MA Thesis: "Speaking for Itself: Poetry in Heidegger"

7/27/2019 MA Thesis: "Speaking for Itself: Poetry in Heidegger"

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Table of Contents

Abbreviations................................................................................................................................. 2

I. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3II. Beginning of the turn: poetry in The Origin of the Work of Art as

connected toBeing and Time

a. Destruktion & thingness .............................................................................................. 5b. Concealment & aletheia .............................................................................................. 10c. World & earth ....................................................................................................... 14

III. The greatness of poets: developments in What Are Poets For?a. Technology & poetry ............................................................................................. 19b. The converting of unshieldedness ......................................................................... 23

IV. The house of Being: culmination of the turn in The Nature of Languagea. Languages nature ................................................................................................. 30b. The word as relation ............................................................................................. 33c. An experience with language ................................................................................ 35

V. Conclusion: Waking Up .......................................................................................... 37Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 42

Abstract...................................................................................................................................... 43


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2Abbreviations

BT Heidegger, Martin.Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

FW Pinsky, Robert. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

OWL Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York:

HarperCollins, 1971.

PH Gadamer, Hans-Georg.Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by David E.

Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

PLT Heidegger, Martin.Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New

York: HarperCollins, 1971.


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3I. Introduction

The overall goal of this thesis is to explicate Heideggers notion of poetrythat is, to

explain his concept of what poetry is and does. Heideggers thought on this subject intertwines

inextricably with his thought on language, art, truth, and technology. To explain his notion of

poetry, then, it will be necessary to discuss the connections between these concepts and

categories in his thought. I hope to reach an understanding of how and why Heidegger came

to accord such great significance to poetry in his later writings. I also hope to provide

philosophers as well as writers and readers of poetry with an enriched appreciation for the

merits and possibilities of poetry.

I will focus my analysis on three key essays in which Heidegger develops his notion of

poetry. Their publication dates are staggered through Heideggers career: the first, The

Origin of the Work of Art, appears about a decade afterBeing and Time (he publishes the

essay in 1936, withBeing and Time first appearing in 1927); the second, What Are Poets For?

a decade after that (1946); and the third, The Nature of Language, another decade later

(1957). Thus, each essay represents a major development in Heideggers thinking since the

essay preceding it; taken together, they yield a survey of his entire intellectual career.

I will conclude by offering my own analysis of Robert Pinskys poem Waking Up. In this

analysis, I intend to follow in Heideggers way of poetic thinking and to demonstrate that this

way is worthwhile not merely with regard to the poems Heidegger discusses in his essays, but

for all poetry.

I have chosen not to discuss Heideggers many essays on Hlderlin, as they often serve to

explore issues and concerns other than those of poetry itself. I have also forgone discussion of

Heideggers other essays on the topic collected in English inPoetry, Language, Thoughtand On the

Way to Language; the three aforementioned essays are the most central to the topic at hand.

Each essay I have selected engages Heideggers philosophical concerns at the time of its

publication with enough thoroughness as to speak on behalf of the briefer essays he authored

coevally.

I will approach each essay with a focus on explaining its basic movements and terms while

highlighting its similarities to and developments since Heideggers preceding works. On a

basic level, I hope by providing clear summaries to show that Heidegger does not warrant the

disparaging reputation some attribute to him for the late essays. He is neither an obscurantist

nor a madman. It is true that his vocabulary is often insular and his arguments tortuous, but


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4when Heidegger is at his best, these tactics enable us to consider afresh certain concepts and

experiences whose worthiness for consideration has become concealed from us by familiarity.

In analyzing these essays, I will proceed according to the chronology of their authorship.

This will enable me to show that the alleged shift in Heideggers thinking after World War

II (from focus on Dasein to focus on language) is not a clean break with his early work; rather,

it is by applying the methods and categories he develops inBeing and Time and by remaining

faithful to his overall project that Heidegger comes to his later emphasis on language and

poetry. Heideggers overall project is fundamental ontology: ontology based in the

question of the meaning of Being in general (BT61). InBeing and Time, he proceeds

according to a belief that such ontologys most elementary and proper foundation is an

analysis of Dasein, the type of being who asks about Being (and who, by extension, he himself

and all of us who ask along with him also are). This is an elegant solution to the problem of

finding a beginning for investigation into Being (like Descartes Cogito ergo sum), but Heidegger

eventually realizes that his project needs an even more elementary starting point: an analysis

of Language, the realm wherein asking (about Being or anything else) is at all possible. This

realization is the so-called shift, and it arises first when he applies the methods he developed

inBeing and Time to a study of the essence of art. Heidegger finds in The Origin of the Work

of Art that art is a way that truth happens, and the very notion of truth as a happeningmore

precisely, as an unconcealing: aletheiasuggests a new direction for his inquiry into the truth

of Being. Hence, in What Are Poets For? he develops a new schema centered on the

Open and the conversion of unshieldedness to enrich this notion of truthand, crucially,

he sets up language as the house of Being; this is the aforementioned new starting point for

his inquiry into Being. Since Heidegger has now elevated both art (as a mode of knowing) and

language (as that which permits beings to inhabit Being), it is only natural that he comes to

grant special favor to the art oflanguage, namely: poetry. In The Nature of Language,

Heidegger explains his designation of language as the house of Being by asserting the

neighborhood of poetry and thinking. Through the closeness established by this

neighborhood, language becomes Heideggers starting point for questioning Being not only in

that language makes asking possible, but also in that language is that which asksin that

language itself is what speaks. It speaks such that it establishes the nearness that is constitutive

of the Open where truth happens.


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5II. Beginning of the turn: poetry in The Origin of the Work of Art as

connected toBeing and Time

II(a). Destruktion & thingness

In Thing and Work, the first section of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger

undertakes a critique of traditional notions of thingness as the first part of an answer to the

driving question of the essay: [W]hat and how is a work of art? (PLT18). He first observes

that all works have [a] thingly character the architectural work is in stone, the carving is

in wood, the painting in color, the linguistic work in speech, the musical composition in

sound (PLT19). But the art work is something else over and above the thingly element,

something by virtue of which certain bits of stone, wood, color, etc. come to be art (ibid.). To

describe this something else in the work, Heidegger must first describe the thingness over

and above which it stands. He is not satisfied with traditional notions of the thing, however; in

the first lecture (Thing and Work) of the three comprising the essay, he applies his method

ofDestruktion in order to come to know the thing-being (thingness) of the thing (PLT20).

Heidegger develops the method ofDestruktion inBeing and Time in order to overcome a

problem he faces in providing an ontological analytic of Daseina problem not only for him,

then, but for Dasein itself, since Dasein is the being for whom Being is a question and who

requires ontological self-understanding in order to fulfill its task. (Its task is to be its ownmost

being: to live authentically.) The problem is the forgetting of Beingmore specifically, the

forgetting of the history of the inquiry into Being. The problem posed by this forgetting is

not only that Dasein is inclined to fall back on its world and to interpret itself in terms

of that world by its reflected light, but also that Dasein simultaneously falls prey to the

tradition of which it has more or less explicitly taken hold. This tradition keeps it from

providing its own guidance, whether in inquiring or in choosing. When tradition thus

becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible,

proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Indeed it makes us

forget that [our ontological categories and concepts] have [historical sources], and makes

us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need

not even understand. Dasein no longer understands the most elementary conditions

which would alone enable it to go back to the past in a positive manner and make itproductively on its own. (BT43)


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6The aim ofDestruktion is to recover for us today those experiences through which the ancients

first determined the nature of Being, for this would renew our own proximity to the question

of Being. We must destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology that continues to

express itself in todays ways of thinking until we uncover the moment at which a decision was

reached within the tradition (BT44). Despite the negative connotation of the prefix de-,

