Found in 1 comment on Hacker News
ValentinA23 · 2024-11-02 · Original thread
I think what bothers you is the poetical aspect of this text (in the sense of Jakobson's function of language, which boils down to, quoting wikipedia, focusing on "the message for its own sake"). This seems to fit what is said elsewhere in the article:

>He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.”

This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it:

>The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside

Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique.

Some quotes from the book [1]:

>[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter.

Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger.

>Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way.

Heidegger

[1]https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Cont...

Fresh book recommendations delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday.