Language and art
Humans’ essential task is not just to unconceal being, but to “house” it, and we do so above all by and in our language. Indeed this housing is really included in that unconcealing, and so vitally that without it our previous account was incomplete. Similarly, it was only by artificial delay that we were able to treat unconcealing without mentioning language’s role in it. Heidegger thinks language is essential for unconcealing being, and that the main reason this unconcealment is usually concealed—the “oblivion” or forgetting of being noted in Chapter 7.4—is that we stand in a faulty relation to language. He stresses that our route to being lies through language, so we may well hope to improve our (murky) sense of being by turning to this.
Language was already important in Being and Time, but it comes right to the center of things in Heidegger’s later thinking. This weight he puts on language, as the philosopher’s topic, is comparable to that which Wittgenstein and much analytic philosophy give it. But of course Heidegger has a quite different account of what language is, and why it’s important; he studies it with a very different angle of attention.
Heidegger’s principal claim about language is easy to state: it has a “constitutive” ontological function, and not just a “representational” epistemic one. That is, language brings entities to being, instead of merely referring to entities already there. But this deeper role of language is very difficult for us to notice properly. We are strongly inclined to think of language as a tool at our own disposal. If it is instead constitutive in this way, it has been working quite beyond our supervision or control. It has, in fact, been making us, as it has made our world.
This constituting role of language poses an obstacle to our understanding it: we can’t “get back before it” to an independent stance from which to reflect on it. EL (UL 75): “What we speak of, language, is always ahead of us. … Thus we are continually lagging behind what we must first have caught up to ourselves, in order to speak about it. Accordingly, in speaking of language we remain entangled in a speaking that is persistently inadequate.”
Now this is, heard one way, a familiar enough point. We are always embedded within a particular language, and unable to step out of its culturally local perspective. We speak English, or German, and so abide by that particular way of delineating things and values. To be sure, we can learn other languages, sometimes abetted by their kinship with our own. But this expands our horizons only modestly, compared with the great host of other linguistic perspectives we can see there are.
This is a “local” version of the problem—it concerns having this language (or these languages). But the problem also has a global form, and it’s this that Heidegger mainly means. The very fact of having a world by language, of having being determined this way, sets constraints on how being “obtains” for us. It has the consequence, we’ll see, that a certain kind of “concealment” accompanies every unconcealment of being. It also has the consequence that we are furthermore at risk of (liable to) a more egregious kind of concealment—a kind widespread and dominant today. It is not which language we speak, but our relation to it as language, that interferes with unconcealing.
We live in an age of “universal, rapidly spreading devastation [Verödung] of language,” such that it “still refuses us its essence” [LH (P 243)]. We’re used to using words in a way that conceals their real role from us. Our ultimate task is not to change our theory about language, but our relation to it, our way of “dwelling” in it. Nor is it a matter of changing how we “use words,” but rather of entering a different kind of relation to them (and language) than that of use.
We don’t adequately understand the constituting role of language by representing it in (other) language. “Much speaks for it, that the essence of language refuses to come to language, namely to the language in which we make assertions about language” [EL (UL 81)]. Instead, we must understand it by changing our relation to language, and in particular by participating in a special mode of the constituting language itself. Developing this will re-cover ground we looked at in Chapter 7, and I hope cast light back on it.
The solution is a new way to language—a way by now we can anticipate. Instead of trying to speak “about [über]” language, we must “from out of language, let it, in itself, say its essence” [EL (UL 85)]. We need to “listen” for language itself to speak, to listen “for the countering word” [75]. Ereignis is the “saying in which language promises [zusagt] its essence to us” [90], i.e. grants us being.
To follow Heidegger we need to distinguish several aspects or forms of language, and his different handlings of them. The sections of this chapter will treat these in turn.
First and most general is the role language plays of housing being, i.e. of embodying an age’s understanding of being. Those tiered unconcealments of being, essences, and world (see Chapter 7.5.ii) happen especially by language. And the way these unconcealments are, as we’ve seen, usually concealed is also due to language—or rather to our misrelation to it. Our prevailing interpretations of language, and our deep sense of it as a tool or instrument, interfere with the way it unconceals—serve to hide that unconcealment. Different kinds of language do worse or better at addressing this generic problem.
This misrelation to language is epitomized in metaphysics—the first more particular kind of language I’ll treat. Heidegger tries to analyze that misrelation by examining metaphysical language. We’ve seen that although he is highly critical of metaphysics, he also gives it a really remarkable importance and value: it makes (some of ) the basic words that house an age’s understanding of being. But it gives these words in a manner that hides that understanding from itself. We traced Heidegger’s history of metaphysics in Chapter 7, and can add to it now metaphysics’ way with language.
Along with metaphysics, being has always been housed in a second discourse, poetry; Heidegger is clearly far more favorable towards this. Poetic language opens a world in a way that displays its own role—as metaphysical concepts do not. We must see how this might be so. We must also explain how a society’s understanding of being can be based both in metaphysics and in poetry—and whether these conflict not just in how but in what they say. And does poetry’s history involve a “destiny” in the way we’ve seen metaphysics’ history does?
Finally, there is the new “language for thinking” that Heidegger anticipates, on the basis of these accounts of metaphysics and poetry. It’s the way philosophy will speak once it has broken loose from metaphysics, and learned a lesson from poetry. Heidegger has not just hopes but ambitions here: he is trying to begin to build this language in his own way of writing. So “thinking and poeming must return to where, in a certain way, they have always already been but have never yet built” [QB (P 319)]. We must consider whether Heidegger’s distinctive late writerly “style” reads better in the light of this special aim.
1. Language as the house of being
Let’s begin by looking at language’s generic role, to “house being.”1 Heidegger develops this, as always, by first identifying and attacking the conception he thinks is usual and prevailing. We commonly think of language as our instrument. And we think that this instrument works a certain way, for a principal purpose: it works by naming or representing the things around us, for the purpose of communicating about them with others. Heidegger will dispute these obvious-seeming claims.
1. The instrumental view treats language as a dispensable means for conveying thoughts, that exist independently of language.2 As an instrument language is at our disposal, subject to a project of design: we can better shape our words to what we want to say. So we see it as “a mere means of expression that can be taken off and exchanged like a garment, without that which has come to language being touched by it” [QB (P 298)].
2. We think that language principally serves us by representing things. This “representing” can be understood in many ways, for example as mirroring, or resembling, or indicating. But in any form of this representational view language plays a secondary role. Things around us, also things in us (our attitudes towards those things around us), are already there before language, for it then to match or denote. Language “comes along after” both us (its user) and things (its referents).
3. And we think that by this representing, language serves us in one main way: it lets us communicate, i.e. transmit to others, our individual ideas about those things. Again language comes in later, to convey to others a content already fully there in one’s mind (or intentionality). Language subserves the wish of these individuals to come together into a group by sharing their views.
All three points seem clearly true, and Heidegger of course does not deny that language does these things. But these views all go wrong in thinking that any of this—serving us by representing and communicating—is the main or essential thing language does. They are true, but only about language in an ontical sense. They fail to see a deeper role it plays, its essence, of which these are merely results [HE (UL 55)]. And in this essential role it is very much not a tool, and neither represents nor communicates; it is not dependent or secondary in any of those three ways. To see this deeper role we have to change the expectations that belong to that usual picture.
Heidegger thinks the error is quite deeply rooted and extremely widespread. WCT 200: “Do we want with this reference to shake all science and philosophy of language in their foundations, and to expose them as a sham? By all means.” The error is embedded in metaphysics, but reaches out into the everyday relation to words in the age it sets up (articulates). We treat language as this kind of tool by long habit through our lives, and this is the key to our “alienation.”3
This standard conception of language rests on the supposition that there is a meaning or content “already there,” for language then to represent (2). But language gets to work earlier than that. It makes or constitutes these meanings—they wouldn’t be there without it. Language is world-disclosing. This is not, however, anything we can use it for (1), since it only adequately plays this role when we give up our effort to work it. Nor does language open a world within individuals who then come out towards one another (3); it runs essentially at the social level, so that shared meanings are primary.
OA (W 46): “language brings entities as entities into the open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of entities, and consequently no such [openness] of the absence of entities [Nichtseienden] and of the empty.” More succinctly a bit later: “language is the happening in which, each time, entities first disclose themselves as entities to man” [46].4
Let’s try to make more concrete to ourselves what Heidegger means when he says that language discloses being, and constitutes our world—and why it does so in a way that runs against the drift of those three standard views.5 This amounts, I think, to the claim that we would lack intentionality, be unable to “mean” anything, if we, like stones, plants, and animals, lacked language.
Now if world is a “background” framework of aims and understandings—the view of Being and Time that remains largely in place—why must it depend on language? We might suppose we could have plenty of aims and understandings without language: we’d still feel thirst and still see water as good for it; so we’d have a world, just a simpler, less finely divided one. It seems likely that language developed, spread, and is even now acquired, because of ways it improves pursuit of those original aims. It seems merely to modify an existing schema, sharpening and complicating and extending a structure of intentions that is already there.6
Heidegger is torn, I think, between two positions here. Sometimes he is willing to allow that there would be another kind of world or clearing of being in this case. So animals, as language-less, are not worldless but “world-poor.” A (EGT 116–17): “Because the animal does not speak, self-revealing and self-concealing, together with their unity, have a wholly different life-essence among animals.” On this line his point is that our intentionality is essentially structured by language.
