we should note here that Heidegger himself, to his perennial discredit, failed to keep faith and bear witness when he chose to use his rectorship at the University of Freiburg to endorse National Socialism. He chose ideological values over the voice of being and the path of power and admixed madness over poetic thinking. Ever silent on his many sins, of this particular failure he could not help but privately concede ‘that it was the greatest stupidity of his life’.92] This saving god of language to whom the poets turn quietly speaks possibility, possibility that ever draws back from our attempts to actualize it as concepts or acts or images. Hence we have a difficult time finding this god in non-poetic works. For god’s saving power is god’s irreducible, unnamable possibility; the very possibility that art and poetry attempt to trace in utterly sheer instances, in brief ecstatic moments. Such art and poetry help others – us – to draw near to the god. There, in poetic contemplation, in the closest of dimensions now often closed off from us, god ‘whispers’ the quiet power of the possible to us: the possibility of the possible as possible. That is, the possibility of being. Yet Sartre, as with Nietzsche, is, to Heidegger’s thinking, still responding to the metaphysical God of ultimate value. Not the quiet, poetic god of the

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possible. The god of the poets does not bear the blame for becoming associated with value. We do. We ensnared god (as God) with our calculative and pragmatic thinking (as we did with being as being). Through our subjectivizing estimations we turned god into a speculative object of consideration or belief, thereby degrading god’s divine essence into something ‘valuable’ – for us. This makes the meaning of god’s existence (or non-existence) yet another cognitive commodity in the marketplace of ideology. The value of which lies at the feet of an ultimate measurability that corresponds to its existential utility: salvation or wisdom or peace as certain, verifiable, useful knowledge (though none of it endures as certain, verifiable, or useful). Now we can only ‘experience’ being regionally, in definitions and delimiting accounts. Dogmas or denials. Our own account – the being of the human being – has subsequently lost all true definition. Mortality has become a ‘condition’. In all our calculative drive to define our essence – to define all essences – we have become beings devoid of content: empty vessels awaiting a determination about the meaning of our actions. Any invocations must now invoke methodology or nothing. No god or goddesses sing through us. For Heidegger, the advent of humanism marks yet another loss of the possible – the possible of being – ever quietly disclosed by the poetic god – the power of the creative word – when we draw near to being. We now fail to feel being’s impress upon us, we receive no revelation of being, no affinity for our own finitude. ‘For this, for everything, we are out of tune. / It moves us not.’93 Sans such sentiments and revelations, our own limits and possibilities fall into a lesser realm of objectification and quantifiability: a world of things, of facts, of action. Nothing remains holy and immeasurable. We sing no hymns of being. We have no language of time.

Time’s Soliloquy Shakespeare modelled the narrative of The Winter’s Tale (1611) largely on Robert Greene’s novel, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588). The novel ends much more tragically, with little in the way of restoration. Shakespeare expands the story and angles the plot – as with The Tempest later that same year – towards an ameliorating, if unbelievable, end. To help accomplish this new resolution Shakespeare further breaks from his source by personifying time as a chorus, making explicit its otherwise implicit role within the narrative. In addition to the telegraphic (though ambiguous) subtitle, time appears twice of note in

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Greene’s novel. About midway through the work he writes, ‘But see how Fortune is plumed with Time’s feathers, and how she can minister strange causes to breed strange effects.’94 This mention of time – as the form and mechanism of fortune – precedes the meeting of Fawnia (Pandosto’s Perdita) and Dorastus (Florizel) at a seasonal festival wherein they fall in love. We find the other notable appearance of time, like the subtitle, outside the body of the text. On the title page we find the following proverb: Temporis filia veritas, ‘Truth is the daughter of time.’ As with any good proverb its genius lies in the compact union of the axiomatic and the poetic. It seems both desirable and indisputable. The saying, however, is no invention of Greene’s. The maxim, usually formulated as Veritas filia temporis, was an emblematic expression of the time–truth relation in the sixteenth century, one often employed for political and religious purposes.95 Artists and writers utilized the saying to propagandize claims to the throne or promote civic and ecclesiastical movements. The proverb proved so popular that either side of a dispute or conflict could invoke it to persuade others (or themselves) that God – as the ultimate arbiter of truth – supported their cause, and that time itself – as God’s chief proving instrument – would demonstrate this. Much of the imagery associated with the saying shows Truth as a young, unclothed maiden emerging from the dark recesses of the earth into a pastoral paradise.96 Having freed her from her chthonian imprisonment at the hands of the serpentine figure of Hypocrisy, Time, bearded and winged, hovers above, leading her out of the darkness and into the light. Hypocrisy now flies above, spewing venom down upon her. The image clearly attests to Time’s power to deliver his daughter from the confines of earthly insincerity. It alludes to Psalm 85:11, ‘Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.’ Here, however, Hypocrisy takes the place of righteousness. This indicates that religious and political ideologies bear the blame for Truth’s earthly captivity (as unjust appropriation) and the persecution of those faithful to her. Yet, the imagery also suggest that Truth belongs to an eternal order, an order to which she cannot ascend and take her rightful place in the heavens without first having been established – through durance vile – upon the earth in order to reflect the other side of her mythic lineage: the daughter of Time and Nature. That Truth will only be born out of suffering adorns her with messianic qualities, an endowment necessary for any instrument of salvation: incarnation through incarceration. As Cordelia informs her hypocritical sisters, ‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides.’97 Those vexed and victimized for their allegiance to ‘the Truth’, therefore, may find solace, even justification, in their persecution as a clear confirmation of the righteousness of their cause or claim.

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Put simply, time works through suffering towards redemption. It vindicates truth and validates sorrows. Poetically and narratively then, in The Winter’s Tale  – as a later Shakespearean romance – we see Time become the decisive arranger and framer of events.98 Tragic events no longer simply and absurdly happen; rather, time slowly draws out the truth, giving the contours of mortal life the colour of hope. As Hermione on the precipice tells us: ‘This action I now go on / Is for my better grace.’ After Antigonus breaks his vow to the king and flees with the infant princess to Bohemia, and after the deaths of the prince and the queen, the slow, slouching, penitent journey of Leontes begins: ‘Once a day I’ll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation.’ He, now broken and willingly guided by Paulina, fades into the background to begin his atonement. The story now lights upon the princess Perdita, the play’s emblem of truth (an arduous honour she shares with her mother). Yet, before she takes centre stage, Time – personified as the work’s chorus – enters and offers a soliloquy. TIME I that please some, try all; both joy and terror Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time To use my wings. Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap, since it is in my power To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass The same I am, ere ancient’st order was Or what is now received. I witness to The times that brought them in; so shall I do To th’ freshest things now reigning, and make stale The glistering of this present, as my tale Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing, I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing As you had slept between. Leontes leaving, Th’effects of his fond jealousies, so grieving That he shuts up himself, imagine me, Gentle spectators, that I now may be In fair Bohemia, and remember well I mentioned a son o’th’ King’s, which Florizel I now name to you; and with speed so pace

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The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace Equal with wond’ring. What of her ensues I list not prophecy, but let Time’s news Be known when ’tis brought forth. A shepherd’s daughter And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is th’argument of Time. Of this allow, If ever you have spent time worse ere now. If never, yet that Time himself doth say He wishes earnestly you never may.    Exit99

As with the chorus’ of Pericles and Henry V, or Prospero or Puck, Shakespeare both brings attention to and merges the play world and the world of the audience. The chorus of Henry V asks the playgoers to ‘let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work,’ poetically enjoining them to visualize the vast landscapes, the great personages, and the militaristic machinery to which the theatre’s instruments can only imperfectly allude. Pericles’ chorus, Gower, similarly asks the audience to imagine certain events transpiring narratively, which necessarily include the passage of time for their accomplishment. Prospero and Puck in their plays’ epilogues implore the house to ‘set them free’ with their approval, demonstrated with applause. And here in The Winter’s Tale Time asks us to allow him this theatrical conceit to the tune of sixteen years, the sudden appearance of Florizel, and a now grown Perdita. Shakespeare, wielding irony as a surgeon a scalpel, gratuitously breaks the wall between the two worlds for the sake of appealing directly to the theatregoers’ imagination. That is, he violates an imagined barrier – the ‘fourth-wall’ – so that he might appeal to the imagination of the audience. He makes this appeal with the hope that they will accept and excuse the various narrative infractions against time and space (including the one just committed in order to make the appeal). The effect bestows a sense of agency upon the playgoers, freeing them imaginatively to forgive – and by forgiving participate in – the ‘truth’ of play world. Their ‘forgiveness’ excuses and makes possible the restoration of ‘truth’ to the play world (which the imperfect verisimilitudes of theatre, the dubiety of narrative, and the chorus’ violation had compromised). This restoration returns the possibility of wholeness to the play. And they – the engaged participants – do not do this naively, but with their eyes wide open. As, of course, do we. Still, in addition to these appeals, what does Time disclose? I that please some, try all; both joy and terror Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error,

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Now take upon me, in the name of Time To use my wings.

Aware of it or not, life is a trial for all. Time tries us. How? Near the end of our second chapter we wondered if being is time? We wondered if we could only approach being through delimitation, think it through temporality, speak it through – as – the language of time? Recalling Pindar or Anaximander or any corybantic Greek or existential German, we find that our existence is a crime for which we will be punished. Our life is a transgression we must pay for – with our life. No substitutions, no representative exchanges, no Faustian bargains. We, like Truth, like Perdita, find ourselves born out through this crime of being. ‘Both joy and terror / Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error.’ Time permits all evidence and testimony. Time takes all in trial. In Time. Time might ‘please some’, but only some and only for a while. To exist, in any genuine and final estimation, means to be tried. It means to be timed. True even and especially so for Truth. Yet and still: Time’s passage – his ‘wings’ – delivers Truth up from her sufferings. This tells us that the trial – in this movement that leads-out or leadsforth or leads-through – is the deliverance. If Time does not try us – now and then – and Truth does not suffer, no restoration arrives, no dream of wholeness endures, no hope of vindication arises. [Aside. While suffering will remain insufferable in perpetuity, we might wish to consider carefully what our world would look like without it. No efforts, no essays, no errors. Whim and delectation unlimited ad infinitum, ad nauseam – ‘Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’100] Time continues: Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap, since it is in my power To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom.

The crime lies with us, not Time. Time’s inexorable turning clears the way for us, opens a way for all that is. Time does this, in part, by ‘o’erthrow[ing] law’ and ‘o’erwhelm[ing] custom’, by things falling down and dying. Physis contra nomos. Our laws and expectations, our understandings and continuities fail before it: sometimes for tragedy, sometimes for comedy, sometimes for romance. Shakespeare calls upon this power here to serve the truth of a romantic narrative: the restoration of balance between the poetic and the political: the

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rise and return of Leontes and Hermione’s daughter, Perdita. To accomplish this we, as vital participants, allow Time to carry us forward into another world, a pastoral kingdom in which a princess has been raised as a shepherd’s daughter. A life that has no doubt taught her to ‘remain true to the earth’.101 Time goes on: Let me pass The same I am, ere ancient’st order was Or what is now received. I witness to The times that brought them in; so shall I do To th’ freshest things now reigning, and make stale The glistering of this present, as my tale Now seems to it.

‘I witness to / The times that brought them in.’ Time seems to time(s) what being seems to being(s). That is, formally a predicate, narratively a god. Not a god who intervenes in the natural world, but one that acts as the ultimate witness to that world in the dimension of imagination. Not time as the ‘essence’ of times or being as the ‘substance’ of beings, rather both as imagined principles incarnated in poetry and conceptualized in philosophy (and both become unhelpfully metaphysical when we forget their imagined origin). But the being of beings and the time of times are only ‘airy nothing’. They, like all poetic creations, need a ‘local habitation and a name’. Once given and established as such – and not forgotten for what they truly ‘are’ – time as Time and being as being can bear witness to what is as it unfolds. The possible comes imaginatively to be. Now Time as political witness can act. Being as poetic possibility can save. ‘So shall I do / To th’ freshest things now reigning, and stale / The glistering of this present.’ Once remembered and imaginatively instantiated, Time can make the present shine. ‘The glistering of this present.’ Time now has us glide sleepily over those sixteen years, leaving behind Leontes and ‘his fond jealousies, so grieving / That he shuts up himself ’, to reawaken in ‘fair Bohemia’. Time introduces Florizel and reacquaints us with Perdita, ‘now grown in grace’ and both ‘equal with wond’ring’. Time then tells us, What of her ensues I list not prophecy, but let Time’s news Be known when ’tis brought forth. A shepherd’s daughter And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is th’ argument of Time. Of this allow, If ever you have spent time worse ere now.

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If never, yet that Time himself doth say He wishes earnestly you never may.

