Poetry, Language, Thought

by Martin Heidegger, Albert Hofstadter (Translator, Introduction)

Poetry, Language, Thought collects Martin Heidegger's pivotal writings on art, its role in human life and culture, and its relationship to thinking and truth. Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opens up appreciation of Heidegger beyond the study of philosophy to the reaches of poetry and our fundamental relationship to the world. Featuring "The Origin of the Work of Art," a milestone in Heidegger's canon, this enduring volume provides potent, accessible entry to one of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Nonfiction, Art, Language, Architecture, Theory

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

I can still hear the uproar of my university classroom on an early spring evening about a month before our Professor would suddenly vanish forever. We had just asked our her who her favorite philosopher was, and after a few laughed disclaimers she finally said the name: Martin Heidegger. There weren’t many of us, maybe a dozen, and almost entirely insufferable artsy dudes in our flannel shirts and emo haircuts though in my memory we were all mostly a faceless mass revolving around our professor like she was our sun, a sun who at this moment was parrying our complaints that she simply could not pick Heidegger. He was a Nazi, for one, he was practically unreadable, and he slept with all his students for another. Though that another of her favorites was Hannah Arendt seemed to help elucidate why she would have an affinity with Heidegger’s philosophy. The professor gave it back to us: maybe if we had the capacity to understand him we’d like him better, and a conversation about separating art from the artist ensued. Poetry, she said, his writing on poetry and, of course, his important additions to the discourse on language.

It was Existentialism, a 400 level class, and I think every one of us was in love with our professor so I can promise I wasn’t the only one who went out and bought this book. She must have been in her late thirties and what I recall most was her enthusiasm for life because the class structure very quickly faded away along with the winter and just became more discussions on life with all of us reading the same texts outside of class. And music. On the first day of class she played us the music video for Bright Eyes - At the Bottom of Everything and had us discuss it in the realm of existentialism. I was thrilled, having long been a Bright Eyes fan at that point, and even the initial groans from classmates faded when it became clear she loved Bright Eyes. Had a classmate previously hated them, that moment transformed them into a fan. Like I said, we were all in love with her. Even the queer ones of us, of which there were a few of us, and became a topic we got to discuss really openly and securely in her class, which at the time felt very radical. Shoutout to the brave student who used the conversation on bad faith and the authentic self to approach the topic. To tease us, she had a framed photo of Heidegger she kept on her desk with a lipstick kiss on the glass. Fine, I made that lipstick part up, though it's certainly better this way. Rather a romanticized visual to focus the imagery than the grumpy face of a third Reich supporter.

When she realized we were all over 21 we began assembling at the bar just across from campus, a few of us arriving before her, most of us staying much after her and eventually meeting up for drinks or to play music outside of “class.” But she was the structure, we all came to hear her talk about her ideas on life and love. She had met someone, she hinted. A man who lived in France and had a kid, so certainly uprooting his life to be with her in this midwest college town was out of the question. Go there, we’d tell her. But don’t bring your Heidegger photo.

Spring break came and went, and we didn’t get an email to meet at the bar as usual so we shuffled back into the classroom where our lessons were supposed to have been taking place. It was a big building with many floors, and I always found a slight humor that the top floor was the philosophy department as I had this cliched image of all philosophy majors being heavy smokers and trying to look like Camus. Which wasn’t far off the mark for all of us in that class. But as we wheezed into our seats we noticed a new face standing at the head of the class. A young man, bleached blonde hair like a Sugar Rey music video, nervously nodding and smiling. Where is she, we said like a chorus. She would not be returning, we were told. Chaos ensued. What? Why? When? How? Was she in trouble? The teacher, at that point, didn’t know and was so dosed with a cocktail of nervousness and excitement taking over his first college lecture he probably hadn’t even bothered to ask. We ended up really liking him, and a very structured class resumed. I wrote a paper on No Exit by Sartre I’ve always been particularly proud of, but Heidegger never came up again.

A few weeks later we got an email. Sorry for the sudden disappearance, she wrote to us. And something about following her heart. Attached was a photo of her and a very studious looking older man beneath the Eiffel Tower.

I can’t see the name Heidegger without thinking about this story. This woman who had a classroom wrapped around her finger, most likely having a rough period of mental health but instead of spiraling, she turned it into a corkscrew roll and ascended to follow her heart. I don’t know what happened after that but I’d like to think it has been a lovely life. A life like poetry, which was what she loved about Heidegger to begin with. Fuck the Nazis, and honestly fuck Heidegger for having been one, but I have come to understand how his writings on language and poetry are still important in the progress of thought on phenomenology and do enjoy reading his works on language. In a way, the professor successfully separated the art from the artist for us all, fully admitting all his faults but also through association with that class we watched a lovely story of an existential crisis that had a happy ending to forever associate with the name.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven essays on poetry and the arts from German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) are collected here, including his key work on aesthetics, The Origin of a Work of Art. However, for the purposes of this review I will focus on his less well-known essay, What Are Poets For?” Here are several direct Heidegger quotes followed by my micro-fiction serving as a tribute to what I take to be much of the spirit of this essay:

“Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings toward itself – toward itself at the center.”

