Abstract
Introduction
We are not asking if the philosophical text, Being and Time (1962), is poetic in any way. For this text is nothing like the history of philosophical works in the Western metaphysical and ontological traditions, and definitely nothing like today’s humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences if they descend from the early twentieth-century (Heidegger 1962, p. 71). It is also irreducible to theology (Heidegger 1962, p. 30) past or present. Therefore, we will not utilize Being and Time to explore, via the humanities (but one can say through the social and natural sciences also), the nature and value of artistic works either. This paper does not begin or end with the subject known as the ‘human.’
We could ask if there is a question of whether a poetical dimension is appropriated and destroyed so that the work Being and Time can advance itself into the most uncanny or ‘strange’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 414) realms that supersede any previous knowledge or ‘contrivance’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 241) of what it means to be human: namely as the preparatory work of an ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ to give us a remote chance to answer the question of fundamental ontology, namely the ‘question of the meaning of Being’ (Heidegger 1962, pp. 31-33, 227) within which ‘time is the horizon for understanding Being’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 39). This is not about how human beings construe time either ‘objectively or subjectively’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 374), either as external physical frame of reference to measure the movement of something or the imagination of how we might feel younger or older at any given time.
But we are not asking that either, namely the question of the meaning of being called a human. Presumably, most people think human beings produce and judge art.
Let us forgo the notion that there is anything remotely artistic or poetic about the work that is Being and Time. Then why put forward such a title of our talk?
We will ask the question of why the title conceals a deeper problem of movement inside the text itself. This takes us back to the heart of what is, arguably, the hardest question in all of Western metaphysics: namely the problem of ‘movement’ (Heidegger 2001, p. 99) in relation to ‘caring’ (Heidegger 2001, p.100) in relation to ‘chairological time as a mode of movedness’ (Heidegger 2001, p. 103) as the basis of the ‘facticity of life’ (Heidegger 2001, pp. 102-103). This complex knot of interrelations is what the early Heidegger saw in utilizing the pre-Christian Aristotle for his entire philosophical departure (2001). This is irreducible to any empirical scientific (Heidegger 2001, p. 13), theological (Heidegger 1962, p. 30), psychological (Heidegger 2001, p. 72), or humanistic conception of ‘man’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 241) or the ‘anthropological conception’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 244) of the human being in general. Moving away from any conception of the human, or any poetic distillation of the mystery of its essence, we turn elsewhere.
We want to ask how the major pivotal movement, which marks the transition of Division One on ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 78) to Division Two on ‘Dasein and Temporality’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 274) occurs through an appropriation of a few scant poetical sources: namely in Chapter VI of Division One on ‘Care’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 225). We will read, carefully, section 42 where ‘No. 220 of the Fables of Hyginus’ (Heidegger 1962, 492) opens up the mysterious depths of the question of ‘Care/Sorge’ (1962, p. 225) that Heidegger seeks to probe. Again, his concern is neither anthropological or scientific on the one hand (Heidegger 1962, p. 242) nor that of literary or artistic criticism of what is ‘fabricated’ on the other (Heidegger 1962, p. 242). Heidegger needs this appropriation-event of turning in and to the poetic in order to move on to the most difficult questions on death and temporality in Division Two; the latter is within which the entire possibility to go forward with fundamental ontology is held in suspense, given the incompleteness of the work Being and Time itself (Heidegger 1962, p. 64). This is not to suggest that we want to insert the later Kehre/turning in Heidegger’s thought to the poetic in an earlier moment before it actually occurred, namely within Being and Time itself.
Rather, we want to isolate the basic question, that given all the immense resources in the history of Western thought going back to the pre-Socratics, why is it that Heidegger chose a compendium of ‘fables’ (1962, p. 492), or myths of ancient Greek antiquity, to advance what appears to be his Platonic drive to use philosophy alone to lay out the conditions of his basic question. Afterall, Being and Time’s opening quote in the foreword is from Plato’s Sophist (Heidegger 1962, p. 19). That great work is one of the preeminent founding philosophical achievements of the West; it questioned ‘techne’ as artistic production of a ‘fabrication’ (Heidegger 1997, p. 29) rather than discovering truth in so far as the thing produced is by and for the use of another (Heidegger 1997, p. 29). In contrast, by setting up the possibility of trying to answer the question of the meaning of Being, or the question of fundamental ontology, Being and Time is farthest removed from any sophistic treatment of anything ‘present-at-hand’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 67) for the use or mind of another. In that sense, there is nothing poetic about Being and Time; and yet it uses a poetic moment to transcend itself philosophically and the poetic at the same time. This is the aporia we will analyze in this paper.
References
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
–. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
–. Plato’s Sophist. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).