No prophecy or prediction of what might occur, Time instead brings forth the events of the future now. Not the end of possibility, rather the envisioning of it. What we see and hear from here on out ‘Is th’ argument of Time.’ Hence the journey of Perdita and Florizel that begins in Act IV, Time tells us, discloses the imagined principle of Time: regeneration (palingenesia). Time hopes that we will allow this – whatever our own experiences up until this moment – inviting us to take up agency as creative participants in the revelation of rebirth. If it is true that ‘we can only destroy as creators’,102 then it is also true that we can only create as destroyers: Time wields a harvestman’s scythe. [Aside. If we prefer thematic structures to hermeneutical partnerships, one way to read this book might be as explorations into five modes of ‘existential salvation’: Chapter 1) reconciliation with the world through the truth of art (or, art’s invisible reason); Chapter 2) deliverance from a thoughtless existence by inquiring into the meaning of being; Chapter 3) redemption of (rational) reality by rediscovering the (other, pre-rational) world here, right where we are; Chapter 4) restoration of relationships and rightful obligations through love and forgiveness; Chapter 5) regeneration of what has declined or perished – or fallen – through the power of time. All of these require our active allowance and contemplative participation. All of which, by virtue of our participation, open whole worlds to us wherein we might find salvation. Or, the (re)discovery of our own soul.] In order for the restoration of the harmony between the poetic and political courts to occur, Time takes us – by having us take ourselves – into the future (that imaginary dimension of possibility), landing us in an Arcadian Bohemia. Here we experience a pastoral turn: simple folk, shepherds, fields and valleys and forests, wild flowers, harvest festivals, country dances, country paths, country ways. If in refined Sicilia Leontes had ‘developed every idea until it [became] grotesque’,103 we now find the pace and taste of life slowed and common. Another world, one not overran with courtiers or courtly concerns. In this bucolic land a whole other sort of menagerie will come forward. In and through this dancing and joyous coterie of country folk, a whole other moment of madness will reveal itself: humour. As often happens in Shakespeare, the trickster steals the show. Here the rogue Autolycus sings, steals, and dances his way into the play, and he, like Dionysus, ‘comes with healing foot’.104 He takes his name from the mythological

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master of thieves, the son of Hermes.105 He provides the pastoral landscape with a blithe eroticism and a cheerful piracy that serve to prepare the narrative for its eventual regeneration. Along with his pilfering and dissembling, Autolycus’ uplifting lewdness acts as a necessary ingredient to a corybantic ‘cure’.106 If Antigonus’ death presages the romantic – regenerative – turn (which we will discuss in the final section), and Time personified alerts us to this turn, then the ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ gives the play world its first good shove in that direction. How? He prepares us – through laughter – to release our anxieties, to ease those tensions that the mad court of Leontes had previously so tightly wound up, permitting us – consciously or unconsciously – to alter our expectation of what is possible. We can begin to hope. We find comedy in Hamlet and Lear, but we never find a reason to adjust our expectation of the tragic forecast. The love between Perdita and Florizel adds to this adjustment of expectation as well: FLORIZEL And he, and more Than he; and men, the earth, the heavens, and all, That were I crowned the most imperial monarch, Thereof most worthy, were I the fairest youth That ever made eye swerve, had force and knowledge More than was ever man’s, I would not prize them Without her love; for her employ them all, Commend them and condemn them to her service Or to their own perdition. POLIXENES Fairly offered. CAMILLO This shows a sound affection. OLD SHEPHERD But, my daughter, Say you the like to him? PERDITA I cannot speak So well, nothing so well, no, nor mean better. By th’ pattern of mine own thoughts I cut out The purity of his.

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OLD SHEPHERD Take hands, a bargain; And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t. I give my daughter to him, and will make Her portion equal his. FLORIZEL O, that must be I’th’ virtue of your daughter. One being dead, I shall have more than you can dream of yet, Enough then for your wonder. But come on, Contract us fore these witnesses. OLD SHEPHERD Come, your hand; And, daughter, yours.107

What Autolycus prepares us for psychologically begins to take shape. Perdita, thought by all to be the shepherd’s daughter, has undergone sixteen years of perdition in ‘the wilderness’ of Bohemia. In truth a princess, she rightfully belongs at court. Yet her ‘suffering’ does not appear as suffering. The ‘uncultured’ landscape signals another culture, one of fertility, mirth, and a folk simplicity. Her upbringing there has grafted a certain grace upon her being. What of Hermione might have been lost, the pastoral world has preserved and renewed. Only a little while before the young lovers exchanged these vows, Polixenes educates Perdita about this art (and unknowingly offers ironical commentary on her pending union with Florizel). Having referred to certain crossbred carnations as ‘nature’s bastards’, which she refuses to nurture, Polixenes asks, Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them? PERDITA For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature. … POLIXENES Say there be, Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean. So over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

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A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature – change it rather; but The art itself is nature. PERDITA So it is. POLIXENES Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, And do not call them bastards.108

She is, of course, the ‘wildest stock’ and Florizel the ‘gentler scion’. This pairing will ‘mend nature’. Yet Perdita herself descends from a noble line. Her time in arcadia, like Truth’s within the earth, was only a temporary purgation and substitutionary atonement for others. Only ever a proving. But the effect holds. Her union with Florizel, which both royal fathers inevitably endorse, will serve as the penultimate precursor of the play’s final regenerative Act: ‘Th’ argument of Time.’ Hypocrisy, however, has yet some venom to spew. Polixenes temporarily falls into a role not unlike Sophocles’ Creon. While Creon in Oedipus Rex gives voice to reason and restraint, he appears to have forgotten all of his own advice from Antigone, which he had offered to his brother-in-law/nephew, Oedipus (perhaps a testament to the seductive powers of the political court). All piety to the gods comes to heel before state patriotism (and misogyny). Here Polixenes, when confronted with his son’s desire to marry Perdita without his consent, expresses political and filial concerns incommensurate with all his previous displays of excellence and generosity. His behaviour borders on a Leontian extreme. After acting as witness to the young lovers’ vows, he – disguised along with Camillo – asks, ‘Have you a father?’ His son acknowledges that he does and that he is a quite capable one. So then, Polixenes wonders, why his absence, why his lack of counsel? But Florizel says nothing. He knows his father would never permit him to marry someone base-born. He knows that matters of the heart bear little weight in affairs of the court. They do not operate according to the same rationality (or irrationality). The encounter then degenerates quickly. FLORIZEL Come, come, he must not. Mark our contract.

Imaginary Ethics POLIXENES [removing his disguise] Mark your divorce, young sir, Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too base To be acknowledged. Thou a sceptre’s heir, That thus affects a sheep-hook? [To the OLD SHEPHERD] Thou old traitor, I am sorry that by hanging thee I can but Shorten thy life one week. [To PERDITA] And thou, fresh piece Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know The royal fool thou cop’st with – OLD SHEPHERD O, my heart! POLIXENES I’ll have thy beauty scratched with briers and made More homely than thy state. [To FLORIZEL] For thee, fond boy, If I may ever know thou dost but sigh That thou no more shalt see this knack, as never I mean thou shalt, we’ll bar thee from succession, Not hold thee of our blood, no, not our kin, Farre than Deucalion off. Mark thou my words. Follow us to the court. [To the OLD SHEPHERD] Thou churl, for this time, Though full of our displeasure, yet we free thee From the dead blow of it. [To PERDITA] And you, enchantment, Worthy enough a herdsman – yea, him too, That makes himself, but for our honour therein, Unworthy thee – if ever henceforth thou These rural latches to his entrance open, Or hoop his body more with thy embraces, I will devise a death as cruel for thee As thou art tender to’t.    [Exit]109

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Florizel disappoints his father by marrying without his consent, marrying a commoner, and then lying by omission about it. The king reacts – quite suddenly – with threats of death (the Old Shepherd), disinheritance (Florizel), and disfigurement (Perdita). No doubt the future of the kingdom weighs upon Polixenes and he is hurt by his son’s deception and thoughtless (if sincere and passionate) negligence. No doubt these breaches of trust have added to his indignation, but wrath? Why does he descend so quickly into threats of malice upon those clearly not at fault? The last time we saw such a fit we were in the court of Leontes. We were in the mad court. We laid the ‘cause’ of the madness at the feet of love. We found it in the enabling silence and sycophancy of Leontes’ courtiers. We suspected it in a poor admixture of the poetic and the political. Here? Here we find another cause, though love still resides at the heart of it and Perdita – as Truth – has not concluded her suffering. What is it? Polixenes, like Leontes, must undergo a transformation. His uncharacteristic turn indicates a very political characteristic: the privilege of power. This privilege easily disrupts the more ‘organic’ movements of the heart. Hannah Arendt made an often remarked upon distinction between authority and power, wherein authority indicates a ‘source of power’ that others recognize or by participation legitimize, while power signals the ability to coerce and persuade (ultimately with the threat of violence).110 The former helps ‘author’ our lived reality as an agent of its cultivation and conservation, the latter can only wield the world’s mechanisms and an individual’s own talents in an attempt to control (or destroy) reality. She convincingly argues that we have lost any sense of genuine authority and that what we now call authority is really only (authoritarian) institutional power. All our kings are tyrants. Their power to charm is their ability to do harm and their power vindicates them, not their authority. The mad court. So too for Polixenes. He must participate as well in Time’s process of earthly purgation so that not only Truth will be proven and born out, but that power and authority can once again be grafted together. ‘This is an art / Which does mend nature – change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.’ While at first less apparent, Polixenes and Bohemia need this mending as much as Leontes and Sicilia. For when Polixenes reveals himself to the young lovers at the harvest festival we find two masks removed: his inelegant disguise and his loss of authentic authority. He wields only power. Hence when circumstances conspire against him – or us – good manners and cursory graces fall away in an instant and words lose out to violence. Yet the play has begun its upturn. Truth nears its emergence and the justification of its – her – suffering. This violence, therefore, cannot be given more time or opportunity. The young lovers must flee.

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Florizel and Perdita turn to Camillo, still the faithful servant of both kings. He, along with Paulina, acts as Time’s minister. He tells them, On mine honour, I’ll point you where you shall have such receiving As shall become your highness, where you may Enjoy your mistress – from the whom I see There’s no disjunction to be made but by, As heavens forfend, your ruin – marry her, And with best endeavours in your absence Your discontenting father strive to qualify And bring him up to liking.111

Where does he send them? Sicilia. This means a return home for Perdita (though she does not yet know it) and a world elsewhere for Florizel (both ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’ – both the familiar and strange – comprise basic elements of authentic regenerative romance). Their love and fear spur them on. And who else to assist them but Autolycus? With an exchange of clothes (for money, of course) and a playful aside in which he indicates that he will not ‘acquaint the King withal’, he, like his mythological namesake’s father, Hermes, acts as patron not only for thieves, but for boundaries and travellers as well, demarcating the transition from pastoral Bohemia to worldly Sicilia. There they will participate in Truth’s emancipation and bear witness to the rebalancing of the political (power) with the poetic (authority). Their arrival will initiate a healing madness. As the music of the magic crescendos in the play’s final scene, the silence of sixteen years of suffering will fade from the foreground, making room for the appearance of Truth and her mother.

Exeunt pursued by a bear Recall that Beaufret had also asked about ethics and preserving the ‘element of adventure in philosophy’. Near the end of the Letter Heidegger takes up these two questions, once again turning to the Greeks and to poetry in response. Of ethics Heidegger writes: The desire for an ethics presses ever more ardently for fulfillment as the obvious no less than hidden perplexity of human beings soars to immeasurable heights. The greatest care must be fostered upon the ethical bond at a time when

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technological human being, delivered over to mass society, can attain reliable constancy only by gathering and ordering all their plans and activities in a way that corresponds to technology.112

He clearly understands this desire for establishing an ethics, adding: Who can disregard our predicament? Should we not safeguard and secure the existing bonds even if they hold human beings together ever so tenuously and merely for the present? Certainly.113

Industrialized mass society, the world given over to rational technologization and total administration, acquires an ever-growing need to alleviate its sense of insecurity. Whether taken as a social phenomenon brought on by material conditions and economic struggle or an aspect of the unconscious, or formulated as world alienation or self-estrangement, our fears beg us to take up the tools at our disposal and construct a system of decision making and acting that will ‘safeguard and secure’ what little we have worth protecting – from each other and from ourselves. While some ethics might deal pointedly with a certain institution or topic, it most basically addresses itself to moral decisions, to determining right conduct. And the faster, more technologically complex and organized the world becomes, the more our role in it – as beings not entirely organized along rational lines – subsequently becomes more oblique, marginalized, and in need of efficient definition. Or we opt for apathy (though not the disinterested sort that Eckhart or Heidegger believes sets us along a beneficial course, rather an apathy merely affected in the face of life’s impossible demands). When either of these inevitably happens, thinking as such comes to an end and calculative thinking overtakes it. Everything becomes an equation. Neighbours and strangers lose their faces in favour of exchangeable quantities. Accordingly, we could consider ethics an extension of economics, a tributary of social science seeking to establish principles and guides for interpersonal relationships towards equanimity by safeguarding property and state stability or maintaining the apathetic delusion of autonomy. Those that follow these principles and guides do so largely out of fear or greed (whether conflated with reciprocity or confused with compassion or taken as more particular modes of care). Heidegger, however, does not give up on thinking just yet. He asks, But does this need [for ethics] ever release thought from the task of thinking what still remains principally to be thought and, as being, prior to all beings, is their guarantor and their truth?114

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The need to adjudicate a moral dilemma according to predetermined ethical commitments and parameters – or to determine the merits of a claim by the consent of certain logical principles or to ascertain the physical properties of a phenomenon through testable propositions and replicable conditions – overrides a more primal imperative to wonder at what is, to think the truth of being. How did this sort of pre-calculative thinking become an imperative and what makes it primal? Being is necessarily prior to any particular being or any issue or relation arising therefrom. Being prompts the first questions of philosophy. The imperative to think being arises simply as a result of the call of being. Being calls us to think of being and for being. Now, while Heidegger hears the call of being through the voice of language, religious writers give this voice to God or the soul, poets to intuition or the words themselves, others to the elements of awe and mystery in nature. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.115

Many might argue that this ontological prioritization – this primal imperative – whether presented phenomenologically, theologically, or poetically, would have us ignore millennia of advancement in a multitude of areas since the time of the Greeks. Such voicing, they could contend, masks our ignorance with imperfect metaphors. With the assistance of our organizing schemes (disciplines) and our technology and our empirical testing and data and our history (of history), we simply know more than the Greeks (or the theologians or the poets) ever did and we no longer need to rely on such ambiguous linguistic devices. We have become wiser and we comprehend more of the world than they could have ever dreamed. To this Heidegger responds: Thinkers prior to this period knew neither a ‘logic’ nor an ‘ethics’ nor ‘physics’. Yet their thinking was neither illogical nor immoral. But they did think φύσις in a depth and breadth that no subsequent ‘physics’ was ever again able to attain.116