“Everything that is ventured is, as such and such a being, admitted into the whole of beings, and reposes in the ground of the whole.”

“The widest orbit of beings becomes present in the heart’s inner space. The whole of the world achieves here an equally essential presence in all its drawings.”

“The objectness of the world remains reckoned in that manner of representation which deals with time and space as quanta of calculation, and which can know no more of the nature of time than of the nature of space.”

“The conversion of consciousness is an inner recalling of the immanence of the objects of representation into presence within the heart’s space.”
-------------------

THE POETRY BAR
Thirsty, I enter a bar that’s dark, smoky and crowded, squeeze through and perch on a bar stool at the end closest the door, cross my arms on the counter and scan the faces of those around me. Many of the people are reading from sheets of paper, some reading silently, some muttering words aloud and still others reading to one another. The bartender approaches and asks me what I want, to which I, in turn, ask what he has on tap.

The bartender replies, “Most anything – Byron, Blake, Stevens, Frost, Browning, William Carlos Williams, you name it.”

So, it’s poetry rather than beer. I’m still thirsty but at least for now I tell him that I’ll take a Frost. The bartender obliges by handing me a copy of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.

I read the first stanza quickly then take my time reading the next three. I pause and look over at one of the crowded booths: six men with beards and black T-shirts are huddled together listening as their leader reads aloud from what I recognized as Alan Ginsburg’s ‘Howl’. The bartender was right – they do have most everything here.

I bend my head and begin to reread the first stanza of Frost when I hear great sobs from across the bar. A man with a ruddy complexion and a Scottish brogue is trying to recite Robert Burns but is having trouble because he keeps breaking down and crying. Another patron knocks roughly against me and then staggers through the door. Looking out the large front window I watch as he crosses the street, oblivious to cars and busses, as if lifted out of himself by an otherworldly ecstasy.

The bartender taps me on the elbow. When I turn he nods knowingly and tells me he always tries his best to keep an eye on anyone overdoing it.

[Nikos Tsentemeidis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ένα μικρό και πολύ όμορφο βιβλίο. Ουσιαστικά είναι μια ανάλυση ποιήματος του Χαίλντερλιν και κυρίως του στίχου που αποτελεί και τον τίτλο του βιβλίου. Το επίπεδο σκέψης του Χάϊντεγκερ είναι εμφανώς υψηλό. Είναι περισσότερο ενδιαφέρον το γεγονός ότι παρατίθεται και το πρωτότυπο. Η μετάφραση είναι αρκετά ελεύθερη δυστυχώς, σε σημείο που βοήθησε το πρωτότυπο σε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις, αν και γνωρίζω λίγα γερμανικά. Γενικά μια ευχάριστη έκπληξη.

[«Έλλη» · Rating 4 out of 5]

Κείμενο που, με αφορμή ορισμένους στίχους του Hoelderlin και με σαφείς επιρροές από τον Ορφέα, αναλύει τη σχέση κτίζειν και κατοικείν ιδρύοντας τον προσφιλή αντι-μεταφυσικό ερμηνευτικό του κύκλο ώστε να διασαφηνίσει τις έννοιες "ποίησις" και "κατοικείν" ο άνθρωπος σε συνάρτηση με τη συνέχεια του στίχου "πάνω στη γη". Ο γόνιμος και φρέσκος ακόμη και σήμερα στοχασμός του Χάιντεγκερ αξιώνει μια τρυφερή προσέγγιση στην ήδη-πάντα ποιητική μας κατοίκηση εν τω κόσμω. Το κείμενο είναι ολιγοσέλιδο και γραμμένο απλά, χωρίς τη συνήθη αυστηρότητα των ορισμών. Διαβάζεται άνετα, σαν συμπλήρωμα στην "Προέλευση του έργου τέχνης", στο "Τέχνη και χώρος" και τις λοιπές διαλέξεις του Χάιντεγκερ περί τέχνης.

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

The nature of poetry, which has now been ascertained very broadly--but not on that account vaguely, may here be kept firmly in mind as something worthy of questioning, something that still has to be thought through.

The above is lifted from The Origin of the Work of Art, the second piece and first essay of this bewildering collection. Overall Poetry, Language, Thought was the most difficult text I've finished since https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... last summer. I read nearly every page four times. I feel as if i know all the components by name and function but have lost the instruction manual. Thus I dither.

The second essay What Are Poets For left my reason blinded, a darkened room where I could appreciate Holderlin but make no sense of anything further. Building Dwelling Thinking with the deliberate absence of commas was my favorite. Afterwards there is 1950 letter from Heidegger to a young student reprinted towards the end. He advises. Practice needs craft. Stay on the path, in genuine need, and learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.

Sage advice, this reader hopes to continue.
Following Beckett I aspire to fail better.