Elsewhere he seems to hold that any intentionality requires language. And since it doesn’t seem that this is definitional, he then needs a transcendental argument that language is a “condition of the possibility” of having a world. It’s not clear just how this would go. But most likely (I think) it would run through the claim that only language gives the kind of persisting and authoritative framework needed for a background world—the point we’ve seen he stresses in his readings of the pre-Socratics (see Chapter 7.2.i).
Whether his claim is descriptive of our intending, or insistent about any intending, what matters is that language works by instituting—
i.e. installing to last—a world. That language is a stable and lasting framework is, I think, the first and main thing Heidegger means when he calls it the “house” of being. Language houses being by serving as the enduring structure, only in or through which entities can show up as entities. EL (UL 63): “The being of anything that is dwells [wohnt] in the word.” This image is not meant to imply that before language there already was being, but wandering around unhoused—though Heidegger does think that being can be better or worse housed.
Language gives this consistency and stability through time by virtue of being a body of meanings independent of me (each of us) and to which I defer. It houses being on the time-scale of history, not just of lives or days, and this makes the crucial difference between us and animals. I submit my spontaneous sense what words mean to the broad and lasting practice, so that my words’ meanings aren’t personal, but settled out around me in that practice. I own allegiance to it, am committed to its authority beneath all my pretense of control over my words.
Indeed my deference to language is still more radical. It’s not really that “I defer” to language, since this suggests that there’s an I there apart from language and related to it. It’s rather that I come to be at the same time as language does for me: through language there’s instituted something stable enough to be a self, over against a stable world. My own continuity is secured only by my being planted in language: I come to be as a speaking thing.
But what exactly is this “language” that has this authority? Language is not, as we might have expected, a “system of signs,” together with their rules for use. HE (EHP 56): “What we usually mean by ‘language’, namely, a stock of words and rules for joining them, is only a foreground of language.” Those words and rules are tools employed for language, not the thing itself. So language’s authority does not lie in its semantic and syntactic rules—the ways these constrain my intending.
For the same reason we should not, I think, describe language as a “practice”—if we mean this in its third-personal aspect, as the fact that a community of speakers say such-and-such things in such-and-such circumstances. This is another exterior aspect, that could be studied by another science, a sociology.
Language itself, in its “interior,” is a way of intending. It is crucially point of view: an overall point of view on the world as understandable by this language. So, most obviously, it views the world as divisible into the kinds named by its words: their “defi-nitional” senses pick out the types of things, properties, events, etc. the world can show to this view. Less overtly, a language views the world by what its grammar specifies there can be types of—as our grammar of nouns, adjectives, verbs expects to find those things, properties, events. A language is a view of the world as divided up—“articulated”—in the very ways it speaks the world.
Heidegger’s idea is not just that a language specifies what a point of view is of—the (kinds of ) contents it has, the world it discovers. Language lets there be point of view at all. Not any kind of consciousness—any bare sensing or feeling—counts as “letting entities appear.” The latter is the crucial event for Heidegger, his analogue to what Kant calls “experience.” And like Kant he sets persistence conditions on this, that would deny that fleeting and fragmented sensations thus “let appear.” Language gives the lastingness needed for viewpoint; language is indeed the persisting viewpoint itself, in toto, which we participate in.
A language’s viewpoint is not that of any one individual, but is pieced together out of many. Nor is it just a viewpoint that many individuals share, but something more inclusive, and divided; it includes the society’s variety and disagreements in use of these words. So it is enormously complex, an intentional realm that individuals can explore their way through. By these internal differences, this comprehensive viewpoint takes the form of a “conversation.” In learning a language I enter a part of this point of view, and my sayings become part of its conversation.7
Indeed the language’s comprehensive viewpoint includes also its history: all the ways each word has expressed the world in the past. The latter remains present in the viewpoint, so that we are in conversation not just with our contemporaries but with the history—past and to come—of our co-speakers. Indeed this conversation also extends across to “other” languages, as German or English interprets Latin, which interprets Greek. What I mean by my words is dependent on all of this, which is also accessible for me to explore.
Heidegger denies, however, that the diversity encompassed by a language is all equal. Some meanings, as expressed in some crucial words, are “essential” in a way that makes them authoritative. It is in recognizing this authority that individuals don’t disagree: “we are one conversation [Gespräch]. The unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essential word there is always manifest that one and the same on which we agree [einigen], on the ground of which we are united and so are authentically ourselves” [HE (EHP 57); also PG 90]. It is these meanings—the viewpoint embedded in them—that we must of course especially pursue; this is how we “listen to language.”
By contrast I do not listen to the “common practice,” to how and what things are said most of the time; WCT 119 decries such “floundering in commonness” [cf. 192]. This general usage does not have authority by its numbers, nor by its status as a default or standard position. Heidegger tells, early and late, a deflationary story against the common way of using language. Because of the iterability of words and statements—language’s means—they can be “passed along” in absence of the view or experience they properly express, and this is precisely how they come to be common [cf. HE (EHP 55)]. Initially genuine statements get repeated non-genuinely as simply “what one says.”
So it’s not this common practice that has authority, but the genuine uses of language, in which they really do express the relevant experience. These are the standard to which our own saying is set: we refer ourselves to the privileged experiences in which words are spoken with full sense. And these genuine uses of language include above all those that unconceal being—when words are first invested with meanings, before they devolve to convention. These meanings are still there in the language, but we miss them, and miss them more and more as we become inured to our words. So WCT 191–92:
[Language] allows both of these: first, that it be reduced to a mere system of signs, uniformly available to everybody, and thus carried through as binding; and the other, that language in one great moment says for once a single thing, which remains inexhaustible, because it is always incipient and therefore unreachable by any kind of leveling.
Viewed most narrowly, this single thing is the original, archaic opening of being as presence. More widely it includes too the later epochal statements by metaphysicians and poets, each specifying the mode of presencing pursued by an age. Language is a house that has been (and is being) repeatedly rebuilt. These rebuildings are always only incremental, however, so that meanings do not replace one another, but accrete around the earliest, original choices, that stay active in all that follow.
Although thinkers and poets carry out these rebuildings, they don’t create their own designs. The true source of the new meanings they build into our words is what Heidegger calls “destiny.” This is a kind of logic of development in our socialcultural history, a very long-term movement, drawing out the ultimate consequences of the original posit of being as presence. Thinkers and poets are sensitive to this movement, able to hear “what must come next.” For they have “stepped down” to the level of being, where the basic choices about our meanings become visible. They put what’s next into words, fuse the new outlook into them.
Thinkers and poets change language only insofar as their new uses disseminate and become common coin. They “house” the coming viewpoint in words that are memorable—in different ways with thinkers than poets, as we’ll see. So their meanings are built lastingly into the language, and get acquired as each individual learns it, remembers it, and defers to its authority. However, this very way meanings get “built in” exposes them to be misunderstood. The thinker or poet means them within the privileged experience of being, but when they’re part of the general inheritance—of the background framework each grows up into—they’re grasped in a much-attenuated manner.
To reach those grounding experiences we must break through this rote and routine with which we ordinarily use words. This is why Heidegger, once again, singles out experiences of breakdown as especially revealing:
But where does language itself come to word as language? Strangely there, where we do not find the right word for something that strikes, distresses, or inspires us. Then we leave unspoken what we mean and … undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essence.
[EL (UL 59)]
We step down to the stance from which an experience requires new words that may or may not come—words fully adequate to that experience. (This reverses our usual stance, in which routine words take the place of experiences: we talk without caring.)
I think these are the broad lines of Heidegger’s later view of language. But there’s a lot of detail to be added, which will give better point to parts of it. We’ll take closer looks at three particular relations to language, one that Heidegger criticizes—metaphysics—and two that he praises—poetry and thinking.
2. Metaphysical language
After his turning, Heidegger mainly uses “metaphysics” for the way philosophy has been done so far, a way he means to turn from. So it is most often a term of opprobrium: it marks the way these predecessors—all the (other) great figures in the history of philosophy—fell short.8 They fell short, above all, in their clarity regarding being. They gave names for being, but didn’t see clearly enough what they were naming, nor what they were doing in so naming it. So their discourse “conceals” being in a way Heidegger tries to diagnose—and to rise above.
Our focus will be on this negative aspect of metaphysical language, seeing what goes wrong so that we can then see what goes right in poetry and thinking (sections 3 and 4). But it’s important to bear in mind that metaphysics is also enormously esteemed by Heidegger—indeed given a cultural role that many might think wildly inflated. “Metaphysics grounds an age in that, through a definite interpretation of entities and through a definite conception of truth, it gives it the ground of its essential form” [AWP (W 57)]. “Our Western languages are in their different ways languages of metaphysical thinking” [ID 73]. It is the metaphysical systems of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, that “gave language” to the “understanding of being” of the whole society (or culture) in their eras. Without their crucial words there would have been no “clearings” of being at all.
To play this role these great philosophers had to go far further than almost anyone else—far further down towards being. Although they are all metaphysicians, and misguided as such, they also do genuinely think. They just do so behind the scenes, as it were, in a way not at all explicit to themselves, a way even inconsistent with their own theories. IWM (P 278): “in its answers to its questions about entities as such, metaphysics speaks out of the unnoticed openness of being.”
It is the language of metaphysics that opens up a world for a “people.” But its way of giving words for being simultaneously closes off that world, prevents us (that people) from living as transparently in that world as we might. So by diagnosing the error in metaphysics we can get at what cuts us off from being. Thus LH (P 245) says that the question of the truth of being “only comes to light if in the midst of metaphysics’ rule the question is posed: ‘What is metaphysics?’”
