Not Only Poets Can Think
It's been a long while since I've dabbled in Heidegger. I see lots of red lines and marginalia, but little do I remember. I remember bits and pieces (as though in fog): Being (Beyng), woodpaths, "thinking" (Denken is somehow superior to thinking),... Jargon-larded language that could only truly appeal to a dyed-in-the-wool Heidegger fan.
That I am not.
That said, I don't believe he really wanted to say only poets can think. Otherwise he'd be eliminating himself from that sacred act.
If not a real poet, Heidegger did recognize the power of the Word and IMO could sometimes wax poetic:
That I am not.
That said, I don't believe he really wanted to say only poets can think. Otherwise he'd be eliminating himself from that sacred act.
If not a real poet, Heidegger did recognize the power of the Word and IMO could sometimes wax poetic:
Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence. Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of Being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky. With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.
[From the end of Letter on Humanism]
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