Destruktion has a positive aim: to re-appropriate for ourselves today the moment of decision

faced by the ancients. Heideggers method answers an imperative stated well by 17th-century

haiku poet Matsuo Basho: Do not follow in the footsteps of the Ancients; seek what they

sought.1

InBeing and Time, Heidegger applies this method to an ontological analytic of Dasein, but

in Origin he applies it to an ontological analytic of the thing. By a thing Heidegger

means all beings that in any way arehe means whatever it is that all beings hold in

common so far as [they are] not simply nothing (PLT21). He cites as examples a stone, a

jug, and a well. The jug and the well are equipment, but they can also be considered in their

thingness as distinct from their usefulness; the stone, however, is a mere thing: it does not

have any additional traits other than its thingness. (Again, Heideggers reason for undertaking

an analysis of the thing is to explicate the thingly character of the work of art.) Though he

does not explicitly invokeDestruktion, he applies its methods, beginning by asserting a need for

them: The answers to the question What is the thing? are so familiar that we no longer

sense anything questionable behind them (PLT22). Heidegger indicates three historical

interpretations of thingness: the thing as substance with accidents, the thing as a unity of sense-

perceptions, and the thing asformed matter. Regarding the first, Heidegger says it was preceded by

a Greek conception of the thing as an always-already-there core (to hupokeimenon) around which

characteristics (ta sumbebekota) have always already assembled; in translating these terms into

Latin, the Romans also reinterpreted them as, respectively, subject (substance) and predicate

(accidents). Heidegger argues that sentence-structure and thing-structure are not the same: a

predicate is not an always-already-there characteristic, but rather that which can be said

about a thingafterthe thing has appeared. To be able to say The pen is blue (a subject-

predicate proposition), the pen must already have appeared as bluebut if a thing is defined

merely by subject-predicate structures, then we cannot inquire into its mode of appearance; we

1 Matsuo Basho,Bashos Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho, trans. David Landis Barnhill (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2005), 139. I invoke a haiku poet here partially as a gesture toward Heideggers

self-proclaimed affinities with Eastern thought, as described in, e.g., the first essay in On the Way to Language, ADialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer.2 N.B.: There is an important distinction between experiencing something linguistically and experiencing it

equipmentally. One does not necessarily use language simply as a way of pursuing ones activities and purposes.


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7cannot ask how there comes to be a state of affairs wherein anything can be said about the

thing we then call a blue pen. We so readily conflate sentence-structure and thing-structure

because they share a common sourcea source that, according to Heidegger, has been

forgotten (PLT24). Both the Greek and Latin versions of the bearer of traits thing-concept

miss the mark in two senses. First, the concept is too vague; it applies not exclusively to mere

things but to any being at all. Second, the concept does not describe what this bearing entails;

it fails to account for the independent and self-contained character of the thing (PLT24).

When we might look to arrange a situation wherein the thing could show its thingness, we

find that we are already in such a situation: things affect us through our senses. But no sooner

do we sensibly encounter a thing than the experience becomes commonplace and we forget

what was shown in it, remembering only the fact that it occurred through the senses; thus we

reduce the thing to a mere unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses and nothing

more (PLT25). Heidegger argues (opposing such a reduction) that we experience the thing

that offers sensations to us anteriorly to the sensations themselves, even though the actual

temporal order of our cognition is the reverse. For instance, in the actual temporal ordering

when one walks out into a rainstorm, one first receives sense-impressions of wet and cold on

ones skin, of many small specks falling before ones eyes, and of susurrations surrounding

ones ears; only after one has these sensations does one label them storm. But in ones

everyday experience as one is going about ones business, one walks out the door and first

notices the Gestaltof storm; only by subsequent reflection can one isolate the individual

sensations subsumed under this name. Even when one does so, one encounters the world in a

primarily linguistic way for Heidegger; we usually experience droplets and wet more fully

and directly than the sensations they describe.2 This assertion is neither decidable nor

falsifiable in the realm of empirical psychology, but Heidegger is concerned simply to show

that there is more to our experience of beings than sense-impressions. He aims to expose the

very field of Being in which sense-impressions are given to us at all and in which it becomes

possible for us to take sense-data as a thing. This hermeneutic as is precisely why Heidegger

believes our encounter of the thing is seated in language.3 He supports this argument against

thing-as-(mere)-sensible-manifold inBeing and Time: Subjecting the manifold to tabulation

2 N.B.: There is an important distinction between experiencing something linguistically and experiencing it

equipmentally. One does not necessarily use language simply as a way of pursuing ones activities and purposes.Otherwise, the preceding argument (that human experience is basically linguistic) would oppose Heideggers

later point that equipmental being has come to be erroneously conflated with the being of the mere thing.

3 One might ask why Heidegger considers the as to be linguistic rather than merely noematic or apophantic. Oneimportant reason is that the as is intersubjective: the showing of a thing occurs in a world where others see it, too,such that the thing can enter discourse. In this sense, the as is linguistic.


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8does not ensure any actual understanding of what lies there before us as thus set in order. If an

ordering principle is genuine, it has its own content as a thing, which is never to be found by

means of such ordering, but is already presupposed in it (BT77). In summarizing the

mistakes of these two thing-concepts, Heidegger says that the first thing-concept keeps the

thing at arms length from us: it does not ask how the thing becomes visible to us, so the part

of the thing that is not visible is forever withheld from us (PLT26). On the other hand, the

second thing-concept makes [the thing] press too hard upon us: the thing comprises only

those aspects of the thing that we experience for ourselves sensibly, so none of the thing is

withheld from us (ibid.). Neither of the first two thing-concepts undertakes to describe the

things self-containment; the things own-ness goes unnoticed in the first interpretation and is

denied altogether in the second interpretation.

The third thing-concept, thing asformed matter, accounts for the things own-ness (its

matter is constant) while also acknowledging its modes of givenness (it always appears in a

sensuous form). Heidegger acknowledges the prevalence of this framework in art theory and

aesthetics, but he suspects that its structure originates not in thingness (the thingly character

of the thing) itself but rather in work-ness (the workly character of the artwork) and is only

later grafted by Western thought onto thingness in general (PLT27). In support of this

suspicion, Heidegger notes that, for useful things such as shoes (also jugs, axes, etc.), the manner

in which form and matter come together is not the things core identity; rather, the manner is

determined by the particular usefulness of the thing. Matter and form, then, are appropriate

determinations within the nature of equipment (useful things), but not within the nature of

mere thingness. Equipment, that type of being for which form and matter are proper

categories, has the self-containment of the mere thing and the made-ness of the art work but

lacks the self-sufficiency of the art work; its being is of a type intermediate between thing and

work (PLT28).

Humans so readily interpret all beings as equipment for two reasons: first, because

humans participate as makers in the coming-into-being of equipment, it offers its middle-

ground position as the archetype through which to interpret the being both of mere things

and of works. Second, the Bible presents the coming-into-being of the totality of beings as the

result of a creative act of God, and humans tend to understand this act and its results by

analogy to their own acts of making. Heidegger again invokes the need for his method of

Destruktion: the interpretation of thingness as synthesis of form and matter initially arose among

the Greeks as a corollary of their discovery of the immediate view with which the thingsolicits us by its looks, but in the medieval and Kantian translations of the interpretation, the


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9interpretations rootedness in this solicitation on the part of the thing was lost in favor of a

basis in someoneus or Godmaking the thing (PLT29). For instance, Heidegger argues in

Being and Time that Descartes depends on a medieval scholastic conception of Being as an ens

creatum while making his new beginning. Descartes ignorance of this dependence further

buried the meaning of Being during modernity (BT45-47).Destruktion of this ontological

concept shows us what has been lost in them that we can now begin to recover. The self-

evidence of the third thing-interpretation to us today is not, then, a proof of the

interpretations validity. On the contrary, the self-evidence is a sign that we have ceased

even to be aware that our interpretation of the thing as formed matter is in fact an

interpretation: one view among many possible views. For Heidegger, the self-evidence of an

ontological concept serves as evidence that the concept must undergoDestruktion: it has

become self-evident not because it has come to provide its own foundation, but because its

foundation has been concealed. The tendency of ontological concepts to conceal themselves

from our understanding is a concomitant for Dasein of the forgetting of the question of Being.

