and is therefore a philosopher. Whatever one in each case participates in continually, what he does, determines what he is.
h) Partaking in the Poetry
The partaking is indeterminate, insofar as it does not concern this or that endeavor, and insofar as partaking is not something that happens to belong to our Dasein as one kind of comportment among others. The partaking to which the poet refers constitutes our Dasein as such a Dasein; it is that way of being of our Dasein that is concerned with beyng and nonbeing in general. In this partaking, the way in which we are what we do gets decided in advance and constantly. If we are not told what we are to partake in or to what we are to be tethered—if we are told only of partaking pure and simple, or of ‘care’—then this precisely ‘says’ that such partaking is a necessary condition for the arising of the time when “divinity . . . strikes” us—when the lightning strikes.
Yet if it is the task allotted to the poetry to bring this lightning flash, shrouded in the word, into the Dasein of the people, then this word can address us only if we partake in the poetry—that is, in the dialogue. It indeed appeared as though we could, in complacent self-certainty, release ourselves from the task of accompanying the telling of that “Not those, the blessed ones . . . ,” since it no longer applies to us. But now we see: Not only do we not know who we are, but we must in the end actually partake in the poetry in order to first create the necessary condition for it becoming the time in which we are then able to experience in the first place who we are. We do not understand the poetry if we measure it by the arbitrariness of our own superior knowledge and thereby seek to master it. We exclude ourselves from the poetic as the fundamental configuration of historical Dasein if we do not, through the poetry, first let the question of who we are become a question in our Dasein: one that we actually pose—that is, sustain—throughout our entire short lifetime.