[Lily]

so many circles! i don't think i made it out of the maze. im still very lost. it was fun at times - like i was on the teacup ride (a little circle inside a larger circle), but then i'd start to feel nauseous and kinda wanna be on the ground again amongst others. other times it felt like i was a circle on a venn diagram that was not intersecting with heidegger's circle but then what about everyone who doesn't intersect with heidegger's circle>??!!!!! idk idk anyway im exhausting the circle metaphors. tbh my fav thing was heidegger's unadulterated fanboying over hölderlin <3 <3 <3 ;)

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man's dwelling on earth. The very existence of Dasein is this poetic dwelling. Holderlin poeticized so.

In our time so many layers of truths and lies. So many discourses about the aesthetics of a work. Constant chattering of media,constant uses of words numb the very speaking of language. As language speaks. And man listens. This hollowness of our time or the hollowness that is always already approaching the horizon of our world. The time which is always destitute. The precensing, the gathering together,the unconcealedness—meanings like these we need.

The thingliness of the things,the presence of absence are not some sentimental use of words. Though going back too far will always make us nostalgic. Still through the uncanniness of Heidegger's thinking we can hope at least for an epoch where truth is not static,but becoming itself. Blooming, bursting out,presencing. Always disclosing the Being of beings.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should not be considered Heidegger's aesthetics. It is a collection of texts which express art's (and particularily poetry's) role in the thinging of things and the worlding of the world - of the eventful appropriation which unfolds and holds together the unity of the fourfold. Poetry and art express the coming to be, the instatement, of the world in truth as unconcealing and taking place. Does this sound like aesthetics? It is the attempt at thinking outside of metaphysics, of which aesthetics is a part.

What is the work of art and what does it do? What is the speaking of language? What is poetry for and what of the poet? These are some of the questions that get folded up into the unfolding of Heidegger's thinking. He shows how the poet, as listener and follower of the divine and of langauge (intertwined in their unforseeable and impossible dimension at the limits of possibility), speaks in response, opening up the space for difference, for the never-yet, to come forth into its own as its own singular being.

The unspeakable that Heidegger was oft wont to call Being, before abandoning it hopelessly to metaphysics and its impossibility of speaking the truth of the most eventful simplicity, lingers ever behind all of the writings collected herein. Heidegger is here ever attempting that single thought that he spent his life tracing down the paths of thought. This collection contains some key attempts at formulating a different or other expression of that most simple complexity that withdraws from all speaking.
Perhaps most impressive, Heidegger enacts such a responsive thinking whilst also explaining that this responsive speaking is the poet's endevour, through explicating the poem or work at hand and thus letting it speak. Poetry and thinking - speaking the same differently.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't the kind of book you "finish", but rather one you return to time and again, in its entirety and in portions, but I have now indeed read it to the end for the first time, and shall let that stand as having "finished" it for now. Reading Heidegger is like getting into the sea, an element you have no control over and little understanding of, but which you decide to trust, and in which you allow yourself to bob, cork-like in its big, bosomy waves, catching an occasional toehold of sand or rock, delighted with yourself for daring and frustrated for not daring more.

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely one of Heidegger's best works. Initially, I read specific pieces (The Origin of the Work of Art, The Thing, and Language) from the book for a couple philosophy classes for my major; however, after doing so, I decided to read the book in its entirety. I'm glad I did.
I suppose one can say they are truly on a philosophical journey if and when Heidegger becomes an enjoyable read.

[Μαρία · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Πώς όμως φτάνουμε σε μία κατοικία; Με το κτίζειν. Η ποίηση, ως κάτι που επιτρέπει το κατοικείν, είναι κτίζειν."

[তানজীম রহমান · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can respect a well-argued point, even if I don’t agree with it entirely. That is a principle I will apply to this book as well.

Let me start off by saying that there are a number of ideas here that I think deserve more attention from me than a short review would allow. For this review, I will focus on one idea from PLT in particular: that of the tension between ‘earth’ and ‘world’.

Very, very roughly: ‘earth’ is what Heidegger calls the parts of nature that are not understood explicitly by the human imagination (or mind, or intelligibility). ‘earth’ represents the abundant potential for meaning held by nature.

‘The world,’ on the other hand, is the structure of meaning that is agreed upon by a ‘historical people’. In other words, it can be thought of as the set of definitions that large parts of the world’s human population use to understand nature.
The Artist’s (or The Great Artist’s) goal should be to look for ‘rifts’ or cracks in the ‘earth’, to sort of tease out the secrets of ‘earth’ and open up a new ‘world’ of meaning. Great Works of Art let us see the great tension between that which is hidden and that which is revealed.
This definition of art is particularly interesting to me. I like the concept of having mystery as an integral part of art.

But Heidegger also argues that the modern ‘Subject/object’ definition of art lacks completeness. The modern view basically says that art is essentially an object that a human subject projects meaning onto. I don’t entirely agree with him on this. And his analysis of the Van Gogh painting doesn’t make the matter clearer. Perhaps he also wanted to include a little mystery in his written work?