This forgetting can also be described as the indifference that simply turns its back upon the

being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being; the difficulty for Dasein in its effort

to let a being be just the being that it is is to remain concerned enough about that being to

engage in sustained thought regarding it, putting forth the effort required to hold the

competing self-evident interpretations at bay (PLT31).

Thus we see that Heidegger applies the method ofDestruktion (originally developed inBeing

and Time) to an analysis of historical conceptions of thingness, and it yields a positive result: a

clue toward the equipmental character of equipment. The clue is the sheer fact that the

interpretation of thingness wherein matter and form are favored has come to historical

dominance. Since matter and form belong properly to the essence of equipment, the clue

suggests that something intrinsic to equipment is its familiarityits tendency to come to be

used unreflectively. Heidegger decides to use the clue about equipment to move in the

direction of an analysis of the work, since equipment is by nature something between the

thing and the work, an intermediate type of being. The move toward the work is a move

toward the goal of his essay: to describe the origin of the work of art.

It might seem that Heidegger thereby abandons the analysis of the thing, which had been

his first target in the essay on the way to its final goal. But the clue about equipment was

also a clue about the thing: equipment tends to promote and familiarize itself, whereas the

thing tends to hide and withdraw itselfmuch as Being itself does, as Heidegger explainsregarding the forgetting of Being at the beginning ofBeing and Time. So the thing


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10withdrawsyet we discover this withdrawal of the thing in the course of inquiring into the

nature of the thing, which suggests that something of the thing is also shown to us. (In the

moment of its escape, we catch it by the heel, so to speak.) At a minimum, we know at least

one piece of information about the thing: we know thatit conceals itself, which means the

thing is both revealed (if only by our knowledge of its concealment) and concealed. In this way

the thingness of the thing and any given thing we encounter play the respective roles of

phenomenon and appearance as defined inBeing and Time: an appearance is like a symptom

(appearance/formed matter) announcing a disease (phenomenon/thing), an announcing-itself

through something that shows itself (BT52-53).

The clue about the thing was, so to speak, the reverse face of the realization of which the

clue about equipment was the obverse face; and now they both point to a clue toward the

workly character of the work. Heidegger claims that the de-concealing of the thing-being of

an art-work happens not insofar as it is a thing, but insofar as it is a workit happens in the

work-being and is part of the work of the work. The course of the essay is following a

hermeneutic circle: to find the work of art, Heidegger needed to analyze thingness, and now

to analyze thingness more thoroughly he needs to move toward an analysis of work-being by

way of an analysis of equipment-being. As inBeing and Time, Heidegger follows a hermeneutic

circle: thing, work, and equipment are inter-related such that it is necessary to understand

each of the three in order to understand any of the three. But it is still possible to enter into an

understanding of them by analyzing the circle itself; Heidegger is able to begin by assessing

the type of inter-relation each has with the others, and this yields clues toward disclosing the

type of being each one is.

We are already drawing closer to Heideggers notion of poetry. By building his analysis

around the relations in a hermeneutic circle, Heidegger preliminarily disposes the analysis to

result in a system that favors language; for as he later says in The Nature of Language, the

word itself is the relation (WL73). To trace the next moment of this shift, I now turn to

discussing Heideggers notion of truth as aletheia, which he puts forth inBeing and Time and

articulates more fully in The Origin of the Work of Art.

II(b). Concealment andaletheia

Heideggers notion ofaletheia is crucial for understanding both his notion of poetry and the

turn in his thinking after World War II. InBeing and Time, he uses the term to invoke aGreek conception of truth and to oppose it to a conception of truth as agreement or


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11judgment. In the latter conception, the logos of phenomenology signifies reason or adequate

judgment, but for Heidegger, both reason and judgment depend on a more basic sense oflogos

as discourse. This is because both reason and judgment presuppose that discourse serves to

make manifest what one is talking about in ones discourse letting it be seen as

something[so that] it can therefore be true or false (BT56). This means that truth does not

primarily bring about agreement (between mind and world, idea and thing, etc.); rather, truth

takes entities out of their hiddenness, letting them be seen as unhidden things.Aletheia is

unconcealment or discovery.4 Its opposite, being-false, is not utter concealment, but

deception: putting something in front of something (in such a way as to let it be seen) and

thereby passing it offas something which it is not (BT57). Something utterly concealed would

be neither true nor false; truth (or falsity) rests in the mannerof showing. Heidegger resists even

translatingaletheia as truth because the latter term bears so much weight from its traditional

use that even as the very term for uncoveredness (or entities in the how of their

uncoveredness) its original meaning has become covered over time; the entire principle of

uncoveredness has been covered by the tradition. Thus, uncovering uncoveredness itself is a

task for Dasein: There is truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is (BT269).

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger begins to discuss aletheia explicitly once he

has finished his initial expositions of thingness, equipmentality (taking the example of the

peasant shoes in Van Goghs painting), and workliness (taking the example of a Greek

temple), but it becomes clear already during these expositions that Heidegger has in mind a

notion of truth as unconcealment, even in his very method of seeking to discern these three

types of beingsforthe beings they are. Regarding workliness, what is performed by a work is a

kind of unconcealment: The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and

to men their outlook on themselves (PLT42). Equipment, on the other hand, conceals the

matter out of which it is made: the matter disappears into usefulness, whereas a work

causes [the matter] to come forth for the very first time (PLT44-45). The rock of an

arrowhead lets us see the possibility of shooting something at which we aim, but the rock of a

temple lets us see the rock itself. The temple places the rock in a relation to the world and us

wherein it asserts its nature, urging us to see it as a rock rather than either deceiving us or

pointing to something else. It asserts its nature, yesbut its nature or essence is not merely

4 Simply to point ahead to where the notion ofaletheia leads after Heideggers turn, I offer a quote from TheNature of Language, one that I will discuss again later in the main text: Only where the word for a thing has

been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it (OWL62). To be shown and unconcealed, the thing must first be;and in order to be, it must be established (via language) as a being. We must experience a thingas the thing it is(instead ofas something it is not), and this as occurs in the word for Heidegger.


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12those features held in common, which would be an inessential essence; rather, its nature

lies in what the entity is in truth (PLT49). Here Heidegger invokes aletheia and restates the

argument fromBeing and Time about how truth as unconcealedness underlies any notion of

truth as agreement or correct correspondence of propositions; having done so, he then

undertakes a fuller explication of what unconcealedness is. He applies numerous metaphors

and invented terms to this task, including clearing, lighting, and the Open; these terms

persist in Heideggers later thought about poetry, lending credence to the idea that

Heideggers turn toward language is motivated in part by this fuller explication of

unconcealedness. In the explication, Heidegger operates in a quasi-poetic fashion, crafting a

non-linear play of metaphors and terms in order to communicate the truth ofaletheia. We look

now to this play.

Heidegger begins by stating that, even when we consider the totality of all the beings that

are,

there is still something else that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place

occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. [T]his clearing is in a greater degree than are

beings. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center

itself encircles all that is Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain

changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere of what is

lighted. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment

(PLT51-52).

By calling what occurs prior to aletheia a center, Heidegger invokes a spatial metaphor. By

calling it a clearing, Heidegger characterizes it as activeas constantly working to clear out

and maintain a space for beings. By calling it a lighting, Heidegger introduces the notion

that concealment (shadow) is intrinsic to unconcealment. This is both a paradox and a further

spatialization of truth, but it is not necessarily a reduction of truth to paradox or to space;

rather, Heidegger uses such terms expressively and evocatively to suggest that the relations

involved in the center/clearing/lighting are more elusive and sophisticated than merely

paradoxical or spatial ones. Heidegger presses the metaphor further by saying that beings can

become concealed either by refusal (a being resists being lighted) or by dissembling (one

being obscures another), although we can never tell by which method a being is concealed.

He describes the same two types of concealment inBeing and Time, labeling them burying-over and disguise, respectively (BT60). Already inBeing and Time he acknowledges that


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13some of these concealments are necessary and grounded in the thingness of the thing, giving

his famous formulation: Yet so much semblance, so much Being (ibid.). In The Origin of

the Work of Art, he restates his idea that double concealment is essential for unconcealedness

in more expressive terms: the clearing happens only as this double concealment. Truth, in

its nature, is un-truth (PLT52-53). Another way Heidegger develops this idea in the latter

essay is by stating that unconcealment (truth) not only occurs by way of the double

concealment, but further it occurs in a conflictresulting from the two types of concealment.

The conflict is this: concealment as refusal enables the act of clearing, while concealment as

dissembling diminishes the clarity of that clearing (PLT53). The formulation Heidegger gives

can be extended further, however, to describe a richer sense of the conflict: refusal and

dissembling alike can both be said to simultaneously enable and limit the process of clearing.

Refusal already both enables the clearing and gives it a boundary in that the very self-

possession that enables beings to remain self-contained (by way of refusal) also enables them to

have essences that can be shown as truth when they choose not to contain it. Meanwhile, the

fact that there is a multiplicity of such self-possessed beings means that one being can be

confused for another in dissembling (lighted beings either cast shadows on others or look like

them), but this multiplicity that enables dissembling also makes it possible to see a being

distinctlyto see it by way of contrast with some other being or beings.

As a result of the conflict of the forms of concealment (which is also the conflict of

concealment with clearing), the totality of beings is able both to stand within the clearing and

to set itself back into itself (ibid.). Wherever this conflict occurs amongany beings, it occurs

amongallbeingsthe totality is brought into the Open, even if not all beings are fully

unconcealed within it, because the Open is the site of the conflict. Only one being is needed to

maintain the Open: there must always be some being in this Open, something that is, in

which the openness takes its stand In taking possession thus of the Open, the openness

holds open the Open and sustains it (PLT59). InBeing and Time, Heidegger argues that

Dasein is the only one who can bring about such a conflict among any beings, and it is for

Dasein that beings as a whole might be unconcealed: the uncoveredness of entities within-

the-world is grounded in the worlds disclosedness. But disclosedness is [a] basic character of

Dasein hence only with Daseins disclosedness is the most primordialphenomenon of truth

attained (BT263). However, in The Origin of the Work of Art, he suggests that Being, by

way of its own nature, lets the place of openness happen, and introduces it as a place (PLT

59). Here Heidegger begins inquiring into Being from a more fundamental starting point thanthe analytic of Dasein inBeing and Time, and he does so by way of introducing the notion of


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14the Open, whose clearing happens even more primordially than the most primordial

phenomenon of truth, which Dasein enactsnamely, unconcealedness.

Heidegger argues that one site of the conflict, and thus one site of the happening of truth,

is the work-being of the work: Truth happens in the temples standing where it is. This does

not mean that something is correctly represented and rendered here, but that what is as a

whole is brought into unconcealedness and held therein (PLT54). (We will consider how he

argues this point when we discuss world and earth.) We can now answer the initial

question of what the work of art is and does with regard to the work component (we will

address the art part later): insofar as it is a work, it is a way that truth happens. We can

better understand how this task falls uniquely to the work by comparing the work to

equipment: the works work-being and equipments equipment-being both consist in a

bringing-forth, but the latter is merely made while the former is created (PLT58). The

Open comes about and is held open by way of some thing, as was said before; but now

Heidegger specifies that the type of thing that can accomplish this is one that is created: to

create is to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth (ibid.). The

madeness of a piece of equipment draws our attention to the activity we can perform through

the equipment, and we forget that the equipment is in its own right. On the other hand, the

createdness of a work draws our attention to itself (the createdness), and we are then struck by

the mere fact that the workis. The mere being of things in general is what is uncovered, then,

by the work, and by the work we regain access to an experience of the basic fact of their

being: The more essentially the work opens itself, the more luminous becomes the

uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not (PLT63).

II(c). World & earth

In this essay, ten years afterBeing and Time, Heidegger responds to those who have

interpreted Dasein as transcendental subjectivity by distancing himself from such a view. He

does so through his explanation of the way Dasein interacts with the work. Heidegger does

acknowledge that, by recovering the basic fact that beings are, Dasein can claim its own will

and learn how to behave in the world. As Heidegger phrases it, He who truly knows what is,

knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is (PLT65). But at the same time, he stresses

that the subjects striving toward himself is not a self-set goal; rather, it is obedience to the

law of the clearing of beings, guided at every step by this clearing. It serves to free Daseinfrom self-contained egoism while also holding open the Open. It is not the deliberate action


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15of a subject, but the opening up of human being to the openness of Being (ibid.). The

response by Dasein interacts complexly with the work itself in a way Heidegger calls

preserving: by letting itself be brought into the openness of Being by the work, Dasein

permits the work to do its work and thereby to persist (i.e., be preserved) as a work (PLT66).

To begin the line of inquiry in the essay, Heidegger had assumed that the work of art has

a thingly character; now, in explaining why the work needs Dasein to preserve it, he rejects

that assumption. Insofar as the work of art is a work, what looks like the thingly element ...

[is] its earthy character (PLT67). The earth is not a thing, but the foundational movement

of self-seclusion and withholding; since things are characterized by their withholding, their

own-ness, they can be confused with earth, but earth is a fundamental force that operates

several layers of conflict beneath the establishment of things; it is own-ness as such (PLT45).

Earth is that which comes forth and shelters such that there can be concealment; by the

conflict within unconcealment of concealment and clearing, the Open takes place; within the

Open, things can come into themselves as things. By consisting in and introducing us to

earth, the work calls into question the very subject-object dichotomy we presupposed when

we originally considered the work a thing. The work needs to be preserved not because it

resists in the same manner as a thing, but because it resists even being seen as a mere thing

it operates on the primal scene of earth that is the very power of resistance. A stone is a

thing, whereas earth is [the stones] heaviness [that] exerts an opposing pressure upon us

[yet] denies us any penetration into it. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and

unexplained (ibid.). The earth is demonstrated for what it is when the stone is put to work in

a temple or a sculpture. This is because, in the work, the earth is placed in its conflict with the

world, and in the conflict both earth and world rise to the occasion and take hold of their

natures. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the world is the ever-nonobjective A stone is

worldless. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their

remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits (PLT43-44). Whereas earth is self-seclusion

and own-ness, world is self-giving-ness and belonging-to-another; earth is the force of

withholding, and world is the element of spaciousness, a horizon for beings. It is tempting to

identify earth simply with activity and world with passivity, or earth with One and world with

Many. Indeed, it seems that Heidegger inquires into deeper and deeper levels of fundamental

binary conflicts, holding that each is established by another such conflict. The levels could

perhaps proceed infinitely into ever-greater obscurity; if so, then perhaps the infinitude of the

levels results from a kind of reflexivity intrinsic to Being. The important point for his analysis


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16here is that the work sets up a world and sets forth the earth such that this reflexivity can

occur as earth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth (PLT54).

