시인과 철학자에 대해 -- Hannah Arendt 의 "Thinking Without A Banister" 에서

Hannah Arendt, "Thinking Without A Banister: Essays

in Understanding 1953-1975" (2018)

 

"계단을 오르내리면서 넘어지지 않도록 언제나 난간을 잡을 수

있다. 하지만 난간이 없다. 그렇게 나는 자신에게 말한다.

실은 그게 내가 시도하는 거다.

-- 한나 아렌트, 책 서두에.

 

난간 없이 생각하기.

전에도 그녀의 책을 읽으면서의 두드러진 느낌은,

한나 아렌트는 생각하기를 좋아하는구나, 였다.

책 겉표지 안쪽에도, "주로 다른 이들이 스스로 생각하기를

권장하려고 그녀는 자기가 생각한 것을 썼다"고. 

 

일반 독자보다 오히려 자유정신이 못 되는 철학자, 시인도

적지 않은 것 같다, 는 생각이 문득 또 든다.

 

시인(W. H. Auden)과 철학자에 관한 아래 인용들은

책에 실린 두 에세이로부터다.

 

 

'Remembering Wystan H. Auden ...'

 

"[M]uch of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out

of idioms everyday language -- like 'Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm.' This kind of perfection is very rare; we find

it in some of the greatest of Goethe's poems, and it must exist in most

of Pushkin's works, because thier hallmark is that they are untranslatable.

The moment poems of this kind are wrenched from their original abode,

they disappear in a cloud of banality. Here all depends on the "fluent

gestures" in 'elevating facts from the prosaic to the poetic' ..., Where

such fluency is achieved, we are magically convinced that everyday

speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the poets, our ears open up to

the true mysteries of language. The very untranslatability of one of

Auden's poems is what, many years ago, convinced me of his greatness.

Three German translators had tried their luck and killed  mercilessly one

of my favorite poems, 'If I Could Tell You', which arises naturally from two

colloquial idioms -- 'Time will tell' and 'I told you so':

 

        Time will say nothing but I told you so,

        Time only knows the price we have to pay;

        If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

[아렌트가 첫 연을 포함 4연만 부분 인용한 시에서 첫 연]"        

 

"[H]e did not claim, or perhaps even aspire to, final perfection. He

constantly revised his own poems, agreeing with  Valéry that a poem

is never finished, only abandoned."

 

 

Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind

 

"I was required to speak as a 'philosopher.' That is, I was required to

speak as someone who is fond of thinking but who 'knows that he

knows nothing,' as Merleau-Ponty put it ('In Praise of Philosophy'),

hence as someone who -- Socrates-like -- has nothing to teach."

 

"Since the rise and flourishing of medieval universities this schooling

has consisted chiefly in the interpretation of the great thinkers --

theologians and philosophers -- or in logical exercises of which

the analytic schools of our own day are the last, or latest, successors.....

Yet philosophy, even in these legitimate ways of inquiring, remains a

curious subject matter. Plato, certainly foremost among all those

whose trext have been taught and learned throughout the centuries,

once said: 'Every one of us is a man who sees things in a dream

and thinks he knows perfectly, and awakens and find that he knows

nothing.' Although I am not erudite enough to document my point,

I'd guess -- after all, an educated guess -- that there is no one among

the great thinkers who, at the end of his life, would not have agreed

with Plato on this as on so much else."