A metaphysics is, in brief, an ontology; it gives an “account (logos) of being (on).” Its limitations lie both in the way it thinks being, and in the way it gives an account, i.e. the way it puts being into words. We made a start on the first limitation in our look at Heidegger’s history (in Chapter 7.2.ii). I’ll first recall and amplify this, then turn to the second limitation, in its language, our focus here.
Metaphysics’ chief “error” regarding being is its tendency to treat it as a kind of entity.9 LH (P 252): “It thinks from entities back to them with a glance in passing toward being.” Heidegger struggles how to state this criticism so that it is consistent with his view that what makes metaphysics so important is that (in some other sense) it does think and talk about being.10 Sometimes he says that metaphysics treats only “entities as a whole”: “It means entities as a whole and speaks of being” [IWM (P 281); also M 333]. Or it treats “entities as such” [IM 20]. Elsewhere he says that it treats only “the being of entities,” and not being itself [LH (P 246)].11
This error is reflected in the way every metaphysics is not just ontology but ontotheology. For its theory of being always has the two aspects we saw on pp. 232–38: it understands being both as “being-what”—the most general genus to which all entities belong—and as “being-that”—the ultimate entity that explains all the others, the god.12 Heidegger finds a theology even in Nietzsche—in his idea of the eternal return of the whole.
The understanding of being as ultimate entity obviously violates the “ontological difference” Heidegger insists on. To treat God—or any other cosmic force or principle—as the ultimate explainer of entities is to fail to step back from the domain of entities to the clearing or opening of a world-for-us, that is being itself. God is an entity within the clearing, but what we need is insight into the clearing itself, and the event in which it opens for us. This event is the precondition even for God or gods (and even for us).
But metaphysics also goes wrong when it posits being not as an ultimate entity but as the “what” of entities; this too stays on the side of entities, failing to bridge the gap.13 Here metaphysics treats an entity’s “being” as its genus, and treats “being itself” as the highest and all-encompassing genus. But it’s misguided, Heidegger thinks, to try to push up to being from below in this way—by generalization from the characteristics of entities. To find being we need to notice in ourselves that basic stance or project that “lets entities be” as presence; this stance lies behind our conception of entities as sortable into genera in that way.
Why do Plato and all his followers make this mistake of interpreting being through entities? How had the pre-Socratics (partly) avoided it? I think Heidegger’s guiding idea is that the pre-Socratics directly experienced being showing itself as presence, and the later thinkers do not. In that experience Anaximander and his cohort saw how presence is “granted” in the Ereignis; they articulated and transmitted this understanding, even without naming presence itself.
Later philosophers, beginning with Plato, take over that understanding, without themselves going “all the way down” to being’s revelation. Since they don’t experience its revealing as presence, presence becomes presupposed—a requirement whose source they can’t notice. M 347: “Metaphysics must think being as entitihood [Seiendheit], it must take presencing and its constancy itself as the most constant.” They operate implicitly with that understanding. Presence, as a project, takes a grip on them, and their failure to see this lets it compel and push them a certain way.14
Now let’s turn back to language: how does metaphysics’ flawed relation to being show up in its relation to language? Metaphysicians use it, of course, to state a flawed content—their misunderstandings of being in terms of entities. But less obvious is the way they use language, and what they expect of it in this use. This too is now shaped by the presupposition of presence: metaphysics wants language to “bring to presence,” to set things in immediate and lasting grasp. Moreover, metaphysics treats language itself as such a presence.15
Metaphysicians do use language effectively, for they succeed in housing their viewpoints in memorable words, by which they can be securely fixed both in individual and group. But they make their words memorable by a different method than poets, or than the new thinkers Heidegger foretells. They make them memorable by a definitional clarity that captures in formulas precise senses of these words. By this these words come to a kind of presence, which then becomes a model for our relation to words generally.
Metaphysics, with its posit of presence, does more than change the language’s words: it changes users’ relation to their words, changes what they understand themselves to be doing with them, as they speak or think them. It transmits the general conception of language as an instrument, for the statement of facts about things, with the supposition that those facts and things are there quite apart from language. It works on its language to make (as it thinks) its words fit the facts. Hence this way of using language conceals its own work in opening a clearing and so “letting entities be”; it hides its ontological role.
Metaphysics tries to make its words exactly map being, by specifying technical senses for them all; its words become concepts. It thereby makes the word itself arbitrary, with all meaning hanging on the definition, which is crafted quite precisely to suit its idea of being. It breaks the word’s link with all its prior history of senses; it wants meaning to come to the word solely through the definition. The word is to be (as it were) transparent to the definition, and the latter gives its meaning full presence: the word’s meaning is locked up in the formula, and is lastingly immediately available in it. So nothing in the meanings of these words is hidden or concealed.
Metaphysics thus suppresses and denies what Heidegger will call (we’ll see in section 3) “the earth.” The earthy aspect of language is the concealment it always involves—inseparable from its unconcealing. This includes, for example, the mere sound of words, and in this their web of links to other words in the language (with all its history). These involve a brute contingency in the way a word means, which makes it uncontrollable by current definitional fiat. That web of links is too vast for survey, and can be meant, by any individual, only “in the background,” and never brought to full presence.
Metaphysics transmits to the general practice its own ambition with language—its aim to bring words’ meanings under control as concepts, eliding implicit resonances. The word’s meaning is to be what we give it, by our definition now—is what we say it is. The word’s meaning isn’t at all a matter of its sound, nor of its history of uses. So it becomes a part of general practice to deny the relevance of language, understood as the whole “conversation” of sayings of the word that envelops our use. Heidegger of course wants to reverse this, and persuade us that meaning comes to words from language—from that enveloping conversation, which we must learn to hear.16
That metaphysical crafting of language takes its ultimate form in our own technological age. Metaphysics culminates in (what Heidegger calls) enframing [Gestell], the essence of technology; we’ll examine this in Chapter 9. And this enframing dictates a certain relation to language:
Enframed speaking turns into information. … En-framing, the everywhere-ruling essence of modern technology, orders up formalized language, that kind of notification by virtue of which man is shaped, i.e. directed, into the technological-calculating essence, and gradually abandons “natural language”.
[PL (UL 132)]
Language is no longer allowed to be natural, but is brought to reason and control, the better to bring us under control.
This enframing relation to language is also reflected in a “metalinguistic” philosophy, as Heidegger says in this rather startling passage:
Recently the scientific and philosophical investigation of languages is aiming ever more decidedly at the production of what one calls “metalanguage”. Scientific philosophy, which is out to produce this super-language, understands itself consistently as metalinguistics. … [M]etalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technologizing of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry are the same.
[EL (UL 58)]
They are the same in expressing that project of enframing and control.
Our crucial struggle is against metaphysics: “What is to be decided is whether … metaphysics, in turning away from its ground, continues to prevent the relation of being to man from coming to light … in such a way as to bring man into belonging to being” [IWM (P 280)].17 And this struggle must focus, we’ve seen, on the faulty relation to language metaphysics involves.
3. Poetic language
Our way out of this faulty relation to language lies through poetry, which bears language’s positive, saving powers. Whereas metaphysical language, in opening being, does so in a way that simultaneously closes it off, poetry is more thoroughly “unconcealing”—and so more true. In fact all arts, and not just poetry, play this special role of revealing being. But poetry does it more basically, because it works in language. We must try to specify how poetry “speaks” differently from metaphysics: not just how it says different things, but how it says them a different way, better suited to open being for us.
Poetry is not the only such unconcealing language. It may be tempting to hear Heidegger as subordinating all philosophy to poetry, as the real site of truth. But we’ll see in the next section that there is also a language of thinking—of the genuine thinking that should replace metaphysics. This thinking is descended from metaphysics, and bears its principal identity there; it is even something metaphysicians already carried out, only implicitly and incompletely. It is something independent of poetry—and with a value independent of it too. But to learn to think more adequately, philosophers should pay attention to poets.
Poetry, and art in general, are almost completely ignored in Being and Time. But notice this passing remark at g162: “In ‘poetical’ discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s self-finding can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence.” Since this disclosing, possible only in authenticity, is the ultimate good in that book, this suggests an importance for poetry that is puzzlingly not pursued.18
i. Art
Let’s start with some orienting points on the broader topic of art—covering a few well-known ideas in “The Origin of the Artwork” [OA], one of Heidegger’s most famous essays.19 He attributes great things to art here; I think we can distinguish two main ideas. He defines or identifies art by two things (he claims) it does, or is able to do—one for society, the other for an individual. At the social level, art functions to set up or “found” the (current) world of a society or people. And for an individual already in such a world, it can do something more: specially “light up” this world, and being itself. These are, of course, both aspects of the “unconcealing” we’ve seen is Heidegger’s epistemic good. We can add detail to that good by seeing how art promotes it.
Take the social point first. Heidegger gives extraordinary cultural-historical importance to art: it shapes (constitutes) the background world of meanings within which all of an age’s experience runs. The age’s artworks lay out how it is ready to see and value things. In “Origin” Heidegger gives one of his rare examples in a famous account of a Greek temple:
The temple-work first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline win for the human essence the shape of his destiny. … The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to humans their outlook on themselves.