Not only were the Greeks unimpaired without logic or ethics, they were thinking about being (physis) – presented or approached as nature or the gods – with a level of circumspection we seem to have lost. As the fields of investigation for today’s scholars have narrowed in concern and receded further and further into the footnotes and specialist journals and laboratories, the phenomena or questions or experiences that first prompted their interest slip from their contemplations

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altogether. Reified and defensible answers – quantifiable responses – replace honest questions and genuine uncertainties. Put another way, these rubrics now misdirect inquiries rather than illuminate them. The pursuit of a good and excellent life through the concept of ‘ethics’, for example, has become largely impossible due to contemporary ‘ethics’ having nothing to do with either goodness or excellence (to say nothing of our misvaluations and overestimations of virtue since Socrates). It now merely calculates normative responses to GMOs, management issues in the workplace, and hypothetical trolley accidents. Such mis-valuative calculi help us to understand why Heidegger turns to the Pre-Socratics and the Tragedians – and to thinkers and poets who channel those originary sensibilities – instead of Aristotle. He is not solving an equation; he is rather pondering a riddle, celebrating a mystery. He wants to think and to say with a vigilance and frugality – a prudence (phronesis) – that envelops both theory (theoria) and practice (praxis) in the poetic ethos allotted to him by destiny. Any imperatives found therein arise beyond ‘ethics’ and ‘logic’. Why does he seek this? They would be imperatives born of a historically moored imagination, not qualities predetermined by the very disembodied principles used to formulate them. They would be imperatives capable of accomplishing what is and has been, and they would unfold what has yet to come. In order to demonstrate the ‘depth and breadth’ of Greek thinking prior to these headings, Heidegger turns to a fragment of Heraclitus: ήθος άνθρωπος δαίμων, ethos anthropos daimon.117 This saying is often translated, ‘A man’s character is his fate’, or sometimes more succinctly, ‘character is fate’. Heidegger cautions us, however, that this translation thinks in a more ‘modern way’ than a Greek one. ‘ήθος means abode, dwelling place’.118 He goes on: The word [ethos] names the open region in which man dwells. The open region of his abode allows what pertains to man’s essence, and what is thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear.  The abode of man contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to man and his essence. According to Heraclitus’s phrase this is δαίμων [daimon], the god. The fragment says: The human being dwells, insofar as he is a human being, in the nearness of god.119

To situate us more squarely to this relation of human dwelling to god’s nearness, Heidegger recounts a story told of Heraclitus.120 Strangers from a foreign land, we are told, come to visit Heraclitus at his home and find him warming himself by the stove. This takes them aback. They had expected something more. Surely a great thinker, a man of such renown, should be about an activity or in a place

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of importance and dignity. Instead they find nothing but a man, shivering, somewhat impoverished, and quite ordinary in his needs and customs. What were they to do? Having anticipated something more profound or exotic or simply less mundane, they gaped from his doorstep in discomposure. Looking as though they were about to depart in confusion and disappointment, Heraclitus invited them in, saying, ‘Here too the gods come to presence.’ This means that the divine resides in the commonplace. Whatever mysteries the philosopher had penetrated, whatever great words he had spoken, it could all occur ‘in the sphere of the familiar’. The temple, the sacred grove, the sacred games, the sacrifice, the ablution, the religious rite whatsoever – none can claim exclusivity for the presence and activity of the god. Heidegger then retranslates the fragment: The (familiar) abode for humans is the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one).121

‘Ethics’, Heidegger tells us, deriving from ethos, more originally denotes the abode of the human being, the site and activity of dwelling, the sojourn from natality to mortality (Aufenthalt). Not a system or code or theory. No practical or utilitarian answer to hypothetical situations. To think ‘ethically’, in this primal sense, means to think ‘the truth of being as the primordial element of the human being’.122 This ‘originary ethics’ is not ‘ethics’ at all (as we would now recognize it), rather ontology. It is fundamental ontology. ‘It strives to reach back into the essential ground from which thought concerning the truth of being emerges.’123 In this way, the most ‘ethical’ thing we could do is to think, to think of and for being, to think right there where we are in our everyday lives, warming ourselves next to the fire. The most ‘ethical’ thing we could do becomes allowing ourselves to be had by the particular surround of being given to us, to be had by its language, its history, its movements. Being in the world in the most ordinary of ways in the most familiar of places and heeding the call of being to think of and for being. ‘Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is.’124 This essential satisfaction, Heidegger tells us, arises from the freedom of ontological thinking. This thinking – and poetic saying – rises above the validity of the sciences in that they are not free to think and say the matter to which they are addressed.125 They can only test within their parameters, describe within their discipline, theorize within their system. So too with all ‘–isms’. Marxism can only see in economic variables, existentialism can only think of human action. For all their power and influence, their devices imprison them. While philosophy and poetry and art, in the primal sense that Heidegger has in mind – in the sense

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of thinking – are free. Free to see and to think and to say what is. Free to let being be. This is what it means to dwell poetically: to dwell freely with god in the house of being. ‘And yet thinking never creates the house of being.’126 It rather guides historical existence towards healing.127 This regenerative movement, Heidegger claims, more clearly reveals evil, the essence of which consists not in the (potential) depravity of human action, but in the ‘malice of rage’.128 That is, the (possible) malevolence of madness. And only a counter madness that surges up and turns towards healing can, like a god, save us. Yet, how do we know the madness of evil from the madness of healing? The answer lies in our reliance on practical utility at the expense of poetic simplicity. Not the simplicity of syntax or jargon or style, but the simplicity of contemplative comportment. Not a manner of behaviour or praxis fabricated by human reason, but a hold – a ‘protective heeding’ – bestowed upon our conduct by the truth of being.129 What is this hold? It is an irreducible, pre-conceptual, originary imperative in which being enjoins us to let being be. This is no prohibition against action as such, rather a call to conduct ourselves in accord with the way things are. Healing can only arise from this accord. Marx’s often cited remark that the point of philosophy is to change the world or Sartre’s that we determine our own essence run antithetical to this possibility. Not due to the everyday situation of making decisions or judgements or taking action, rather because naming an essence or changing the world prior to being in tune with it only contributes resentment to thinking in an effort to dominate. It only adds malice to madness. Leontes has shown us this kind of contribution. Beaufret’s last question: ‘How can we preserve the element of adventure that all research contains without simply turning philosophy into an adventuress?’ He, like many philosophers, worries for philosophy. He worries that philosophy will become merely another avenue of research. That it will become (or already has become and will remain) nothing but an historical exploration of beings, a static account of what has passed. Heidegger counters this concern by indicating that the adventure of philosophy – as thinking – might be better grasped as advent and arrival. But thinking is an aventure not only as a search and an inquiry into the unthought. Thinking, in its essence as the thinking of being, is claimed by being. Thinking is related to being as what arrives (l’avenant). Thinking as such is bound to the advent of being, to being as advent. Being has already been destined to thinking. Being is the destiny of thinking. But destiny is in itself historical. Its history has already come to language in the saying of thinkers.130

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This destiny arrives ever anew from the sayings of thinkers and poets handed down to us. From Sophocles, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and others. It arrives in our history of their narratives and verses of being coming to be. Their writings – as sayings – show us the movements of being. They reveal the presence of the gods in thinking, of the foreign already at home in the nearness and surround of being, of the cohabitation of the ordinary and extraordinary. They give us a glimpse of the old gods struggling against the new, nature against the ways of men, worlds against kingdoms. They show us these mythic or poetic or philosophic accounts prior to any partition between thinking and being. As Will McNeill writes: Now, theoria, praxis, and poiesis are one and inseparable: they unfold in their unity as the sensuous immediacy of human dwelling in the world, and are not yet analytically separated in the manner that becomes determinative for the remainder of Western philosophy, science and technology.131

It is through this pre-determinative unfolding, beautifully described here as the ‘sensuous immediacy of human dwelling’, that Heidegger wants to think the advent of being and the arrival of ‘ethics’. Not a scientific or logical or practical adventure become research terminating in proof, veracity, or advice. Rather, historical witness resulting in imaginative, dynamic testimony; a creative-historical measure of what is and is to come over principled canons of all knowledge marching towards total efficiency and absolute administration. Before we can claim such a measure, however, we must reconsider – fundamentally and ever again – what philosophy and poetry are and what they should be doing. It is time to break the habit of overestimating philosophy and of thereby asking too much of it. What is needed in the present crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter.132

When we try to make something into something that it is not we invite trouble. We open up what is and ourselves to misuse, to injury, to corruption. We open the door to a madness (the mad court) birthed of a world (the political court) severed from our dream of the world (the poetic court). A world not unfolding as one. What was, or should have been, joined – like lovers – has become separated. This separation leads inevitably to spiritual death. Yet, however we articulate it (and there have been many articulations of it), it is only through death that something can be born anew. And though the institution of philosophy cannot

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bring back the dead, philosophy as originary thinking and poetic saying can give us hope of recovering what has been lost. Shakespeare’s demonstrates this regenerative moment. Recall that near the end of her life Hermione stood before a crazed Leontes, on trial for nothing but jealous fantasies. When it had become clear that she could no longer reason with him or appeal to any kindness in him – when she realized that they no longer recognized one another – she began to understand the situation. HERMIONE Sir, You speak a language that I understand not. My life stands in the level of your dreams, Which I’ll lay down.133

She had not broken her vows. She had not assisted in Polixenes and Camillo’s decampment. Her child was Leontes’. The oracle soon confirmed all this. The king, however, would not believe her innocence. She can only speak the truth or remain silent, and yet even the time for that soon passed. Her life, which previously had been one of mutuality with the king, had been twisted off by his madness. She then stood ‘in the level of [his] dreams’, her guilt an airy nothing bodied-forth from his possessed imagination. Nothing remained for her but to abide in grace, to acquiesce to what was happening. Her freedom, distinct here from her social and political liberties, endured as her own to dispose of in a manner commensurate with who she was and what had befallen her. No power other than the one that had initiated this course of events – madness – could save her. And yet it could only do so if she allowed it, as certain painters, poets, and prophets might ‘let their mad genius run its course into the dark night of truth’.134 Plato tells us: ‘The best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift from the god.’135 The question remains, of course, whether or not Leontes’ madness in fact came from the god. What if it had not? Without some higher set of metaphysical concepts or ideological values to act as guides, whatever their make or method, no measure comes to us by which to measure this madness. We cannot yet judge it. We have only dreams of being that are – we trust – at one with being or with what being will become. We have only imagined imperatives impressed upon us by being. ‘In dreams begin responsibility.’136 And truth, we learned, must be borne out through suffering. Hermione, therefore, must hope that the madness is divine. She must have courage and await the healing counter surge of madness. She must stand ready – inwardly disinterested while yet gracefully comported – for the poetic

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rebalancing of events and sensibilities (whether or not such healing arrives). For if, and perhaps only if, she has prepared herself in this way, her receptive acquiescence can become her ethical agency. In this way, ‘Never is [she] more active than when [she] does nothing.’137 [Aside. It ought to give us pause that this receptive acquiescence resembles the sort of commonly held attitudes towards certain historically disenfranchised groups, which in this particular instance means women. The idea being that those who suffer, be they wives or workers or women in society whatsoever, would be best served by either ignoring any abuse or violence done to them or learning to appropriate it in some ‘positive’ way. To speak up or to act otherwise, so the thinking goes, only stirs up trouble. In their professional and interpersonal relationships, women – and all historically oppressed and marginalized groups – have been encouraged, whether quietly or not so quietly, to grin and bear it or risk reprisal: a horror of the world without merit. And so any view that would seem to reskin these circumstances deserves our scepticism, if not our outright antipathy. Yet the resemblance here tokens only an efficient reduction. Receptive acquiescence – or, radical apathy – signals ethical agency, rather than the loss of it. And it concerns not only women and minorities; it concerns us all. All who want to be in tune with the world and all who want it to be what it ought to be. This is the gathering together of ontology and ethics, politics and poetry, dreams and reality. How? If possible, we have to return to a simpler way of being in the world. We ought not merely affect a stoic disposition as a last resort, as a therapeutic attempt to resign ourselves to the things we cannot change. Instead we must realize that receptive acquiescence grants us the capacity to let the world be what it is – before naming it, before knowing it – and in so letting the world be what it is, we are able then to bear witness to it as it is and offer testimony about the way it should be. Testimonies, whether prophetic (just pronouncements) or poetic (truth claims), which seek to address the world without having first let the world be what it is – without honestly and authentically having born witness to it – only impose another form of domination on the world. Good intentions be damned. Only when the world and vision – being (physis) and madness (manike) – are faithfully joined can we, having heeded the primal imperative to listen and wonder, freely offer our own measure by which to measure. Our own imaginary ethics. Until then we merely function as salesmen, statesmen, and consumers; playing parts not written for us; living by mandates and customs not in accord with who we are or must become.

