THE ELEMENTAL DIALECTIC OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME XXXVIII

Editor-in-Chief

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Belmont, lvlassachusetts

a sequel to: VoL IV : Ingardeniana I VoL XXX : Ingardeniana II VoL XXXIII : Ingardeniana III

as well as to the following volumes in philosophy and literature: VoL XII : The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature VoL XVIII : The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition:

Poetic - Epic - Tragic VoL XIX : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 1:

The Sea VoL XXIII : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part 2:

The Airy Elements Vol. XXVIII: The Elemental Passions of the Soul Vol. XXXII : Phenomenology and Aesthetics, Approaches to Compar­

ative Literature and Other Arts

THE ELEMENTAL DIALECTIC OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

The Passions of the Soul

in the Onto-Poiesis of Life

Edited by

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

A -T. Tymieniecka, President

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

TIJe elemer'1-:al aialectlc of light arId darkness the paSSlons of "the

soul In the onto-pOleS1S nf life' 8clteO b\ Anna-Tecesa v"l'le""1ec ... a.

p. em. -- (Analecta !-1usserllana ; v. 3S) Includes Index.

1. L 1 terature--Ph II osophV. In l1terature. 4. Dlaiectlc

2. LIght In 11te"ature. 3. Darkness lr. l1terature. I. iyrr,lenlecka. Anna

-Teresa. II. Ser'es. 83279.H94A129 vol. 38 [PN47] 142' .7 s--dc20 [S09' .9336]

ISBN 978-90-481-4121-0

Printed all acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

© 1992 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1992

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1992 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice

91-<:2956

may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means. electronic or mechanical. including photocopying. recording or by any information

storage and retrieval system. without written permission from the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-90-481-4121-0 ISBN 978-94-017-3296-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3296-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE THEME / Light and Darkness: The Primeval Dialectic of Life vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ~

PART ONE

THOMAS RYBA / Elemental Forms, Creativity and the Trans­formative Power of Literature in A-T. Tymieniecka's Trac-tatus Brevis 3

KRYSTYNA GORNIAK-KOCIKOWSKA / The Light, the Word, the Sea, and the Inner Moral Self 27

LOIS OPPENHEIM / "No Matter How No Matter Where": The Unlit in Samuel Beckett's Not I and Stirrings Still 43

SIDNEY FESHBACH / The Light at the End of the Tunnel Is Coming Right at Me, or, the Dialectic of Elemental Light and Elemental Dark 55

ELDON N. VAN LIERE / Monet's Revealing Light: Evolution and Devolution 85

SIT ANSU RAY / Tagore on the Dialectics of Light and Darkness 101

PART TWO

THEODORE LITMAN / The Sublime as a Source of Light in the Works of Nicolas Boileau 111

PETER MORGAN / Light in Wordsworth Illustrated 121 COLETTE V. MICHAEL / Light/Darkness and the Phenome-

non of Creation in Victor Hugo 131 CHRISTOPHER LALONDE / Illuminating Light in August 149

v

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART THREE

L. M. FINDLAY / Imagining Epistemology: Plato and Roman-tic Luminaries 163

CHRISTOPH EYKMAN / The Symbolic Meaning of Light in Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild 183

BEVERL Y SCHLACK RANDLES / Virginia Woolf's Poetic Imagination: Patterns of Light and Darkness in To the Light-house 193

JORGE GARCfA-G6MEZ / The Swan and Erotic Love: Light, Color, and Myth in Ruben Dario's Poetics 207

WILLIAM S. HANEY II/Metaphor and the Experience of Light 237

PART FOUR

SHERL YN ABDOO I Jake Barnes' Insomnia and Fiesta Night-mare in The Sun Also Rises 249

DAVID BROTTMAN / Light-Values as Existential Indices in Thomas Pynchon's Extravagant Comic Revery 269

ALAN PRATT I A Note on Heidegger's Death Analytic: The Tolstoyian Correlative 297

PART FIVE

HANS H. RUDNICK I Per aspera ad astra: Aspects of Dark-ness and Light in Western Literary Consciousness 307

GEORGE L. SCHEPER / Illumination and Darkness in the Song of Songs 315

FREEMA GOTTLIEB / Light and the Aesthetics of Holiness in the Jewish Spiritual Tradition 337

MARLIES KRONEGGER I Reason and Laughter: Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher and La Danse des Morts 351

CARMEN BALZER I Creative Imagination and Dream 363

INDEX OF NAMES 377

THE THEME

LIGHT AND DARKNESS:

THE PRIMEVAL DIALECTIC OF LIFE

When we refer in any way to light and/or darkness, their essential conjunction is necessarily surmised - conjunction and opposition. This very oppostion indicates a primal relationship: darkness without refer­ence to light would have no degree in quality, no pitch, no intensity; in fact, it would have no qualitative endowment at all. This amounts to saying that there would be no meaning of "darkness." And the same holds true for light. It would at first seem that this type of intrinsic relatedness of light to darkness and the inverse holds for every pair of opposites. But where such pairs as straight and crooked, cold and warm, day and night certainly imply each other in their qualitative endowments, and the gradation to be measured in terms of "more and less," the dialectic exhausts itself in the nuances of their qualitative endowment and stops there. It does not touch their respective essential significant nuclei. As much as we may fancy a perpetual day, may we also envisage all lines being crooked in an infinite variety of ways. The situation becomes more puzzling with the opposites of warm and cold. This opposition seems to border on that of light and darkness. And, this for a good reason: they too acquire significance with their role in life. In fact, light and darkness are not only the primal fruits of Imaginatio Creatrix as this latter sets to work establishing a human significance of life, but they assume this role while being the primogenital moments of the construction of this gigantic, existential sphere of the living being which perpetually glimmers in qualitative variety. They play in a way a unique role with respect to all the other elemental factors. They emerge with the initial steps by which the human creative function establishes the main factors to become operative in the constitution of this specifically human sphere of life - the human world of life - but their entering into the constitutive functioning of the human being is fulfilling a unique role: the elements of light and darkness in their dialectics transmit into the human significance of life the basic existential opera­tions of life itself. In their dialectical game, light and darkness bring together physis and psyche, natural growth and techne, the telic striv­ings promoting life with those spurning the spiritual unfolding, bios and

Vll

Vlll THE THEME

ethos ... in an infinitely nuanced variating rainbow whose glimmering rays fulgurate, sparkle, expand, in an ever new play.

The dialectic of light and darkness appears then, as I have pointed out elsewhere, l as the essential element in the poiesis of life at large; playing in all its sectors: organic, vital, psychic, societal, spiritual and religious, a life-prompting and enhancing role on the one hand, and permeating them all, it unifies vital stirrings and moves with the specifi­cally human experience.

Human language, artistic creativity, literary imagination and creation are so permeated by this dialectic that it needs a special and extensive analytic effort to disentangle from their tightly spun fabric the particular lines, threads, designs, and stitches through which light and darkness subtend and weave together its (this fabric's) living tissue.

This analytic work is the task of philosophy.

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

NOTE 1 Cf. by the present writer, The Passions of the Soul and the Onto-poiesis of Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere thanks are due to my assistants Mark Olivere and Louis Houthakker for their help with the editing of this volume and the compilation of the Table of Contents; thanks are due too to Isabelle Houthakker for the proofreading of the text, and to Robert Wise for the preparation of the Index.

A-T. T.

IX

Conference 1990: Sydney Feshbach. Hans Rudnick, Louis Houthakker.

x

Some participants in the 1990 seminar in aesthetics.

Xl

Some participants of the 1990 conference. From left to right, first row: Bruce Ross. Manuel Vazquez-Bigi. Jadwiga Smith, Rosemarie Kieffer, Marlies Kronegger, Lois

Oppenheim. Second row: Bill Smith, Hans Rudnick, Kathryn McKinley.

XII

The 1991 Conference. Cronkhite cafeteria: Maija Kule, Rosemarie Kieffer, A-T. Tymieniecka, Marlies Kronegger, Sarah and Jorge Garcia Gomez.

xiii

Hans Rudnick (right) , Louis Houthakker (middle) and Robert Wise (left).

xiv

Louis Houthakker preparing our book exhibit for the conference.

xv

Hans Rudnick.

xvi