Abstract
Dillard next integrates the objective yet objectless holy with human decision-making and action. His analysis begins with what Heidegger describes as a thankful openness to the world, an openness with temporal and spatial aspects. From some of Heidegger’s remarks about Georg Trakl’s poetry, it can be seen how something can function as a sort of fixed clock measuring actual and possible changes within our world and us. As Heidegger suggests, in his discussion of Friederich Hölderlin’s poetry, thankful openness also involves “the dimension” in which we reflect upon and evaluate the actual or possible changes of which we have become aware. The elements of energy and tranquility included within Otto’s phenomenology of the holy then guide us in making principled decisions about whether or not to embrace these perceived changes. Dillard also indicates a strongly Christocentric flavor in the resulting Gelassenheit theology.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 139.
- 2.
Ibid., 142.
- 3.
Ibid., 146.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid., 142.
- 6.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 85.
- 7.
Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 140.
- 8.
Quoted by Heidegger in “Language in the Poem,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 173. For the original German text, see Georg Trakl, Die Dichungen Gesamtausgabe mit enimen Anhang: Zeugnisse und Erinnerungen (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1938), 127.
- 9.
Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem,” 176.
- 10.
Aristotle, Physics, trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 4.12, 221a1 (294).
- 11.
Ibid., 4.14, 223a29–34. For a more comprehensive discussion of the Aristotelian concept of time as the measure of change, see Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), especially 84–97.
- 12.
Heidegger, “Language in the Poem,” 164–165. For the original German text, see Trakl, Die Dichungen Gesamtausgabe mit enimen Anhang: Zeugnisse und Erinnerungen, 163.
- 13.
Heidegger designates “apartness” as “the site of Trakl’s poetic work.” See “Language in the Poem,” 172.
- 14.
“Not necessarily,” since presumably even an hourglass or a watch could function in a manner similar to Trakl’s poetic figure of the stranger. In such a case, its units of temporal duration would be incidental to the hourglass or the watch functioning as a device registering actual and possible changes. Moreover, as the next example will make clear, a “Trakl clock” might presuppose finer temporal discriminations (years, seasons, mornings, afternoons, and evenings of days) without using such units to calculate a rate of change.
- 15.
Heidegger’s original German is less ambiguous than its English translation, since Heidegger uses “die Gegend” for a region in the local sense and the older form “die Gegnet” for region in the global sense of the openness bounding our perceptual field. See “Conversation on a Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John A., Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 66.
- 16.
See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1975): “Things which, as locations, allow a site we now in anticipation call buildings (154).
- 17.
See ibid., 152–153.
- 18.
Heidegger, “Conversation on a Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, 64.
- 19.
Ibid., 65.
- 20.
The following two paragraphs build upon Don Idhe’s presentation of basic phenomenological concepts in Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities (Albany: State University of New York, 2012), 35–44.
- 21.
Heidegger, “Conversation on a Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, 68.
- 22.
Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thinking, 225.
- 23.
The sky as open expanse with a flexible limit conforms to what Idhe describes as the Eastern as opposed to the early Western conception of the heavens: “In the early cosmologies of the West, the sky was the dome of the heavens and seen as solid, its color was the color of the dome. In the East, the sky is the open and color recedes infinitely within the openness” (Experimental Phenomenology, 92).
- 24.
The same applies to a place (e.g., the summer cabin and its environs) or a routine (e.g., taking a morning walk around the pond) that serves as a Trakl clock: once the place or routine has made us aware of actual or possible changes, we step back from the specific region of the place or routine and await guidance about whether to accept, reject, or ignore the detected changes.
- 25.
Heidegger, “Conversation on as Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, 72.
- 26.
See Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 220.
- 27.
Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation,” in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 488–509.
- 28.
Ibid., 507.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., 508.
- 31.
The temporal spatiality of thoughtful openness does not delimit any general characteristic of being disclosed in time–space as something common to all beings. Whenever a relatively stable being (e.g., a cabin) is used as a Trakl clock, it functions as a measure that is fundamentally different from what is measured and held up for decision: namely, other beings that have changed or might change and are momentary distanced in the dimension of Hölderlin space. On such occasions, the fracturing between the being that measures and the beings that are measured frustrates any concomitant attempt to subsume all of these beings under any single, overarching feature—even a temporal–spatial one. Whereas Heidegger’s under-developed remarks in Contributions about the ubiquity of “time–space” threaten to re-entrench metaphysics, no such threat looms here.
- 32.
The following example is taken from Barry Morely, Beyond Consensus: Salvaging Sense of the Meeting (Wallingford: Pendle Hill Publications, 1993), 14–15.
- 33.
Ibid., 17–18.
The author also uses the example of spectator who focuses his eyes away from the baseball game occurring in the site of activity right before him and instead toward a tree just beyond the right-field fence where nothing in particular is happening. The spectator is thereby able to take in more of what actually happens in the game than by looking right at it. See ibid., 17.
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Dillard, P.S. (2016). From Phenomenology to Agency. In: Non-Metaphysical Theology After Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58480-9_8
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