Review

Reviewed Work(s): Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought by Albert Hofstadter

Review by: Gilbert J. Shaver
Source: boundary 2 , Spring, 1973, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1973), pp. 742-749
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/302317

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 MARTIN HEIDEGGER: POETRY, LANGUAGE, THOUGHT*

a review

by Gilbert J. Shaver

Not until recently, the last decade or so, have the seminal wor
of Heidegger begun to appear in English. There is reason for this ext
delay. In tackling Heidegger the translator faces problems which are
merely formidable, they are outright herculean. Not only is he faced
a difficult edifice of thought per se but, what is more, he is challeng
the utmost by a thinking (an "andenkendes Denken") that is so uniq
interwoven with such an originative language that the unique and or
in expression are identical with the thought itself. Heidegger forges
language in a primal way. He takes not only the language of philosophy
but also the language of everyday parlance and thinks them back to their
ontological source. Hence, etymology plays an essential role in Heidegger's
approach to thinking. A parallel might be seen in the problems the
translator of lyric poetry encounters. In fact, Heidegger is a "poetic"
philosopher, for ever since the appearance of Sein undZeit (Being and
Time) in 1927, he has moved ever closer to the language of poets ("The
Thinker as Poet," the first selection in our volume, is a lyric poem) and has
directed his thinking to a number of poets such as Rilke, Georg Trakl,
Stefan George, and, above all, to the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin.
The seven writings translated and assembled by Professor
Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (a very appropriate title) are
exemplary in their lucidity and facility of diction. These translations set a
high standard for any future translators, for the snarls of the Heideggerian

*Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and collected by

Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, xxv + 229 pp.

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language thicket are more successfully cleared and lighted than in most of
the works translated to date. The seven writings are: "The Thinker as
Poet" ("Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens"), "The Origin of the Work of
Art" ("Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes"), "What Are Poets For?" ("Wozu
Dichter?"), "Building Dwelling Thinking" ("Bauen Wohnen Denken"),
"The Thing" ("Das Ding"), "Language" ("Die Sprache") and
" . . . Poetically Man Dwells .. " (" . . . Dichterisch wohne
Mensch . . .").
While all the assembled pieces seem to be directly or indirectly
concerned with art we should not be misled into assuming that Heidegger
is concerned here with "aesthetics," i.e., sensuous apprehension, in any
usual sense of this term. In fact, Heidegger rejects aesthetics outright. This
is not so alarming if we look into Heidegger's philosophy itself to discover
the reason why. The rejection is born out of the fact that aesthetics is an
imprisoned product of the basic faults that have accrued throughout the
entire historical tradition of Occidental philosophy. In "The Thinker as
Poet," Heidegger states that of the three dangers that threaten thinking,
the "bad and thus muddled danger is philosophizing" (p. 8). Heidegger is
rejecting the Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian subject-object dualism, i.e.,
metaphysical subjectivism, a representational thinking that has been the
touchstone of aesthetics since its beginnings in the eighteenth century,
from Baumgarten through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the early Nietzsche,
down to the very present. The inherent fault, as Heidegger sees it, is that
all such "philosophizing" has taken a false step forward by starting out
from subjective consciousness rather than Being. Just what Heidegger does
think about aesthetics, or any philosophy of art, can best be adjudged
from the epologue he wrote to "The Origin of the Work of Art," where he
states:

Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is as

something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty
does not occur along-side and apart from this truth.
When truth sets itself into the work [of art], it appears.
Appearance - as this being of truth in the work and as
work - is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the
advent of truth, truth's taking of its place. It does not exist
merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object (p. 81).

Heidegger's thinking about art, as about all else, is an

"andenkendes Denken," a recall of what has been forgotten (i.e., Being).
In the introduction Professor Hofstadter characterizes this recall as "a

thinking that memorializes and responds .... Like poetry and song,
grows out of being and reaches into its truth. The being that is its origin
the being to which authentic human being belongs" (p. ix).

