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the course of the history of being. If we enter upon this course, it brings thinking and poetry together in a dialogue engaged with the history of being. Researchers in literary history will inevitably see the dialogue as an unscholarly violation of what they take to be the facts. Philosophers will see it as a baffled descent into mysticism [ein Abweg der Ratlosigkeit in die Schwärmerei]. However, destiny pursues its course untroubled by all that. (WP, 204)

Paradoxically, Heidegger makes clear in the essay that he does not mean that the task of poetry is to render the unsaid sayable; it is precisely to disclose such meaning in its unsayability, obviously a difficult and paradoxical notion. As he puts it in a remark on Heraclitus, “When Heraclitus speaks of fire, he is thinking above all of the illuminating power that holds sway, the showing that gives and withdraws” (VA, 3, 71).8

On the next page, he formulates this illuminating power of the poetic as lichtend-bergende and entbergend-verbergender, both a disclosing and concealing at the same time (Ibid., 72). The maxim about experiencing the unsaid is a prelude to his discussion of Rilke in that essay, and his account of Rilke there and in BP can give us some initial idea of the purpose of Heidegger’s appeal to poetry and literature as embodying a new thinking, post-culmination. The same theme is echoed somewhat more enigmatically in “poetically man dwells ...”

Yet—and this is what we must now listen to and keep in mind—for Hölderlin, God, as the one who he is, is unknown and it is just as this Unknown One that he is the measure for the poet. This is also why Hölderlin is perplexed by the exciting question: how can that which by its very nature remains unknown ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. (PLT, 220)

A good deal of Heidegger’s commentary is like this, an explication of something evoked that cannot be named; something disclosed but with no determinate content, a revelation with nothing revealed (no determinate content but not mere absence); rather an evocation of absence with density of possible inflections and implications that it defies critical paraphrase.9


8. Halliburton’s translation 1981, 119.

9. One way of thinking about what he is trying to point to is to see the issue as something like a descendant of the “authenticity” issue in BT. The temptation is to think of authenticity as some determinate state, some achievement in any being-toward-the-future or projection, “after which” everything looks different to one. But, I would suggest, it has no such status; there is no resolution of the issue of its achievement or failure. It is rather, if the issue is to bear on a being like Dasein, always “at issue.” Indeed, that is what it is; always being at issue and being unresolved.


The Culmination by Robert Pippin