Overall, a really engrossing book full of ambition and fresh ideas. I should note that I consulted Iain Thomson’s essay on Heidegger’s aesthetics as found on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy while reading Poetry, Language, Thought. The essay is a fine read in its own right.

Slashing one star because Heidegger was a Nazi bastard.

[Erika Higbee · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading Stein’s Tender Buttons alongside Derrida’s Sign Structure, and Play, Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought was a very appropriate text to continue studying the purpose of poetry— and the purpose of language and the individual word in general. The “Being,” “work-being” of the work, and various “origins” that Heidegger repeatedly makes reference to throughout the book again made me question the intangible “missing center,” “essence of the thing,” and the idea of approaching the word “without any pre-conceptions.” The emphasis on letting the object be unaffected and that, instead of imposing oneself upon it, that one should “listen and hear” to it, is an interesting point particularly related to phenomenology. Modern linguistics and modernist writers frequently focus on such impossibilities, though often gesturing to some kind of hope. One can only imagine whether such non-preconceptual thinking and such regard to an essence— the nothingness that is always present as the determining force— will ever emerge clearly out of the text.

That being said, I recommend this book as a learning guide to poetry and art! It definitely helps to read up on some phenomenology and linguistic models before reading this. I’m sure I barely grasped the surface of things. Not to mention, of course, one has to grapple with Heidegger’s Nazism. Though it is always a question whether one should separate work from author, his political beliefs definitely decreased my initial enthusiasm toward the text.

[for-much-deliberation ... · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heidegger's exploration of the arts of human life and thinking...

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martin Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought is a very obscure book. Heidegger writes in a style all his own, with phrases that he himself has coined and using imagery that favors pastoral and religious life. Nevertheless, I will try, very briefly, to translate the upshot of the essays in this collection from "Heideggerese" into plain English (inasmuch as I can make sense of them).

"The Origin of the Work of Art" is about how the purpose of artwork is to reveal tensions--like the natural world versus the man-made world, love and hate, success and failure, freedom and fate, and so on--and remind human beings of their place in the world and the way in which their connected to the ordinary and sacred world and the natural and man-made or social world.

"What Are Poets For?" is an essay about how poets help people understand their place in the world, and they're especially capable of doing this "in destitute times," when people feel like they lost their way; poets can act as guides to remind them of a better way to live and deal with nature of the world.

"Building Dwelling Thinking" is about how it is fundamental to human nature that human beings attempt to be comfortable in the world that they live in, and they do this through building, creating, and making connections between the natural world and social world, and between mysterious and ordinary aspects of the world--but of course, if they do not respect these different aspects of the world, and become too involved with calculating and measuring, studying the world scientifically, treating people and nature merely as things, and so on, then they lose this comfort; living in the world is, for human beings, learning how to live with these different aspects of the world in harmony.

"The Thing" is about what things are, and Heidegger thinks things are whatever appropriately maintain a harmony with the divided aspect of the world: things are objects that fit comfortably for us into the natural and social world, and the mysterious and ordinary world.

"Language" is an essay about language, and Heidegger asserts that language helps reveal the hidden nature of things but it is also something that happens to us, not just something we produce; I think what he has in mind something like the way in which whenever we sit quietly thoughts just come to us in language without us forcing them, and then it's up to us how we want to respond.

"Poetically Man Dwells" is about how human being's true nature is to be comfortable in the world or, "dwell poetically." Heidegger thinks we can't quite do that because we've somehow lost our way, but we could somehow he regain that ability.

I enjoy reading Heidegger as much as the next person, but no doubt some die-hard Heidgger-er will say that I've mischaracterized him in this essay. Quite possibly so. But I did as much as "thinking was up to the task" (using some Heideggerese here). Perhaps someone more knowledgable could tell me what it really means.

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the convenience of this popular collection introducing the thinker's aesthetics, to comment on Heidegger exposes us to the same embarrassment as essaying on Hegel—except that the 19th-century philosopher's obscurities were, at least to his own mind, the steam generated by a drive toward clarity so total it was blinding. His 20th-century successor, by contrast, pursues the incomprehensible as a goal in itself, a dark wooded refuge in a world of synthetic and ersatz bedazzlements. Though largely humorless, Heidegger can produce sentences we might expect to find in his contemporary Gertrude Stein: "The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing." And not only such sentences, but a methodological defense of such sentences:

Merely to say the same thing twice—language is language—how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.

Like so many artists and thinkers of the early 20th century, Heidegger thinks we need to slow down in a world consumed by the efficiencies and transparencies of technological change. As in other contemporaries, not only Stein but also figures as temperamentally diverse as Eliot and Shklovsky, he accordingly uses language as an impediment, to make us aware of this medium of all thought and experience. For Heidegger, language is "the house of Being," the world-making capacity that sets us apart from plants and animals.