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 All the pieces assembled here present the "late Heidegger." All
were written between 1935 and 1951 and represent that stage in the
philosopher's thought which, for better or worse, has been stamped with
the term "Kehre" (a "turning"). Many critics have viewed the Kehre with
keen suspicion, seeing it as an about-face, a reversal in the directions of
thought originally set forth in Being and Time, as though the rigorous
philosophical approach had been abandoned for a vaporous mythicizing
and a Wortmystik (a "word-mysticism"). Such criticisms overlook the
whole drift of Heidegger's thinking. True, the Existentiale, the categories
particular to Dasein, are' not so pronounced in the later works as they were
in Being and Time, but appearances are deceiving, for the philosopher
remains just as concerned with the problems and questions first raised in
Being and Time. He has, in fact, deepened his perspective and penetrated
further into the one question that lies at the heart of all his thinking, i.e.,
the question of Being itself and the associate problems that surround its
revelation. The point of contention has much to do with the different kind
of language employed in the late works, a language inspired by, and in
part taken from, poetry. Such concepts as "earth" (which first crops up in
the "Origin") or the "fourfold" which plays an essential role in works such
as "Building Dwelling Thinking," "Language," and "The Thing" are just a
few examples of the new language.
Ever since Plato threatened to banish art (with its claims to
wisdom and truth) from the ideal state, which philosophy alone shall
guide, art and philosophy have been uneasy bedmates. Heidegger, the arch
anti-Platonist, challenges the threat by showing art as an essential way in
which truth reveals itself. The "Origin" is concerned with the nature of
how and the manner in which truth comes to be in art and in the work of
art. Art itself is the origin of the work, of its creators and of its preservers.
The hackneyed concepts of matter (content) and form do not suffice in
revealing the nature of art or of the work. They are categories that assault
and distort our relationship with the work of art. We must bring ourselves
before the work. Heidegger illustrates this by eloquently conjuring up a
painting by Van Gogh which shows us nothing but a pair of peasant shoes,
only shoes - and yet, they belong to the earth and are protected by the
world of the peasant woman. In this protection, the work comes to a
"resting-within-itself," from which the painting, as work, lets us know
what things are in truth. The work of art is one way in which truth reveals
itself to Dasein.

By truth, Heidegger does not mean the correctness of a

proposition, i.e., the agreement of knowledge with fact; by truth, he
means the un-hiddenness or unconcealedness of beings. Thinking
originatively, Heidegger goes back to the Greek word for truth, aletheia,
which means unconcealedness. In the work truth happens. The work
discloses truth and, in its own way, un-conceals the Being of beings. The
happening of truth results in the work's resposing-in-itself between earth and

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world. This repose is the unity that results from the struggle or inter-play
between earth's self-concealing nature and the self-disclosing nature of
world. Heidegger is not just switching terms on us. Earth is not mere content,
nor is it only matter like stone or paint. It is the origin to which every thing
returns, hence, it is self-concealing. World is not mere form. It is "the
self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential
decisions in the destiny of an historical people" (p. 48). Centered between
earth and world, the work of art, like man, stands in the most essential
position. Revealing truth, the art work reveals the essential position and
reveals what is essential as such, so that it also makes man essential.
The "Origin" affords us a first glimpse into the direction taken
after Being and Time. It opens up the areas of concern and the new
language that characterize all the later works in our book. The "Origin"
appeared in 1935 and was preceded by an intensive study of H61derlin's
poetry. This poet's influence shows itself in the role that "earth" plays in
the "Origin." H"lderlin's influence increases in the following decade --all
told, Heidegger has written six essays on the poet. Not only these six, but
all of Heidegger's writings on art, poetry and language are pervaded with
the spirit and language of Hblderlin. It is appropriate, therefore, to
consider for a moment the nature of the relationship between thinker and
poet before turning to the other essays.
H6lderlin was misunderstood by his own times. During his life, and
throughout the nineteenth century, he was regarded as a rather insignificant
dreamy Romantic who yearned for nothing else than to retreat to the golden
age of Greece. Not until shortly before the First World War was this view
radically overturned when the poet's late works, composed between 1798
and 1806, were discovered. The discovery had far ranging effects on German
poets and philosophers. Rilke and George, inspired by the late poetry,found
new directions for their own. Such diverse philosophers as Ernst Cassirer and
Heidegger, like the poets, saw here a poetry that had a great deal to say to
modern man.

Hblderlin held a triptychal view of history. He saw a past in which

man enjoyed proximity and communion with the godhead. Present man,
i.e., modern man, however, has lost this relationship; he has been
abandoned by the godhead, and left in the abyss of night to "wait and
watch" for the possible future return of the divinities. Man's station is a
precarious position in which the total burden of the world is placed on the
shoulders of man himself. As the result of the default of the gods, man
exists in a destitute time; he is challenged by the very destitution of his
time not to surrender to an easy nihilism. He must hold out and dwell in
holy night, which is the presence of divine absence.
A kinship exists between Hdlderlin and Heidegger, between poet
and thinker who, as Heidegger (borrowing a phrase from "Patmos,"
Hlderlin's last hymn) likes to point out, "dwell near on mountains
farthest apart." Hblderlin's view of man's dwelling in the presence of

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divine absence shows an affinity with Heidegger's view that Being is not
yet prepared to reveal itself to Dasein, that all inquiry into Being's full
nature is still preparatory. Both poet and thinker see man's present
destitution as a "no-longer" which is a "not-yet." Heidegger says in "The
Thinker": "We are too late for the gods and too/ early for Being" (p. 4).
In his letter to a young student (the epilogue to "The Thing") Heidegger
states:

The default of God and the divinities is absence. But

absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence,
which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness
and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is
presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in
prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This
no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its
inexhaustible nature. Since Being is never the merely
precisely actual, to guard Being . . . is [a] vigilance,
watchfulness of the has-been and coming destiny of
Being . . . (p. 184).

