In the thinking-philosophizing of Heidegger, language is that through which being shows itself and hence allows a glimpsing of that which it sends forth. And in poetry, when it is an originary language, the grounding of being occurs.
Language, Poetry, and the Grounding of Being
In Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger says that in “language…what is purely spoken is the poem”. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger says that the language of poetry safeguards, shelters, and holds within itself the essence of language, which is itself poetizing. This poetizing, as the original essence of language, renders unconcealed as a letting-appear of what closes itself off and recedes into obscurity.
In Poetically Dwells the Human, Heidegger says that “But the responding in which human being authentically listens to the appeal of language is that saying that speaks in the element of poetizing”.
In Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Heidegger says that poetry is an “originary language”. This means that the language of poetry, or more specifically, the language of Hölderlin’s poetry, belongs to, and preserves, the originary saying of language that harbors within itself the truth of being in its concealing and revealing.
“Poetry is nothing other than the elementary coming-to-word, that is, the becoming uncovered of existence as being-in-the-world. With what is thereby articulated, the world first becomes conspicuous for those who earlier were blind.”
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
“Poetry is founding, the effectual grounding of what endures. The poet is the grounder of being. What we call the real in the every- day is, in the end, unreal.”
Martin Heidegger, GA 39
The poem allows the hearing of the inceptual saying of an originary language, of what an originary language says in its grounding and founding of being. This grounding of being happens as an event of unconcealment, occurring as a letting-appear of what shows itself differently.
The poem allows this hearing because it says a language of essence. This language reveals how beings occur from out of the event of the grounding of being. This event is not simply the mere taking place of construction. In Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger says that “this never means that language, in any old meaning picked up at will, immediately and definitively supplies us with the transparent essence of the matter like some object ready to be used”.
The originary language of the poem grounds and founds the event of being by bringing us face to face with what was concealing itself from us, with a world showing itself differently to us. In The Fourfold, Heidegger says that this showing is a shining through which the earth shows itself to us. To read more about what Heidegger means by the fourfold, read this article.
An example explaining what Heidegger means by how an originary language brings us face to face with what shines differently is how both the medieval narratives and Hölderlin’s poetry think of the things of the world.
The medieval world thinks of the things of the world and the world itself as divine creations. The things of the world are created things, rendered possible, and brought into existence, by God. Hölderlin, on the other hand, grounds a fourfold world, where earth, sky, mortals, and divinities come together, and are gathered, into the forming of the relational things of the world.
This means that the things of the world always arise as sites in which the fourfold occurs. The world is not made of isolated and scattered things, but rather of relational things, brought together beneath the sky, on the earth, in connection with the mortals, and in a certain nearness and relation to the divinities.
For more articles on Heidegger’s philosophy, visit this webpage.