In understanding Heideggers account of the dynamic between world and earth, it is

important to note that, while Heidegger articulates his concept of world inBeing and Time

and continues to use it in more or less the same sense in The Origin of the Work of Art, it is

only in the latter text that he introduces the counter-concept of earth. InBeing and Time,

there is a duality wherein world is the horizon of possibilities for Dasein and Dasein is being-

in-the-world. With the introduction of earth, there arises a complex interplay among the

three that does not lend itself to straightforward philosophical description. This is because the

concept of earth is, in a sense, an empty concept: the very concept of emptiness, a true

counter-concept, a way of speaking about the Nothing that nothings. As Hans-George

Gadamer describes it, the concept of the earth sound[s] a mythical and gnostic note that at

best might have its true home in the world of poetry (PH217). With earth, poetry becomes

inherent in Heideggers approach to philosophy and makes it possible for him to develop a

notion of truth wherein truth is not taken up and perfected in the truth of the philosophical

concept [but is rather] an eventof truth (PH224). Because of this, he can say that the work

of art does not merely unconceal (i.e., bring into their truth) the particular beings it references

or depicts, but rather it performs unconcealment itself, whereby any and all beings become

unconcealed. The meaning of the work of art, then, is inexhaustible. The work (i.e.,

function) of art is to perform unconcealment and thereby guard against the universal loss of

things (PH227). Modern science threatens such a universal loss; its calculative mode of

knowing threatens to cause us to construe all things only in terms of their possible uses for us,

converting everything into equipment. Such construal is problematic because the true

thingness of a thing is precisely what cannot be put to use (PH228). The correctness or

incorrectness of scientific facts presupposes that the things under scientific consideration are

unconcealed, but if we were to construe things solely as mere use-objects, we would lose the

very unconcealment that makes science possible (PH225). In other words, what the work of

art protects is not merely our ability to think and say phrases like Things are, nor does the

work effect changes in the physical properties of things. What the work protects is our ability

to see things for what they are and thereby to see the possibilities they offer, including the

possibility of their use as equipment or as objects of science; it gives the things to their

possibilities. We also receive from the work our own ability to imagine possibilities for

ourselves as beings, including the possibility of our conducting sciencesuch is the


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17relationship to the world and other beings that art opens for us. In Heideggers later essays, he

further explores this conflict between poetry and technology.

At the end of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger introduces a nascent version of

the notion of poetry he eventually reaches. He uses poetry in a general sense to mean the

way that truth happens through the createdness of the work. Thus he is led to say, All art

is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art is the setting-itself-into-work of truth (PLT

70). The Greek root of the term poetry is the verbpoiein, create, and this is what

Heidegger has in mind. In later essays, when he begins to use the term Saying, it serves in

the way poetry does here: to say is to give voice to the thing said, to bring it into a world

where it can take up its real meaningto create. What is more, each instance of Saying

establishes and preserves voice as such and holds therein not merely the thing under

discussion, but all things; in this sense Saying is an analog for work-being. Heidegger also

gives consideration to poetry in the narrower, more typical sense of poesy, the composition

of linguistic works of art, according it a privileged position among art forms. The reason for

this partiality is that language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for

the first time (PLT71). According to Heidegger, Dasein engages inprojection (takes up its

possibilities as possibilities, i.e., as possible projects to undertake) by way of language, so all

non-verbal art formsmusic, visual art, dancestrive insofar as truth happens in them

toward the standard set by the poem. Each art form strives to bring into the Open whichever

being is proper to that form such that even the non-verbal forms can Say without wordscan

Say intransitively, naming all things at once in the conflict of world and earth. Although it is

not entirely clear in what way Heidegger means that language is not necessarily verbal, it does

seem that, for him, language is most itself when it is verbal. He holds that even non-artistic

uses of verbal language share in poetry (perhaps as thoroughly as non-verbal art forms do):

Language itself is poetry in the essential sense (PLT72). Further, verbal art is not only the

standard but also the source of the other art forms insofar as they are poetry: poesy is the

most original form of poetry in the essential sense (ibid.).

In this essay, the answer to the question of what originates the work of art is Art, and its

work is to let truth originate. The question of what originates Art remains unanswered, as art

is the movement of coming-to-be. Yet it seems that already for Heidegger poetry is more

fundamental than art, for poetry is founding and art happens as poetry (PLT75). He does

not view poetry as being so thoroughly originary in his lone statement about it inBeing and

Time. There he says, In poetical discourse, the communication of the existential possibilitiesof ones state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of


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18existence (BT205). In this early formulation, what poetry discloses is Being; in the essay, he

restates the formulation with the nuance that poetry discloses the truth of Being. He does so

because of the addition of earth and the consequent dynamic whereby this truth happens as

poetry. Also, in the statement fromBeing and Time, Dasein already projects and occupies its

possible states of mind before it undertakes to communicate them in poetry (or in any

discourse); by the time of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger claims that Dasein only

originally projects those possibilities by way of language. It is the disclosure accomplished in

poetry that enables Dasein to have the existential possibilities of its state-of-mind at all. This is

not to say that only people who read verbal poems have states of mind, but that the

movement in us that enables us to have states of mind rests most essentially and thoroughly in

the art of language. Gadamer rightly points out that Heideggers mystical view cannot be

verified by subjective demonstration, but this is because concepts like the event of being are

themselves the ground of subjectivity. Heideggers aesthetics remains concerned with the

mode of being of art without making art subservient to philosophical categories; in this way it

not only avoids the prejudices of traditional aesthetics and the modern conception of

subjectivity [but] also avoids simply renewing the speculative aesthetics that defined the

work of art as the sensuous manifestation of the Idea (PH223). Like the art it describes,

Heideggers aesthetics is also an origin: it opens the possibility of inquiring afresh into its

subject. The inquiry yields for Heidegger the view of poetry that becomes the focus of his later

work. This focus is in many ways distinct from the focus inBeing in Time, yet the alterations

that occur in each text are, as we have seen, traceable and organic.


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19III. The greatness of poets: developments in What Are Poets For?

III(a). Technology & poetry

In his essay What Are Poets For? Heidegger presents poetry and technology as two

opposed modes of willing and knowing. The technological mode denies (although it does not

minimize) external influence on ones aims, whereas the poetic mode acknowledges and

invites such influence not only on ones aims but on the presuppositions of ones epistemology

and on ones relation to Being itself. This is an elaboration of the opposition between art and

equipment described in The Origin of the Work of Art.

Heidegger recapitulates many of the concepts he employed in that essay, such as the

structure of the Open. He retains the term world, but he exchanges earth for a set of

related terms: the venture, the pure draft, the widest orbit, daring. The most

important terminological innovation in What Are Poets For? is the converting of

unshieldedness, which enables us to restore ourselves to the Open without merely undoing or

negating our detour into the closedness of purposeful self-assertion. The converting (or

turning) of unshieldedness lets us chart a course that takes this detour into account. His

most important methodological innovation is to build the essay around lines of poetry by

Hlderlin and Rilke which he mines for structures and terms. The method brings with it an

increased emphasis on poets themselves as creators of poetry. To give a full exposition to

Heideggers account, I will first explicate the notion of technology and its relation to poetry

without appealing directly to the many terms Heidegger borrows from Rilke to explain the

complex structures that underlie their relation. Then I will give a more thorough explication

of the way Heidegger uses those terms to develop and explain his notion of the converting of

unshieldedness. In the latter section, I will also reflect on ways this essay employs and alters

conceptions from Heideggers prior texts.

