Poetry and Experience

by Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf A. Makkreel (Editor ), Frithjof Rodi (Editor )

This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.


This volume presents Dilthey's principal writings on aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" (also known as his Poetics ) is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hölderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung , a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, German Literature

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Wilhelm Dilthey (German: [ˈdɪltaɪ]) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.

Reviews

[سیــــــاوش · Rating 4 out of 5]

دیلتای حیات روانی شاعر را از زمینه تاریخی زندگی او جدا نمی‌کند. او می‌نویسد: «فعالیت‌ها و عملکرد‌های تخیلی در خلا رشد نمی‌کند. این اقدامات باید در روح قدرتمند سالمی که انباشته از واقعیت است ریشه بگیرند. هر شعر نبوغ‌آمیزی از واقعیت تاریخی تغذیه می‌کند.»
این نبوغ شعری از امور واقع تاریخی‌ای تغذیه می‌کند که در تجربه زیسته شاعر ثبت شده است.
دیلتای معتقد بود شاعر نباید محدود شود به توصیف و طرح جهان آن‌گونه که هست. وی باید بصیرتی داشته باشد که بتواند تخیلاتش را فراتر از آنچه صرفا در تجربه داده شده است تعالی بخشد. انسان جنون‌زده به این دلیل که شبکه روانی شکل گرفته او غیرفعال شده تخیلاتش از واقعیت منفک شده، تخیلات شاعر واقعیت را تغییر می‌دهد از آن رو که نشانه‌ای از نوع  typical است بر ملا کند.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I concetti di Dilthey espressi in questo prolisso ma significativo testo sono riassumibili in pochi semplici punti: attraverso quattro ben documentate e precise monografie, dedicate, rispettivamente, a Lessing, Goethe, Novalis e Hölderlin, il filosofo tedesco intende esplorare le "Weltanschauung" dei singoli autori in modo da mostrare come, nel caso della cultura tedesca, ci sia stata un'evoluzione che ha dato significativi apporti alla cultura e alla riflessione sulla vita e sul mondo circostante.

Tralasciando l'accesa enfasi con cui Dilthey compone le monografie, che potrebbe essere derivata dagli sviluppi dell'Idealismo tedesco (in fondo, come storico, si è occupato di Schleiermacher, che dopo la "triade" Fichte-Schelling-Hegel era il maggior rappresentante del movimento), tra le righe dei quattro solidi saggi si scorge l'intento di fondare un nuovo modo di intendere l'estetica che si erge sul concetto di espressione. Dilthey, infatti, ritiene che le potenzialità rappresentative della poesia siano superiori a quelle di cui dispone la pittura. Di conseguenza, l'estetica non si focalizzerà più sul concetto di "mimesi", cioè sull'osservazione disinteressata o meno della realtà per cercare dei modelli, bensì darà peso all'"Erlebnis" del poeta, la sua esperienza vissuta; l'opera poetica, cioè, trapela dal vissuto interiore del suo autore e attraverso di essa viene storicizzata e si carica di significati solo in riferimento al mondo in cui egli è stato partecipe.

Dilthey, tuttavia, vuole anche andare oltre questo fatto e tentare, in riferimento a Schleiermacher, di compiere un processo di ermeneutica: nonostante, infatti, le poesie restino storicizzate nel periodo e nel sentire in cui esse vengono composte, si può comunque tentare in esse di cogliere dei significati universali, le si possono interpretare in un'altra ottica attraverso un processo di comprensione che sarà oggetto centrale di discussioni lungo tutto il Novecento, da Heidegger fino a Gadamer.

Queste sono, in conclusione, i principali spunti che si nascondono dietro l'eccessiva prolissità dell'opera: è una lettura non impegnativa ma consigliata esclusivamente agli appassionati della letteratura tedesca del XIX secolo o agli amanti della filosofia, perché probabilmente dopo un po' di pagine, se i dettagliati ragionamenti di Dilthey intorno agli autori non riescono a convincere il lettore, questi faticherà tanto ad arrivare all'ultima pagina. Resta comunque un'opera centrale per un filosofo alquanto importante per il pensiero del secolo scorso, e nonostante io, personalmente, ritenga la pittura ben più potente della poesia, sono rimasto comunque soddisfatto dagli spunti che Dilthey stesso è riuscito a darmi.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Poetry and Experience, Wilhelm Dilthey traces the history of humankind's attitudes towards art as reflected in the stages of philosophical history. This is where the dominant element in Dilthey is ambiguous in itself, suggesting that any argument proved can also be disputed with an equal amount of practical vigor. Keeping with this line of thinking, Dilthey suggests that, for instance, an argument can be made that modern philosophy has failed because it has been proven to be unscientific, that it is only philosophy in an alienated form, containing no truth but a hierarchy of propositions that is ultimately not compelling. What might the consequences be of a philosophy that has developed from a non-laboring society, and what would happen if the absolute conditions vouching for the trustworthiness of work were to disappear? Is modernist philosophy disaffected from science and, as such, is a province removed from logic, as Dilthey contends, and what has this to do with the retreat into surfaces that has stifled the development of the class struggle? According to Dilthey, "In ideal presence a mere representation of something past is transformed into a complete image where there is no past as distinct from the present. ... The ideal presence created in art allows us to fashion a more coherently emotional response to reality than would otherwise be possible." This has a bearing on my writings of the pitfalls associated with a predominance of attention to the surface-image of things which has the effect, in the Warholian sense, of turning reality into a system for the disbursement and regulation of pseudo-events. The danger of a superficial reading of philosophy stems from an overly logocentric reading of text and one that is, semiotically, allied with a surface-level interpretation of the Bible, which is the bearer of the ultimate signifiers of poetry and experience. The retreat or detour into surfaces is wrong-headed because the wholly conceptual realm of Truth is imageless, and this is why God is invisible to us on the mortal plane of existence. Behold here the essential nucleus of my permutation of the academically-inclined story of philosophy!

[stephen]

this is a a particularly stodgy-looking volume--the hardcover has a little profile cameo of dilthey and is grey. inside there are 4 main texts written between 1887-1910--what holds them together is dilthey's project of historicizing aesthetics in general, poetics in particular (relativizing the traditional categories, making the methodology more inductive) and interest in making things as a psycho-social process.

not surprisingly, dilthey's work in this area is also a product of its situation (whence the emphasis on genius in the earlier texts and on the always irritating goethe/holderin nexus of "great germanic poetry" the "highest expression of the german spirit" blah blah blah in the later)...

poetry linked to process, to forming, to generating representation not in the sense of image-of but more in the sense of pattern (networks of associations/distinctions, valences, etc), so not an Event in the old-school poetry-as-Oracular sense but an event in the sense of traces of the processes of bringing-into-relation---but this presupposes an equivalence between poetry as a surface and perception that tends to efface technique.

on the other hand, dilthey worries the problem of communication--if there is something of an event-status to poetry, that event refers mostly to the person doing the writing: so what links the experience of poet to that of reader and how does this linkage work? which brings technique back in again. turn of the century academic types of technique, of course--newer versions could run in other directions.

dilthey probably lay as much behind benjamin as does marx, if you think about it.


anyway-->
this is perhaps best approached from one of two directions: either knit into a broader reading of dilthey's other writing (which would enable controlling for the terminological looseness and emphasis on emotion which is of a piece with it in favor of the more rigorous frames in his historical/hermeneutics)
or as material to be cut up.