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Hermione faces her own destruction at the hands of the man she loves, and does so with a freedom and a grace that only receptive acquiescence and – her own – imaginary ethics can bestow.] We will remember that Leontes rewards Hermione’s fidelity with death. That Perdita, their daughter – the play’s emblematic expression of truth – was saved by Antigonus and raised by a shepherd in Bohemia, where, sixteen years later, she falls in love with Polixenes’ son, Florizel. The young couple’s confrontation with the king spurs them, upon Camillo’s counsel, to flee to Sicilia to seek the help of Leontes. Now, we wonder, what has become of him since the death of his entire family? What price has he paid? If the opening of the final act gives us any indication, then it seems a high one. CLEOMENES [to LEONTES] Sir, you have done enough, and have performed A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make Which you have not redeemed, indeed, paid down More penitence than done trespass. At the last Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil. With them, forgive yourself. LEONTES Whilst I remember Her and her virtues I cannot forget My blemishes in them, and so still think of The wrong I did myself, which was so much That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and Destroyed the sweet’st companion that e’er man Bred his hopes out of. ’True?138

One of the king’s courtiers, Cleomenes, believes Leontes has done more than enough to redeem himself. He has performed more penance than trespass. He has, we can imagine, offered sacrifices to the gods and said countless prayers. He has, perhaps above all, lived in deep sorrow for sixteen years. His subjects wish that he would forgive himself. But the past still has him. He cannot forget. What he has done haunts him anew every day. He ‘destroy’d the sweet’st companion that e’er man / Bred his hopes out of ’. He is not yet free. Paulina disagrees with the court. PAULINA Too true, my lord. If one by one you wedded all the world, Or from the all that are took something good

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To make a perfect woman, she you killed Would be unparalleled.139

Paulina, friend of the queen and now priestess-like counsel to the king, encourages this prolonged sorrow. She believes Hermione has no equal in ‘all the world’. Leontes knows it to be true. His attendants, Cleomenes and Dion, contrariwise, feel the king has suffered enough and must now see not only to his own well-being but to that of the state’s too: It is time to procure an heir. Without a successor there remains uncertainty, and perhaps even eventual conflict. The king has a duty to his people to wed again and have a child. What dangers, by his highness’ fail of issue, May drop upon his kingdom and devour Incertain lookers-on.140

Paulina, however, appears to advice according to a higher standard and to place more trust in the ways of the gods than in the pragmatic concerns of the king’s counsellors. PAULINA There is none worthy Respecting her that’s gone. Besides, the gods Will have fulfilled their secret purposes. For has not the divine Apollo said? Is’t not the tenor of his oracle That King Leontes shall not have an heir Till his lost child be found? Which that it shall Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonus to break his grave And come again to me, who, on my life, Did perish with the infant. ’Tis your counsel My lord should to the heavens be contrary, Oppose against their wills. [To LEONTES] Care not for issue. The crown will find an heir. Great Alexander Left his to the worthiest, so his successor Was like to be the best. LEONTES Good Paulina, Who hast the memory of Hermione, I know, in honour – O, that ever I Had squared me to thy counsel! Then even now I might have looked upon my queen’s full eyes, Have taken treasure from her lips.141

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In addition to noting Hermione’s matchless qualities, Paulina recalls Apollo’s oracle: ‘King Leontes shall not have an heir / Till his lost child be found.’ She, like her apostolic namesake, trusts that the gods will fulfil their ‘secret purposes’.142 The issue of course remains that to his and everyone else’s knowledge both his children have died. Yet events, she believes, will unfold in accord with the word of the god, though how it should be so defies logic. Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonus to break his grave And come again to me, who, on my life, Did perish with the infant.

For one of Leontes’ children to return to him seems as likely as the return of Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, who died while abandoning Perdita. Still, her confidence in the oracle, though resisted by concerned courtiers, remains resolute. It is as though she knows something no one else knows. She advises him therefore to ‘care not for issue’. And it is the memory – the sight, the vision – of his wife, which Paulina faithfully tenders, that binds him to any course that honours her. Memory here becomes a promise. The exchange then turns to something presaging the end. If, Leontes fantasizes, Hermione ‘would make her sainted spirit / Again possess her corpse’ she would come to him and ask, ‘Why to me?’ Paulina takes up the fantasy and tells him that she, if she was the spirit of his wife, would have him mark her eyes before issuing an imperative: ‘Remember mine.’ To which a grief-stricken Leontes replies, ‘Fear thou no wife; / I’ll have no wife, Paulina.’ Having plied and primed him with the memory and the imagined vision and voice of his late wife, she extracts an oath from him not to marry without her consent. ‘Then, good my lords, bear witness to his oath.’ The interchange concludes with Paulina alluding to the conditions by which she will grant her consent: ‘That / Shall be when your first queen’s again in breath, / Never till then.’ This would seem to mean never or that the world is about to change. The young lovers arrive shortly thereafter. Though still ignorant of Perdita’s true identity, the king nevertheless warmly welcomes them. Most dearly welcome, And your fair princess – goddess! O, alas, I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as

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You, gracious couple, do: and then I lost – All mine own folly – the society, Amity too, of your brave father, whom, Though bearing misery, I desire my life Once more to look on him.143

This young couple (unsurprisingly) reminds him of Polixenes and Hermione, and of his mad jealousy. In addition to his daughter’s beauty calling up memories of his wife, it also hints at Greene’s, Pandosto, which unfolds more darkly. In it Leontes falls in love with Fawnia (Perdita) and attempts to seduce her, but upon learning that she is really his daughter commits suicide. While we see none of this in Shakespeare’s version, those familiar with the original narrative do not take Leontes’ praise so innocently. The genius of Freud, like the Greek poets millennia before him, revealed to us the more monstrous elements of our being; they show us our own pre-rational, libidinal, anarchic creatureliness. Very little about us is innocent. The madness prompting Leontes’ jealousy, however, has long since ebbed and any overt sinister elements with it. The couple’s arrival moves him; it does not signal more destruction. He longs to recover whatever he can of what he has lost and this appears as a first step towards that end. LEONTES The blessed gods Purge all infection from our air whilst you Do climate here!144

Leontes believes their presence capable of healing his court and realm. The gods will ‘purge all infection’ that resulted from his past crimes against them and his sin against his wife and friend. He quickly learns, however, that the young couple has in fact not yet married, nor do they have Bohemia’s consent to do so. They have attempted to deceive him. The air stirs in their favour though and Leontes agrees to meet with Polixenes and procure his blessing. In the penultimate scene of the final Act we hear rather than see what then occurs. (Shakespeare does not always show us what he can tell us if masterly exposition and obscuration can take us where he desires.) The king now knows Perdita’s true identity, he has reconciled with Polixenes, and the young couple has married. The court and the kingdom – along with Perdita as Truth – begin to emerge at last from the gloom visited upon them by a disharmonious madness, by a jealous politicization unheeding of any poetry. There remains only one thing: regeneration.

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[Aside. As we well know, at this point Hermione has been dead for sixteen years. Some critics, however, think her death a ruse; the only time Shakespeare ‘deceived’ us. They believe she never died and that Paulina merely hid her away and lied to the king and his court: PAULINA I say she’s dead. I’ll swear’t. If word nor oath Prevail not, go and see. If you can bring Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye, Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you As I would do the gods.145

The textual evidence supporting the theory that Hermione never died rests mainly with the Second Gentleman’s observation of Paulina in Act V: ‘I thought she had some great matter there in hand; for she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house.’ The implication being that she was tending to the needs of her mistress who was very much alive and in hiding. Though this reading in some ways works well with the events that follow, it relies on an anomaly: the single occurrence of Shakespeare’s deception of the audience. Additionally, it ignores the possibilities of magic and the supernatural, devices that occasionally do indeed appear in his plays: Henry VI Part 1, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest. Though Paulina might not be the gentlest of heroines – and there is no reason why she should be – she does not seem to be a dissembler. There remains as well the fact that Leontes went and saw the bodies of his wife and son.146 Hence, while it certainly does not substantially diminish the play to read it this way, there seems insufficient reason to do so as the narrative neither necessitates it nor does the theory do anything to enhance or expand our experience of it.] Paulina leads the kings, the court, and the newlyweds to her ‘removed house’, where she reveals to them a sculpture of Hermione fashioned by ‘that rare Italian master’, Julio Romano (Giulio Romano), a noted (and non-fictional) Renaissance artist. His tomb, the historian Vasari tells us, held an inscription: ‘Enraged that a mortal should breathe life into his creatures, and that the buildings of a mortal should rival those of heaven, Jupiter snatched this artist from earth.’147 We can reasonably infer that Shakespeare ran across this passage in Vasari, and that he, like all great creators, immediately saw something that most others do not. What the Italian writer surely meant simply as high praise the English dramatist took as singular power: his work could come to life. Here the playwright found his otherwise invisible mechanism by which to elevate Paulina’s questionable

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necromancy into a salvific alchemy; the Witch of Endor becomes the pious apostle. ‘If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.’148 She draws the curtain behind which the statue stands, and the entire party marvels at its lifelikeness. LEONTES Let be, let be! Would I were dead but that methinks already. What was he that did make it? See, my lord, Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins Did verily bear blood? POLIXENES Masterly done. The very life seems warm upon her lip. LEONTES The fixture of her eye has motion in’t, As we are mocked with art.149

The sculptor had rendered the image of Hermione as if she had aged naturally over the past sixteen years, instead of freezing her appearance in time. It provokes Perdita to kneel before it and receive her mother’s blessing even though to do so ‘’tis superstition’. She then moves to touch it, but Paulina forbids her as it has yet to dry, which recalls a scene from St. John’s testimony of Christ’s resurrection: ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.’150 And the work of art so pierces Leontes’ soul that he may now, possessing vision – the image of Truth reborn before her mother – truly let things be what they are and play his part in helping them to become what they will be. Fully sorrowful and fully thankful, he stands ready to be of use to his realm, his daughter, and all that is to come. Romano’s statue, like Heraclitus’ stove or van Gogh’s painting, can speak to us if we learn to listen to it: ‘Here too the gods come to presence.’ [Aside. Who is Hermione? Hermione’s name derives from the divine messenger, Hermes, god of commerce, boundaries, roads, and markets, patron of travellers and rogues (an etymology connecting her to Autolycus, as well as Paulina, whose namesake Paul was an apostle, meaning ‘messenger’). This mythological association allows us to read Hermione as the means and possibility of exchange, the (soon to be) living site where the ordinary and divine merge into one. What had fled and been lost – truth – can here re-emerge. In this sense, she

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is the work of art come to life, the mother of truth, the messenger bridging earth and world, mortals and gods, the possibility of an ever closer intimacy rising up from the rift between what is and what can be. She is language. For her to be so only requires a little faith, vision, and magic; only requires a forbearing hope for the return and healing counter surge of poetic madness. All of the play’s happenings lead us to this regeneration of Hermione – language – and signal the reunion of the two courts, the poetic and political.] The magic Prospero worked for Miranda and Ferdinand, if we recall, necessitated silence. Should we wish to listen and see what is truly before and around us we must quiet down, otherwise we only see and hear ourselves (selves we hardly know). Here, however, Hermione’s silence has persisted for sixteen years. The time for silence has now passed and the time for accomplishment has finally come. The moment for a musical magic has arrived – ‘soon (we) will be song’. Paulina, like a wonderworking Prospero taking the podium and raising her baton, begins the final movements of a regenerative symphony. PAULINA Music; awake her; strike!    [Music] [To HERMIONE] ’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. [To LEONTES] You perceive she stirs.    [HERMIONE comes descends] Start not. Her actions shall be holy as You hear my spell is lawful.151

The music plays and the healing element of the gods’ madness returns. Hermione comes to life, descending from a near, yet untouchable place. She emerges into the ‘sensuous immediacy of human dwelling’, and her lover, Leontes (as princely power), may now ‘present [his] hand’ and touch her.152 Language now sings as graves fill up with our pain and emptiness to make room for life’s arrival. And she, Hermione, our life-affirming poetic expression of exchange – the mother and possibility of Truth – has become holy and free. ‘Behold, I shew you a mystery.’153 To do or to say before now, to change the world, would have been futile, or worse, unethical. She was dead and no true

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exchange could take place (or the exchange had yet to find its resolution). To act before regeneration  – which might be better grasped existentially rather than eschatologically – signals only will-to-power without compassion, politics bereft of poetry, rationality lacking love. Hermione’s life – an imagined portrait of our own relationship to truth and power – begins anew. It signals the restoration of the imaginary court’s authentic agency, wherein freedom has not been taken, rather accepted. Her long silence ends, and life speaks from death. You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head!154

Contemporary sensibilities might prefer to exit here, yet Shakespeare’s romances maintain a commitment to ‘comic’ resolution through marriage (a trope often corresponding to celebrations of actual marriages outside the play world). They also, in contradistinction to tragedy, indicate the possibility of life to come. The great tragedies revel in other, darker promises: human failing, finitude, and irresistible finality. These mortal signatures strike opposing chords. One brings us together around the promise that life will go on; the other demonstrates the hollowness of such promises. We know, however, that life (comedy) and death (tragedy) are beautifully and absurdly joined together (romance). Excepting his histories, Shakespeare’s plays tend towards one of these ends. Here we find that rare romantic admixture of life and death ultimately stamped with marital solemnity. Not solely for the young lovers or Leontes and Hermione, but for Paulina and Camillo as well. We also find these marriages and reunions provide symmetry: three couplings for three deaths. Now we can recall that near the end of Act III, just before the appearance of Time, Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, had, at the king’s command, taken the infant far away to be abandoned to the elements. Auspiciously, the far away land was Bohemia. In that scene, Antigonus recounts how Hermione came to him in a dream and bade him name the baby Perdita. It becomes clear that forsaking the baby, a deed he swore to perform, fills him with great sorrow – ‘my heart bleeds’ – and yet he does it. He leaves her only to find himself immediately attacked and killed by a bear. The stage directions for his death are widely considered the most famous in English drama: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ While the manner of his death seems largely absurd, it nevertheless allows Shakespeare the opportunity to manifest the non-rational forces of nature outside the boundaries of Leontes’

