The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.
martin Heideggerquotes
1889 - 1976
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) radically rethought Aristotle’s philosophies and devoted his life to ontology (the study of being). With the publication of his masterwork, Being and Time, he laid a framework to be built upon by numerous other schools of thought and philosophers. It won him international renown as a leading philosopher of his day, and Heidegger continues to be known as an original thinker who significantly influenced contemporary European philosophy.
However, Heidegger’s works have also drawn much criticism and have remained controversial because of his deep involvement with the Nazi movement in the 1930s. After the war, he was banned for teaching because of this involvement. The ban was lifted in 1950, and he went back to work at Freiburg University for another decade.
His students found him mesmerizing and engaging as a professor, and he is famous for his theories on existentialism and phenomenology. Interestingly, as soon as Being and Time was in print, Heidegger found fault with its basic approach. He began a second work to accompany it, but never finished. Obsessed with culling the mystery of being, Heidegger turned less toward philosophy to answer his questions and more toward poetry. He was particularly captivated by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Heidegger would have loved to see a return of the Greek traditions, for he found Western thought nihilistic. The classical experience of being, he believed, was the way for society to begin anew.
What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.
man / natural / unfamiliar / wonder
In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.
There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.
He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.
What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.
Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
Truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.