[OA (W 20–21)]20
We should note that it’s debated whether Heidegger’s point is really that art constitutes a world, rather than specially lighting and revealing a world a people already has.21 I think he does mean the ontological point and not just the epistemic one, but that the difference between these is less due to the kind of thing a world is—due to the unity and clarity it requires, as noted in section 1 of this chapter. The world that comes to be from the artwork is a unity of the shared practices: it gives them a point—indeed a long-term historical point, a destiny. Moreover, the artwork pulls a world together by the way it manifests that point: it calls repeated attention to it by its conspicuous presence. So there might indeed be a rich set of shared practices that preceded the artwork, yet lacked that manifested unity, so that the group remained “worldless.” Thus Heidegger converts “having a world” into an honorific (we’ve seen this is a frequent move), such that only properly unified societies have worlds. This somewhat runs the epistemic and ontological points into one another.
We’ve seen that Heidegger thinks our history is broken up into “epochs” distinguished by their respective understandings of being. It seemed that these epochs were instituted by metaphysicians—that their basic words project being. But here, in “Origin,” he seems to give the crucial role to art: an epoch’s understanding is embodied in essential artworks. The artist embeds a new “look and outlook” in a physical thing that then “stands there” as a public presence for the people—around which they live, and by which they orient their lives. This artwork gives a concrete presence, a visual (or auditory) emblem for the basic values and world-view of the group—and so lets them have those common values and world-view.
Let’s defer the question how this is related to the founding by metaphysics. It is at least clear that (he thinks) art can found a world. Indeed it sometimes seems that it only counts as art if it does do so. “Always when art happens, i.e. when there is a beginning, a thrust enters history, history first begins or begins again” [OA (W 49)]. The artwork is in this sense itself an origin—of each successive world of outlook; this is the pun in the essay’s title, which Heidegger reveals only near its end.
These claims about art’s world-founding role may strike us as far-fetched. We think of art as isolated in galleries and museums, and how can that have any such sway? But Heidegger agrees, and sometimes draws the conclusion that there is no art in the modern age, since none of what we call art plays that world-founding role. Either we lack a world in that honorific sense, or our world gets its manifest unity from some other source.
The account in “Origin” of art’s social role shows nostalgia for the Greek and medieval pasts, where art was principally religious. The temple and cathedral, including their associated sculpture and painting, give convincing embodiment to the qualities of the divine, and the human, that deeply orient their societies in their worlds. We can better see how “look and outlook” might be shaped this way. Heidegger holds out, in the background, hope that art might some day play this role again.
However, he now comes to see a different role for art than founding a world—it must do something else in our modern age. Art doesn’t now found a world, but it can—it should—remind us of what we’re lacking. Art shows what’s missing when we fail to come together this way. It unconceals the concealment we’re now subject to: how we lack a unifying point to what we do—our nihilism. It can even, more positively, begin to put in place pieces of a new world, with that manifest unity ours now lacks.
Unfortunately art mostly doesn’t play this helpful role today, because—in Heidegger’s pessimistic view—it has been largely subverted to service of technology and enframing. Art is a “resource,” whose economic and cultural value is assessed and compared with that of other resources. We come to it in the wrong way. This misuse is reflected in our theory of art, our aesthetics: with the rise of aesthetics “great art comes to an end” [WPA (N v.1 84)]. Aesthetics is metaphysics applied to art, and so works to bring it under the dominion of presence. “Aesthetics is the … modern metaphysical way of delimiting the essence of the beautiful and art” [HHI 88].
Art can only play that helpful role as an exception to this, hence not at the social level, but individually and privately. So it is no accident that Heidegger’s example of a modern artwork is of a painting that works by specially and privately affecting individuals. He treats at some length Van Gogh’s painting of “peasant shoes”: “In the rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and everuniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind” [OA (W 14)]. Reflecting on how the painting shows these shoes, he comes quickly to a word for the “essential being” of this equipment (and all equipment): “reliability” [Verlässlichkeit]. I’ll return to this notion, and its difference from Being and Time’s “to-handness,” but for now the important point is that the painting reveals to us this being, as—usually—observing actual shoes and their use would not. “Van Gogh’s painting is the opening of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, in truth is. This entity steps out into the unconcealment of its being” [16].22 Art’s epistemic power makes it a vital topic and resource for thinkers pursuing the truth about being.
This second way the artwork unconceals seems quite separate from the first.23 Van Gogh’s painting doesn’t found or institute the world of the peasant woman—nor presumably the world of its viewers. It gives, it seems, an isolated insight that need have no impact on the broad structure of one’s world. It is an insight into a structure (reliability) the world (of equipment) already has—a structure it has for us as well as for the peasant woman. So here the artwork seems to play only an epistemic role.
Nevertheless I think Heidegger hopes that this epistemic effect will lead to a constitutive one: the artwork can light up the world in a way that gives it a manifest unity it had lacked. It does so by embodying a new overall point or aim. So that Van Gogh painting can show us a different overall stance towards things: it gives us the ideal of a subtly different relation to equipment than Being and Time had offered. It points the way out of enframing and technology, by beginning to construct, in responsive individuals, the new world we can hope will come. As they live in the world thus (partly) opened by the artwork, they become what Heidegger calls its “preservers.”
So these two examples, of the temple and the painting, are less separate than initially seemed. The temple constitutes its people’s world, but the painting has the power to begin to construct a new world for us. In both cases the artwork gives truth. OA (W 44): “Art is, then, a becoming and happening of truth.” Here Heidegger thinks he breaks sharply from Nietzsche, who claims that art and truth contradict one another [WPA (N v.1 148)].
ii. Poetry
But our interest is especially in language, and how it unconceals. So let’s turn now to poetry, the linguistic art for Heidegger, to try to make more concrete how those ontological and epistemic functions might work. How do the poet’s words found a society’s world, and/or “light up” the essential character of the world for an individual? The other arts largely drop out of the picture in the writings after “Origin,”24 and the focus is all on poetry.
What counts as “poetry” for Heidegger? In “Origin” he distinguishes wider and narrow senses. In the wider (and “essential”) sense poetry [Dichtung] is the poeming [Dichten]25 of truth, which means the founding [Stiftung] of truth—i.e. it is setting a new outlook into a culture by embodying it in a work. In this sense, he says that all art—including sculpture, painting, architecture—is poetry, since art generally is “the setting-into-work of truth” (this, we’ve seen, is art’s first function) [OA (W 44–47)].26
By contrast poetry in the narrower sense—poesy [Poesie]—is linguistic art, artistic language. And this is the primary art, because it is language above all that lays out a world. OA (W 46): “since language is the happening in which, each time, entities first disclose themselves as entities to man, poesy … is the most original form of poetry in the essential sense. … Building and shaping, on the other hand, always happen already and only in the open of saying and naming.” So the other arts, as we might put it, lay out a world by changing the “look” (or “sound”) of things. But there can only be a look to the world if there’s already a language for it—and this is what poesy affects. Poesy changes that aggregate language, and so restructures a people’s world—the system of ways they are prepared to discover or interpret things.
It’s this narrower—and more usual—sense of “poetry” that Heidegger usually means (by Dichtung) in his later writings, and from here on I’ll stick to it. As linguistic art, poetry plays the primary role of founding a world. HE (EHP 59): “in that the poet speaks the essential word, through this naming entities are first nominated [ernannt] as what they are. So they become known as entities. Poetry is the wordly founding of being.”27 And it also plays the secondary role of lighting up a world already there—or lighting up our lack of a world, in a way that promotes finding one.
But if poetry is linguistic art that founds or lights up a world, which things will count as poems? How many of the verses we ordinarily call poems will be such? And will any other things count? Street slang (or popular music) changes language, but not in the way, we’ll see, Heidegger requires of poetry. He focuses conservatively on what we’d all call “poems,” by a few German poets of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries: Hölderlin [1770–1843] first and foremost, but he also examines poems by Stefan George [1868–1933] (in EL, Wo), R.M. Rilke [1875–1926] (in WP), and Georg Trakl [1887–1914] (in LP). He also pays attention to some Greek poets: Homer (in AS) and Sophocles (in IM, HHI). As we’ll see, the traditional character of such poetry plays an important role in Heidegger’s argument.
These count because they are “great” poems—OA (W 19) says that “only [great art] is under consideration here”—i.e. are able to play either the founding or the epistemic role. They found or light up basic or central aspects of the world—and don’t just change stray details of the linguistic practice, as we might suppose, for example, slang does. Indeed they found or light up the aim of our general comportment towards the world.
In the primary case the poem changes the language—gives words new meanings in the general practice. HE (EHP 60): “Poetry is the primal language [Ursprache] of a historical people.” Heidegger quotes Hölderlin: “But what endures [bleibet] is founded by poets” [EL (UL 68)]. Poets make new basic words, and thereby disclose a new truth, a new world. We see this in Greek poetry: Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar voiced answers to the dilemmas of the people—and the people came to voice these themselves as the language was inflected by their poems.
But we’ve seen that Heidegger thinks modern art no longer plays this role. The world is now set up in different ways than by art. Art works less as social and constitutive, and more as individual and epistemic: it can reveal, in private experiences, the deep character of our prevailing world, made in those other ways. It can also give us glimmers of a world we might have, that would set us better towards being; if such poetry can play a social role, it is by beginning the long work of designing such a world.
