10
PARTISAN REVIEW
literature on Nietzsche and on Rilke who has attempted any detailed
comparison: Erich Heller, who has included an essay on "Rilke and
Nietzsche, With a Discourse on Thought, Belief, and Poetry" in
his
book,
The Disinherited Mind.
On most points I agree with Heller,
and I have learned from
his
essay. What I am interested in is not
criticism of another critic but a better understanding of some really
important problems which have rarely been posed so well. Some of
Heller's brilliantly formulated criticisms shall here be used as points
of departure.
"In the great poetry of the European tradition," Heller
say~
"the emotions do not interpret; they respond to the interpreted world.
In Rilke's mature poetry the emotions do the interpreting and then
respond to their own interpretation." At this point one is apt to
think
of Faulkner: often he does not first give us the interpreted
course of events and then the emotional response of his characters,
but he lets their emotions do the interpreting, and many readers find
it very difficult to determine what has occurred. Heller continues:
"All great art (and, for that matter, every human order stabilized by
tradition) rests on a fundamentally fixed correspondence between
the impact of external experience on man and man's articulate
answers."
Is this an acceptable characterization of great
art
or, for that
matter, great philosophy? To begin with the latter, some of the great
philosophers have done a good deal of rationalizing, but that for
which they are remembered is their refusal to accept the traditional
order. We do not continue to read Descartes because his proofs of
God's existence or the immortality of the soul command our respect,
but because he resolved to doubt everything. We study Berkeley not
because he was a bishop but because he questioned the existence of
matter. It is not
his
traditional life but his radical skepticism that
es–
tablishes Hume's claim to greatness. And Kant's stature is not a func–
tion of
his
postulates of God, freedom, and immortality, which few
philosophers have taken seriously, but of his
Critique of Pure Reason
which sought to annihilate the very basis of traditional metaphysics
and theology.
In this respect the great
poets
are at one with the great phil–
osophers. Most of the famous names can be disregarded here because
great
poets
who have written more than half a dozen fine
poems