Technology in Heideggers thought is a mode of knowing that seeks to escape being

conditioned by factors extrinsic to human will. In the mode of technology, humans configure

their world so as to serve their ends; instead of acknowledging that these ends are conditioned

by factors beyond ones control, a man thinking in the technological mode interposes

something between himself and things that distract him from his purpose (PLT108). This

something is the attitude of willing Heidegger calls self-assertive production. This attitude

supposes that it is possible and desirable for humans to view all objects as raw material forachieving human ends; further, these ends are supposed by the technological mindset to be


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20self-assertive, determined within the human mind prior to intervention from the material of

the external world itself. Heidegger describes a peasant womans shoes (which had served as

an example of equipment in The Origin of the Work of Art) as an example of technology:

when the shoes are serving as objects of technology, this means that the woman ceases to

notice the shoes while carrying on the labor she has set out to perform and is only able to

perform by way of the shoes. The shoes are technological in the respects and moments in

which they do not determine her ends but are merely subjected to those ends, subsumed

under them entirely (PLT32-35). Technological production sets man against all else,

objectifying and thus equalizing all else; evidence of this is the system of monetary currency,

according to which the value of any object is quantifiable and objects are exchangeable and

interchangeable according to the corresponding quantity of currency they are deemed to be

worth. Technology prescribes in a preeminent way that man be the subject and the world the

object of knowledge (PLT115). This scheme is totalizing; to adhere to such a scheme is to

demand that all other people adhere to it as well and that the whole world be subjected to it.

In Heideggers view, the technological mode is self-defeating. It threatens to transform not

only other beings but also humans into objects insofar as humans permit their willing to be

subsumed within the technological mode. Consider, for instance, the way in which new

technological devices and advances come to be dispersed at fantastic speed in capitalistic

societies through commercial markets. Most people accept such devices and permit the

devices into their lives without regard for the good or ill effects the devices might have on the

world, on humans relation to the world, or on humans relation to each other; the only

relevant consideration is whether the device serves the goals of technology. The goal of

technology seems to be merely to enable humans to achieve their ends by converting other

beings into objects, but its goal is also to promulgate the goal itself: the more pervasive a

device becomes, the more readily and unthinkingly will humans seek and accept even more

devices and have their will influenced even further by technology. This latter point illustrates

that humans in fact come to serve technology, not vice versa; technology assaults mans

nature in his relation to Being itself (ibid.), since humans are more than self-assertive wills, yet

technology only permits humans to treat themselves as self-assertive wills. When technology

succeeds in this, it also prevents humans from realizing what they have lost precisely because

they have lost the way of knowing that could recognize this subjection as a loss.

To explain the alternative mode of knowing that Heidegger calls poetry, it will first be

necessary to explain Heideggers concept of the Open. Heidegger says, The Open is thegreat whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as


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21they are drawn (PLT109). The meaning of unbounded is clarified by a quotation

Heidegger offers from a letter by Rilke to the effect that animals are in the Open insofar as

they do not place the world over against themselves at every moment. Animals (says Rilke) do

not separate themselves from their environment and so identify with all it holdsair, space,

and so on. Humans glimpse this experience in falling in and in religion, for these are the

experiences wherein one sees ones own vastness in another (PLT105). If the nature of

consciousness is representation (as modern metaphysics holds, according to Heidegger), then

humans cannot enter the Open insofar as they are conscious and thus re-present other beings

as objects of consciousness. Humans promote [their] own unshieldedness by parting

themselves against the Open, doing so through the self-assertion that achieves its purposes by

viewing other beings as objects. To be unshielded is to be removed from the community of

beings in the Open. It is difficult to speak in conceptual terms about subjective experience of

the Open; we can only point to transcendent experiences of love and religion.

But there is in fact more to consciousness than representation; humans can will in a way

that differs from the absolutism of self-assertion. They do so by venturing themselves. To

venture oneself is to be without care (i.e., to let ones drive to self-assert be overridden), a

mode that accomplishes, but it does not produce: what it accomplishes is not to remove

ones unshieldedness but to convert ones unshieldedness into the very Open that this

unshieldedness threatened to part one from (PLT117). How so? Consider that a humans

entrance into the Open differs from an animals being held in the Open: unlike an animal,

which always exists in the Open, a human knows an alternative and must sacrifice it willingly

in order to enter the Open. This sacrifice really means convertingones unshieldedness, for as

long as representation is still a part of consciousness (which is to say constantly), one cannot

simply lose ones unshieldedness. To convert ones unshieldedness, the Open must have

shown one in advance the true character and threat of the unshieldedness, for knowledge of

the threat is not available within the technological mode of knowing itself.

This conversion amounts to affirming unshieldedness within the widest orbit (PLT

122). This means that, by being converted, we become able to posit not only humans but all

things as beings; we let Being enclose the widest range of things in its orbit. To convert ones

unshieldedness is to reconstitute ones relation to other beings in a more primordial form:

The conversion points to the innermost region of the interior. The conversion of

consciousness, therefore, is an inner recalling of the immanence of the objects ofrepresentation into presence within the hearts space (PLT127).


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22By this Heidegger means either that representation is only one function of consciousness or

that consciousness is only one activity of ones being. Earlier he mentioned the way in which

currency enables other beings to be reduced to objects defined by exchangeable economic

quantities of value, with their value assessed with reference to their utility for achieving certain

self-assertively willed human ends. In the framework Heidegger now presents, beings only

have utility for achieving such ends because each being already has many qualities, capacities,

and values before it is represented in human consciousness, at which point humans select and

emphasize certain qualities of a being over other qualities. A rock is more than a tool, even

though we usually have no regard for this. The beings we render mere objects have self-

subsistence within the world that is their own and they can be at rest within themselves;

thus to convert our unshieldedness (which is our separation of ourselves from other beings) we

must impress this preliminary, transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so

passionately that its nature rises up again invisibly within us (ibid.).

To explain how one might accomplish this, Heidegger returns to and clarifies his notion of

venturing in tandem with his notion of language as the House of Being. According to

Heidegger, language does not merely signify; we reach what is by constantly going through

this house (PLT129). Language is the way that we as beings acknowledge and enter relation

to other beings. Here Heidegger describes the way in which the purposeful self-assertion that

drives technology opposes the more profound access to Being offered by language, even

though such assertion requires language:

[Man] weighs and measures constantly, yet does not know the real weight of things.

Nor does he ever know what in himself is truly weighty and preponderant (PLT133).

Beyond mere calculations, it is possible through language to engage in more profound saying

that honors and embodies the soundness of worldly existence, which by being spoken of

turns itself toward man (PLT135). Heidegger holds that certain poets are capable of such

saying, and they occupy a role comparable to that of Zarathustra or perhaps even Jesus: poets

have lived in and been affected by the technological self-assertive mode and only then risk this

mode by undertaking to say. In saying, one takes on risk or venture because the outcome of

connecting oneself with other beings is not known in advance and threatens to decenter the

human as all-powerful and self-enclosed subject. The well-known agony of artists derives in

part from this self-abasement before Being. Heidegger says of those poets who are capable ofthe higher kind of saying that enables humans to enter the Open that to them the nature of


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23poetry becomes worthy of questioning (PLT139); through their work, these artists address

the very function of language and the place humans have within the Being of beings.

Heidegger claims that such poets accomplish the conversion of unshieldedness without

explaining how they do it, which is fitting; the how is not a question of philosophy but is

precisely the question of poetry. It is what transpires in a new and unique way in each great

poem.

A major goal of poetry for Heidegger is to unseat the humans self-concept as a subject

whose will is unconditioned by external factors. In exchange, the human enters into a mode of

knowing in which the human lets the preconditions of his knowledge (i.e., his being) be

influenced by other beings full weight apart from the beings usefulness for predetermined

human aims. Doing so enables the preconditions of the humans knowing to be influenced by

all practices that are performed by or affect the other beings to which the human now attends.