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court. We get our first glimpse of the world outside of the king’s madness and power. A world no one truly and completely masters. And this world, with all of its bears and storms and darkness, provides a stage for the appearance of saving spirits, forces, and gods. Or, language restored. As Antigonus’ incredible death attests, it grants the future certain prospects it otherwise would not contain. This unruly arrival presages the regenerative – thus necessarily sacrificial – turn culminating in the healing of the mad court, the restoration of Perdita, the king’s salvation, and the regeneration of Hermione. It bestows the possibility of a new beginning for all, signified by the marriages of the young lovers and the faithful stewards. It promises the resurrection of the dead.155

Notes Chapter 1 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), aphorism 290. 2 Latin maxim: ‘In matters of taste, there can be no disputes’, often rendered, ‘There is no accounting for taste’. 3 Metaphors usually imply figures of speech not intended to be taken literally, rather only emblematically or symbolically. It arises from the Greek, metapherein, which means ‘to carry over’, or ‘to bear across’. I here make the assertion, which seems selfevident, that language itself bespeaks a ‘carrying over’ of meaning. Meaning – taken as sense, import, intent – does not come to us without language ferrying it across to us. In all its uses language itself (as opposed to merely specified ‘metaphors’) functions metaphorically. Nietzsche clearly makes this case in On Truth and Lies and a Non-Moral Sense. See also n. 80. 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 302. 5 The remarkability of this ought to be as pronounced and humbling today as it was among the ancients. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 105. ‘For archaic man, doing and daring are power, but knowing is magical power.’ 6 As Greek psyche is largely the genesis for our conceptions of both ‘mind’ and ‘soul’, whatever distinctions we make between ‘intellectual’ and ‘spiritual’ matters seems largely a matter of aesthetics or rhetoric. 7 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, 892–4. 8 Language allows for ideation, whether image based, experienced, or abstract. Or, put another way, the phenomenon of language gives us the capacity to conceptualize, to construct ‘objects of thought’ capable of being articulated, recalled, questioned. And as ideas are constructions – taken as, or distinct from, conceptions – they are subject to deterioration, thus in need of maintenance or even renovation. All words, ex post facto, hide within this ideating process and realm by way of their everyday usefulness in communicating.

228 Notes 9 Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Bread and Wine’, in Friedrich Hölderlin Selected Poetry and Fragments, ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 158–9. Yes, and rightly they say [the poet] reconciles Day with out Night-time,    Leads the stars of the sky upward and down without end, Always glad, like the living boughs of the evergreen pine tree    Which he loves, and the wreath wound out of ivy for choice Since it lasts and conveys the trace of the gods now departed    Down to the godless below, into the midst of their gloom. 10 Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–8. 11 The image (thought through eidolon) of the phenomenon (phainesthai) is the ‘look’ of ‘what shows itself ’. The reason (logos) for its appearance is always and only present in and through thinking and discourse, through words and the exchange of words. I say that phenomena always appear as idols due to only accepting the languageless world of humans as a myth. There can be no ‘pure’ reception of phenomena in and of themselves. In this late age it might be argued that we can only receive them as images, idols, presentations. And the look of what shows is concurrently bound to a symbol indicating reason, that is, a word (logos). Reason, however, should not be confused with meaning. While they share similarities, meaning as such requires authentic interpretation. It does not exist without it. Reason, on the other hand, while concealed, is not constituted by interpretation, though interpretation is the only act that brings it to light. In this way, reason as concealed logos would be distinguished from reason as some sort of faculty or capacity (nous) that makes interpretation (or any knowing or complex relating) possible. 12 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 139–44. 13 William Shakespeare, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997), 5.1 1–29. The Norton Shakespeare will be used throughout. I will list the title of the play, followed by the act, scene, and line numbers. 14 Plato does this as well, see Phaedrus, 245a. 15 The final chapter, ‘Imaginary Ethics’, which reads The Winter’s Tale alongside Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, takes up the theme of madness at length, exploring it through political and poetical modalities. 16 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Selected Poetry, ed. Timothy Webb (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 124. 17 As an example, consider the word ‘general’. As an adjective it signifies how something relates to all, is common, or is wide-ranging, yet as a noun it indicates someone of high rank within the military or a religious order.

Notes  229 18 This sense of conjecture dates back to the fourteenth century. In Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1425), for example, we find: ‘By þe chaungeyng of þe coloures men … knawes and coniectures wheder it schall be derthe of corne.’ 19 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Letter to Paul Demeny’, in Rimbaud Complete, trans., ed. Wyatt Mason (New York: Random House, Inc., 2002), 366. 20 Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 410. 21 Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 410–1. 22 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1982), 217. 23 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 3. 24 Garber, Shakespeare After All. 25 Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 231–40. 26 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1 100–24. 27 Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 66. 28 Van Doren, Shakespeare. 29 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 49. The lovely passage he refers to is worth citing: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine; There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. 30 A straightforward, non-Shakespearean example of this ‘essential everydayness’ can be heard in Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, The Onion, which poetizes the essence of the onion through the onion’s form. In this poet’s hands, we not only receive a poetic and humorous meditation on the nature of an onion, she compels us to reflect on our own existence as well. Simple, profound, ordinary. 31 Shakespeare is credited with innovating over 1,700 of our most common words. He did this by using nouns as verbs, making gerunds, interchanging adjectives and adverbs, using verbs as adjectives, placing different prefixes or suffixes onto words, and all in all by creating new words. His contribution to modern English is simply unparalleled and unquestionable. 32 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1 140–55. 33 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271.

230 Notes 34 The distinction here lies between the slow, careful interpretation of a work (whatever its medium) in order to participate in the ‘life of the work’ and the analytical observation of a phenomenon as part of an experiment in order to collect objective data. 35 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), xvii, 17. 36 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1993); ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, ed., trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001). 37 Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare: Studies in the Archetypal Underworld of the Plays (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 2006), 9. 38 Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1985), 32. 39 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 73. 40 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 182. 41 Ibid., 200. 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), section 797. 43 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 199. 44 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), 191–2. 45 Though Heidegger provides us with ample support for this claim – such as ‘the danger may remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw’, from The Question Concerning Technology (1954) – it nevertheless remains a point of contention. See Taylor Carman, ‘Heidegger on Correspondence and Correctness’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007): 103–16. 46 Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’ and ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–54, 155 –82. 47 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 185–9. 48 Ibid., 174. 49 Ibid., 170. 50 Robert B. Stulberg, ‘Heidegger and the Origin of the Work of Art: An Explication’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter, 1973): 262. 51 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 188. 52 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest’, in The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 99. 53 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Notes  231 54 Adam Kirsch, ‘The Taste of Silence’, Poetry, Vol. 191, No. 4 (January, 2008): 342. 55 Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, trans. Charles H. Kahn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Fragment LXXXII. 56 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 550. 57 One can also find a similar notion in his earlier reading of Kant’s first critique, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, wherein he reads Kant’s unification of the sensible and intelligible in the meeting-ground of the imagination as the possibility of an oppositional ‘letting-stand-against’; that is, essential – if imaginary – opposition allows for the possibility of knowledge as such. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 54, 58, 64, 85–7. 58 It should be noted that creative activity is often (if not always) bound to destructive (or de-structuring) activities, like turning over the earth for farming, or harvesting wood and stone for building, or any sort of constructive activity requiring the ‘stuff ’ of the earth. 59 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 174. 60 We are not here particularly addressing Heidegger’s distinction between facticity (Faktizität) and factuality (Tatsächlichkeit) made in Being and Time, we are instead attempting to de-conflate fact (in either sense) and truth (aletheia), which are often used interchangeably. 61 Heidegger’s distinction seems to suggest that facticity (Faktizität), unlike factuality (Tatsächlichkeit), is something always already ‘before’ our own historical situatedness. Cf. Being and Time, 56, 135, 276, 284, 348, et passim. 62 Cf. Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 202d–e. Such thinkers as Simone Weil, Eric Voegelin, and William Desmond have explored the significance of the metaxy beyond the role given to it by Plato. 63 Romeo and Juliet, 2.1 67–74. 64 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 185. 65 Ibid., 188. 66 Ibid., 167. 67 Emerson, ‘History’, 114. 68 Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, in Basic Writings, 424. 69 Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Pathmarks, 239. 70 ‘Enowning’ and ‘propriation’ are preferred here over usual interpretations of Ereignis as ‘event’, ‘occasion’, ‘happening’, or even ‘appropriation’ (all of which would be clearer English), as these two terms seem more in accord with Heidegger’s particular usage, as well as being more or less standard within Heidegger scholarship. 71 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Shakespeare; Or, The Poet’, in The Essays of Emerson and Representative Men (London & Glasgow: Collins’ Clear-type Press), 495.

232 Notes 72 73 74 75 76

Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, 425. Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 239. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 198. Ibid., 199. Heraclitus’ fragment (Diels-Kranz 123, Marcovich 8, Kahn X), physis kryptesthai philei, ‘nature loves to hide’. 77 Homer’s Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), VIII 100–20: Odysseus hid his face and wept. His weeping went unmarked by all the others; only Alcinous, sitting close beside him, noticed his guest’s tears. 78 Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, 406–12. 79 Ibid., 397–8. 80 It should be noted that Heidegger explicitly rejects this essential role of metaphor in his conception of language. Readers of Heidegger, however, are not entirely convinced that he fully appreciated his own reliance on figurative and playful language, or even the essential function of language as such. Notables of this position include Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Guisuppe Stellardi, Paul Ricoeur, and Clive Cazeaux. 81 I am here attempting to stay with Heidegger’s aim in Being and Time of deconstructing the conception of a sovereign, Cartesian subject. 82 Friedrich Hölderlin, from a draft of the poem ‘Mnemosyne’, as found in Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 165. 83 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 84 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 173. 85 Ibid. 86 We could here consider T. S. Eliot’s well-known pronouncement that ‘The duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve’. See his essay, The Social Function of Poetry (1943/45). 87 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1 3–6. 88 Ibid., 1.1 7–11. 89 Ibid., 1.1 41–4. 90 Cf. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994). In chapter nine of this text Yoder explores the ethical possibilities of ‘revolutionary subordination’. 91 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1 46–51.

Notes  233 92 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 188. 93 Richard II, 3.2 125–30. 94 In mythology Hippolyta escapes and the two never marry. 95 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 43. 96 Cf. Jennifer Ann Bates, Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), particularly chapters one through three. 97 Cf. Sonnet 152, ‘In loving thee thou know’st I am foresworn’. Those that perform ‘biographical readings’ of Shakespeare’s work believe the sonnets alone suggest that Shakespeare defaulted on his marriage vows, if not sexually, then at the very least ‘emotionally’ (whatever that might mean). There remains as well the silence surrounding Anne Shakespeare: imagine the wife of Shakespeare having never received even a single line of poetry (that we know of). One could possibly make the case that he upheld the most substantive portions of the marriage bond – financial support and production of offspring – while failing the less required but the more deeply felt ones. 98 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1 106–10. 99 Bloom, Shakespeare, 153. 100 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1 232–5. 101 The phenomenon of love, discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus, for example, is always embodied or defined through beings and narrative, thus the invisible becomes visible. Still, love does not ‘appear’, we do not ‘see’ it; we rather envision and narrativize our experience of it. 102 As mutual exchange or fair getting and receiving, we can easily imagine peoples organizing, in part, based upon an expectation of reciprocal dealings with one another in all areas of life, from friendship to economics. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1990). 103 Cf. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. M. L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6. 104 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1 93–114. 105 Ibid., 2.1 115–117. 106 Ibid., 2.1 82–7. 107 Ibid., 2.1 34–42. 108 ‘Faerie’ derives from the Latin fata, meaning ‘the Fates’. 109 Self-transparency (Durchsichtigkeit, diaphanousness, insightfulness) allows us to truly see ourselves and become free for our own concerns, able to work through them, capable of becoming who we are. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 137. 110 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 188. 111 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1 119–21. 112 Ibid., 2.1 122–37. 113 Ibid., 2.1 154–7.

234 Notes 114 The Greek metaxy means ‘in-between’ or ‘middle ground’. A daimon, as we would here loosely characterize Oberon, stands between gods and mortals, thus traversing the metaxy separating the human and the divine. 115 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1 157–69. 116 Consider that Heidegger’s notion of leaping ahead (vorspringen) is connected to transparency (Durchsichtigkeit). In context, it refers to someone leaping ahead of someone else in order that the other person gains self-transparency by caring for him- or herself, by carrying his or her own weight, by dealing with his or her own problems. I use the term here to convey a sense of leaping ahead of and for oneself, not to bypass dealing with one’s own problems, rather to imaginally step away from oneself in order to gain a conception of oneself at all (even if that conception is Heidegger’s pre-conceptual Dasein). When we have such an ‘image-parable of self ’, we can begin to authentically wrestle with our own lot, take up our own cares. Cf. Being and Time, 122, 298.

Chapter 2 1 Plato, Laws, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 775e. 2 Plato, The Republic, trans. Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 377b. 3 I do not take The Republic to be a work of political philosophy as such, though it is undeniable that much has been gained over the centuries by reading it as one. Succinctly stated, I read the text’s central thesis to be that justice is a matter of individual character, or harmony of the soul, and not a model for a just state. See 329d, 368d–e, 443b–e, 592a–b, 614b–621d, et passim. 4 Plato, The Republic, 327a. 5 David Margolies, Monsters of the Deep: Social Dissolution in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 67. 6 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), 1. 7 On the art of reading, in a vein similar to the one presented here, see the beautiful book by Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1993). 8 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 26. 9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), xix. 10 Hamlet, 1.1 106–27.

