After the war, Martin Heidegger’s work focused increasingly on language and technology. His championing of both Nietzsche and Hölderlin remained, although his overtly nationalistic overtones were now largely gone, replaced with a focus on poetry and the importance of language in the construction of meaning.
... Nietzsche, the thinker, is a poet in his own way and...Hölderlin, the poet, is a thinker in his own way. In Nietzsche and Hölderlin’s thinking and Poetizing, Poetizing and thinking are interwoven with one another in a single and wondrous way, if not completely joined together [verfugt]1
Heidegger’s thought, taken inescapably as a critique and diagnosis of the modern condition, underwent a refocusing towards language as having emancipatory importance. In holding Nietzsche and Hölderlin together as thinkers and poets at once, Heidegger intends to reform the way in which we think about philosophy and poetry. Both can be construed as attempts at clarifying meaning, and his drawing upon such ‘modern’ minds as Nietzsche and Hölderlin is telling.
At this stage of genuine thinking, only those can guide us, of course, who already genuinely think. Thinking in such a way, they already are saying to us in advance and have already said what now is. They are the thinkers and poets...the cohesion of thinking and Poetizing seems to be so intimate that thinkers stand out at times through the poetic character of their thinking, and that poets only become poets through their nearness to the genuine thinking of thinkers2
Heidegger's 'fall from Being' is characterized by a sort of distractedness, or listlessness, which obscures genuine thinking. Thinking as such must be an activity grounded in truth, and through the misuse of both language and technology the truth has been once again concealed. Heidegger’s call for both thinking and poetizing is thus a call for un-concealment, a call for worthy thinkers to once again bring out into view that which has been hidden. Heidegger’s later period, his refocusing, can be thought of as a stepping back from the philosophical method proper. His concerns clearly laid with the plight of modern man and his increasing inability for genuine communication or connection. It is no wonder that Heidegger first championed the early Greeks, eschewing the metaphysicians, and later engaged with the most prominent poets of his own time. Fundamentally he viewed them (and himself) as embarking upon the same project.
A turn to language in a time bereft of meaning makes sense when one considers the ultimate complexity of language. Language, and its use, represents the pinnacle of human complexity. In its unknowability as a system, it takes on a life of its own. Language, taken as a life-form in and of itself, and as having a world-disclosive function, is the ideal refuge for a race beset upon by the inequities of the equitable and the dogmatic rationality of egalitarian societies. However, language is not an idyllic, invincible refuge from reckless and misguided modernization. It, too, has become drained of its spirit and revelatory power in the modern age. Consider Heidegger’s concept of Gerede [idle talk]. Within the idle talk of our age, language has been stripped of its revelatory power. When language is utilized, when it is used as a means to an end, and when that end is not the reaching of a shared understanding, language has been humiliated by technologization. As per Ernst Jünger,
The disappearance of crafts goes hand in hand with the flattening of language. Words lose their substantial content and are reduced to mere idioms. The leveling power with which technology threatens, and even annihilates, the three original classes was first felt by the knight with the invention of gunpowder. The priest and the farmer followed him. Their language was preserved but lost its persuasive and curative sense.3
Philosophers and poets have wrestled with rationalism and the scourge of its domination since its enshrinement as an end in itself by Enlightenment thought. Heidegger held Hölderlin in high regard and touted his relevance at every mention of the poet, due in part to his belief in Hölderlin’s relevance for the future. Quo Gadamer, “No other poet was so shackled by the impossibility of saying what he wanted to say. Hölderlin embodies what one might call 'suffering in the search for expression'. In this, he is truly a poet of the 20th-century, a 'contemporary' of Trakl, Rilke, & Benn.” Heidegger, quoting Hölderlin, would deem these sorts of utterly contemporary poets “poets of a destitute time,” and amongst these poets Hölderlin is “the precursor...no poet of this world era can overtake him.” We can surmise that this ‘destitute time’ is precisely our time. In a time characterized by the degradation of systems of meaning, the poet, as the arbiter of authentic speech, is obligated to reach into the abyss of meaninglessness; he must probe the sticky extent of man’s pervasive unhappiness. The poet is “he among mortals who must, sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, comes to know the marks that the abyss remarks. For the poet, these are the traces of the fugitive gods.”4
Heidegger, in a 1966 interview with German magazine Der Spiegel (published posthumously), spoke about his relationship to National Socialism and how it broadly was informed by his concerns regarding technology. In the interview, Heidegger utters a now-famous phrase, “Only a god can save us now.” Contextualizing this phrase within the Nietzsche-Hölderlin thinker-poet distinction, its initial tonal despondence is revealed as a call to action for thinkers and poets.
Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and Poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline...we cannot bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait...5
From our preceding usage of Heidegger’s “What are Poets For?” essay, we can surmise that among those who ‘awaken this readiness to wait’, the poets stand most prominently. What Heidegger means here may seem illusory, and even sounds evasive. Here, a prodigious mind, indisputably the most influential thinker of the 20th century, seems to be appealing to the basest of humanity’s complexes, our yearning for the sacred. He is not referring to the Christian God, or to any god specifically. He also is not (necessarily) referring to a religious deity at all. Heidegger is incredibly careful not to proffer solutions or to try and ‘think’ humanity out of our predicament. But he is utterly aware of and anxious about our ever-increasing inability to grasp our place in the world. Our godlessness has led to a profound sort of homesickness. The inimitable Western literary trope of returning home rears its head once again in the modern age, in the contemporary experience.
For Hölderlin’s historical experience, the appearance and sacrificial death of Christ mark the beginning of the end of the day of the gods. Night is falling. Ever since the ‘united three’ – Herakles, Dionysus, and Christ – have left the world, the evening of the world’s age has been declining toward its night. The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the “default of God.”
There is no longer a divine light which imbues human behavior with meaning. The ‘default’ of God has left humanity in the lurch. Heidegger’s usage here of a metaphor of illumination and darkness is quite fitting. We tend to think of illumination as going hand in hand with knowledge. When something is illuminated, that thing is revealed to us in its true and whole form. But Heidegger is convinced that we are living in an ever-darkening world, and this darkening, this retreat of the gods, the retreat of light from the world, goes hand in hand with our increasingly rationalistic society. Modern man can wrest from this darkness large swaths of information, data which from the perspective of doctrinal rationalism should orient him better within the world. But he finds himself drowning in an ever-expanding dearth of knowledge bereft of a unifying vision.
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 bodes something grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’ history.6
In a sense, man is now able to shine a flashlight with ever increasing intensity at a certain aspect of the world, but he is doing so amidst a darkness so heavy and so complete that what the light reveals takes no part in a grander structure. Heidegger insists, however, that all hope is not lost. Humans, although afflicted by their homelessness and lostness in the world, still exist. They are and so long as they are there is potential yet for understanding. With Nietzsche, Heidegger thinks of the humans as having a special creative quality, which finds itself fully realized in the poet.
...the human as poet, as thinker, as God, as love, and finally as power. The word “power” is named last out of clear thinking, as “power” for Nietzsche is always will to power. Will to power, however, is poetizing, thinking, the godhead of the God. For Nietzsche, “will to power” is also love. The human is all of this insofar as [the human] stands in a distinguished way within the will to power.7
In “What are Poets for” Heidegger also reiterates his critique of technology, and more broadly his critique of modernity. It is no coincidence that Heidegger repeats his concerns about humanity’s rootlessness in the modern world in an essay which ostensibly concerns the role of the poet. The poet, by his very nature, stands starkly against functionalization. Quo Jünger again, "The sovereignty of the author is also proved by his independence from the state of science. This is also true for the poet. Evidence is below his level."8 The poet stands apart from, and indeed, above science. Let us conceive of ‘science’ apart from a literal description of scientific practice, and more as a generally negative term. While this might offend the modern, temperate person’s sensibility, science is hereby construed as that pervasive positivism which so dominates daily life at present. The poet is he who must commit himself to the mystery of language; not to its clarification, as this would be a positivistic-scientistic goal, but rather to reifying its sacredness and sovereignty. The poet is sovereign amongst men because he is the most beholden to man’s last remaining sovereign: language.
Martin Heidegger, Thinking and Poetizing
Thinking and Poetizing
Ernst Jünger, Autor und Autorschaft
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought
Der Spiegel
Poetry, Language, and Thought
Thinking and Poetizing
Autor und Autorschaft