Abstract
In the previous chapter, we saw that the structural challenges to our capacity to remember Being do not rule out our responsibility for such remembrance. Instead, they prompt us to take up the task of remembering Being in a way that is “poetic.” We also saw that Heidegger’s conception of “poetry” is both expansive and elusive. On the one hand, poetry was shown to be synonymous with disclosure or unconcealment , and therefore a constitutive feature of who we are. On the other hand, however, poetry was shown to be a practice of acknowledging the inexorable structures of absence that accompany all events of disclosure, and therefore something from which we are always at a distance. Consequently, “poetic dwelling” was shown to refer to a mode of being-in-the-world that is neither subjectivist nor fatalistic, and neither domineering nor passive, but instead, actively responsive. The question of this chapter is what consequences these insights hold for how we understand the task of thinking. What does it mean to think poetically? And how can poetic thinking help us engage more authentically with “the other,” be it another person or God? If the previous chapters offered a defense of the import and possibility of ontology as an ethical and poetic enterprise, the coming chapters seek to highlight more concretely the ways that we might enact that possibility in everyday life.
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- 1.
“What is Metaphysics?,” in Existence and Being, 357–358; “Das Denken, dessen Gedanken nicht nur nicht rechnen, sondern überhaupt aus dem Anderen des Seienden bestimmt sind, heiße das wesentliche Denken. Statt mit dem Seienden auf das Seiende zu rechnen, verschwendet es sich im Sein für die Wahrheit des Seins.” GA 9, 309.
- 2.
On the Way to Language, 136.
- 3.
“What Are Poets For?,” 129.
- 4.
“Letter on Humanism,” 218–219.
- 5.
Ibid., 219.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
GA 8, 9.
- 8.
Zollikon Seminars, 98; GA 89, 128.
- 9.
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 103.
- 10.
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 108.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Discourse on Thinking, 55.
- 13.
Heidegger, Parmenides , 162.
- 14.
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 103.
- 15.
Parmenides , 162. Compare to Hegel, who writes, “To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do.” The Phenomenology of Spirit, 3.
- 16.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. Although Adorno famously said that Heidegger’s thought is “fascist to its innermost core,” Habermas notes that “Adorno is in the end very similar to Heidegger as regards his position on the theoretical claims of objectivating thought and of reflection…” Habermas , Theory of Communicative Action, 385; see also Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Edwald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 412–413. Safranski quotes Adorno as saying in a letter to Horkheimer that Heidegger was “in a way…not all that different from us.” For a more extended analysis of the elective affinities between Heidegger and Adorno, see Jan Rosiek, Maintaining the Sublime: Heidegger and Adorno (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000). For an excellent essay on Heidegger’s and Adorno’s shared belief in the radical, if ambiguous potential of works of art, see Krzysztof Ziarek, “Beyond Critique? Art and Power,” in Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, ed. Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 105–123. Finally, as another way to consider the parallels between Heidegger and Adorno, one might examine Zygmunt Bauman ’s description of Negative Dialectics as a tome one how to be “human in a world inhospitable to humanity.” Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 41.
- 17.
These terms are ubiquitous in Heidegger’s work, though Heidegger’s most sustained discussion of “the Nothing” occurs in his 1929 lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” What makes these terms difficult to comprehend is that, like “Being,” neither refers to an entity. Rather, they refer to the condition of possibility for beings to come to disclosure . As Heidegger “For thinking, which is always essentially thinking about something, must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it thinks of the nothing.” “What is Metaphysics?,” 97. See also “Letter on Humanism,” 261, where Heidegger writes, “because it thinks Being, thinking thinks the nothing,” and GA 71, 208, where he writes, “[t]he emptiness of the clearing is the initializing nothing.” (“Diese Leere der Lichtung ist das anfängliche Nichts.”)
- 18.
SZ, 127/ BT, 119.
- 19.
“The Turning,” 48.
- 20.
For an excellent articulation of how the very idea of a counter-cultural, antinomian aesthetic has become indistinguishable from mainstream consumer-culture, see David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–194.
- 21.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 146; GA 65, 186–187.
- 22.
“The Age of the World Picture,” 138.
- 23.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 367. For an excellent articulation how the very idea of a counter-cultural, antinomian aesthetic has become indistinguishable from mainstream consumer-culture, see David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–194.
- 24.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1.
- 25.
For an excellent poem that dramatizes this concern, see Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said,” in The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–1982 (Port Townsend: Cooper Canyon Press, 1982).
- 26.
SZ, 167/ BT, 157.
- 27.
SZ, 175/ BT, 164.
- 28.
SZ, 176/ BT, 165.
- 29.
SZ, 295/ BT, 271.
- 30.
Introduction to Metaphysics, 171; GA 40, 123.
- 31.
Heidegger, Being and Truth, 147.
- 32.
Schmidt, “Sources of Ethical Life,” 41.
- 33.
What Is Called Thinking?, 117.
- 34.
Ibid., 118.
- 35.
Gelassenheit, 22–23; Discourse on Thinking, 54; I borrow Michael Zimmerman ’s translation here. See Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, 219.
- 36.
“The Word of Nietzsche,” in The Question Concerning Technology, 56.
- 37.
Zollikon Seminars, 110; GA 89, 143.
- 38.
On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 24; GA 14, 25.
- 39.
“The Word of Nietzsche,” 109.
- 40.
“The Turning,” 41.
- 41.
“Letter on Humanism,” 237.
- 42.
Contributions to Philosophy, 401; GA 65, 510.
- 43.
Elucidations of Hölderlin ’s Poetry, 61.
- 44.
Identity and Difference, 38.
- 45.
Elucidations of Hölderlin ’s Poetry, 56.
- 46.
Ibid., 55–56.
- 47.
Heidegger’s point here is also succinctly, if mystifyingly, captured in his dictum, “Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens” (the being of language: The language of being). For by eliding the copula, Heidegger intimates that one can never say what being or language “are” without already being caught up in a relation to being/language. GA 12, 170.
- 48.
“What Are Poets For?,” 129.
- 49.
Elucidations of Hölderlin ’s Poetry, 55.
- 50.
“What Are Poets For?,” 129.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
“Building Dwelling Thinking,” 171.
- 53.
On the Way to Language, 132.
- 54.
GA 4, 38 (translation mine); Elucidations of Hölderlin ’s Poetry, 61.
- 55.
History of the Concept of Time, 263.
- 56.
SZ, 166/ BT, 155.
- 57.
History of the Concept of Time, 263.
- 58.
“The Projection of Being in Science and Art,” in The Heidegger Reader, 107; GA 34, 63–64.
- 59.
On the interconnectedness of thinking and embodiment in Heidegger, see David Michael Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1985) and “Usage and Dispensation: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Hand,” in Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin ’s Question of Measure After Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 60.
GA 9, 316.
- 61.
On the Way to Language, 76; GA 12, 165.
- 62.
SZ, 273/ BT, 296.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
SZ, 183/ BT, 172.
- 65.
Heidegger, “Letter to Medard Boss, June 14, 1948,” in Zollikon Seminars, 239; GA 89, 301.
- 66.
This conclusion bears strong resemblances to a variety of wisdom traditions. Pirkei Avot (4:1) states that a sage is one who can learn from anyone. In The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. A.C. Spearing (London: Penguin, 2001), the spiritual seeker is described as one who can practice continuously clearing his mind of concepts to make way for the non-propositional, non-representational event of divine revelation. In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton, describes God’s wisdom as the wisdom of a child, explaining that whereas adults tire of routine, children welcome repetition. In this way, Chesterton proposes, God’s perfection to consist in his capacity to always be amazed. See G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Co., 1908), 108. Shunruyi Suzuki describes the practice of Zen in similar terms as the practice of maintaining “a beginner’s mind.” On his view, the difference between an expert and a master craftsman is that the master craftsman does not let his technical knowledge crowd-out his sense of freshness. Common to all of these models is the seemingly paradoxical suggestion that a master is not one who possesses technique or cleverness, but simply an open spirit (although clearly the master also has great technique). In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a medieval Islamic parable about a poet who is instructed by his teacher to memorize 100,000 lines of verse. After ten years, the poet returns, having successfully accomplished the feat. He is then instructed to forget those 100,000 lines. Roazen notes that whereas the feat of memorization can be tested, there is no objective way to test whether one has genuinely forgotten a line of poetry. Only the poet can himself know if he has truly forgotten, but, paradoxically, if he has truly forgotten, then it is also questionable whether he can know he has forgotten. In any event, what is striking about this parable, Heller-Roazen shows, is that true learning also involves unlearning. See Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone, 2005), 191–194.
- 67.
Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 48; GA 10, 88–89.
- 68.
For an article that extends this point even further, by showing that there is an essential connection between regarding “the truth of being” and coming to authentic “friendship” with the other, see Krzysztof Ziarek, “Semiosis of Listening : The Other in Heidegger’s Writings on Hölderlin and Celan’s ‘The Meridian,’” Research in Phenomenology 24, no. 1 (1994): 113–132, 127.
- 69.
The paradox of Gelassenheit is perhaps most acutely captured in the “Serenity Prayer” or “Alcoholic’s Anonymous Prayer,” attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change/ The courage to change the things I can change/ And the wisdom to know the difference.” Notably, the German version is called the Gelassenheitsgebet, and translates “serenity” as Gelassenheit.
- 70.
Country Path Conversations, 75; GA 77, 116.
- 71.
Contributions, 30; GA 65, 36.
- 72.
On the Way to Language, 135. Bernard Stiegler offers a similar point when he writes, “But if the instrumentalization of language is possible, this is because its instrumentality is inherent to it […] It is a question not of struggling against instrumentalization of language but of resisting the very reduction of an instrument to the rank of means.” Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Colllins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 205–206.
- 73.
Schelling, 25.
- 74.
Introduction to Metaphysics, 15.
- 75.
On the Way to Language, 122.
- 76.
SZ, 164/ BT, 154.
- 77.
On the Way to Language, 123.
- 78.
SZ, 165/ BT, 154.
- 79.
On the Way to Language, 122; GA 12, 241. See also GA 12, 27, where Heidegger writes, “die Sprache spricht als die Geläut der Stille” (“language speaks as the peal of silence [the ringing of stillness]”).
- 80.
David Wood , Time After Time, 113.
- 81.
Ibid., 112.
- 82.
This conclusion would be in deep accord with Heidegger’s claim that “[t]he being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Being-true as discovering is in turn ontologically possible only on the basis of being-in-the-world.” SZ, 218/ BT, 201.
- 83.
For a book that does try to argue this, however, see Marlene Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). For a similar argument, but one that more plausibly situates him within anti-Greek, anti-philosophical Christian lineage, see John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 151.
- 84.
Levinas goes so far as to argue that even the creation story can only be understood as a prelude to the revelation story. Quoting a midrash in which God tells the non-human beings he has just created that “If Israel accepts the Torah, you will continue to exist; if not, I will bring you back to chaos,” Levinas writes, “Being has a meaning. The meaning of being, the meaning of creation, is to realize the Torah. The world is here so that the ethical order has the possibility of being fulfilled. The act by which the Israelites accept the Torah is the act which gives meaning to reality. To refuse the Torah is to bring being back to nothingness.” Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 41.
- 85.
For an important and original investigation of the way that different thinkers have sought to grapple with the relationship between “God” and “Being,” see George Pattison , God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 86.
Note that this tension is not simply a tension between Biblical faith and Greek philosophy, as if these could be neatly separated, but one that divides theologians themselves. Arguably, the most central figure in the history of Jewish theology, Maimonides, taking up the influence of Aristotle insists, in his Guide for the Perplexed that none of the Bible’s anthropomorphic descriptions of God are to be taken literally. Properly speaking, from a Maimonidean perspective, God does not feel anything or want anything. Abraham Joshua Heschel, meanwhile, taking up the influence of Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, and Midrashic sources, wants to insist that God, as it were, is not perfect, but precisely “in need of man.”
- 87.
Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 39.
- 88.
Elucidations of Hölderlin ’s Poetry, 141.
- 89.
Caputo, The Weakness of God, 297. Elliot Wolfson offers a similar argument in “Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable.”
- 90.
“The Word of Nietzsche ,” 112.
- 91.
Ibid.
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
“Der Wessenstand des Dichters gründet nicht in der Empfängnis des Gottes, sondern in der Umfängnis durch das Heilige.” GA 4, 67 (translation mine).
- 94.
I am thinking here of the “New Atheist,” Richard Dawkins. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
- 95.
Der Ister, 63.
- 96.
Ibid., 62.
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Atkins, Z. (2018). “The Task of Thinking”: The Fecundity of Listening. In: An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96917-6_4
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