Notes  235 11 Heidegger, Being and Time, 1. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 2–3. 14 Hamlet, 1.2 66–86. 15 Ibid., 1.2 87–94. 16 Ibid., 1.2 129–37. 17 Ibid., 1.2 158–59. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 25. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 31. 21 Res ipsa locator, literally means, ‘the thing speaks for itself ’. The phrase, however, ordinarily denotes a precept of common law in which the very nature of an act – an accident or injury – testifies to negligence in the duty of care. 22 Ibid. 23 Martin Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, Revised & Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 341. 24 Heidegger, Being and Time, 60–1. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Ibid., 121. 27 Cf. Kierkegaard’s The Present Age (1846) and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886). 28 Heidegger, Being and Time, 118. 29 Ibid., 119. 30 Hamlet, 1.3 58–81. 31 Heidegger, Being and Time, 33. 32 Hamlet, 1.5 1–28. 33 Ibid., 1.5 91. 34 Cf. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986); Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 71–7, 81–4, 108–11, 525–6. 35 Hamlet, 1.5 166–9. 36 Heidegger, Being and Time, 254. 37 Hamlet, 1.5 183–91. 38 Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 1–12. 39 Ibid., 39. 40 Ibid., 40. 41 Ibid., 44. 42 Ibid., 40.

236 Notes 43 Ibid., 42. 44 Ibid., 59–105. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Ibid., 178–86. 47 Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 1140a24–1140b30. 48 Heidegger, Being and Time, 62–7. 49 Hamlet, 2.2 293–8. 50 Ibid., 2.2 350–1. 51 Ibid., 2.2 526–37. 52 Ibid., 2.2 537–43. 53 Ibid., 2.2 543–52. 54 Ibid., 2.2 553–65. 55 Ibid., 2.2 566–75. 56 Ibid., 2.2 575–82. 57 Heidegger, Being and Time, 256. 58 Ibid., 184. 59 Ibid., 264. 60 See Anaximander’s fragment and the early writings of Nietzsche, The Greek State (1871–2) and Homer’s Contest (1872). 61 Heidegger, Being and Time, 265. 62 Hamlet, 3.3 36–72. 63 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I and II, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1991), 32. 64 Heidegger, Being and Time, 266–272. 65 Hamlet, 3.3 97–98. 66 Heidegger, Being and Time, 273. 67 Cf. Haldeen Braddy, Hamlet’s Wounded Name (Texas: Texas Western Press, 1964). There are many commentators who read Hamlet as an effective agent within the play, but this work in particular – a beautifully produced, concise text, labelled A Unique Item of Shakespeareana – seeks to use folklore motifs, medieval conventions, and Nordic traditions to demonstrate that the play has historically been misread by those who assert he is a non-effective agent. 68 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 126. 69 Heidegger, Being and Time, 245. 70 Ibid., 229. 71 Ibid., 303. 72 Ibid., 279–87. 73 Plato, The Republic, 443d–e. 74 Heidegger, Being and Time, 242.

Notes  237 75 Ibid., 342. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 343. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 44. 79 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 48. 80 Ibid., 351. 81 Ibid., 352. 82 Ibid., 274. 83 Ibid., 275. 84 Ibid., 277. 85 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 86. 86 Hamlet, 3.1 58–92. 87 It should be noted here that Heidegger, in his lecture course on Heraclitus (1944), specifically mentions and comments on these lines. As was indicated in one of my ‘asides’ in Chapter 1, Heidegger did not hear the same philosophical depth in Shakespeare for which I am here arguing. He seems to indicate that these overly familiar lines – ‘To be, or not to be’ – are incapable of expressing the ‘infinite depth’ of the question of being. Hopefully my explication of these lines will demonstrate otherwise. 88 Hamlet, 5.1 251–6. 89 Ibid., 5.1 187–99. 90 Cf. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye On Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 99. 91 Hamlet, 1.4 59–63. 92 Ibid., 5.2 157–61. 93 Martin Heidegger, ‘Anaximander’s Saying’, in Off the Beaten Track, eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242. 94 Heidegger, ‘Anaximander’s Saying’, 242, 248. 95 Richard Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), 63. 96 Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, trans. and ed. Charles H. Kahn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), fragment XCIX. 97 Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, fragment CIII. 98 Cf. Bloom, Shakespeare. 99 Hamlet, 5.3 269–82. 100 Ibid., 5.3 283–301. 101 Cf. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 1.

238 Notes

Chapter 3 1 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1993), 311. 2 Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New York: The New College and University Press, 1956). 3 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 167. 4 Cf. Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, 406–12. 5 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 311. 6 Ibid. 7 Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), which famously begins, ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’. 8 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 312. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 314. 11 See Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), lines 80–90. 12 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, entry 550. 13 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 314. 14 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 15 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 317. 16 Cf. Plato, The Republic, 411d–e. 17 See Chapter 1, section entitled, ‘Becoming Song’. 18 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 331. 19 Coriolanus, 2.2 120–4. 20 Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 83. 21 Cf. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: NYRB Classics, 2002); The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980). 22 Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, 1133a25–1133b25. The editor points out here that the Greek word for ‘money’, nomisma, shares the same root as the word for ‘law’ and ‘custom’, nomos. This seemingly simple etymological connection has powerful implications for our analysis of Coriolanus. See also Georg Simmel’s writings on money. One of his better-known passages describes money thusly: ‘Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of “how much?” Money, with all its colourlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving

Notes  239 stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.’ 23 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Culture’, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 642. 24 Anselm, Proslogion, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001), 10. Due to its relevance here we should note Anselm’s Latin word play: power, potentia, and weakness, impotentia, contextualize the most basic ability to act, posse, from which we derive ‘possession’. The argument being that in certain cases only those who are impotent have the ability to act, only by their weakness do they have ‘power’. This equation appears to cut both ways, implying that the most powerful are often the weakest, and the weakest possess the greatest power. 25 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I and II, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1991), 26–7. 26 Cf. Karl Marx, ‘Capital, Volume One’, The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1978), 317. 27 Cf. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 311. 28 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), xxv. 29 Euripides, ‘The Bacchae’, in Euripides, ed. Robert W. Corrigan, trans. Minos Volanakis (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1965), 184. 30 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 320. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 ‘Ibid.,’ 322. Italics added. 34 Sophocles, ‘Antigone’, Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 76. 35 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, 51–122. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Sonnet 94. 39 Cf. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 18–21; Thomas Langan, The Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study of An Existential Phenomenology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 88, 130, 162; et al. 40 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 331. 41 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 550, entry 1067. 42 Coriolanus, 2.2 132–6. 43 Ibid., 4.6 94–6. 44 Ibid., 5.4 10–11.

240 Notes 45 Ibid., 5.4 15–16. 46 Ibid., 5.4 16–20. 47 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 141. 48 Heidegger, ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’,’ 322. 49 Ibid., 324. 50 Ibid., 325. 51 While primary sources on the subject are rare, there remains little doubt that there were ancient traditions holding radically different views about the identity and motives of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as well as to serpent or dragon (or even Promethean) motifs in ancient accounts and creation myths generally. Of Gnostic Christian movements, the Ophites, while problematic, are perhaps still the best example. The basic notion being that the serpent was a benign entity (if not a prefiguration of the Christ) intent on helping humanity, not cursing it. For two examples of how Gnostic understandings of the serpent differ from that of Orthodox ones, see Apocryphon of John and Testimony of Truth. In addition to other ancient primary texts, there are numerous secondary sources as well: Francis Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, Being Studies in Religious History from 330 B.C. to 330 A.D. (New York: University Books, 1964); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Tuomas Rasimus, Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 52 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 323–4. 53 Ibid., 324. 54 Tragedy, from Greek tragoidia, literally means ‘goat song’. Tragedy originated with the Dorians and began as lyrical or dithyrambic performances before moving to Athens and developing into its fuller and graver dramatic form. The meaning of tragedy as ‘goat song’ is thought to derive from the fact that the prize for best tragedy was a goat. 55 Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self (New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), 29–30. 56 Cf. Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). 57 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 7–8; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second, revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 82, et passim. 58 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1892 version). 59 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 324. 60 Ibid., 327. 61 Pindar, The Complete Odes, trans. Anthony Verity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 48. 62 See Heidegger, Parmenides, 53. Heidegger writes: ‘The Roman veritas has become the “justice” of the will to power. The circle of the history of the essence of truth, as metaphysically experienced, is now closed. Yet aletheia remains outside this

Notes  241 circle. The province of its essence is practically obliterated within the region of the domination of Western veritasd.’ We do not here debate whether or not ‘aletheia [as such] remains outside this circle’ in any essential sense. Rather, that our experience of ‘truth’ has fallen prey to the justice – as domination – of veritas, and as such is now only experienced as the rational means by which the correct is made efficiently available at all times. The lack of such means, both logically and practically, becomes injustice. 63 Martin Heidegger, ‘Age of the World Picture’, in Off The Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71. 64 Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 1. 65 A medieval Catholic expression for exorcism: ‘Step back, Satan’. 66 In a broader etymological sense, ‘corn’ might refer to ‘grain’ or ‘seed’, or even ‘rye’ or ‘pea’, and not simply American ‘maize’. This means the implications of a corn shortage or concern over its price probably implies something more critical or structural. This helps explain why corn is a default example of sorts in Marx. 67 Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 46. 68 Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, 47. 69 See Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Basic Writings, 106–10. 70 Cf. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (New York: Vintage Books, 1951). 71 Hosea 14:3 King James Version. 72 Ibid., 14:8. 73 Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1 199–211. 74 Cf. Plato, ‘Meno’, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 72c. 75 Cf. H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951), 171–5; W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975), 8–10. 76 Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers, 8. 77 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 332. 78 Ibid., 332–3. 79 Ibid., 333. 80 Ibid. 81 Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 224. 82 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 333. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.

242 Notes 85 The Greek word, pharmakon – from which we get ‘pharmacy’, ‘pharmacist’, ‘pharmaceutical’, and so on – most basically describes a drug or medicine that works to remedy a sickness. Yet it can also mean a spell, charm, or potion, one that can heal or harm. It is ambiguous. A pharmakis, for example, is a witch or sorceress, a pharmakos a poisoner or magician (or even scapegoat). The point here lies with the pharmacological nature of technology: it is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, neither exclusively a ‘cure’ or a ‘poison’, rather both concurrently. (And perhaps a scapegoat too.) Plato specifically considers written language to be a pharmakon. See Phaedrus, 274c–279c and Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy. 86 Of all the possible exceptions that we could here list, the one that comes to mind is Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper Voyager, 1994). 87 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 334. 88 Ibid. 89 Cf. Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. 90 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 340–1. 91 Ibid., 339. 92 Ibid., 337. 93 Ibid. 94 Cf. Gianni Vattimo, ‘“Verwindung”: Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy’, SubStance, Vol. 16, No. 2, Issue 53: Contemporary Italian Thought (1987): 7–17. 95 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 338. 96 Ibid. 97 Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Patmos’, in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 231. 98 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 136. 99 si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi Trans … 100 See Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘great’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). 101 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 339. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 326–8. 104 Ibid., 339. 105 Ibid. 106 Jn 20:29 King James Version. 107 Coriolanus, 3.3 121–39. 108 Cf. Lucretius, The Way Things Are, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1968), Book II. 109 Coriolanus, 5.1 9–14.

Notes  243 110 Is there ever reason to leave one’s place and people? Of course. There are all manner of justifiable reasons. Socrates, however, ought to remain our conscience’s foil. See Plato’s Crito: ‘“Surely”, [the laws and the state] might say, “you are breaking the commitments and agreements that you made with us without compulsion or deceit, and under no pressure of time for deliberation.”’ (52e) Our final chapter, ‘Imaginary Ethics’, which reads The Winter’s Tale alongside Letter on ‘Humanism’, will also touch upon this topic. 111 Coriolanus, 5.3 141–84. 112 Ibid., 5.6 103–17. 113 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 341.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 222. Ibid., 223. Heidegger, ‘A Letter to a Young Student,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, 182. Ibid., 183. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”,’ in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239. Heraclitus’ fragment (Diels-Kranz 112, Marcovich 23, Kahn XXXII), sophronein arete megiste kai sophin aletheia legein kai poiein kata phusin epaiontas, the last part, kata phusin epaiontas, being translated, ‘perceiving things according to their nature’ or ‘listening-in to the being of things’. Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 214. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 221. Cf. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), see Chapter 2 of part II, ‘Being and God’; Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1957), in particular see section two of Chapter 3, ‘Religious Symbols’. Ibid., 217. Cf. Acts 17:22-23 King James Version: ‘Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.’ The Tempest, 1.2 1–12. Ibid., 1.2 12–14.

244 Notes 16 Cf. Plato, ‘The Republic’, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 378b–e. 17 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 218. 18 The Tempest, 1.2 454–6. 19 Ibid., 3.1 6–34. 20 Ibid., 3.1 37–9. 21 Ibid., 3.1 46–8. 22 Ibid., 3.1 63–7. 23 Ibid., 3.1 67. 24 Ibid., 3.1 71–3. 25 Ibid., 3.1 74–6. 26 Ibid., 3.1 83–97. 27 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 54. 28 The Tempest, 4.1 117–27. 29 See Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 198; ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 214. 30 The Tempest, 4.1 146–58. 31 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 219. 32 Ibid., 223. 33 Martin Heidegger, ‘…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch...’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 204–5. The translation is my own. 34 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1 12–17. 35 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 220. 36 See Chapter 1, The Poetic Rift, particularly the section, ‘Becoming Song’. 37 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 224. 38 Cf. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism. 39 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 225. 40 Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, 104. The emphasis on redeem is my own. 41 Ibid., 105–6. 42 Ibid., 118. 43 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Essential Rilke, revised edition, trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 125. 44 The Tempest, 3.3 83–93. 45 Ibid., 5.1 1–3. 46 Ibid., 5.1 17–19. 47 Ibid., 5.1 20–32. 48 Robert Mezey, untitled couplet, Evening Wind (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 42. 49 Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, 226. 50 Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, 118. 51 The Tempest, 5.1 71–9.

