File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0104, message 48


Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 00:45:15 -0700
From: Kenneth Johnson <kenn-AT-beef.sparks.nv.us>
Subject: "The Witness Of Being" - Zaine Ridling, Ph.D.



Is anyone familiar with this book and have an opinion on its merits?

Here's the forward, which I generally like:

"In the second half of Martin Heidegger's philosophical career, he made a
turn toward explaining the metaphysics of language through poetry.
Heidegger's ontology of language relies largely upon the work of Friedrich
Hölderlin, whose poetry Heidegger understands as giving 'voice' to Being in
a peculiar proximity. For Heidegger, Hölderlin's articulations are not
those of a subject 'expressing' a meaning (according to the classical
theory of language from Aristotle to Husserl), but rather those of a poet
whose 'remembrance' recalls a sense of Being metaphysics has forgotten.
Heidegger argues that Hölderlin's language is of Being, beyond the self as
defined by humanist notions of subjectivity which reduce Being, along with
beings, to the subject's objectifying examination. In "dialogue" with
poetic language, Heidegger's philosophy aims to achieve a genuine thinking
of Being, as well as Gelassenheit, which is the stance of receptivity.
According to Heidegger, only the poetic power of language is able to open
up an historical world. It does this by awakening a basic mood in the
people and leaving "the unsayable unsaid" in saying. Heidegger takes his
essential concept of language as such from poetic language. Everyday
language, communication, statements are for Heidegger not language in a
primary sense, but poetry as the "originary language of a people" is,
compared to which language in the conventional sense as understood by
theories of language and in linguistics is only an insipid dilution. (The
concept of the "originary" historical time of the peoples is therefore the
time of the poets, thinkers and creators of states, i.e. of those who
properly found and reinforce the historical existence of a people.)"

-k




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