Yet "world-making" suggests something too agential and Hegelian; Heidegger is a human exceptionalist, but not one who urges us toward further and further action, more and more dominion over earth. Rather, he believes we disclose what can be disclosed of the necessarily obscure earth by using language and art to create revelatory worlds within it: the temple in which the god resides is his example in this volume's key text, the 1935 essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art." There he distinguishes among things, equipment, and art. Things are worldly phenomena, of which equipment and art are subsets. Equipment designates items made for use, matter formed for a distinct human purpose—tools, in other words. The better they work, the less conscious one is of the matter so formed. Art, on the other hand, reveals the essence of the matter it's fashioned from, brings it into individual and collective consciousness:

In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing into the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast, the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not care for the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the world's work.

Again we see an affinity with other modernists—even ones quite distant from Heidegger in sensibility, like Joyce—for whom the revelation of the form comprising what were once thought to be mimetic or functional representations seemed an urgent task in a mass-media landscape multiplying representations at a fantastic rate. Viewing truth not as a logical proposition but as "aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings," Heidegger prefers images far from the world of technology and commerce. Besides the Greek temple, his extols Van Gogh's painting of a peasant's shoes; to it he devotes an ekphrastic prose-poem reminiscent of Pater's reverie on the Mona Lisa:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.

In the painting—indeed, in the peasant woman (cf. Woolf's beggar in Mrs. Dalloway)—world, generated by the art itself, and earth, as the art's subject matter and material substrate, come together. "Art is the setting to work of truth," he writes, whereas, by contrast, "science is not an original happening of truth," first, because science works only with truths already established by the artist, to whom it is alone given to unconceal beings, and, second, because science abets the anti-artistic reign of technology that makes modernity so spiritually impoverished. Looking at art trains us in a less assertive and acquisitive mentality: "to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work."

This collection's other long essay, written immediately after World War II, "What Are Poets For?"—a question he takes from Hölderlin—answers its titular query:

Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals a way toward the turning.

In what Heidegger follows Hölderlin in calling our "destitute time," the culprits who have beggared us are not only technology and commerce, but totalitarianism too (more about Heidegger's complicity therewith in a moment). "Modern science and the total state," he laments, driven by "self-assertive production," cause "[t]he earth and its atmosphere [to] become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view toward its proposed goals."

In self-assertive production, the humanness of man and thing thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will to will, trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers.

The poets, "the sayers who more sayingly say," like the temple-builders and like Van Gogh among the artists, demonstrate a savingly divergent, anti-scientific, anti-commercial, anti-totalitarian sensibility:

Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It is not a willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be produced. In the song, the world's inner space concedes space within itself. The song of these singers is neither solicitation nor trade.

This is all clear enough—and to me, in time more technologized than a writer in 1946 might have been able to imagine, almost entirely welcome—but most of the long essay, a gloss on a short poem of Rilke's that turns the poet's limpid mysticism into murky prose, is almost unreadably abstract:

The sphericity of the unifying, and the unifying itself, have the character of unconcealing lightening, within which present beings can be present.

If you say so! Yet the overall thesis can be recovered. Human exceptionality among living things both allows our techno-commercial rampage over the earth—what Heidegger joins Rilke in calling "Americanism"—and enables us, through art and language, to reveal without dominance or objectification the mysterious source, the mysterium tremendum, he portentously calls "Being" to receptively attentive and actively passive eyes. Humanity is both the disease and the cure; as Hölderlin writes, "But where there is danger, there grows / also what saves."

Other essays in this collection are more opaque to me, particularly "Language," which defines language as what speaks rather than what is spoken and seems to anticipate Derrida (much talk of a word the translator spells as "dif-ferrence") in ways I find unclear, except that its diminution of human agency may anticipate where it does not actually influence today's censorious "words are violence" attitude. More revelatory is "The Thing," in which Heidegger seems to dissolve the differences among thing, equipment, and art that he'd maintained in the "Origin" essay. Here his example is a jug, surely a piece of equipment, yet one he defines by its sacramental function of pouring out for the feast in which the fourfold of "earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once." He ends the essay with a list of similarly redemptive things, a list expansive in one way, yet (tellingly) restrictive in another: jug, bench, footbridge, plow, tree, pond, brook, hill, heron, roe, deer, horse, bull, mirror, clasp, book, picture, crown, cross. A beautiful list, a poem in itself, yet it was written in the middle of the 20th century, even though it harbors no item newer than the Middle Ages, newer even than antiquity.

I have been comparing Heidegger to his fellow modernists, but here he differs even from those of a superficially similar ideological bent. Could he, like Pound, have seen "petals on a wet, black bough" in the Paris Metro? Could he, like Woolf, have detected a new sublime in an airplane skywriting a candy ad? Could he, like Joyce—well, no, he couldn't have, because Joyce was a city man, and a philo-Semite to boot. But I am not so interested in the doleful commonplace of our philosopher's Nazism. His preference for what's rooted in the earth—including "the historical destiny of a people," to quote one of this book's more troubling phrases—is enough to explain and to deplore his political dereliction. I find the fascist elements of his thought both obvious and, for my purposes, fairly detachable from his (to my mind) plainly worthwhile critique of imperial scientism and his valorization in its stead of a poetry that demands no such furious and total human activity. My preference for Joyce, for Woolf, even for fellow-fascist Pound is about something other than, if related to, Heidegger's recoil from modernity.

