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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.30 pp.107-130
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2008.30.107

An Encounter with the Transcendental Being: W. B. Yeats and Ethics of the Other

Yoon Il hwan

Abstract

Building on the readings of Yeats’s esoteric poems, essays, and A Vision, Iposes to rethink the ethical dimensions of his occultism, more specifically hisreflection on an encounter with the transcendental beings. The need for rearticulationof the role of the ethical, that is the relation to the other gains urgency because thetranscendental beings are by nature obscure, indistinct, and indefinite. They resist toomuch clarification and determination that may reduce their complicated andirreducible beings to distinct concepts. The difficulty, therefore, lies in the questionof how Yeats could present the beings in a manner as precise, proper, and rigorousas possible and at the same time he could respect and honor the mode in whichthe beings conceals themselves in the mystery, by letting them be the mystery thatthey are.
A Vision was the culmination of Yeats’s lifelong wish to relate the divinity ofthe supernational beings to the human soul. In order not to present God as apersonal deity, Yeats says only about the nearest equivalent his system offers toGod, the gnomically-named Thirteenth Cone. The Cone is actually a sphere becausesufficient to itself, but as seen by man it is a cone. It is more a symbol of thehuman relationship to the ultimate being than a symbol of that ultimate itself.Otherwise unknowable, the supernatural beings could be evoked by symbols. Thesymbol's job for Yeats therefore is not, first and foremost, cognition, in the sense ofunderstanding, calculation, and definition, but instead bringing what is other forlanguage and thought into the openness of its alterity and maintaining this alterityagainst the power of cognitive assimilation. Yeats lets the symbols work up themind to evoke the world of the supernatural beings, which will remain unknown to those who relay on the evidence of their senses.
“The Cold Heaven” gives a good illustration of the human relation to thesupernational beings, for it combines Yeats’s own personal history with hissupernatural vision. Staring at a winter sky, he desperately looks back at where hislife has gone, gathering together in a passionate fusion the lacerating memory of hisfailure with Gonne and his themes of death, ghosts and dreams. Supernatural Songsshows how Ribh’s ecstasy in an encounter with the supernatural being not onlyarises from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectlyseen but also escapes from the barrenness and shallowness of a too consciousarrangement. “The Spirit Medium” well exemplifies the phenomenon of permeablestructure inhabiting different regions of reality simultaneously so that the world ofthe supernatural being and that of the individual, inside and outside, one side andthe other, subject and the other, appear as correlated and overlapped as equal partsof the inhuman symbolic spirit medium.

초월적인 존재와의 마주침: W. B. 예이츠와 타자의 윤리학*

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