This is the main significance of Hölderlin, Heidegger’s essential poet, about whom he seems to have written more than about anyone but Nietzsche.28 Although Hölderlin’s poems haven’t made our age’s world, they do articulate its essential situation, to those who can hear them. They voice an alienation from the age, and the age’s alienation from itself: we are “not at home.” (Having been a structural feature of Dasein in Being and Time, this Unheimlichkeit is now historical.) They reveal our spiritual poverty, our distance from the gods, the oblivion of being. So Hölderlin regards himself as a “poet in a destitute time,” in the phrase of “Why Poets?” And indeed, “[h]is poetry dwells in this locality more intimately than any other poetry of his time” [WP (W 203)].
This diagnosis of our situation is the “content” Hölderlin expresses, and all great poets of the modern age must say this same thing. “Hölderlin is the forerunner of the poets in a desolate time. That is why no poet of this era can overtake him” [WP (W 240)]. But our interest is in the particularly poetic way he expresses this content—the different way his words “light up” this situation than discursive or argumentative prose can do (including my bland statement of the point just now). His poetic point must stir us more deeply in order to be understood.
The first way poetry works is by effecting—this is now a familiar idea—a certain kind of breakdown: a breakdown in our relation to language. The poet’s unexpected words throw us off our usual path through language. They strip off our usual assumptions about the meanings of words, and this brings us back to original decisions. Again Heidegger thinks this breakdown has great epistemic value: it lights up our relation to both language and world.
Poetry steps us back from our customary discourse, our habitual—and therefore unnoticed—uses of words for things. It frustrates our effort to hear words in everyday ways. So it prevents us from sliding straight through the word to the thing, and missing the gap, as we usually do. To step back to notice words this way is to suffer (or effect) a breakdown in the prevailing meanings—or rather in the automatic and habitual way of assuming these meanings.
In reminding of the gap between word and thing, poetry (paradoxically?) brings things closer to us—lets us experience them more freshly and fully. Ordinarily our relation to the thing is mainly a relation to the word, which passes for the thing; we feel the thing as if instilled in the word. Our concern doesn’t reach out vividly to the thing, instead hovering around the word. Poetry, with its unexpected words, calls attention not just to them but also to the things, which look new themselves when named by these new words. So we recognize at once both the independence of the thing, but also the word’s crucial role in letting it appear.
To help us find the tone of this special breakdown, Heidegger refers us—in a passage quoted on p. 287—to times “where we do not find the right word for something that strikes, distresses, or inspires us”; in such cases we “undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essence” [EL (UL 59)]. For we come back before language’s framing of the world (its essential function), to the situation in which it is still open how to put being and entities into words.
However, the poet effects this breakdown while on the way to doing a second thing: giving words new meanings. In reading poetry we experience, with the poet, the latter’s “discovery” of the new word (or meaning). Moreover, we experience this discovery as responding to the need to say things the available words aren’t up to. The poet wants to “bring to language something that so far has never yet been spoken” [EL (UL 59)]. Moreover, the poet houses this new viewpoint in memorable words (words memorable for reasons we’ll see). The “right word” is the one that memorializes the new experience; it makes it something lasting.
Heidegger delineates this breakdown experience in poetry quite specifically. On the one hand we feel that there was something there waiting to be said by the poet. But on the other hand we also feel that without language to say it that “something” could not really be. (If we feel in the right way the word’s lack, we feel that things can’t really be “that way” without it.) And thus we recognize, by feeling it, the constitutive role of language: how it “nominates” entities into being. Heidegger develops these points in a reading of Stefan George’s poem “The Word,” and especially its last couplet: “So I renounced and sadly see: / Where word breaks off no thing may be” [EL (UL 60), also Wo (UL 140)].
So by poetry we participate in an ontological event: in speaking fresh words that found meaning, we experience new things “coming to being” by these new words. This, I think, is what all (great) poetry does, for Heidegger: it lets us experience words forming world—and being. But—and he stresses this—we experience these new words not as invented by the poet, but as spoken through him by “language itself.” There’s an inevitability or necessity in these words, and the new outlook they give us; they are not just the personal fiat of the poet.
We hear the poet’s words to come from a source behind him—and so indeed they do, Heidegger thinks. He attacks the Romantic cult of genius in which the artist creates the work in an heroic originality of will and self-assertion. Nietzsche gives powerful expression to this idea, but Heidegger reverses it: the poet succeeds by being receptive and attentive to the situation of the people in the age. The poet is somehow “open to” and “hears” what is destined, i.e. the words needed next as the current ones lose their force. The poet is responsive to “the withheld determination of historical Dasein itself” [OA (W 48)].
The poet receives the new words from language—understanding the latter to be, as we saw in section 1, the comprehensive point of view embodied in the sayings of the people, through its history. So the language is not just the “uses” of words as the linguist may study them, and not just the “practices” in which these words are embedded, as the sociologist may study them. Instead it is the “meant” or “felt” viewpoint which these uses and practices merely express. The poet enters this meant medium and finds his new words there, “sent,” as a destiny, from the very sources in this language.
Language is the overall view of the world which is expressed in the great synthesis of the uses of its words, through a history. But this synthesis is not a mere sum of all the individual uses at specific times and places: some uses are essential and determinative, whereas others are parasitic and deficient. Language speaks principally in those essential uses, which express the deep structure of the overall viewpoint. They express, above all, the ultimate aim or purpose which all the other uses presume but neglect.
The poet “listens to language” by entering the viewpoint expressed in these seminal uses of words. So Heidegger depicts poets as strongly traditional—as hearkening back to the sayings of their major predecessors, and responding to them. Thus Hölderlin carries out a “poetic dialogue” with Sophocles [HHI 55]. These earlier poets articulate the “mission” [Sendung] the people has been sent upon, and thereby also the “mandate” [Auftrag] it is its task to achieve [LQ 106].
However, we still haven’t come to the special character of poetic language. Most of the things we’ve so far said of the poet’s methods—how he induces breakdowns and initiates meanings—are true of the metaphysical philosopher too; metaphysics also gives new words that jar us out of linguistic complacency, in a way that fixes them for us. What distinguishes poetry is its different way of making its words “memorable,” and the different relation to language this sets us into.
Metaphysics makes its words memorable, we saw, by offering them as concepts. These are recommended by the special clarity with which they are defined, as well as by the metaphysician’s adjoined arguments that they fit precisely along the real joints in things. These concepts are meant to be transparent onto things so that the latter lie exposed and available to us. Concepts aim at securing a “pure presence” of things to the subject or intellect that has them. This presence is meant to be not just immediate but lasting—to give a lasting control.
The poet offers new words in a very different spirit. What takes the place of definition, as the way to these words’ meaning, are the stories and human situations the poet’s verses install us in. We must gather their meaning in the experiences—sensuous, perceptual, emotional—they elicit, as they bring us to inhabit those situations. We inhabit them in an unaccustomed vividness, and it’s this that makes the words memorable. They reinstall us in those moments. By the web of experiences the poet’s words set us into, they give us a new stance—some part of a new way to live. And they give us not merely the conception or description of this stance, but the affective and willful taste of it.
In this different way poetry makes new meaning, it’s very important that this meaning not be completely transparent, as the concept aspires to be by its accompanying definition. Wo (UL147): “The poet must renounce having words under his control as the portraying names for the posited entities.”29 Indeed poetry purposively and essentially gives its world in a way that is not transparent, and not susceptible to conceptual capture. It founds a different kind of world, by sustaining certain mysteries and indeterminables within it. Heidegger’s term for this aspect of the way art founds world, is “earth” [Erde]. Poetry makes its words memorable by and in their “earth,” and by this bars full openness.
Here we arrive at the large idea in “Origin of the Artwork” that I mentioned I was keeping aside. This is “earth,” used in contrast and conjunction with “world’; this contrast-term is not present in Being and Time. The earth is (as it were) the penumbra of mystery that must surround the clearing or world—a mystery that penetrates into every entity that shows up in the world, as something to it that precedes every way it shows up, every way we can discover it. In the words we learned above, earth is that concealing which is the essential concomitant to the unconcealing of being. It is also what cannot be brought to presence. It is a principle of breakdown embedded in the clearing itself.
When the artwork “lights up” a world, it also reveals that world as from and upon a ground, an earth, that is not revealed. Our world is that system of paths we know our way along, all that we are prepared for. It is the “open” or “clearing” in which our concern and effort move. Artworks such as Van Gogh’s painting can reveal this world—can let us see/feel what is normally in a deep background. But in doing so they show it as emerging from something independent, something inscrutable and uncontrollable by our most searching concern. So the artwork reminds us—in a way metaphysics’ concepts do not—of the limits of our world. There is something all our skill and knowing can never control, something that comes before it. Art’s reminder of earth gives us a particular modesty in our world.
One essential way the artwork does this—gives earth—lies in how it presents itself to us in its materials, its bricks or paint or bronze or words. It fuses its meaning in these materials, so that it can’t be abstracted away in concepts and statements. So, for example, with the painting: no concepts can capture the contribution made to its meaning by the particular hues and textures of its paint. An artwork displays its materials as essential to what it says—by contrast with a tool, whose materials “disappear into usefulness” [OA (W 24)]. The tool works best when we don’t notice what it’s made of, but the artwork calls attention to itself this way: it “sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of the stone, … into the lightening and darkening of color, into the ringing of tone, and into the naming power of the word” [OA (W 24)].