Certainly ones knowledge and ones aims are always altered and determined by subjects and

beings other than oneself, but the transformation one undergoes when one enters the poetic

mode of knowing is that one becomes aware of such influence and invites it to further alter

ones aims.

III(b). The converting of unshieldedness

In What Are Poets For? Heidegger more thoroughly articulates an idea initially

presented in The Origin of the Work of Art, namely that Dasein (which he here calls

man) lets truth happen as unconcealment by bringing about the conflict between world and

earth. The major conceptual development in this essay is the opposition Heidegger describes

between the ontological modes of poetry and technology. We will discuss this opposition in

more detail later; for now it will suffice to briefly describe the two modes. Technology is a

process of objectification to which a person gives over her will when she wills in the mode of

self-assertive production, whereas poetry is a process of converting of unshieldedness

whereby a person can come to will in a way that harmonizes her will with the wills of other

people and other beings. The major methodological development in this essay is that, whereas

the text of The Origin of the Work of Art merely included passing references to poems and

sporadic quotations therefrom, the entire text of What Are Poets For? takes the structure of

a commentary on the poetry of Rilke and Hlderlin. Certain lines operate as refrains revisited

throughout the essay, most notably the essays opening question (taken from Hlderlin):and what are poets for in a destitute time? (PLT89). This heightened focus on poems and


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24poets has direct conceptual implications as well. Heidegger departs from certain terms he used

in The Origin of the Work of Art and rearticulates them using basic words taken from

Rilkes poetry. For instance, here Heidegger no longer uses the term earth; he retains the

idea, but he describes it using Rilkes will, ground, and shielding. Heidegger still uses

the term world, but expresses its action through Rilkes terms flinging loose and the

daring. Other new terms from Rilkethe venture, the draft, the center, Nature

seem associated more closely with the Open, although Heidegger continues to use his

earlier term the Open (which was already taken from Rilke) as well. We now move to a

survey of the course taken in Heideggers essay, followed by a closer examination of the

relationship he describes between poetry and technology.

Heidegger begins, as mentioned above, with Hlderlins question: and what are poets

for in a destitute time? Heidegger takes his own era to be a destitute time; we can

understand part of its destitution as the failure of Nazi Germany, given that the essay appears

in 1946 and makes frequent reference to the atomic age and the dangers of technology. The

greater part of the destitution, however, results more directly from Western metaphysics

which in its self-completionmay even be at the same time the extreme oblivion of Being

(PLT93). This oblivion is so dire because it renders us oblivious even to the fact that we have

become oblivious. To bring us out of the oblivion, the abyss of the world must be

experienced and endured, so there must be some person or people who reach into the

abyss (PLT90). For the poet to be this person and to bring his age out of destitution, he must

seek out a trace or clue of the gods (Being, aletheia, the Open) that have been lost; Heidegger

contends that not all poets accomplish this, but only those poets who gather in poetry the

nature of poetry, which is to say that the role and potential of poetry in general is both

brought into question and demonstratively answered by their poetry (PLT92). Such poetry

can disclose to the thinker (viz., Heidegger) the course of the history of Being, thereby

producing a dialogue between poetry and thinkinga dialogue that is a violation to

literature scholars and an aberration to philosophers, but destiny for Heidegger himself

(PLT93-94). Indeed, he pursues this course all the more fervently in his later writings,

speaking at length of the neighborhood between poetry and thinking in his essay The

Nature of Language. Returning to the destitution of the age, it consists in mortals having

not yet come into ownership of their own nature because they lack the unconcealedness of

the nature of pain, death, and love (PLT94-95). The poet must find a way to bring about this

unconcealedness. In considering Heideggers description in this essay of how the poet brings


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25about unconcealedness, we can compare it to the description offered in The Origin of the

Work of Art of the role of artists more generally.

Heidegger suggests that an unpublished, improvised poem by Rilke has an unforeseen

character that opens a way out of the eras destitution into unconcealedness (PLT97). In

explicating this poem, Heidegger renames earth as the will, the self-concentrating

gathering of every ens unto itself (PLT98). He equates this with the Being of beings, which he

further equates with Rilkes Nature. Being intrinsically gives particular beings over to

venture, which means the Being is both the occurrence of venturing and the place where the

venturing occurs (PLT99). We can equate this to Heideggers description of the Open in

The Origin of the Work of Art as both the action of opening and the space that both makes

the action possible and is itself opened by the action. Beings that are thus ventured enter the

venture in varying degrees according to their respective levels of unshieldedness (another

name for partition from the Open, self-closure, and participation in earth). To be unshielded

incurs risk: a being risks losing its own essence when it opts not to restrain its essence within

itself and guard it against invasion by other essencesit risks becoming undifferentiated. But

in opting to release its essence, the being takes up its essence as its own for the first time, as an

essence that can opt and as its essence in community with other essences (i.e., in the world).

Beings take up their unshieldedness as Being draws them to do so. As Heidegger calls Being

the venture with regard for its risking element, he calls it the draft with regard for its

attractive element; Being becomes the center for beings that they themselves constitute as

the center of all beings as a whole (PLT102). Humans set themselves against the draft of the

Open in that they are inseparably engaged in representative consciousness, through which

they see themselves as subjects and other beings as objects. The human being stands over

against the world [and] sets up the world toward himself (PLT106-107). The human will

thus takes up the mode of self-assertive production. In this mode, it has a command

character as it seeks to preserve itself against external influences and to position other beings

in a way that favors this preservation (PLT109). The very failure of this will in the destitute

time reveals that Being exerts a non-commanding type of willa type we have failed to

adopt.

It is misguided, however, to suppose that the adoption of a self-assertive mode of will was

an intentional choice humans made so as to meet their aims, for this would presuppose that

humans already possessed a self-assertive mode of will when they chose to adopt the mode

itself. Humans do not freely will to will self-assertively. Rather, they are compelled to do so bytechnology, which co-opts human beings as instruments to spreads its own dominion, not


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26theirs; humans are themselves mastered by the very ideal of mastery (PLT110). When one

begins to objectify some beings (i.e., consider some beings to have object-character alone), one

cannot stop oneself from objectifying all beings, other humans, and ultimately oneself. In

objectifying oneself, one engages in a kind of schizophrenia or chaotic evil wherein the process

of objectification itself becomes the subject operating within one: Self-assertive man, whether

or not he knows and wills it as an individual, is the functionary of technology (PLT113). One

becomes compelledto assert ones will. It seems at first that self-assertion is a form of shielding,

since it seeks containment rather than openness; but in fact it produces unshieldedness in that

self-assertive humans exclude themselves from the protection offered within the Open.

Humans are enslaved as functionaries of technology because they cannot see that technology

is not their original mode but is rather derivative from Being, a reduction of Being:

What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the

world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank,

down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from

which any rank and recognition could possibly arise(PLT114).

For example, because the sciences necessarily treat the beings into which they inquire as if

those beings were merely objects, no science can discover its own ground or prejudices (since

this would require it to inquire into itself while treating itself as a being). That is to say, a

science cannot help but assert that all beings in all contexts ought to be treated according to

the sciences own objectifying methods. Technology can operate so effectively in obscuring the

natures of beings because technology itself prevents any experience of its [own] nature (PLT

115). If we are to avoid objectifying each other and ourselves, we must enlist the aid of the

poet. As pointed out in The Origin of the Work of Art, the artist is the one who creates

works that do not lend themselves to being treated as mere things and that thus enable us to

treat the subject matter of the works and indeed all entities as more than mere things. In

What Are Poets For? Heidegger focuses on the types of reduction to mere thingness that are

the result of humans self-assertive willing, calling these reductions technology. Becoming

free from technology (not from machines or equipment, but from the totalizing mindset of

technology) will require that we find a way with the poets help to not establish our nature

exclusively within the precinct of production and procurement, of things that can be utilized

and defended (PLT118).


