Thinking about contemporary matters, it arises that something is coming to an end and something else is emerging.
Whether what is ending or that which is emerging is beneficial or deleterious to our world, humanity, all life and cosmos itself -- is up for consideration and debate.
One, I suspect, could hope. Or, abandoning hope (as Dante suggested we do entering hell) we could embrace something else. Let’s see what name we give that.
SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?
Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. 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.27
SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?
Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].
SPIEGEL: But can we help?
Heidegger: The first help might be the readying of this readiness. It is not through man that the world can be what it is and how it is -- but also not without man. In my view, this goes together with the fact that what I call "Being" (that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word) has need of man in order that its revelation, its appearance as truth, and its [various] forms may come to pass. The essence of technicity I see in what I call "pos-ure" (Ge-Sull), an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression.28 To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity -- a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end. (--"Only a God Can Save Us": The Spiegel Interview (1966), with Martin Heidegger, published five days after his death in 1976 )
("Encorporation" is an archaic form of "incorporation". It means to unite something into a whole, to include something as part of something larger, or to form something into a legal corporation. It is essentially an older spelling or usage of the word "incorporate”.)
The prefix "en-" generally means "in," "into," or "cause to be." It can be used to transform nouns and adjectives into verbs, often indicating a state of being or a process of entering or being placed within something. For example, "encase" means to put something in a case, and "endanger" means to put something at risk. (--AI)
The 20th century’s great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said: \"Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking – not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.\" (What is Called Thinking? p. 4) For us, thinking is traditionally thought to be \"rationality\", \"reason\", \"judgement\”. Heidegger, somewhat provocatively, says: \"[M]an today is in flight from thinking.\" (Discourse on Thinking p. 45)
Not only do we not think; human beings are actively avoiding thinking. For Heidegger, all the scientific work today, all the research and development, all the political machinations and posings, even contemporary philosophy, represents a flight from thinking. \"[P]art of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. He will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course.\" (Discourse on Thinking 45)
And
\"The answer to the question \"What is called thinking?\" is, of course, a statement, but not a proposition that could be formed into a sentence with which the question can be put aside as settled…The question cannot be settled, now or ever…Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway.\" (Heidegger: What is Called Thinking?)
\"Just as it is with bats’ eyes in respect of daylight, so it is with our mental vision in respect of those things which are by nature most apparent.\" Aristotle (Metaphysics Ch. I, Bk 2, 993b)
\"The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.\" Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A 158, B 197)
(--freom Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? (Philosophical Archive)
Somewhat akin to Lao Tzu’s Tao-te-Ching (The Way and its Power), “Thinking itself is a way.”
And there’s a backdoor to Heidegger’s words for me. And that is his use of the word “itself.”
Here’s my re-accentuation: Thinking “Itself” is a way. “Itself” is, for me, what has traditionally been called “God.” Hence, according to Heideggerian emphasis, “The question cannot be settled, now or ever.”
The “Itself,” or whatever is considered to be “Itself, ” is infinite, eternal, and omnipresent. In popular parlance -- there’s no end to it, who knows where it begins?
When we “think” -- if we were to begin to think -- we would begin to encorporate that which is beyond capability of being encapsulated in thought. It would entail encorporation of Being and Becoming, One’s body and one’s body, wayfaring underway, journeying with no known destination.
This is referred to as poetic thinking.
Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’ (--Poetic measures of architecture: Martin Heidegger’s ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2014)
Poetry really lets us dwell. It assists allowing thinking into being (Being). That which is being created assists that which is coming-to-be and that which is there (DaSein) to dwell, as one, where, how, and when they are where, how, and when they are.
What is poetic thinking?
I define poetic thinking as the transforming power in the interaction of the form of life and the form of language that acts when a subject constitutes itself in a creative and dialogical way, transforming the ways we feel and think, in short: the way we perceive the world.Against the backdrop of the anthropological question, that is, what does it mean to be human?, in the German tradition of philosophical and historical anthropology, poetic thinking builds on two approaches:
a) Thinking language: that is my translation of the German Sprachdenken or the French pensée du langage. The fact that English does not normally allow for this transitive use of the verb ‘to think’ is already indicating a conceptual problem: we are lacking concepts to think the functioning of language – I want to stress that thinking is done in language. Thinking language has the fundamental belief that language has a cognitive value; it is, as Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated, ’the labour of the mind’, die Arbeit des Geistes. In order to make the world our conscious world (which is often the definition of the human world), we need language. Languages are worldviews, Weltansichten – again Humboldt.
Society is organised in the medium of language, all social relations, including with ourselves. Human life is inconceivable without language. Language is meaning-making and meaning is not exclusively within the sign but in what Henri Meschonnic calls rhythm or the continuousness of language – language patterning and sound are an important aspect of language that needs to be taken into account in our meaning-making processes. We have to think in terms of a serial semantics and of a language-body continuity.
b) Dialogical thinking: by this, I refer to a predominantly German-Jewish tradition, in my view best developed in Martin Buber’s dialogical principle. This is based on the I-You-relationship which – rarely – happens in a moment of encounter, unfolding a sphere of the in-between, in which the subject does not perceive the other as an object but merging with the other in the sphere of a subject-subject-relationship. This is opposed to the everyday I-It-relationship when we deal with the world as outer objects. However, it is particularly the dialogical I-You moments which are fundamental for our being in the world.
Throwing off mooring-lines and dock-lines -- let’s listen for the word coming to sound -- let’s be underway!
