The “gaps” of the western mind and modern poetics

Abstract

As early as at the beginning of the nineteenth century western philosophy in general and the work of Schopenhauer in particular indicated the need to assimilate the results of eastern thinking into western philosophy. Although the most important philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century did not choose to continue to proceed accordingly, the representatives of natural sciences and poetry were all the more eager to elaborate on the new insight. Among them the physicist Erwin Schrodinger engaged in a systematic assessment of the European philosophical traditions and realised that there are “gaps” (“die Lucken, welche die Verstandlichkeitsannahme lasst“) in the causal, i.e., cause and effect patterns of the European mind. He experienced this as a crisis of the western thinking and its attempted objectivity, and stressed the need for a “Blutmischung mit dem Osten”. Schrodinger undertook the exploration of the above problem not as a philosopher or a philologist, but as an assessor of the consequences of the scientific findings of his age. His aim was to call attention to the antinomies underlying the history of the European mind. Regarding poetics, the question arises how define the poet’s space in this system, and where is the creator within creation? Not only did a physicist meditate on this complex subject but contemporary poets were also challenged by its implications, and my paper aims to inquire into their efforts. In my view the forms evolving in 19–20th century modernity mark the stages of becoming conscious of the “gaps” discovered in the western mind. Departing from Schrodinger’s idea, in the following I attempt to identify poetic resolutions which be compared to the question the physicist raised. They will mark borderline situations, since through the dialogical quality of modernity they point toward the evolution of the synthetic mode.