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27We can save ourselves from technology, Heidegger says, by the turning of unshieldedness.

This turning is a conversion whereby we do not do away with our unshieldedness but rather

establish it within the Open. This means that the unshieldedness consists no longer in parting

ourselves against the protection of the Open but in depending on that protection. This

requires first our having seen unshieldedness as what is threatening us (PLT119). Once we

see that our unshieldedness threatens to negate other beings and the beings that we ourselves

are, we can begin to acknowledge all beings positive character. We see the difference between

the attitudes of pre-converted and post-converted unshieldedness with special clarity in their

respective attitudes toward death. Regarding the former, the self-assertion of technological

objectification is the constant negation of death; technology seeks to eliminate ones death by

extending ones life, will, and power (PLT122). Converted unshieldedness, however, lets us

acknowledge death as the preeminent evidence that we as human beings are already on our

way into the whole of the pure draft: in death, we will be undifferentiated from other

beings, participating purely in the release (world, the Being of beings) that we currently

share with them as common ground (PLT123). We cannot simultaneously make such an

affirmation of our common ground with all beings (to whom we might be released by death at

any moment) and also objectify those beings. This view of death resembles the one Heidegger

develops inBeing and Time, where death is that possibility which is ones ownmost, which is

non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped (BT294). Ones ownmost possibility,

then, is the possibility of surrendering the self and becoming pure Being, a possibility

Heidegger calls in the earlier text ones potentiality-for-Being (BT307). In this later essay,

death is likewise non-relational in that affirmation of death prevents one from setting oneself

in mere subject-object relations with other beings. Another difference between unconverted

and converted unshieldedness for Heidegger is that the objectifying consciousness of the

former considers entities by way of representation which deals with time and space as quanta

of calculation, whereas converted consciousness considers entities to occupy time and space

as irreducible dimensions by which the entities have an interiority of their own (PLT126-127).

To address how we come to realize the need for conversion and how we then achieve it,

Heidegger suggests that we experience within Being itself a clue toward something more in

Being than we had yet realized. This clue shows itself to us in Beings being present in the

word (PLT129). Here Heidegger introduces his famous formulation:

Language is the precinct (templum), that is, the house of Being. It is because languageis the house of Being that we reach what is by constantly going through this house. When


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28we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through

the word well, through the word woods, even if we do not speak the words and do not

think of anything relating to language. Thinking our way from the temple of Being, we

have an intimation of what they dare who are sometimes more daring than the Being of

beings. They dare the precinct of Being. They dare language. All beings are qua beings

in the precinct of language. This is why the return from the realm of objects and their

representation into the innermost region of the hearts space can be accomplished, if

anywhere, only in this precinct(PLT130-131).

Technology, then, attempts to subordinate all beings to human reason, and to do so it must

construe the beings according to propositions and calculationsbut propositions and

calculations are merely artificially narrowed types of language. Objectifying logic only exists

within these narrow types of language. The broader type of language whereby we go through

the words well and woods brings with it the antidote to the aforementioned narrowing,

and it is unavoidable in the course of our everyday experience that we constantly reacquaint

ourselves with this broader type of language (we are constantly going through this house)

and so become reminded by the things we must name that the things are more than mere

objects. In the course of living, we cannot help but say, and the whole sphere of presence is

present in saying (PLT130). This does not mean that technology has never been a true

threat, but simply that the way to subvert it is always making itself available; Being is always

availing itself to us through language. Technology can never completely eradicate language

and so blind us to its antidote because technology itself can only achieve its aims by employing

language, albeit artificially narrowed language.

Since language is the house of Being, we all always endeavor to say; but our salvation from

technology comes most readily from the ones who can say most thoroughly, who most truly

say not merely any one particular being but Being itself, who say language itselfwho are

sayers to a greater degree (PLT134). Their saying is not self-assertion (neither solicitation

nor trade), but songsaying that is interested not in itself, but in language, in the very

saying. In this way language places us in relation to other beings without treating them as

objects to subordinate to our purposes; we can become interested in other beings for their own

sakes and become open ourselves to adopting their purposes as our own. Certain poets can

restore us to other beings natures and cause us to ask what kind of relation we have to those

beings; they accomplish this in that to them the nature of poetry becomes worthy ofquestioning (PLT139). They are poets in that they engage more deeply in a struggle with


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29language, searching for what to say, and their account of this struggle reveals to us the true

depth of language. Its depth is the depth of Being that urges us into a non-objectifying relation

to other beings. Poets take up their own wills by willing to listenby willing to forgo the

notion that they already know what to say and can impose what they want to say on other

beings. This gives other beings an opportunity to break through the poets self-assertive mode

of willing. This willing of the more venturesome does not part itself against the will as

which Being wills beings (PLT138). This amounts to a conversion of the parting, as poets

and those who listen to them take up residence in the Open where truth happens and part

themselves against its outside, the self-assertive outside in which they formerly dwelled.

We have seen that What Are Poets For? draws on important categories from The

Origin of the Work of Art; it draws explicitly on the structure of the Open, and it draws

implicitly but no less extensively on the category of earth. The later essay does so with

refined attention toward the role of human beings in bringing about this conflict and the

possible negative effects human beings can suffer if they fail to do so. At the same time, the

essay heightens and explains poets distinction among artists in the formula language is the

house of Being. Although all art does its work through language in some sense (if only by

exposing us to beings in their full nature), poetry concerns itself with language most

thoroughly and essentially, and thus the poet serves as the archetype for other artists. At the

same time, the poet serves as the archetype for all humans insofar as the poet takes up

residence in language as we all do, but the poet most profoundly declares his exile from any

other home. In The Nature of Language, Heidegger deepens and justifies his declarations

regarding the connection between language and Being by way of an analysis of the word.


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30IV. The house of Being: culmination of the turn in The Nature of Language

IV(a). Languages nature

The essay The Nature of Language appears in 1957 and stands as Heideggers most

sustained late engagement with the topic of poetry. This essay takes up the post-WWII

concerns of What Are Poets For? over technology, but it translates them into the Cold War

era. Heidegger also follows down the path he established in What Are Poets For? by

constructing this essay as an extended commentary on a poem by Stefan George (The

Word) with frequent references to other poets and poems. He again employs a poetic line as

a refrain throughout the essay (Georges Where word breaks off no thing may be), which he

uses as a formula along with several other recurring formulas (such as the being of language:

the language of Being), including the repetition of the same opening statement in each of the

three lectures that comprise the essay. A new device of Heideggers is to analyze the essays

title in the essay itself and to alter the title in the course of the essay, a device he borrows from

The Word, the poem the essay discusses. In the essay, Heidegger contends that humans

dwell preeminently in language, that words are the relations by which things have being, and

that there is a neighborhood between poetry and thinking (where thinking is distinct from

technology, which still stands in opposition to poetry). Heidegger acknowledges that these

claims and the arguments he develops by them are not falsifiable and are difficult to

understand: every observation on the subject will at first sound strange and

incomprehensible (OWL58). Furthermore, Heidegger still mentions some of the terms he

developed in What Are Poets For? and The Origin of the Work of Art (clearing, the

Open, technology, saying), but to a greater degree than in previous texts he trades his former

terms for new ones, many of them drawn from Georges poem. Nonetheless, Heidegger holds

that his approach is valid because he seeks not facts about language, but an experience of it.

The experience we seek along with him has eluded us thus far, so the possibility of the

experience may actually require as a precondition that we develop new terms and concepts to

rid ourselves of the habit of always hearing only what we already understand (ibid.).

The first of the three lectures begins by stating the intention of the essay as a whole: to

bring us face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with langu

MA Thesis: "Speaking for Itself: Poetry in Heidegger"

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