Notes  245 52 53 54 55

Ibid., 5.1 50–7. See Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), 5.2. See Endnotes 23 and 24 of Chapter 3. Denise Levertov, ‘The Poet in the World’, in The Poet in the World (New York: New Directions Books, 1973), 115. 56 The Tempest, epilogue 1–20.

Chapter 5 1 Plato, ‘The Republic’, 382a–c. 2 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 148. 3 Ibid, 144. 4 John 1:1 King James Version. 5 Heb. 11:1-3 Lattimore translation. 6 This of/for distinction was also made regarding texts. See Chapter 2, section entitled A Sense of the Text. 7 Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and On the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–26, ed. Marcus Bullock (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 63. 8 Of course this does not mean that human beings – as a cognitively and socially advanced species – bear no responsibility for the arrival and evolution of language, rather, that we do not experience language (qua language) as an act of willed construction. It is not acquired or employed or disposed of like other ‘things’, it is not simply a tool or a mode of communication. It is not a house we build. As a phenomenon its existential powers over human experience – in most if not all things – is such that to experience anything as a human being is to encounter it through language. 9 This Latin saying from the Medieval world, corruptio optimi quae est pessima, is usually translated something like, ‘The corruption of the best is that which becomes the worst’. 10 Cf. Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 2007). 11 Cf. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essay (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 1997). 12 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010), 82. 13 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 191–2. 14 Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest’, 95.

246 Notes 15 Cf. Finley, The Ancient Economy, 17–34. 16 Ibid., 28. 17 Cf. Martin Ostwald, ‘Freedom and the Greeks’, in The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West, ed. R. W. Davis (CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 35–63; ‘Eleutheria’, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, eds. (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 250–7. 18 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 7.135.3. 19 Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, Chapter 6, 82–101. 20 Ibid., 49–68. 21 Ibid., 46–7. 22 Ibid, 84. 23 Cf. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 24 In a few short centuries the ‘mysteries’ would evolve to become a means of escape from the world: by learning and contemplating the secret truths of certain gods, celebrants gained a mystical knowledge that became the basis for hope in a life beyond mortality. This was not the original hope of the early cults or the purpose of the mysteries. This notion of a ‘saving knowledge’ would have a powerful influence on religious ideas and practices, particularly on Christianity. See Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Double Day Anchor Books, 1955), Chapter 4, ‘The Failure of Nerve’. 25 Ibid., 12–13. 26 ‘Special’ here does not mean strictly exclusive, rather suited to the task at hand due to having a close and particular relationship to the thing or activity in question. 27 Cf. Sophocles, ‘Antigone’, Sophocles I, second edition, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), see particularly the ‘Ode to Man’, 332–75, 174–5. 28 Aristotle, Ethics, 1177b26–28. 29 The Winter’s Tale, 1.2 27–45. 30 Ibid., 1.2 45–63. 31 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 32 The Winter’s Tale, 1.2 63–88. 33 Ibid., 1.2 88–109. 34 Ibid., 1.2 110–22. 35 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater and the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 37.

Notes  247 36 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Doubleday Anchors, 1954), 335. 37 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 39. 38 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 106. 39 Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom, 117. 40 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 159. 41 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. 42 Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 274. 43 A. L. Rowse, Prefaces to Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Orbis Publishing, 1984), 243. 44 The Winter’s Tale, 1.2 131–48. 45 Ibid., 1.2 188–208. 46 Ibid., 1.2 281–99. 47 Garber, Shakespeare After All, 835. 48 See A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 345–9; Nora Johnson, ‘Ganymedes and Kings: Staging Male Homosexual Desire in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 26 (1998): 187–218. 49 Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Dallas: Spring Publishing, 1981), 140. 50 Cf. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 76–82. 51 The Winter’s Tale, 2.3 33–6. 52 Ibid., 3.2 131–3. 53 Ibid., 3.2 146–7. 54 Ibid., 2.1 27. 55 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 241. 56 Such appears to be the assessment of Hannah Arendt. See David Ferrell Krell’s introduction to the text in Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 216. 57 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 239. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Heidegger, ‘What Calls for Thinking’, Basic Writings, 373. 62 See Chapter 1, The Poetic Rift, wherein the idea that art founds truth is explored. 63 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 240. 64 Ibid., 241. 65 Cf. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 203. ‘Wherever there is a catch-word ending in -ism we are hot on the tracks of a play-community’.

248 Notes 66 Cf. Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer Publishing, 2007), 140. 67 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 241. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 242. 71 Meister Eckhart, ‘Of Undevoted People Who are Full of Self-will’, in Meister Eckhart, trans. Raymond B. Blakney (New York: HarperPerenial, 1941), 5. 72 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Sonnets to Orpheus’, in The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), I, 3, 231. 73 Cf. Pieper, Leisure. 74 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 243. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 244. 77 Ibid., 245. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 247. 81 Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 149. 82 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 251. 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1985), 7. 84 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 9. 85 Ibid., 38, 41. 86 Ibid., 39. 87 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 258. 88 Ibid., 265. 89 See Chapter 4, section entitled, ‘Measure’. 90 Cf. Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’, in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37–55. 91 ‘Metric’ was originally associated with measuring in relation to poetic or musical metre, before metre became a fundamental unit of length in the ‘metric system’. That is to say, it was always ‘fundamental’, albeit not in objectively exacting terms for determining universal spatial values. 92 Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37. 93 William Wordsworth, ‘The World is Too Much with Us’, in The Portable Romantic Poets, ed. W. H. Auden and Norma Holmes Pearson (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 168.

Notes  249 94 Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588). 95 Cf. Dawn Massey, ‘“Veritas filia Temporis”: Apocalyptic Polemics in the Drama of the English Reformation’, Comparative Drama, Vol. 32, No. 1, Drama and the English Reformation (Spring 1998): 146–75. 96 Cf. Soji Iwasaki, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis and Shakespeare’, English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1973): 249–63. 97 King Lear, 1.1 286. 98 Cf. Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 170; Garber, Shakespeare After All, 842. 99 The Winter’s Tale, 4.1 1–32. 100 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), aphorism 125, 181. 101 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 42. 102 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 58, 121. 103 Van Doren, Shakespeare, 274. 104 Sophocles, ‘Antigone’, 1140, p. 205. 105 The Winter’s Tale 4.3 24–9. 106 Cf. Dodds, The Greeks and The Irrational, 78. 107 The Winter’s Tale, 4.4 357–78. 108 Ibid., 4.4 85–99. 109 Ibid., 4.4 404–28. 110 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), Chapter 3, 91–141. 111 The Winter’s Tale 4.4 513–21. 112 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 268. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903). 116 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 269. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 269–71. 121 Ibid., 271. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid, 272. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid.

250 Notes 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 274. 130 Ibid., 275. 131 Will McNeill, ‘A “Scarcely Pondered Word”. The Place of Tragedy: Heidegger, Aristotle, Sophocles’, in Philosophy and Tragedy, eds. Simon Sparks and Miguel de Beistegui (New York: Routledge, 2000), 179. 132 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 276. 133 The Winters Tale, 3.2 77–9. 134 John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 37. 135 Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 244a. 136 Delmore Schwartz, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New Direction Books, 1978), 1–9. The title appears to be taken from an epigraph to one of William Butler Yeats later poems, Responsibilities (1914). 137 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 325. I am appropriating Arendt here who is herself citing Cato. 138 The Winter’s Tale, 5.1 1–12. 139 Ibid., 5.1 13–16. 140 Ibid., 5.1 27–9. 141 Ibid., 5.1 34–54. 142 Cf. Col. 2:2-3 King James Version. ‘That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’. 143 The Winter’s Tale, 5.1 129–37. 144 Ibid., 5.1 167–8. 145 Ibid., 3.2 201–5. 146 Ibid., 3.2 232–8. 147 Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 85. 148 The Winter’s Tale, 5.3 109–11. 149 Ibid., 5.3 62–7. 150 Jn 20:17 King James Version 151 The Winter’s Tale, 5.3 98–105. 152 Cf. Jn 20:27 King James Version: ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’.

Notes  251 153 Cf. 1 Cor. 15:51-52 King James Version: ‘Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’. 154 The Winter’s Tale, 5.3 122–4. 155 Of course, contrary to this claim, no resurrection awaits Mamillius in the play. Accordingly, his absence – like that of the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – serves as an invisible outline of conflict and loss, as an anatomy of tragic accomplishment. He remains a sacrifice to madness. And yet, at the same time, outside the textual world of the play, can we not imagine events otherwise? As my concluding thoughts suggest, can we not imagine a world in which Mamillius too shares in resurrection? A world elsewhere?

Index accomplere  187 action  186–7 accomplishment as essence of  187 causing an effect  186 as social functions  187 aesthetics  13. See also art alethos pseudos  158 Alexander  83 anamnesis  38 Anaximander  86, 87, 201 ancient Greeks. See Greek(s) Antigone (Sophocles)  25, 101, 206, 246 n.27 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)  81 apathy  210 Arendt, Hannah  208 arete  98, 107 as efficiency  114–16 as question of excellence  115 as virtue  115 Aristotle  43, 44, 59, 61, 95, 112, 168, 212, 238 n.22 Armstrong, Neil  75 art  1, 11, 14–15, 40, 96 as an accomplishment  19 archaic understanding of  15 of dying  158 Olympian summits of  163 poetry and  196 religion and  112 revealing-concealing nature  19–20 Shakespeare  179 technology and (see technology) truth and  19–21, 132, 157, 158 work of  15, 20 artist  15 As You Like It (Shakespeare)  11 Athens  163 attentive interpretation  40 attentive listening  55 audience  200 authentic dwelling  129

authenticity of being  49–53. See also inauthenticity of being authentic life  87 authority vs. power  208 autonomy  179. See also freedom auxiliary thinking  189 Babylon  163 Beaufret, Jean  186, 189, 209, 214 beauty  15, 114, 162 being  15–16, 153. See also world authentic and inauthentic modes of  49–53 creative-destructive event  86 Dasein  58–60, 62, 65 endowment of  190 essence of  58–9 guilty  65–72 historical  16–17 indefinability  44 metaphysical conception and frame  43 phenomena and  48 phenomenological meaning of  87–8 question of the meaning of  41–4 self-evident nature  44 self-showing of  48 thinking belonging to  189–90 universality  44 Being and Time (Heidegger)  15, 37–91 being-there. See Dasein Bestand. See standing-reserve (Bestand) Bodenständigkeit  13 bondage for freedom  139 boundaries  2 Bradley, A. C.  72 building and thinking  158 Caesar  83 calculative thinking  43, 109–10, 113, 197, 210–11 calculus  166

Index care  61, 65–6, 67, 71, 73 Cartesian epistemology  87 causa efficiens (efficient cause)  95, 102 causa finalis (final cause)  95 causa formalis (formal cause)  95 causality  95–6 causa materialis (material cause)  95 cause  95–6 becoming truth  101–2 etymology  96 Cazeaux, Clive  232 n.80 changeling  33, 35, 141 chaotic love  139–40 children education of  37–8 as revealing-concealing incarnations  25 chorus  199–200 Christian tradition  140 colonial powers  101 comedy  204 ‘Common Notions’ (Euclid)  166 concepts  192 conjecture  6 conscience  65–72, 79–80, 114, 191 consciousness  148 contingency  2 Coriolanus (Shakespeare)  93–128 court of madness  169–86 (see also madness) theatre and  177–9 creativity  134 linguistic roots of  16 creature  149 cuckoldry  181 cultic practices of Greeks  166–7 Dante  8 Dark Age  163 Dasein  58–60, 62, 65 Das Unheimliche  101 daughters  25 death  72–91, 215–16. See also life accepting truth of  87 anticipation of possibility  73 care about  73 free for  72–86 metaphysical interpretation  73 as non-negotiable truth  86 nothingness and  158

253

unsurveilled element  149 worlding awareness and conditioning  149 deinos  101 deliverance  203 Der Aufriss  94 Derrida, Jacques  14, 173, 232 n.80 destiny  75 Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft  14 Dickinson, E.  8 dimension  2, 8, 12, 135–41 as chaotic love  139–40 as imagination  140–1 upward glance  135, 136 disease  106 divine  167–8 divine madness  184 divinity  129 Dostoyevsky  106 dramatists  178 earth  5, 99, 135–6, 144–6. See also world elemental stuff of  19 mysteries and  166–7 and world, rift between  16–17, 19–20, 30–5 Eckhart, Meister  190, 210, 248 n.71 economies of ancient Greeks  164 education  96 of children  37–8 efficiency  98, 102, 114–18. See also technology arete as  114–16 idols of  114 modern conception  115–16 practicality  116 quantifiability  116 tragic  98–9, 155 Egypt  163 The Eighth Elegy (Rilke)  148–9 Elements (Euclid)  166 Eleusinian Mysteries  167 Elizabethan English  10 Ellul, Jacques  98–9 elsewhere  122–8, 157, 158. See also world Emerson, Ralph Waldo  1, 2, 8, 20, 21, 119, 227 n.4, 231 n.71, 239 n.23, 242 n.98 endowment  190