Turning back to poetry, its words aren’t concepts because their meaning depends on their “earth.” The latter includes, for one thing, their sound—their rhythm, their rhyme, the particular way they’re shaped in the mouth, how they feel in the mouth to say. And the poem’s earth also includes, I think, the particularity of the images and situations it embeds its message within. So Sophocles projects ideals and attitudes not by defining virtues or goods, but by telling stories about individual men and women; his meanings are in these stories, and can’t be extracted as concepts and precepts without interpretation and loss. All these factors in its meaning make the poem elude conceptual capture, as it does translation.
In science, in philosophy, in everyday talk these factors are counted irrelevant; attention passes through them to the sense or content, and it seems unapt and juvenile to weight them much. Those features seem merely cosmetic, and to work at them seems an effort to influence by underhanded means. Against this the poem insists, and makes the reader accept, that these factors are much of the point. And if we hear poetry right it persuades us that this is really true of language more generally: it works by something it cannot express outright.
EL (UL 98–99) develops the importance of language’s “sensuous side”: “That language sounds and rings and vibrates, hovers and trembles, is in equal measure characteristic of it, as that the spoken has a meaning.” But this sensuous side has been misunderstood by being treated only “from the perspective of physiology and physics, that is, technologically-calculatingly in the widest sense.” Instead, Heidegger insists, we should view this sensuous side as showing our roots in “earth.” These roots run through the mouth, in speaking: “body and mouth belong to the flow and growth of the earth, in which we mortals flourish, and from which we receive the soundness of our roots.” And so: “Language is the flower of the mouth. In language the earth blossoms against the bloom of the sky.”
The poet’s language calls attention to its own sound—but sound not as physics or physiology might study it, i.e. not as brute or meaningless wave-lengths or pitches. A word’s sound is something different from its sense and reference (its content), but is itself another kind of meaning. It is a meaning that branches out into obscurity, as roots do in soil. So it includes, above all, that the content is said in a particular language, within which the words stand in massively complex relations of (mingled) sound and sense to other words. These relations, moreover, have a history, and each word links back to formative uses in the culture’s deep past.
Poetry insists that we hear these echoes and reverberations (whereas metaphysics tries to wipe this slate clean and determine the meaning solely through definition). Heidegger’s many sound-connections among words—the way he runs through series of terms built on the same root, for example—are meant to expose these elements in words’ meanings, how these other terms resonate in them. This is true for poetic language, and also for natural language, apart from its regimentation in concepts with definitions. Words bear these overtones as their “earth”: sense reaches out multifariously and indefinitely through language, as plants’ roots reach down through ground.
So the poet gives his words’ meaning over to the language to codetermine. His fresh words evoke vivid stances in us, and have a part of their meaning in our experience of those stances. But meaning also flows to that experience from the language—from the manifold viewpoints expressed by its words. The poet means to keep his words open on that side too—to let meaning accrue to them from the meanings they have elsewhere. In particular, he offers his words within the cultural practice and tradition of poetry, hence in a kind of dialogue with other poets. So his words have meaning in relation to theirs, and these relations inflect, as we notice them, the experiences the words evoke. (This is another reason slang may not count as poetry for Heidegger.)
More particularly, the poet speaks in a particular dialect, rooted in a particular region and locale. This makes his words express “earth” in a more literal sense: their meaning draws too on a particular region or landscape or “soil.” Heidegger remarks in particular on Hölderlin’s use of words from the Schwabian dialect. The geography of this region in southern Germany (Heidegger’s own), and especially its rivers, figures prominently in Hölderlin’s poems. This way a localizing “accent” contributes to the meaning of a poet’s words reinforces that this meaning can’t be defined or captured in concepts.
The poet’s words are conspicuously multivalent. By the standard of the concept they are indeterminate, though this is not a matter of mere vagueness [HHI 121]. Indeed each poetic word’s links run off in opposite directions, so that it always has contrary meanings. Heidegger develops this with respect to Trakl: “‘Green’ is decay and bloom, ‘white’ is pale and pure. … Yet this meaningmore [Mehrdeutige] of poetic saying does not flutter apart into an indeterminate meaning-many [Vieldeutige]” [LP (UL 192)]. Yet these divisions are not chaotic or arbitrary; the ambiguity “resides in a play that, the richer it unfolds, remains all the more rigorously held in a concealed rule” [QB (P 320)].
In these several ways there is an ineliminable obscurity in poetry, a mystery that can never be cleared up. A poem gives us a world with that mystery embedded in it. We participate as it makes new meaning, but the meaning is “set back” in the sounds and situations so that we can’t “capture” it in the familiar terms we have in control. We can’t fix it as a propositional content. It can’t be grasped by the representing subject, but needs to be understood “in the body,” in our feeling and will.
This dichotomy of world and earth, so famous from “Origin,” is superseded in later works by what Heidegger calls “the fourfold” of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities—all as something like regions or aspects of the world. I’ll come back to this when I talk about Heidegger’s treatment of gods in Chapter 9, but for now we should note that this schema preserves the stress on a mystery in things, but now allocates it into lower and higher sectors, “earth” and “gods.”
Poetry, then, carries its responsive reader out of the stale habit of language, into a situation in which the usual words don’t suffice. The reader then shares in the experience of language’s founding role, by speaking with the poet his new words, giving a new world, but a world inflected by (concealing) earth. So the reader participates in the ultimate event of Ereignis, in which world comes to be. And when poetry plays its social role—as it did among the Greeks, does not do now, but may do in the future—the whole society learns to speak these words, and to live in this new world. But it learns to live in it as made by language of this earthy, impenetrable character.
So, in the optimum, the new basic words the poet injects into the language change the world of the people who speak it. But Heidegger conceives of this “thrust” as decaying and lapsing over time: as the poetic words become common coin they lose their freshness and surprise. They continue to hold users in this world they project, but their own role in making this world drops from notice. And as they grow usual, it’s harder and rarer to notice their “earth,” the indeterminable meaning in their mere sound. As they become the habitual language, the light dims, that had shown words’ founding role.30 The world itself takes on a different status: no longer experienced as made by these words, it comes to seem obvious and inevitable. So poetry is not a higher form of everyday language; the latter is a forgotten and misused poetry.
Poetic words thus become hard to understand even among the people whose world they make. Nevertheless, Heidegger thinks they retain their potency, if we approach them right. They keep their power to “light up” a particular world-and-earth, even for people from other ages or cultures. It is of course the aim of his explications of poems to show how this can happen.
One important tactic for reviving the original sense of a word is to expose its etymology. Heidegger is often ridiculed for this. But his main point is not to assign these root senses to the word, but to locate the formative moment in which the root meaning is poetically converted into a new sense not analyzable into its root. Those root senses of course inflect the word, but only in helping us to have the experience the poet frames with the word. Etymologies can help us to regain that experience, and so to hear a word’s poetry again.
But in order for us to get this effect, our aim mustn’t just be to understand some other age or people. Instead of touristing in poetry, we must bring to it all of our concern, and so use it, in the end, to make ourselves a better home. In the “oblivion of being” we now suffer in our technological age, we must use poetry to begin to build a new language, to house a new world—to house it poetically, i.e. so as to give us this world with its earth, and its gods, both of which technology precludes. Hölderlin above all, he thinks, gives us words for this task.
Our own role is to be “preservers” of that poetry, by learning to live openly in the world it unconceals. Preserving is needed because of the iterative nature of language: “[b]ecause the word, once it is spoken, slips out of the protection of the caring poet, he alone cannot easily hold fast the spoken knowing … in its truth” [HK (EHP 49)]. Poetry is preserved by those who live in the world as opened by its words. “Preserving the work means: standing within in the openness of entities that happens in the work” [OA (W 41)]. “[F]or a work only actually is as a work when we transport ourselves out of the habitual and into what is opened up by the work” [47]. We preserve poetry when we sustain the power of its words to show themselves making our world.
I’ve deferred several times the question of poetry’s relation to “thinking,” which, we’ve seen, is what Heidegger promotes to replace metaphysics. I’ve described poetry largely in its contrast with metaphysics; we can improve this account by contrasting poetry next with thinking. The relation between these two, both favored by Heidegger, is much subtler than is either’s relation to the rejected metaphysics.
4. Thinking’s language
Having reviewed Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and his praise for poetry, we turn now to what seems the obvious consequence of these, his effort to write a poetic philosophy. We turn, that is, to Heidegger’s own language—to the style that is so striking and controversial a feature of his later work. Why does he write like this? How does he mean us to read him? And does he want us—as aspiring thinkers or philosophers ourselves—to write (and even think) this way too?
His lesson is not to give up philosophy for poetry. He identifies himself as a thinker rather than a poet. He writes very often about poems, but only exceptionally does he write verse—though he much esteems two philosophers who do, Parmenides and Nietzsche.31 Nor does he write in the dramatic-fictional style of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which ideas are embedded in a story about an individual life. And although he does use the favorite literary genre of philosophers, the dialogue, he uses it rarely.32 His later writing is abstract and discursive; it proceeds as a kind of argument. It still belongs, more clearly than much of Nietzsche’s, to the family-line of metaphysics. In his writerly genre, at least, he doesn’t switch sides.
This affinity to metaphysics is of course much closer in Being and Time, where he coins his philosophical vocabulary in strong imitation of Aristotle.33 He takes words from everyday discourse and converts them into technical terms. In particular he very often converts prepositions into abstract substantives; he does so especially in mapping teleological structure (e.g. das Wozu [the towards-which], das Worumwillen [the for-which]), which makes the resemblance to Aristotle still more striking (compare to hou heneka [the for-which]). On the other hand the architectonic effort of the book to build from basics reminds of other members of the metaphysical tradition: of Descartes (I suggested in Chapter 3) as well as of several German predecessors. Its language organizes its subject-matter with great care to set each point down in systematic place, where it is justified and also controlled by points before.
