Description
Over two hundred years ago, Hölderlin asked the question: ‘What are poets for in a destitute time?’. Over eighty years later, Nietzsche proposed that the philosopher should be ‘a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things’. Exactly midway through the twentieth century, Heidegger returned to Hölderlin’s question in his essay ‘What are Poets For?’, where he referred to that particular poet’s output as ‘thinking poetry’, and that we are now living in ‘the age of the world’s night’ and ‘abyss of the world’ which ‘must be experienced and endured’. The twenty-first century is really only beginning now, where the centrality of human existence is no longer possible as we are plunged into an age of environmental catastrophe and technological omnipotence.In this one-day workshop, we return to Hölderlin’s question applied even more acutely to the contemporary ecological disaster, in an attempt to merge the natural with the technical once again. Could it be that we need to radically redefine the role and activity of the philosopher in these troubled times? Is there a certain kind of philosophical poet that can help bring us into a new poetic mode of thinking and into a new or renewed reality? There could be a variety of approaches and experiences in making and reading poetry: a ‘reaching into the abyss’, a guide into the ‘arts of noticing’, to enter a reality of the ‘thick present’, an act of resistance in an age of acceleration, reconnecting with non-human entities and matter, or simply ‘a shout in the street’. Addressing these questions and approaches, we will encounter poetic modes of thought in Plato, Lucretius, Hölderlin, Leopardi, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Pessoa, Joyce, Eliot and Coetzee. Eight speakers have been invited to traverse these diverse philosophical poets in the art of living and dying in an age of ecological destruction, survival and flourishing
| Period | 24 May 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Lisbon, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |