Heidegger and Art

From: Heidegger, Creativity, and what Poets do: On Living in a Silent Shack for Three Months and not Going Mad

Author: Dan Disney

In his essay, ’The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971), philosopher Martin Heidegger sets out to explore the relationship art shares with truth.

Via a series of looping questions -’Where and how does art occur?’; ’what and how is a work of art?’; ’how does truth happen?’; ’(w)hat is art?’ and what is art ’that we call it rightly an origin?’ (17-69) -the philosopher finally proposes art to be ’truth setting itself to work’ (38). Heidegger instructively sets out to reject the Ancient quarrel between philosophies and poetries by calling poetry an ’illuminating projection’ with ’a privileged position in the domain of the arts’ (70-71).

Throughout the essays collected in Poetry, Language, Thought, the philosopher stakes a series of stunning claims for poetry from the bleakness of ’(i)n 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’ (that is, poets. See 90), to the oblique ’(p)oetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’ (216). Throughout Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger privileges poets as language users who apprehend and then construct dynamic truths. There is something to this theory of creativity that promises not only compliments but, potentially, illumination and self-knowing.

’The Thinker as Poet’ (Heidegger, 1971) scans more like a manifesto than poetically-figured language. But the philosopher’s adoption of a ’poetic’ form indicates no small faith in poetry as a mode of expressing truthfulness. His notion of poets singing the species into being seems a skewed anthropo-morphism, but what Heidegger is suggesting is that poets use a resonant language, and that part of the resonance is neither simply syntactical nor sonic. The singing/thinking of poems is a way for humans a just-begun poem to
ontologise ’their’ world.

In ’The Thinker as Poet’, for example, I am struck by how much the philosopher seems to fathom where poems come from: we never come to thoughts. They come to us. (16)

At his most ineffable, the philosopher proposes a distinction between two poetic modes in ’The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971) dichtung and poesie and it is dichtung, a primordial and extra-linguistic framing essence that makes poesie, the manifestation of poetry in language, possible:

Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry (dichtung) is the saying of the uncon-cealedness of what is. (71)

To Heidegger, dichtung is a wordless creative essence the ’poetry’ that bespeaks ’of what is’ embedding not only the poesie of language expressed as poem; indeed, according to Heidegger, the universe is shot through with this originary impulse, which a poem mimetically enacts as it languages beings. In other words, reality may indeed be out there, somewhere (just like Bruegel’s universal language). But, as theorist Terry Eagleton (2007) puts it, ’(p)oetry is an image of the truth that language is not what shuts us off from reality, but
what yields us the deepest access to it’ (69). To arrive at a junction of these ideas, then, a poet’s making might be regarded as seeing into the heart of matters, into the truth of beings, and so into the being-ness of dichtung’s truth: what dichtung creates is an opening into which unconcealed beings ’shine and ring out’ (Heidegger, 1971: 70)

Commenting on how art materialises, Heidegger (1971) writes, ’the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process
for the work to emerge’ (39).

as dichtung moves into poesie, poetry is named by Heidegger as a style of thinking that opens up and originates its own ontologies.

Heidegger writes ’(t)he basic disposition of wonder displaces man into the realm where the most usual, yet still as such unthought (beings), are established in their most proper unusualness’ (1994: 147).