We’ve seen that Heidegger continues, in his later writings, to rate metaphysical language very high: it comes closer to expressing being than ordinary discourse, and so deserves the closest attention. The metaphysician’s words come from “near the source,” and carry a force that can be revived. Heidegger’s writings about past philosophers are often extremely compelling for the way they breathe life and freshness back into terms now stale for us. And his own terms in Being and Time carry this freshness themselves, for many readers. In this respect even metaphysics—and Heidegger’s own work before his turning—can constitute a form of “thinking.”
Nevertheless, he learns a lesson from poetry that makes him pull away from metaphysicians’ ways of writing, including his earlier own. This is not just a matter of his appropriating a number of poets’ words. Nor is it just that he thinks and writes about poetry. He goes on to present his lessons in a style that seems sometimes—at crucial moments—to mimic it, without the verse form. For example EL (UL 101): “When the word is called the mouth’s flower and blossom, we hear the sound of language rising like the earth. … The sound rings out in the resounding assembly call which, open to the open, lets world appear in things.”
At issue is far more than simply Heidegger’s “style,” taken as something cosmetic. Making thinking poetic is not done to “refresh and beautify the dull progress of thinking” [WCT 19]. His way of using words is his way of thinking, per se, and not an added ornament to it. He insists on the very special character of this thinking, lying above all in its special relation to its own words. So if thinking is to use words “poetically,” this will reach deeply into its very method or procedure: it will affect, above all, the way thinking gives grounds. We must consider whether this poetic element in Heidegger’s way of thinking makes it no longer the kind of “reasoning” we would want for truth.
Heidegger says that thinking and poetry lie very close: thinking “goes its ways in the neighborhood of poetry” [EL (UL 69)]. But often he seems to make them more intimate still: they include or involve one another. Sometimes it seems that poetry is a kind of thinking: “the lofty poetry of all great poetic work always vibrates within a thinking” [EL (UL 69)]. Other times it seems that thinking is a kind of poetry: “The thinking [Denken] of being is the original manner of poeming [Dichten]” [AS (W 247)]. Each seems to be a case of the other: “All reflective thinking is poeming, but all poetry a thinking” [PL (UL 136)]. These mutual involvements threaten to erase the distinction between poetry and thinking, and to merge or blend them with one another.34
But, I suggest, rather than merging thinking and poetry Heidegger sets them in a complex relation we can analyze.35 They are, to begin with, two species in a genus, with a common project: unconcealing being by language. Because they share this project they are also in a way collaborators; they “say the same thing.” But they do so best when they say this same thing in their respective, distinctive ways:
“What is said poetically and what is said thinkingly are never identical; but they are sometimes the same, namely when the cleft between poeming and thinking cleaves cleanly and decisively” [WCT 20].36
I think there are two main points to see. (1) We must look at what thinking and poetry have in common; it’s important that Heidegger largely draws this generic character from the example of poetry. (2) We must identify the specific differentiae of thinking and poetry—how each does that same thing in its own way; here is where that “gulf” between them appears.
(1) Thinking and poetry are both: unconcealings of being, in and by language, such that language’s role in the unconcealing is also unconcealed. The thinker’s or poet’s words make possible and available a viewpoint for which the very being of entities is clear or explicit—and clear as dependent on those words. Their words express and bear this viewpoint, which notices the basic project that controls, from the background, what kinds of entities can appear. Their words bear this viewpoint conspicuously, in a way that brings home how words “let be.”
So both thinking and poetry are events in language, but this means something different than we usually suppose. We might have said that they are “uses” of language, but Heidegger denies that language is a tool put to work by the thinker or poet. Language is not a system of words and their uses, but—we’ve seen—a comprehensive stance or point of view, opening upon a world; it is this viewpoint as expressed by and embodied in words. Thinking and poetry are sectors in that overall viewpoint, likewise expressed in particular words. By being “housed” in the thinker’s or poet’s words, a new possibility arises in that viewpoint: in particular, these words “say” the viewpoint becoming clear or explicit to itself.37
Thus neither the thinker’s thinking nor the poet’s poeming is an event in the individual’s head; they happen in the space or medium of the language, and are accessible to all speakers of it. These new sectors of the viewpoint are laid out, of course, by certain (sequences of ) words, the “saying” of the thinker or poet. Those words—the treatise, the poem—embody that new view: they “house” it, in Heidegger’s favorite expression. But although the thinker and poet make (or assemble) these words, they are not ultimately responsible for that new possibility. It arises by a “destiny” within that overall viewpoint—that way of having a world—so that really it is language itself that says (or speaks) in these words.
What’s crucial to thinking and poetry is to house not just any new possibility in the language, but one that “lights up” being as founded in words. In the fullest case, they light being down to its ultimate level, its specification as presence; they not only say pre-sencing, they show it as embodied in their words. And it’s here that the contrast with metaphysics lies.
Metaphysics does not belong to this genus, even though it satis-fies its first two conditions: it is an unconcealing of being, in and by language. Its words are indeed, like thinking’s and poetry’s, (transformative) “events in language,” fundamental extensions in its overall viewpoint. But metaphysics fails the third condition: it doesn’t unconceal the role of its own language in being’s unconcealment. Indeed it suppresses recognition of this role—and of being itself (as presence).
Metaphysics is in the grip of being as presence. It is driven by enframing, first and foremost in its relation to language: it picks its words as tools to set everything in a maximal order. Our habitual enframing not only wants words that express its control of the world, it also wants control over these words themselves, wants to fix them with definitions that render them maximally present and available. So we’ve seen how metaphysics treats its words as empty vessels getting all content from its definitions—and treats these definitions as inferred or read off from things: definitions report the discovered kinds of these things, and words are arbitrary names for these kinds. But this hides the way metaphysics’ own words really work (i.e. mean).
Because metaphysics doesn’t step back/down to the ultimate level of being’s clearing, it can’t notice its own particular relation to words—this enframing ambition with them. It also can’t notice how these words in fact elude that ambition to control them, and carry out their work of opening a world in a quite different way than by its definitions. Metaphysics misses the earth or mystery in its words, which is the necessary complement and limit to its clarity. It uses words with the objective to eliminate all mystery, and so actively interferes with access to being. It misaligns us for the insight to being; being can’t be known by concepts. PG 90: “what was in different ways named ‘being’ and ‘reason’ and, in such naming, was brought into a certain light, does not allow of a definition in the academic sense of traditional concept formation.”
So a post-metaphysical thinking must change what it wants to do with its words. We need “a transformation of our saying and … a transformed relation to the essence of language” [QB (P 306)]. Thinking needs to think its words not under its control, but as gifts. Rather than imposing their senses by willful definitions, it must receive them somehow from being itself, which thinking can learn to do from poetry.
Heidegger’s later writing deliberately models thinking’s new relation to language on poetry. Thinking learns from poetry a certain modesty in its relation to its words: to abandon the effort at a rigorous control, and to let them take their meanings from the language, as it extends around and behind us. It learns to set its words afloat in the language, letting them draw sense from their history, as well as from such subliminal and “chance” aspects as their sound-relations to other words. Thus the sense of the words diffuses outward (and backward) through the language, and cannot be “presenced” or contained.
This semantic strategy is reflected of course in Heidegger’s incessant play on words’ resonances and echoes in other terms, as well as in his often-speculative etymologies. His reliance on such sound-relations provokes the complaint that his philosophizing depends on mere puns—or on a claim that words’ “real meaning” is found by etymology. But he has grounds for this procedure.
First, this strategy lets words “bear earth,” and so sustain us in that reverence for mystery that we need for the revelation of being. This is why they can’t get their meanings by definition and fiat—can’t have sharp-edged and controllable meanings at all. By making their sense lean conspicuously on their sound, and on the undertones and associations they carry, Heidegger lets his words “preserve earth”—in the way we’ve seen holds in poetry.
He also has a more positive aim in that strategy. The thinker, like the poet, has his words get meaning this way, because it lets them tap the illuminating power buried in these words’ past. Thinker and poet thereby recover a potency in these words, which they had in their formative uses, but have lost to routine. “Words [Worte] are not terms [Wörtern], and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop an at-hand content. Words are springs that the saying digs up, springs that are to be found and dug anew again and again” [WCT 130]. The power in these old words is carried in such “chance” features as their sound.
But the thinker, like the poet, is only able to tap this buried potency by also saying something new with the words. The past senses are brought to life only by virtue of issuing in a fresh view or stance towards things; this fresh view brings life back to those old senses, and they further vivify it in turn. It’s the meaning our own time needs that most lives for us. So thinker and poet let their words draw sense from their history, while also adding a new sense to that history; they must do both to do either.
The thinker further follows the poet in the way he sets this new sense forth: it is fixed in a vivid new experience, that the words express and evoke. The words bring to life, they insert us, their readers, within, a “felt outlook” that stands apart from routine. They give us the world in a fresh aspect, which we feel more genuine than the habitual view it interrupts. The old words get new sense by being tied to this experience; this opens a new region in the overall viewpoint which we’ve seen is the language. The key difference between thinker and poet comes at this point, I think: in the different kinds of experiences they evoke, and give their new meanings in. But let’s approach this difference more methodically.