Some of Heidegger's fellow philosophers deride him as not really a philosopher at all. Sam Dresser writes up his conflict with Rudolf Carnap, a thinker ambitious to dispel metaphysics with logic, who called Heidegger a "musician without musical ability." Without wishing to weigh in on the question of what is or isn't philosophy—like a conjugal quarrel in the next apartment over, it's blessedly none of my business—this particular insult is a direct hit. I don't know if Heidegger is a good or bad philosopher or a philosopher at all, and I don't understand much of what I read in this book, even though I also read George Steiner's Fontana Modern Masters entry on Heidegger, listened to illuminating lectures by John David Ebert and Michael Sugrue, and, for that matter, studied Heidegger years ago in two separate graduate courses (in English, not philosophy: a student from the philosophy department, an analytical emissary from the Vienna Circle, sat in the back of one of these seminars and confidently pronounced everything on the syllabus—Leibniz, Spinoza, Heidegger, Derrida—to be be nonsense and gibberish, much to the chagrin of our deconstructive professor).

Whatever his status in philosophy, though, Heidegger seems to me to be a bad poet. The great poets reveal the mystery of Being by specifying objects and experiences that incarnate its refulgence; again, Pound needs only two lines and one metaphor to light up modern Paris and old Japan at once, and to change the subway rider's perception forever. Heidegger's pages of bizarre and repetitive abstraction, by contrast, light up very little. Here (except that it doesn't quite explain Pound's case in the same way) I am tempted to say the literary flaw and the political flaw become one. Averse to too many of the sights where a more receptive eye might have seen splendor—incognizant that "what saves" might actually have been growing in the last places he'd have thought to look for it: the street, the marketplace—he sought too severe a shelter, a darkness not pregnant with holy mystery but only fogged with the foul smoke of human sacrifice.

[jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

mortals who gravely sing the wine-god

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a refreshing read. What I really like about Heidegger is his capacity to bring to the fore new definitions and to stick to them. Even though he is usually linked to Nazism, i think that people tend to forget that behind that name also lies a whole heritage of philosophy whose aim id to detect truth where we do not usually see it. But what I find a bit off is that Heidegger has been so obsessed with Being that maybe it dragged his thinking down. I know that the core of his philosophy hovers around Being, but if he put Being withing a phenomenological sphere rather a transcendental one, maybe then he wouldnt have lost himself in a blind quest whose aim is to find a Being not accessible to us.

Still these essays have much to say. And I recommand this book to anyone who dares question the norms.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense. It took no less than 2.5 months to read this thin volume of lectures. As a recommendation, do not, as I did not, read this book in order (I heeded the suggestion of another scholar and thank my lucky stars). I think this seemingly disorganized method made all the difference in reading this work. I started with "The Thing" read along with Buddhist thought (namely the Boddhisatva), "Building Dwelling Thinking" along with architectural theory aligned with Heidegger, "...poetically, Man dwells...", "What are Poet's For?", "Language", then "The Origin of the Work if Art" with the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Heidegger and Aesthetics. After all that I was ready to approach "The Thinker as Poet" with something more than crazy-making confusion. This is my first approach to Heidegger.

[Mr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hofstader's capable translation of these extraordinary Heidegger essays makes this one of the indispensable books of 20th century philosophy. This collection is especially indicative of Heidegger's 'turn' to art and poetry, particularly in his amazingly complex 'Origin of the Work of Art' and 'Poetically, Man Dwells.' 'The Thing' is also a remarkable essay in Heidegger's descriptions of the closing of distances in modernity, as well as his phenomenological observations of the relation between things and world. This is an excellent representation of Heidegger's philosophy of Language, and Hofstader has translated them quite well, even if the translations of Holderlin are a bit too cautious.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

p. 140 (about Rilke’s “Sonnets for Orpheus”)

Those who are more daring by a breath dare the venture with language. They are the sayers who more sayingly say.

The converting inner recalling is the daring that dares to venture forth from the nature of many because man has language and is he who says.

[could just as well be “Because man has language and is who he says.”]

p. 165

All distances in time and space are shrinking… Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness… what is happening here when… everything is equally far and equally near?… Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place.

[because he pulled the switch long ago]

p. 170

…considered scientifically, to fill a jug means to exchange one filling for another.

Science’s knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded.

p. 177

The distanceless prevails.

p. 178

To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes.

p. 160

The nature of building is letting dwell.

In the Black Forest, the coffin is “the tree of the dead.”—“Totenbaum”

p. 161

However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.

p. 90?

In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.

p. 215

Poetically man dwells

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

p. 225

Who is the god? Perhaps this question is too hard for man, and asked too soon. Let us therefore first ask what may be said about God. Let us first ask merely: what is God?

p. 228

For a man to be blind, he must remain a being by nature endowed with sight. A piece of wood can never go blind.

[Lucas Sipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the back of this collection, there's a blurb that says "Poetry, Language, Thought collects Martin Heidegger's pivotal writings on art, its role in human life and culture, and its relationship to thinking and truth." It's slightly misleading. Heidegger, for various reasons, isn't terribly interested in aesthetics or art. In "The origin of the work of art" he doesn't speak of an aesthetic or beauty or anything like that. Rather, all of these essays speak about art, poetry, and language as ways in which man is. We hear about the fourfold (sky, earth, divine, mortal) in "Building Dwelling Thinking." We hear of language as the house of being in "Language."

So much is present in these essays. "The origin of the work of art" might be the single best introduction into Heidegger. "Building Dwelling Thinking" is such a rich text that it demands further reflection. Many of these essays are connected but they deal with a diverse array of topics at the same time. Overall, we might think of these essays as Heidgger's way of analyzing how man lives authentically (expressed to an extent in "...poetically man dwells...") and how that must be done poetically. A shift occurs in these essays (the fourfold mentioned above is a mysticism of sorts) but they all focus heavily on unfolding and grounding.

Heidegger isn't simple. Getting him is never easy. We always run a risk of misunderstanding or going in the wrong direction. Of course, getting in any direction is also what is called for. "Correct" thought is by no means true revealing or disclosing anything. As it is said in the beginning, "to think greatly is to err greatly."

[Phillip · Rating 2 out of 5]

goodreads really needs to create another option/button for couldn't read or couldn't finish. heidegger's poetry is fairly useless, and his dog-chasing-its-tail philosophy of where does art begin and where does the artist end (and vice-versa) left me cold.

[Katrinka]

How in the world could one possibly give a star-based rating to anything by Heidegger? I did attempt a bit of discussion here: https://zwieblein.bearblog.dev/the-fl...

[FyzaReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of lectures and essays of Heidegger (considered later Heidegger) put together by the editor. The theme is to get to the nature/essence of particular phenomena which in this case is art.

Heidegger's language is ambiguous. It takes time to understand what he means by "thinging of things," "working of work," "Being of beings" etc., etc. It helped to read slowly and to draw diagrams to understand the connections he formulates between different concepts. His writing becomes more evident as one keeps on reading. The language almost grows on you till you feel like Heidegger is directly conversing with you and convincing you of his ideas.

It was also interesting to learn how much Heidegger was influenced by the poetry of Holderlin and Rilke.

[Ann Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are challenging essays, especially if you haven't read his tome-like book on thinking and being.

I objected deeply to "What Are Poets For?" Heidegger close-reads a Rilke poem in such a way as to prove Heidegger's own philosophical assertions, and it seems ludicrous. Go read Nabokov's Pale Fire instead, and laugh at that sort of attempt.

There are some brilliant ideas, here, however. They just need to be read in context with more study of Heidegger. Though it seems logical to collect these thematically-related texts into one book, the system fails to convey what Heidegger's really about. In my opinion.

[Abeer Abdullah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not like this, i only liked the poems at the beginning, philosophy is so hard to approach. I dont understand what it is or it's significance

[Dylan]

pretty frustrating, not least because the interesting observations and nuggets are embedded in a thicket of self-important proclamations about the proper way to do philosophy. an exemplary moment is at the end of the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” when Heidegger addresses the housing shortage which I presume inspired him to write the piece. he writes: “However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase in the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals must ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.”

at this point i have had my head-reorienting encounter with Heidegger’s philosophy. and for what it’s worth, I do see key moments in Being and Time as unbelievably helpful for understanding how objectivity is a limited frame of reference for describing our experience of the world; for understanding how we are bound up affectively with others and with our environment and with our own pasts and futures. but how can anyone read that passage, with its insultingly perfunctory references to history and to present material conditions, and not see it as an expression of profound indifference to real human suffering? across these essays one continually gets the impression that we are, presently, in a state of philosophical/intellectual alienation from the world around us, from works of art, from objects and tools, from language itself. but how did we get here, and why does it matter? Heidegger was a reactionary—a fascist—and it’s clear that his outlook precludes a satisfying explanation for the rotten contemporary state of affairs. history and class struggle are not thinkable to him: all he can offer is that we have been philosophically misled, that our thinking has become impure. almost every essay asserts from the outset that true understanding of the topic at hand requires us to adopt the mode of philosophizing which is entirely proper to it. we must follow a path to its outermost conclusions.

this emphasis on purity, on absolute separation between disparate kinds, on following a path to its conclusion, on return to a mythological unmediated european past (he is obsessed with Greek etymology)—how can anyone read this as anything but a fascist project? how is there any doubt about the complicity of his writing on language, art, and poetry in his inhumane and unacceptable politics?

we should all remember that Heidegger never apologized or accepted responsibility for his nazism. he only lied about it.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

SEVEN ESSAYS BY HEIDEGGER ABOUT POETRY AND ART

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was an influential and controversial German philosopher, primarily concerned with Being, and phenomenology---who was widely (perhaps incorrectly) also perceived as an Existentialist.

