It is the most “stylish” of philosophers, those most alert to the expressive constraints and resources of stated thought, to its implicit cadence, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who look to Heraclitus. It is Novalis, practitioner of the Orphic fragment, and Heidegger the neologist, the craftsman of tautology. Rhapsodic and oracular intellects recognize in Heraclitus the fundamental, generative collision between the elusive opacity of the word and the equally elusive but compelling clarity and evidence of things. Immediate or hurried apprehension, the colloquial, misses the decisive tension, that, in Heraclitus’s celebrated duality, of the bow and the lyre. To listen closely—Nietzsche defined philology as “reading slowly”—is to experience, always imperfectly, the possibility that the order of words, notably in metrics and the metrical nerve-structure within good prose, reflects, perhaps sustains the hidden yet manifest coherence of the cosmos. A conjecture cardinal to metaphysics. The analogy with Pythagorean and Keplerian models of concordance between harmonious relations and intervals in music and planetary motions is relevant. Again, music is the transit between metaphysical-cosmological speculation, i.e. “mirroring,” and semantic articulation.
George Steiner; The Poetry of Thought

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  1. victorioushandofgod posted this