Poetry, Language, Thought: Essential Philosophy―Heidegger's Brilliant Writings on Art, Truth, and Thinking (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)

This was the first of Heidegger that I ever read, and it pushed me to pursue many philosophical questions about art and thought. P.L.T. deserves at least two read-throughs to understand all of what Heidegger is saying. Many of the thoughts he writes about in this book, he further develops in other writings. Heidegger tackles many deep subjects about the nature of art and how humans interact with it. His philosophy seems clearly influenced by the Ancient West—people like Plato and Aristotle—but he opposes Plato especially by arguing that poetry (and art) is the highest form of truth.

Used book for pleasure reading - received in excellent condition

Clean and pristine.

This collection of essays on the purpose of art and the relationship between art, language, and thought epitomized through poetry is a dense but fascinating read. Heidegger ultimately argues that the purpose of art is to mark the boundary between things and being. The contemplation of what it is to Be is the defining characteristic of humanity. All things Are but only humans think about what it is or means to Be. According to Heidegger, language is merely utilitarian unless it points to beingness. Without illuminating the gap between merely doing things and the awarenss of beingness, language is dead. Language speaks only when it demarks the boundary of the mystery of Being. Because much poetry explicitly uses language to explore existence beyond the literal, it is the epitome of art - dancing in the gap between language and inarticulable consciousness. The essays indicate a spiritual understanding of the profound humanness of consciousness of that which is beyond and engages with some poems in a way that tend to indicate a willingness to accept a literal embodiment of Heaven and Earth that strikes me as contrary to the understanding of the mystery of Being discussed outside the context of the specific poems. Although Heidegger presents himself as a philosopher and a rational thinker, he cannot remain so in the context of this conversation. He is explicitly trying to use language to point out how language is used to illuminate the gap between concrete, objective facts and subjective understandings of the world, amd to do that, he is required to use language in exactly the poetic way he is describing. This is what makes him both so hard to comprehend rationally and so beautiful to read. He is writing poetically on the nature of poetic use of language. As a reader of poetry and a writer and storyteller, there was nothing in these essays that I didn't already know from my experience working with language and art, but it was a pleasure to engage with a serious thinker thinking seriously about these ideas. In the final essay in the collection, he makes an argument that Kindness is foundational for human being and awareness of the world that allows for understanding. Although it is not addressed in this book, this final point about Kindness gets to the heart of the biggest intellectual problem with Heidegger for a modern audience - his anti-Semitic acts and his relationship with Nazism. In Heidegger's thinking, caring is fundamental for knowledge and because human beings are incapable of caring about everything, we cannot help living in a bubble of knowledge surrounded by ignorance. And, it is clear that in his life, his caring did not encompass politics enough for him to see what we now see about the world he lived in.

Wrong frontpage compared to the one received

So writes Martin Heidegger in Section I, The Thinker as Poet (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens) of "Poetry, Language, and Thought" translated by Albert Hofstadter and originally published in 1971. The 233 pages include seven essays: I The Thinker as Poet II. The Origin of the Work of Art III. What Are Poets For? IV. Building Dwelling Thinking (Note: omission of commas is intentional) V. The Thing VI. Language VII. "....Poetically, Many Swells." Heidegger, who lived to 86 years of age, had time to write extensively about why philosophers since Plato were wrong. Not only did they often ask the wrong questions but also misunderstood the nature of Being and man's basic relationship to the nature of things. Before he was finished, Heidegger had shook up philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, some aspects of religion, and made forays into thought in politics and economics. Among the ways of thinking he is credited with influencing are existentionalism, phenomenology, and (possibly) the beliefs of the Nazis. That hard-trimmed sail of thinking had its meaning in the world of real, perceived, actual matter. The 22 paqe introduction by editor & translator Albert Hofstadter provides a useful summary of these broader aspects of Heidegger's thought, particularly his 1927 "Being and Time," and offers valuable analyses of each of the seven chapters. These analyses discuss both the salient ideas and the nuances of the translation. The meaning to Heidegger, for instance, of "ereignen" is ".....a coming into the open, the clearing, the light---or disclosure---with the conjunction and compliancy of mutual appropriation." (p. xxi) As the other reviewer has remarked, Heidegger's writing can have moments of incomprehensibility, but can reward patient reading. However, much may be both accessible and beautiful to readers familiar with poets such as Ranier Maria Rilke, because the essays tend to be reflections on poets, writers, and thinkers. This familiarity can give readers a leg up and also leave us with a more complex, complicated, and perhaps ultimately noble understanding of these poets. Here for example is Heidegger on Rilke's Angel, which shows Heidegger's word-play (haleness, holiness, wholesome) that is characteristic of this translation and according to Hofstadter, the German original: "In the invisible of the world's inner space, as whose worldly oneness the Angel appears,the haleness of worldly beings becomes visible. Holiness can appear only in the widest orbit of the wholesome.." Reader Alert: This book is English only and translation only except in a few phrases. It is not a bilingual edition. There is no index and only a few brief references to the original sources of the seven essays. That is, the book was brought together with Heidegger's approval from varied other work because the editor/translator felt the essays fit together on the topic of poetry, language, and thought. This is a good thing indeed for readers interested in this aspect of Heidegger's thought since the original souces are magazines and journals not easily accessible to many of us, such as Jahrbuch der Akademie, Bund l, 1951. OVERALL: Highly recommended. The version reviewed here is paperback, Harper Perennial Classics, 2001, with usual quality paper and binding. Quoting again, "We are too late for the gods and too early for Being. Being's poem, just begun, is man." As a reader, I may not be sure at first what Heidegger means exactly, but I do like thinking about it until a meaning(s) is clearer, and perhaps other readers will too.