The editor of this 1971 volume states in the “References” section, “The present volume is composed, with Heidegger’s consent, of writings from various works, chosen because they fit together to bring out the main drift of his thinking that relates poetry, art, thought, and language to Being and to man’s existing as the mortal he is.”

Heidegger says, “The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made… The work is a symbol… Our aim is to arrive at the immediate and full reality of the work of art, for only in this way shall we discover real art also within it. Hence we must first bring to view the thingly element of the work. To this end it is necessary that we should know with sufficient clarity what a thing is. Only then can we say whether the art work is a thing, but a thing to which something else adheres; only then can we decide whether the work is at bottom something else and not a thing at all.” (Pg. 20)

He points out, “We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things---as this thing-concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly.” (Pg. 26)

He states, “What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly is such an intention---to let a being be as it is---represents the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself its very own being.” (Pg. 31)

He observes, “All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here there flows the stream, restful within itself, of the setting of sounds; which delimits everything present within its presence. Thus in each of the self-secluding things there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. The earth is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding.” (Pg. 47)

He says, “Thus in the work is its truth, not only something true, that is at work. The picture that shows the peasant shoes, the poem that says the Roman fountain, do not just make manifest what this isolated being as such it---if indeed they manifest anything at all; rather, they make unconcealedness as such happen in regard to what is as a whole. The more simply and authentically the shoes are engrossed in their nature, the more plainly and purely the fountain is engrossed in its nature—the more directly and engagingly to all beings attain to a greater degree of being along with them. That is how self-concealing being is illuminated. Light of this kind joins its shining to and into the work. This shining, joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.” (Pg. 56)

He summarizes, “Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth… Truth is never gathered from objects that are present and ordinary. Rather, the opening up of the Open, and the clearing of what is, happens only as the openness is projected, sketched out, that makes its advent in thrownness.” (Pg. 71)

In the essay “What are Poets For?” he states: “But the default of God which Hölderlin experienced does not deny that the Christian relationship with God lives on in individuals and in churches; still less does it assess this relationship negatively. The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.” (Pg. 91)

He says in another essay, “technology itself prevents any experience of its nature. For while it is developing its own self to the full, it develops in the sciences a kind of knowing that is debarred from ever entering into the realm of the essential nature of technology, let alone retracing in thought that nature’s origin. The essence of technology comes to the light of day only slowly. This day is the world’s night, rearranged into merely technological day… The danger consists in the threat that assaults man’s nature in his relation to Being itself, and not in accidental perils. This danger is THE danger. It conceals itself in the abyss that underlies all beings. To see this danger and point it out, there must be mortals who reach sooner into the abyss.” (Pg. 117)

He asserts, “In the conversion of objective representation, the logic of the heart corresponds to the saying of the inner recall. In both realms, which are determined metaphysically, logic prevails, because the inner recalling is supposed to create a secureness, out of unshieldness itself and outside all shielding. This safekeeping is of concern to man as the being who has language… This is why the ‘logos’ … requires organization by logic. Only within metaphysics does logic exist.” (Pg. 133)

He contends, “Science’s knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded. The bomb’s explosion is only the grossest of all gross confirmations of the long-since-accomplished annihilation of the thing: the confirmation that the thing as a thing remains nil… That annihilation is so weird because it carries before it a twofold delusion: first, the notion that science is superior to all other experience in teaching the real in its reality, and second, the illusion that, notwithstanding the scientific investigation of reality, things could still be things, which would presuppose that they had once been in full possession of their thinghood.” (Pg. 170)

In the final essay, he observes, “dwelling occurs only when poetry comes to pass and is present, and indeed in the way whose nature we have now have some idea of, as taking a measure for all measuring… Nor is poetry building in the sense of raising and fitting buildings. But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling.” (Pg. 227)

These essays reveal another side of Heidegger, which is not seen as clearly in his more “metaphysical” works. It will be of definite interest to anyone studying his thought.

[Sunny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book but I found it quite complicated overall. Here are the best bits:

Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.

It has often enough been pointed out that the Greeks, who knew quite a bit about works of art, use the same word techne for craft and art and call the craftsman and the artist by the same name: technites.

Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the open for the first time.

But what brings us a secure being, and with it generally the dimension of security, is that daring venture which is at times more daring even than Life itself.
But this more daring venture does not tinker here and there with our unshieldedness. It does not attempt to change this or that way of objectifying the world. Rather, it turns unshielded-ness as such. The more daring venture carries unshieldedness precisely into the realm that is its own.

our task is to impress this preliminary, transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so passionately that its nature rises up again 'invisibly' within us. We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisible." (We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible.)

Alas, who knows what’s in himself prevails. Mildness? Terror? Glances, voices, books?

That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell.

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that
*from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from " space."

Meister Eckhart says, adopting an expression of Dionysius the Areopagite; diu minne ist der natur, daz si den menschen wan-delt in die dinc, di er minnet-love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves.