Abstract

Struve's book inspires sympathy both for its thought and its form. The thought tries to "grasp speculatively the mystical experience"; the form, to restore the aphorism, "reflection out of the disorder." As suggested in the title--The Other Draught--something draws our thinking initially out of its confusion. Unable to say what it is, we can only witness that "it draws." The main theme appears thus to be the departure from attained positions: the Other within and behind present things, although present but not a thing, urges readjustment of all re-presentations. Its address claims an answer, first of all astonishment. Struve's challenge is to translate the personal condition of a reply into philosophical discourse. One is not surprised to learn that he has abundantly commented upon Kierkegaard. The experience of the ineffable splinters the system, but a syntax is necessary to keep it from being dumb. The aphorism is the speech of the unspeakable. The main issues of the phenomenological tradition are reinterpreted in maxims of from two words to twenty lines. "The miracle: all that is I can transcend; I can thus be totally alone."--"A definition of man: the living being that can be totally alone."--"Dream is spell. While one is dreaming, one is in a peculiar way spellbound by oneself within oneself."--"To say yes means to pronounce the reality; I say yes to something, that means: I declare it real."--"Shaping of a world: abode."--"I am not myself; the same paradox as: all is not all." Often the reader feels carried back into the German mystical tradition, at other moments, the texts look like a professor's summarizing of Phenomenology for College students--or for a block-almanac. Triviality indeed sometimes threatens. The chapters are always organized around three concepts: "Finitude, imagehood, worldliness."--"Solitude, bareness, openness."--"Forgetfulness, sensuousness, memory...." An appendix gives notes from voyages to Norway and Egypt. These pages describe life abroad as the symbol of the existence itself: torn out of the familiar, thrown into the undisclosable.--The [[sic]] author, whose lectures we have enjoyed in Freiburg, Germany, moves apart from the desire for public recognition. The strange peacefulness of his book, when shipped over to a busy continent, becomes a peaceful stranger amidst noisy struggles for the survival of philosophy.--R. S.