Full Description
Innovatively combining philosophical inquiry and aphoristic writing, this study presents a bold new interpretation of philosophical poetics. Exploring fragments, both thematically and formally, Luke Fischer situates the form as uniquely positioned between philosophy and poetry.
Like poetry, fragments condense insights into few words, employ striking metaphors that draw intuitive connections, and make space for creative interpretation. Contrasting with the logical linearity of much philosophy, fragments disclose rather than prove, intimate more than argue, suggest a whole without elaborating a system, and emphasize the intuitive act of thinking. Fischer readjusts our understanding of philosophical ideas as they originate in moments of illumination, and reveals the fragment as philosophy in process. In a collection of original fragments and an exploratory essay, Fischer sheds light on the relation between poetry and philosophy, aesthetics and society, art and the environment, and discusses seminal practitioners of the fragmentary form, including Novalis, F. Schlegel, Nietzsche and Heraclitus. Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking makes an engaging, nonlinear case for the possibility and significance of a poetic transmutation of philosophy.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I: Poetological Fragments
1. On Poetry and Language ...
2. On Philosophy and Freedom ...
3. On the Alchemical Transmutation of Philosophy and Poetry ...
4. On Art, Music and Nature ...
5. On Practical Aesthetics and Society ...
Part II: The Fragment as Philosophic Poem: An Essay
6. Fragments of a Whole
7. 'Language is Delphi'
8. 'In Ten Sentences . . . A Book'
9. 'A Flash of Eternity'
10. 'Metaphoricity of Being'