(2) Heidegger stresses thinking’s difference from poetry. He attributes to each its own role or function. HHI says that thinking has “its own proper origin, one equally essential, yet therefore basically distinct from that of poeming” [112]. The difference is not, we should see at once, the one Nietzsche insists on, that thinking wants truth but poetry is antithetical to truth. Because thinking and poetry both disclose being, they are both “true” in the most important sense, of alêtheia. Nor is the difference that poetry deals with values and thinking with (something like) facts. For thinking’s words are valuative too, and poetry gives a look to things and says how they are.
Heidegger’s clearest way of separating the two is by assigning them different topics: “The thinker says being. The poet names the holy” [AWM (P 237); cf. HHI 138]. This divides between thinking and poetry the aspects Aristotle attributes to metaphysics: ontology and theology.
We should notice right away how this undercuts the view that Heidegger makes thinking subordinate or subsidiary to poetry.38 For being clearly “lies deeper” than the gods for him. M 217: “the thinking of be-ing is a deed deeper than any immediate veneration of god.” Gods are, or are not (or are, as for us now, distant or away), by virtue of being—by virtue of how “there is” being for us. So although indeed the poet appears first in an epoch, and the thinker relies on this precedent, the thinker goes further and deeper.39
I’ll examine Heidegger’s account of “the gods” in Chapter 9, and will be brief here. Our interest is in how the poet’s and thinker’s different “topics” bear on their different “uses” of words. For they speak, he stresses, in different ways.40 The point is not, I suggest, that the thinker has words for gods but not being, and the thinker words for being but not gods. It’s rather the way that all the poet’s words involve an implicit reference to gods, and all the thinker’s words an implicit reference to being. In particular, all their words are (respectively) meant as from gods, or from being; this gives them quite different tones.
The idea that the poet gets his words from divinity is most explicit at the starts of Homer’s poems, but Heidegger thinks that any “true” poet must feel this. He must feel, that is, that his words, and the new outlook on things they embody, come as a gift from a source that means or intends (and has other human-like properties) yet is discontinuously higher or better in a way that gives that new outlook decisive credit. These words open a world that “is there” due to this higher source, and that shares in the latter’s glory. And this is why and how the poetic words disclose the world as beautiful [WCT 19]; their particular form of truth lies in this uncovering of beauty.
So the poet experiences this new vision as received, in moments of revelation that he undergoes rather than accomplishes. The poet can transmit this outlook through the words that frame it, but he can’t show the reader a route to the poetic experience itself—one must wait to be “struck” as by lightning (which is Hölderlin’s image for it). And this, I suggest, is the key procedural strength of thinking over poetry, as Heidegger now thinks it: the thinker finds “paths” that lead to the revelation of being, paths on which he makes his own way. Although finding these paths requires a receptiveness, a readiness-to-be-affected, they still give us an active ability to come towards Ereignis ourselves.
The thinker has a different kind of experience with being: not that of a momentary reception or gift, but of finding or following a “path” [Weg]—which is a crucial term in Heidegger’s notion of thinking, and where (I claim) it differs from poetry.41 His writing describes a path, which has a different temporal logic than telling a story. This is how he reframes the age-old philosophers’ claim to surpass poets by the giving of arguments, of reasons in favor of seeing the world their new way. Thinking makes a path to being; it finds a way to come into being’s vicinity. It dispenses with reliance on the authority of others (the gods), and finds a way to see being directly.
To be sure, this “path” is not at all a clear and fixed road. It is a “wood path,” a Holzweg—as he explains in the prescript to Holzwege: “In the wood there are paths that are mostly overgrown and end abruptly in the untrodden.” Heidegger elides in several ways the extent to which this path gives us control. It must be entered by a leap [PG 60], or else it makes possible a leap. And it is pursued not by aggressive exploration, but by a “waiting” or receptiveness that refrains from representing what it awaits [FC 75 (= DR (DT 68)).
However, this receptiveness is not towards gods—not a waiting for experiences of them. It waits to hear something in the human medium of language, understood as that overall viewpoint stretching back through history. It recognizes that whether gods are here or absent depends on that medium, which it can explore—make its paths within—by efforts of its own. So although this thinking can’t make a road that lastingly controls the space it moves through, it can improve its ability to find its way through it, each time anew.42
In one aspect thinking’s paths run back through history, but in another they run “down” to the foundations of our current world-view. These paths pursue that history because it shows how those foundations were laid—because it helps to bring those foundations to the special kind of explicitness they need. Those foundations were laid in words, and become explicit by our properly hearing words. And it is the experience of this special kind of insight (truth) that gives the crucial clues or signs along the path. Thinking finds its path by following a thread of illumination, in which this truth-experience is extended to more and more decisive levels of our meaning a world.
Heidegger’s later talks and essays follow paths in just this way. They begin more locally, trying to establish a sense of the kind of insight at stake, by raising some familiar philosophical issue, and showing how it has become too familiar—showing this by breathing life back into its terms, whose prior roteness becomes evident. This sets the standard of vivacity in words that we are to try to sustain as we move from these more local—or ontical—questions towards the deep stance and aim that shapes those questions, and is also expressed in those words.
This way of finding a path is the thinker’s “method,” which Heidegger hears through the Greek: “‘Path’ in Greek is hodos; meta means ‘after’; methodos is the path upon which we go after a matter: the method” [PG 63]. Thinking’s method is to follow the clue of the new kind of truth, back into history towards the formative sayings—by thinkers and poets—that remade language and experience. In these primary sayings thinking finds the original and still-guiding senses of our words. It recovers the potency buried in these words, and by them takes the stance that reaches all the way down to being.
This path that distinguishes thinking from poetry amounts to a kind of reason or “ground.” This is how Heidegger transmutes philosophy’s claim to provide—as poetry cannot—an argument that justifies what it says. Arguments themselves can’t really justify, he thinks, since justification happens only in the actual experience of the truth of being. WCT 233: “What has been seen can be demonstrated [ausweisen] only by being seen and seen again. What has been seen never lets itself be proved [beweisen] by adducing grounds and counter-grounds. Such a procedure forgets what is decisive, the looking.” Thinking’s method is all about this “looking”—it takes this experience itself as its clue.
It’s this insistence on reasons, and on making a path, that brings thinkers past gods and down to the level of being. And it’s by this that a people has a full-fledged history. It was the pre-Socratics’ pursuit of reasons that brought them (but not Homer) to the level of being, and opened the great discussion of it that followed in later philosophy. This fateful discussion has brought us to our modern dilemma, in which we find ourselves in the grip of enframing and technology.
Summary
Humans understand being only by virtue of language: we “house” being in our words. So language plays a founding and constitutive role, letting a world be there for us at all. This really crucial role is concealed by our prevailing conception of language as a tool by which we communicate information about a world that is there independently of language. This instrumental conception reflects our own alienation from language, and in particular our effort to subject it to the same control by which technology “presences” all entities. Our misrelation to language is a key element in the “oblivion of being”; our way to the truth of being depends on our finding a new way of speaking and hearing our words.
A language is not a system of signs with their rules of use. It is an overall view of a world as understandable by its words. So it involves intentionality or point of view. It is a comprehensive intentional space that includes all of a society’s diverging uses of words, and indeed the history of uses reaching back in the culture’s past; all of this has been one “conversation.” This vast space can be explored by individuals who already live in some sector of it. Those myriad uses are not all equal, however: some meanings housed in some simple words are decisive for opening the culture’s world. These are not the commonest public meanings, but the “originary” meanings expressed by thinkers and poets.
Since Plato Western thinking has been metaphysics, which exhibits a flawed relation to language. Metaphysical thinkers have, to be sure, played the crucial role of articulating the culture’s understanding of being; each houses the current understanding in the new basic words he introduces. But these thinkers mistake the very being they articulate, by misconceiving it as either the highest genus of entities, or as an ultimate entity itself. And this error is tied to their misuse of words: they propagate that instrumental conception of language by presenting their words as “concepts” pulled quite out of the cultural space and assigned meaning entirely by the metaphysician’s definition.
In strong contrast with this metaphysical relation to language is what we find in poetry. One large aspect of Heidegger’s turning after Being and Time is the weight he now puts on art, and on poetry in particular. Our culture’s understanding of being has been articulated not just by philosophers, but by poets. We find in their way with words lessons that can help our thinking too. By contrast with metaphysics, which makes words blank markers controlled by defi-nitions, poetry relies on their sound, on their associative links with other words, and on the concrete stories and situations it embeds them in. So its meanings are not transparent and contained, but draw on such sources impervious to definition and control. Heidegger calls this aspect of poetic meaning “earth”; poetry reminds us of the crucial role of earth in meaning.
Heidegger’s own later writerly style shows his effort to use lessons from poetry to find a non-metaphysical way to think. Thinking learns a kind of modesty in its use of words, allowing their meanings to accrue from the language; in this medium every word bears manifold senses, many due to its “mere” sound. Thinking relies on words to revive the originary meanings housed in the language by poets and thinkers. It differs from poetry first in speaking not from gods but from being, and second by following a “path” to being (whereas the poet depends on being struck by revelation). Thinking’s path, which runs back through those formative thinkers and poets, is what remains of the argument philosophy has prided itself in; it involves a kind of method with grounds, which separates it from poetry.
Further reading
J. Young: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [A distinctive account of Heidegger’s later views on art, and especially his readings of Hölderlin.]