A friend asked me what I thought of Heidegger’s book Poetry, Language, Thought. I didn’t know what to say, I was a few pages in and had to admit to myself that I wasn’t so much as paying attention to what Heidegger was saying but to how he was saying it. I have read his Being and Time, The Essence of Truth, and What is Called Thinking? Similar themes had come to me, but I really wasn’t paying attention, which was wrong since it was not about what I found in Being and Time, which is about the trillions and trillions of activities, thoughts, and so fourth going on at once in life. Imagine that. It is like there are trillions of you going through the same thoughts and feelings simultaneously and they are just as valuable as people and just as interesting and perhaps more. That’s amazing to me. What I like to do with a book is to think about its title. He is talking about three things. Those things are equal to each other in terms of the grammatical presence of commas. Poetry comes first, language second, and thought third. What does Heidegger mean when he talks about Poetry? He says it memorializes and responds to life. It is genuine thinking, speaks of truth, is the unconcealedness of beings (which he speaks about in The Essence of Truth), a correctness of a proposition (also spoken of in The Essence of Truth), what things actually are, that which aids in seeing the bright possibility of the world, an absolute connection to the actual event, what is spoken but what is never what is said. Poetry that thinks, he said, breeds perfect ideas, elaborates upon something much greater than reality, a thingly character, the core of something, words buried in its nature, and the real. What does Heidegger mean when he talks about Language? He is talking about where thinking is able to say what it thinks. It is the way something is spoken/said. It is an author’s vision of truth and being, reporting what is seen, heard, authentic, which equals poetry. It is spoken purely, building, dwelling, growing, as a fitness for philosophy, thinking, rethinking, thought into language. It is the truest nature of things. It is a use of reason, old-new thoughts, not necessarily said, a context within which poesy and poetry take place. It belongs to the closest neighborhood of man’s being. It is everywhere language speaks. It is speech, an abode for mortal being. An audible means of the communication of human feelings, accompanied by thoughts, expression, activity, presentation, and representation of real and unreal. Enunciation, language, and not man, speaks; peal of stillness, by camping out, bearing, endearing, of the world, ringing of bells as indicative of change of stillness, able to speak in their own way in sounds. What does Heidegger mean by thought? Memorializing and responding. Poetry when genuine, voice is poetic because it is truthful, concealed, examining things as themselves, truth, Roman thought takes over Greek words without corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. Questioning. Essential discourse equals philosophy, dwelling when listening to others, respond, and recall. What I missed completely or did not give enough credence to is that the poem in the beginning of the book is most important in that it brings all these ideas together. It amazes me that while Heidegger is such a genius as a writer of philosophy, he is also a great poet. His poem “The Thinker As Poet,” is one of the best I have read that conveys ideas of life that answer a deep question about life, which is inherently that we have nothing to worry about. The truth is always there and “The world’s darkening never reaches/to the light of Being.” As a poet, or at least, this might be the thing I am when I am writing poetry, which is not to say that I am good at it, but I have written poems that have done to me what other poems have that I have loved. I have not written that many and love John Ashbery, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and others, more, for example, who have gotten great distance from themselves. When writing poetry that relates to abstraction some words and their combinations have provided “memory and response to life” [I would venture to say that poetry is life], is “genuine,” etc. Poetry is often, as it has been said in Buddhism, that it is the space between ladder rungs. All these words are spoken, but the hard wood steps of the words are not the thing or space between them. The ladder is utility. Being on the ladder can be elevating or freeing. It is our relationship to the ladder that is about the ladder and what it means. Let’s go into the poem at the front of the book to get a sense of what Heidegger is communicating: Way and weighing Stile and saying On a single walk are found. When we walk, we weigh the events of life, existence, how we feel when we stroll, what we are thinking. When we are advancing toward a wall and each placement of our steps toward that wall and quest to cross over and as we are saying to ourselves, in our minds, on this walk, we are in contemplation. Go bear without halt Question and default On your single pathway bound. Heidegger says to go and enjoin life and do not falter, question it, and move despite other distractions toward a single journey. He compares the “Early morning light” as something Being-oriented, poetic, and a cause and inspiration for existential fact. He relates this experience to Man him/herself. He does this throughout the poem and the book, where language, especially the language of poetry, makes you stop and think if you ever expect to get what he is trying to say. Poetry almost often demands that you consult the dictionary, because no one really has access to all the denotations and connotations of all words. Such a grasp of the nuances of words allows for one to cross over to the poem as it might be understood or perceived. The definitions of words and grammar limit or qualify interpretation and provide evidence for or against the author as having said something that is profound or not. The nature of the words: Poetry, Language, Thought as provided above give you a sense of the possible elements and relationships of his ideas, and you can put them together to expand the breadth and depth of what he might have meant.

Of course the book is a great one. I've read it several times. My warning is that the kindle edition is an abomination It should not be offered. Don’t buy it. To be responsible Amazon should take it down.