The poetry of things…according to Martin Heidegger
In part 1 of this 3 part blog post series, I used quotes from Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought to portray the idea of dwelling poetically. Part of dwelling poetically is appreciating the essences of non-human entities in the world, and understanding that we are always in a relationship with something else. In this post, I will use quotes specifically from his essays “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing” to show how the quality of our relationships with “things” changes our existential relationship with ourselves and with the cosmos.
An older version of this post was originally published in an old blog from 2017.
What does it mean to dwell?
The meaning of dwelling can be understood in different ways: dwelling as a building; dwelling as staying in place; dwelling as a way of living. When we understand that these perspectives are not separate meanings but intertwined aspects of our relationship with the world, we got closer to understanding the essence of being human.
To build originally means to dwell. To dwell means to live our lives.
To dwell also means to care for our home.
As mortals, by living, we are already thinking of the earth, the sky, and the divine (because of our inevitable death).
To dwell, is to preserve the fourfold of earth, sky, mortality, and divinity.
With care (e.g., through nurture and construction), mortals bring the fourfold relationship into things. That is how we dwell.
Humans don’t like to deal with great distances, so we counter distance with speed.
But nearness, we can understand by reaching out to things.
But the essence of things (i.e., the way we come to understand our relationship with the world) becomes sterilized by science. Take the jug for example. We think of it has having a material shell and a hollow space filled with air. The jug’s essence, this void, is reduced to nothing.
But the truth is, a jug both holds and gives.
It gives the gift of water from the sky to the earth.
It gives the gift of water to us mortals. And it also gives the gift of libation to the immortal gods.
The jug gathers earth, sky, divinities and mortals together into its essence.
What makes a thing different than an object?
A thing appears when we understand it beyond merely representation. A thing appears when the fourfold of earth-sky-mortality-divinity (i.e., our existential nature) has been gathered into one.
How?
We’ve come full circle. The fourfold is gathered into one by dwelling, specifically, by dwelling poetically.
See the next post for a more complex example of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle.
References:
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry. Language, Thought. Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial.
Humans constantly yearn for home. If being at home means to belong, then poignant landscapes are the experiences that remind us that we always belong to life.
Heidegger addresses what it means to dwell poetically in his essays. The conclusion: we are all capable of being poetic because it is part of being human.
The Void can be found in the archetypal landscape between heaven and earth, humanity and divinity. It is a clearing for truth in Heidegger’s phenomenology.
Our awareness is limited to what we know until we learn to shift the way we see. Phenomenology creates shifts by contextualising and bracketing experience.
We cannot physically transform the world through landscape design in ten days, but we can change the way we see the world and make place by shifting perception.