Both Holderlin and Heidegger are waiters and watchers for the possible
revelation of Being in a destitute time. Whether that should manifest itsel
theologically in the Ultimate Being of the divine (Hblderlin) o
ontologically in the Being of that-which-is (Heidegger) does not alter one
iota the predicament of having to dwell in a destitute time.
Through H6lderlin's poetry Heidegger comes to conceive of a
unique relationship between thinker and poet that takes the form of
"dialogue"; it is a cooperation between the originative thinking of Being
and the fundamental act of poetizing. By engaging with the essence of the
poet's word, the thinker is thinking Being in the essence of its truth.
Heidegger says that the thinker states Being and the poet names the holy,
i.e., "das Licht des Seins" (the light of Being). Both thinker and poet share
the responsibility of bringing Being home by forging language which, as
Heidegger insists, is the "House of Being."
For Holderlin, man spans the between of earth and sky by
measuring himself against the godhead. In "... Poetically Man
Dwells . . " (one of the essays on Holderlin) Heidegger conceives of
poetry itself being the measure-taking "by which man first receives the
measure for the breadth of his being" (p. 222). Contrasting this short
essay, written in 1951, with earlier works such as "Origin," we become
aware of the degree to which Heidegger has deepened and ripened his
thought as concerns poetry. Now, poetry is no longer just one way in
which truth manifests itself, it is the very gauge for measuring the full
authenticity of man, or, in Heidegger's words, poetry is "the authentic
gauging of the dimension of dwelling . . . " (p. 227), where dwelling is to
be understood as the being of man's existence in the world.

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 A striking example of the kind of language and thought that has
evolved from the "dialogue" with Hblderlin comes to the fore in "The
Thing." Heidegger meditates here on the thingness of the thing and sees its
nature as a "gathering-in" of what he calls the "four-fold" ("das Geviert,"
literally, the "squared"). He follows the word "thing" back to its original
meaning which is a "gathering" that concerns man (Old German "dinc").
The thing, then, is a gathering that is particular to the sphere of man's
concern. An ordinary jug is taken to serve as example of the thing. The jug
comes from the earth and is fashioned out of it by the potter. It holds, in
that it can contain libation for man such as water or wine - water that falls
from the sky and gathers into the stream that belongs to the earth; wine
the product of the grape that gathers the sunshine from the sky into th
fructive earth's offering up of its nutrients. But the jug also serves, in th
it is a vessel that gives drink to mortals, or it can serve as a consecration
vessel that offers to the divinities. The jug (that which gathers-in) gather
the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities into the onefold of the
world. This gathering-in brings distance near. The thing is not just an
object, an over-and-against (a Gegeni)ber). And it cannot be viewed i
terms of idea, i.e., in terms of its outward appearance. To see the thing a
object and in terms of its outward appearance distances it from itself and
from man.

By including the divinities ("die Gottlichen") Heidegger is not

trying to slip the Christian God, or any other god in the religious sense, in
through the back door, so to speak. He is thinking in H'dlderlinian
language, where the god is the unknown. The divinities are the unknown,
the always-more, that necessarily belongs to the total constitution of Being
which in revealing itself to man still withholds from him. Being
dissimulates, for it is always more than what has been or is being revealed.
In "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger relates the four-fold
to man's being-in-the-world and declares: "Mortals dwell in that they await
the divinities as divinities" (p. 150). Dwelling does not consist only in
attending to and awaiting the divinities, but it does necessarily include
such in order that existence be authentic. It does not suffice to content
ourselves with the easy familiarity that what-is-present offers us; only
when man stands in the face of the unknown can he experience the
anguish which brings about care for the things-that-are as well as for the
mystery of the unknown. Man, for Hblderlin, measures himself against
the unknown godhead. Man is himself this measure. Man would be
in-authentic (uneigentlich) if he were to side-step the unknown, or if he
pretended that it did not concern him and involve him in his temporal
horizon.

Heidegger's dialogue with Hblderlin and his study of the

pre-Socratics (for whom poetry and philosophy were inseparable)
eventually lead to the dictum that thinking and poetizing are essentially
the same act. Both operate in the realm of authentic language, i.e.,

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language that remains pure by not having lost its primal force. (In the
essay on Anaximander thinking is termed the "Urdichtung," that is, the
"primal poetry.") Authentic language is preserved in the poem which
speaks purely. That is why, when meditating on language, Heidegger turns
to poetry and, in the case of the essay "Language," turns to Georg Trakl's
poem, "A Winter Evening."
Through reading the poem we become aware of what Heidegger
means when he states that language speaks and mortals listen. Language, in
speaking, calls near the things that are distant; it bids things to come and
gathers in the fourfold that stays the world which grants things their being.
Language brings world and things into a unique intimacy which resides in
the "dif-ference," i.e., the between or middle where division prevails. (The
"dif-ference" is basically a broader and deeper conception of the Riss, the
rift or inter-play discussed in "Origin.") The "dif-ference" unites opposites
(world and thing) like a pen-drawing that "draws and joins what is held
apart in separation" (p. 204). Mortals speak in that they respond to the
intimacy of the "dif-ference."
Reading through the volume, we become more and more
conscious that each essay is, in its own way, one more attempt to bring
man one step closer to unveiling the mystery of Being. Each is a venture
that brings to light and resuscitates what has fallen into oblivion - be it a
simple thing, language, man's dwelling, the work of art, or whatever
concerns man. Each rethinks and thinks anew what has been perennially
forgotten as a result of the indifference cast over man by abstract thinking
and technology. Venture itself becomes the central issue in the long essay
"What Are Poets For?" which delves into the nature of Rilke's poetry. The
title already hints at the standard by which Rilke is to be measured; it is a
phrase excerpted from Holderlin's elegy "Bread and Wine," where the
whole context runs: " . . . and what are poets for in a destitute time?"
Heidegger interprets our destitute time as the abyss (Abgrund) which he
understands as an "Ab-grund," i.e., the complete absence of the ground.
The question raised is how far does Rilke's poetry venture into the abyss
that conceals Being? Heidegger does not doubt Rilke's stature as a poet as
such, but he does believe "that Rilke's poetry does not come up to
Hblderlin's in its rank and position in the course of the history of Being"
(p. 98). In short, Rilke is viewed as a poet standing in the shadow of
Nietzschean metaphysics, which is to say that Rilke's venture into the
abyss is a case of the will to will, of the"Wi/le zum Willen'" In other words,
Rilke has not surpassed metaphysics.
Heidegger points to Rilke's belief that man is given the mission to
transform the visible into the invisible of the heart's innerspace as a clear
sign of a metaphysical poetry. It is a subjectivism such as lies at the heart
of all metaphysics. True, but such a view does not take into account an
essential feature of Rilkean transformation. That is, Rilke's conception of
transformation is foremost concerned with the issue of hereness and

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imminence; it is a re-membering, a re-calling of all that is into the
innermost presence of man. Things, fragments, the forgotten - all is to be
gathered into the protective center of man where it can be held and
preserved, where it, for the first time, becomes unique and necessary. Yes,
this is still subjectivism, but of a cast not altogether foreign to aspects of
Heidegger's own thinking. The gathering-in of the fourfold of world into
the thing is structurally akin to Rilke's gathering-in of the things. Both are
basically concerned with proximity, with a bringing near to man what
otherwise remains an over-and-against. Heidegger considers the Angel of
the Duino Elegies to be "metaphysically the same as the figure of
Nietzsche's Zarathustra" (p. 134). But do not the "divinities" of the
fourfold function in the same capacity as Rilke's Angel? Both present the
"always-more" - for Rilke, an "always-more" against which man must
measure himself; for Heidegger, an "always-more" that properly belongs to
the total composite nature of Being that conceals at the same time that it
reveals itself in truth. Both Angel and "divinities" are in their very nature
meta-physical. When the poet of the Elegies praises and shows the
everyday things of the world to the Angel, he is accomplishing the same as
does the inclusion of the divinities when they join with the threefold of
earth, sky and mortals. At one point, Rilke names the Angel Spiegel
(mirror); in "The Thing" the fourfold world is ultimately termed a
"Spiege/spiel" (mirror-play).
Heidegger himself admits that his thinking remains preliminary to
the surpassing of metaphysics. In "The Thinker as Poet" he says, "the
poetic character of thinking is/ still veiled over" (p. 12). And so is the
abyss. Rilke and Heidegger have both ventured into it, and the similarity
of the ventures is more striking than their difference. A close reading of
"What Are Poets For?" leads me to the conclusion that this dialogue
between thinker and poet gives us a revealing insight into the thinker's
thinking about the nature of his own thought. The dialogue has become
more a monologue of self-interpretation. The question of surpassing
metaphysics pales in the light of the achievement that both thinker and
poet have made. Both have wrestled with the issues that most concern
man's being in the world without flinching and with such intensity and
profundity that it is our loss if we do not heed the message each has to
offer. Thinker and poet do indeed dwell near on mountains farthest apart.

State University of New York at Binghamton

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