254 enframing  104–5 English Renaissance  7 Enlightenment  116, 121 epistemology  160 Epistles of Paul  12 equality  165 eros. See love The Essential Constitution of Historicity (Heidegger)  75 ethical agency  217 ethics  209–26 contemporary  212 etymology  213 imaginary  217–18 moral decisions  210 thinking  213–14 Ethics (Aristotle)  61 Euclid  166 eunomia  166 evil  214 Existence and Existents (Levinas)  14 existential freedom  168–9 existentialism  186, 213 Existentialism Is a Humanism (Sartre)  186 factical existence  75 facts vs. truth  17–19 Fagles, Robert  101, 232 n.77 faith  160–1 leading to wisdom  161 religious vs. philosophical  161–2 verifiability  161 fancy  146–7 fate  75 Fiedler, Leslie  12–13 Finley, M. I.  164 foolishness  114 forgiveness  154 freedom  106–7, 150, 154–5 ancient Greeks and  164–5 bondage for  139 chaos-born love and  140 for death  72–86 existential  168–9 for life  86–91 ontological  168 political  168 Frye, Northrop  7–8 fundamental ontology  213

Index Gadamer, Hans-Georg  162 Garber, Marjorie  8, 183 German writers  14 Gestell  104–5. See also enframing gift  96, 190 capacity to accept  188 exchange of, ancient Greeks and  164 of language  2 madness as  216 goal  94 god(s)  101, 129–35, 194–7 as alien to known  130 concept of  130 cultic practices of Greeks  166–7 metaphysical  195 poetic  195–7 as speculative object of consideration/ belief  197 of systems and worldviews  112–13 unknown and invisible  134, 146 work of art and  20 as work of thinker and poet  133 Golden Age  163 grace  153–4 gratitude  154. See also kindness greatness  120 Greek(s)  13–17, 43, 67, 86–7, 101, 111, 209–12 aletheia  16 ancient, study of  163–9 arete as efficiency and  114–16 divinities  140 economies  164 equality and inequality  165 freedom and  164–5 Golden Age  163 justice  165–6 literature and philosophies  163 love (eros) for  29 mathematical operations  166 Olympian symbology  166–7 phenomenology  47–8 poiesis  16 state machinery  165 technology and arts  120 temple  20 texts  14 tragedies  20, 240 n.54 Greenblatt, Stephen  10, 179

Index Greene, Robert  197, 198, 221, 249 n.94 guilt/guilty  65–72, 79 Guthrie, W. K. C.  115 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  37–91 healing  214 Hebrews  160 Heidegger, Martin  13–14. See also specific work aesthetics  13 analysis of being (see being) Beaufret’s questions to  186 critics' accusations  159 on dimension  135–6 essence of language  22 on god (see god(s)) interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare  14 lecture course on Parmenides  13 on measures and measure-taking  144 on modern technology (see technology) on rift between earth and world  16–17, 19–20, 30–5 on thinking (see thinking) Hellenes  163 Hellenic echo  16 Hellenism  165 Henry V (Shakespeare)  200 Heraclitus of Ephesus  17, 87, 212–13, 223, 231 n.55, 237 n.87, 237 n.96–7, 243 n.6 heritage  75 hermeneutical partnerships  203 hermeneutics  14, 53 Hermes  223 Hermione  223–4 history  76–7 Hölderlin, Friedrich  14, 21, 32, 117, 130, 132, 133, 135, 146, 147, 228 n.9, 232 n.82, 242 n.97, 253 holy, dimension of  194 Homer  12, 115 Hosea  112, 113, 241 n.71 Huizinga, Johan  178, 227 n.5, 240 n.57, 247 nn.36, 65 humanism  186–97 humanistic projects  189 humanity  94 creative and protective powers of  148

255

humans  100–7 as dangerous creature  101 Greek tragedians  101 as poets  145 as supreme  101 uncanniness and power  104 ideas  111 idolatry  111–13 idolizing  112 idols  111 The Illusion of Power (Orgel)  178 imaginary beings  31–2 imagination  6, 157–8 dimension as  140–1 fancy and  146–7 madness and (see madness) imaginings  145 inauthenticity of being  49–53. See also authenticity of being inauthentic self  72 inequality  165 institutionalizing  162 institutional relationships and arrangements  27 intellectual relationship  2 interpretation  53–5 interpretive method  39 ‘-isms’  189 isonomia  166 Jonson, Ben  8 Jung, Carl  106, 240 n.55 justice, ancient Greeks and  165–6 Kant, Immanuel  140–1, 231 n.57 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger)  140–1 kata-basis  38 Keats, John  15 kindness  153–5 King James Bible  10 knowledge  161 Kreutzer, Conradin  110 Kubler, George  40 language  1–2, 131, 159–61 acceptance  23 appeal of  143 creative-poetic essence  22

256 event of  21 exceptional  1–6 foundation  143 gift of  2 as house of being  21–2, 131 humanistic projects  189 intercession  160 meaning and truth as  160 metaphor  2 misunderstanding and misuse of  159 phenomenological beginning  161 phenomenological experience of  159 power  22 rifting forth  23–4 Shakespeare  10–11, 24 silence and  143 truth and  22–4 universe and  2 Laws (Plato)  37 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger)  21–2, 130–1, 157–226 Levinas, Emmanuel  14 liberation in social spheres  168–9 licentiousness  181 life. See also death cost of  99 free for  86–91 as marketplace  98 as transgression  201 as trial  201 listening  22, 67, 131, 133, 134, 149, 159, 190 to language  94–5, 143 revenge and  55–7 to silence  143–5 literary societies  14 logos  8, 35, 95 loss of action  80 love blindness to vision of  34 capacity to  188 chaotic  139–40 envisioning  26–9 for Greeks  29 lyrical voicing of  29 phenomenon of  233 n.101 philosophy of  28–9 salvation and  140 Shakespearean  138–40

Index madness  4, 5 divine  184 as gift  216 as a gift from god  216 healing  214 malevolence  214 mysteries of  184 poetic vision  179–80 political and poetical courts  169–86 magical power  155 magical vision  142 marriage  27, 225 Marx, Karl  8, 14, 186, 191, 194, 196, 214, 239 n.26 Marxism  186, 191, 213 mass societies, issues haunting  157 mathematical operations, Greeks and  166 McNeill, Will  215 meaning  2–3 measures/measure-taking  131–2, 144–7 meditative thinking  109–10, 113, 194–5 metaphorization  31–2 metaphors  227 n.3 metaphysical thinking  193 metaphysics  87, 192–6 metaxy  161, 234 n.114 Mezey, Robert  153 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)  1–35 Miller, J. Hillis  232 n.80 minorities  217 modern subjectivism  14–15 modern technology. See technology modes of knowing truth  61–2 money  110–11, 116, 238–9 n.22 ancient Greek perception of  164 as measure of power  98 as representative medium of exchange  97–8 will-to-power  111 monstrous energy  17 mortality  58–9, 197 mortals  146, 148 dwelling  158 Murray, Gilbert  166

Index nature  30–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich  8, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 50, 67, 69, 74, 76, 86, 87, 96, 104, 144, 163, 196, 215, 227 nn.1, 3 nihilism  16 nothing/nothingness  16, 87–8, 158 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats)  15 Ode to Man (Sophocles)  100 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)  206 Olympian symbology  166–7 On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (Nietzsche)  76 ontological freedom  168 ontological thinking, freedom of  213–14 ontology  48, 53 ‘the Open’ (das Offene)  147–50 ordo cognoscendi  195 ordo essendi  195 Orgel, Stephen  177–8 originary ethics  213 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger)  1–35, 132 Othello (Shakespeare)  81 Otto, Walter F.  184 painters  23 Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (Greene)  197, 198, 221, 249 n.94 Parmenides  13 passionate thinking  72 pathology  108–9 Patmos (Hölderlin)  117 Pericles (Shakespeare)  200 Persia  163 pharmakis  242 n.85 pharmakon  107, 119, 124, 242 n.85 pharmakos  242 n.85 phenomena  47–8 and being  48 experience of  159 philosophy  14, 17. See also being as academic discipline  43 adventure of  214 figurative price of  82 history of  168 institution and practice  43–4 journey and genius of  43 of love  28–9

257

thinking (see thinking) true nature of  187 phronesis  61, 62, 64, 84, 164 physis (nature)  96 Pindar  86, 107–8, 115, 201 Plato  8, 37, 40–1, 43, 44, 73, 111, 115, 135, 158, 160, 163, 167, 216, 231 n.62, 233 n.101, 242 n.85 poetic agency  149 poetical court of madness  169–86 ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ (Heidegger)  129–56 poetic measuring  131–2, 144–7 poetic testimony  217 poetizing and language  21–4 poetry art and  196 magical power  155 measure and measure-taking  131–2, 144–7 service of  155 poets  23 fancies and imaginations  146–7 as guardians of the house of being  131 humans as  145 listening to silence  145 poiesis  16, 96 political court of madness  169–86 political freedom  168 political power  179, 184 power  154–5, 188 authority vs.  208 cause becoming  101 money as measure of  98 of possibility  190 privilege of  208 structures of  178 veracity  101–2 Western  98 practical wisdom  61 prejudice, portraits of  25 private realm of world  111–12 problem solving  188 prophetic testimony  217 protective heeding  214 proverb  198 psychology  14 Pythagoras  167

258

Index

The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)  93–128 questions/questioning  93–4 radical apathy  217 rationality  104–5, 106, 165, 166, 168 reason  29–35, 94, 114, 168 receptive acquiescence  217–18 reconciliation  203 redemption  149, 199, 203. See also restoration regeneration  179, 203, 204, 221, 224–6 regenerative movement  214 regenerative symphony  224 Reinventing Shakespeare (Taylor)  7 religion  17, 112, 129, 161, 178. See also god(s) religious piety or devotion  38 religious vs. philosophical faith  161–2 Renaissance Theatre  179 representation  107–8 The Republic (Plato)  37–8 resoluteness  57, 71–2, 75–7, 79, 84–5, 119–20 resources  105 restoration  147–55, 201–3 revenge, listening and  55–7 revolution  167 Ricoeur, Paul  232 n.80 rift between earth and world  16–17, 19–20, 30–5 Rilke, Rainer Maria  8, 37, 106, 147–51, 190, 244 n.43, 248 n.72 Rimbaud, Arthur  6, 8, 106, 229 n.19 romances  225 Romano, Julio  222 Rome  96–7, 102–4, 109, 121–8. See also Coriolanus (Shakespeare) Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)  27, 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  95, 238 n.7 salvation  117, 118, 119, 128, 140, 197, 198, 203 Sartre, Jean-Paul  160, 186, 191, 194, 195, 196, 214 schizophrenia  108–9 schizophrenic pathology  109 sciences  14, 114, 188, 213 scientism  186 sculptors  23

self-knowledge  53 self-transparency  53 sense of the text  39–40 Shakespeare, William  7. See also specific work art of  179 centrality and influence  7–13 Fiedler on  12–13 Garber on  8 German writers on  14 language  10–11, 24 romances  225 as a secular bible  12 Taylor on  7 works of  8, 23–4 Shakespeare After All (Garber)  8 Shakespearean love  138–40 shared realm of world  111–12 silence  25 listening to  145 in practice of magic  143 understanding  143 Simmel, Georg  238 n.22 Socrates  37–8, 212 Sophist (Plato)  40–1 Sophists  115 Sophocles  25, 100, 163, 206, 215, 239 n.34, 246 n.27 soul  96 space  166 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  14 spell (magical)  142–3 silence and  143 spirits  31–2, 101 spiritual death  215 spiritual relationship  2 standing-reserve (Bestand)  104–6 Stellardi, Guisuppe  232 n.80 Stone Age  163 The Stranger in Shakespeare (Fiedler)  12 suffering  192 suffrage  97 suicidal contemplation  38–9 surveiller  149 Taylor, Gary  7, 8 techne  61, 84, 96, 98. See also technology technology  93–128 art and  118, 120–2 being a system and a rational  100

Index challenging  99 concept  99–100 efficiency (see efficiency) free relationship to  117–18 mysterious essence of  116–17 revelation of  105 wonderlessness  118 The Tempest (Shakespeare)  129–56 temple  20 temporality  73 Temporis filia veritas  198 testimonies  217 theatre and court  177–9 theology  163 they-self  50–1, 65, 72 thinking  187–8 auxiliary  189 building and  158 calculative (see calculative thinking) as listening  190 meditative  109–10, 113, 194–5 originary  189 questioning path  94 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)  74–5 Tillich, Paul  132, 243 n.11 time  74, 197–209 chronological  74 as form and mechanism of fortune  198 humans experiencing  74 personified as the work’s chorus  199–200 as political witness  202 trial  201 truth and  198–9 tragedy  38–9, 240 n.54 tragic efficiency  98–9, 155 transcendence  2 trial of time  201 true lies  158 truth  96 art and  19–21, 132, 157, 158 as causa efficiens  102 cause becoming  101–2 drive for  158 facts vs.  17–19 founding of  15 language and  22–4

259 modes of knowing  61–2 mysterious and unknown  145 time and  198–9

unheimlich  101 unsurveilled element  149–50 Unüberwachtes  149 Van Doren, Mark  10 veritas  109 Vernant, Jean-Pierre  97, 165 vigil  149 vigilare  149 vindicare  55 vision  146–7 The Way to Language (Heidegger)  21 whole being  73 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare)  157–226 women  25, 217 words  94–5. See also language existential experience of  161 learning the world through  159 origin of  161 reasons  161 spelling and arranging  142–3 world. See also being authentic/inauthentic being and  49–53 beauty and horror of  58–65 Dasein  59–60 elsewhere  122–8 meanings for  49 private and shared  111–12 resources  105 richness of  148 rift between earth and  16–17, 19–20, 30–5 spatiality  59 spectre of  108 squaring images of  108 as standing-reserve  104–6 and vision  217 as worldliness  49 worldliness  49 worldviews  108 Wozu Dichter? (Why Poets? or What Are Poets For?) (Heidegger)  147