The Taste of Silence

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by Adam Kirsch in Poetry

Ours does not promise to go down in literary history as a great age of religious poetry. Yet if contemporary poetry is not often religious, it is still intensely, covertly metaphysical. Human nature, it seems, compels us to keep asking about the first things, even if we no longer accept the same answers that our ancestors did, or even the same kind of answers. The more widely you read, in fact, the clearer it becomes that our poetry has a distinctive metaphysics, a set of principles or intuitions held in common by poets as different as Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins. This metaphysical sensibility, I think, is what will give our period a retrospective unity, when readers of the future come to survey what looks to us like chaos. And the best document of that sensibility—the single piece of writing that does the most to explain what our poetry believes, and the ways it expresses that belief—is an essay by Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

Today, Heidegger’s name is most often heard in debates about his collaboration with the Nazis. Though he lived from 1889 to 1976, his life and work must be judged by his behavior during the early thirties, when the Nazi Party came to power with a promise to renew the German spirit. Because this was also Heidegger’s goal—in a different, but not unrelated sense—he was happy to add his intellectual prestige to the Nazi cause, serving as rector of his university under the new government. He was soon disillusioned with Hitler, but he never fully came to grips with his catastrophic moral and intellectual failure. It was left to writers in our own time, like Richard Wolin and Charles Bambach, to show the full implications of Heidegger’s Nazism for his immensely influential work.

Even in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the dark affinities of Heidegger’s thought can be traced. (Indeed, the essay began as a lecture that Heidegger delivered in Freiburg in 1935, in the third year of Hitler’s regime.) Yet it is not surprising that poets should continue to turn to Heidegger for inspiration and guidance. For Heidegger, more than any other philosopher, looked to poetry as a model of what thinking should be. He used individual poems, especially the hymns of Hölderlin, to help explicate his own ideas about nature, technology, art, and history. He constantly dwelled on the mysteries of language and translation, how the way we name things can reveal and conceal their essence. And he himself approached writing in a poetic spirit. We usually think of philosophy, especially German philosophy, as being written in dry, awkward jargon. But Heidegger’s writing, though difficult, is deeply creative: he uses nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns, puns on etymologies, and even plays with spelling, all in an effort to jar the reader out of conventional ways of reading and thinking.

All this makes it natural that writers and theorists of language look to Heidegger. But in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, “uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. “The nature of poetry,” he goes so far as to declare, “is the founding of truth.”

To understand exactly what Heidegger means by this numinous formula, it’s necessary to sketch his complex argument. To answer the abstract question “What is art?” Heidegger begins by setting the reader before a particular artwork—a Van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes. When you wear shoes, he points out, you seldom think about them. Shoes, like all kinds of tools and equipment, are at their best when they are most reliable, that is, when they perform their function silently and unobtrusively. In fact, you only begin to pay attention to your shoes when they stop working properly—when they pinch your foot or when the sole comes off. And most of the objects that surround us share this quality of being instruments, things that we use and ignore.

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