Within the winter semester of 1944, Martin Heidegger started what can be his closing lecture course on the College of Freiburg — certainly, his final official lectures as a professor. Translated right here, Einleitung in die Philosophie — Denken und Dichten (Introduction to Philosophy — Considering and Poetizing) asks after the interior relationship of philosophy and poetry, pondering and poetizing. Pursuing this query doesn’t ‘introduce’ (einleiten) us to philosophy; by our essence, we’re already ‘in’ philosophy. However we aren’t at house in our philosophizing essence, and so we’d like a information (Anleitung) on this “unknown area” (p. 3). Our guides on this course are Nietzsche, the poetizing thinker of homelessness, and Hölderlin, the considerate poet of homecoming. An encounter with Nietzsche’s poetizing pondering and with Hölderlin’s pondering poetizing will information us in direction of a dwelling in our essence. Heidegger had spent a lot of the earlier decade in confrontation with each Nietzsche and Hölderlin; right here, he lastly guarantees to assume them collectively. Sadly, this promise isn’t fulfilled.
Heidegger privileges Nietzsche and Hölderlin on this textual content for a number of causes. First, in every (but in several methods), “poetizing and pondering are interwoven with each other in a single and wondrous approach” (p. 13). Second, in line with Heidegger, such interweaving has been seen earlier than solely at the start of the Western philosophical custom — in Plato and Parmenides, Pindar and Sophocles (pp. 6, 14). That we see it once more now in Nietzsche and Hölderlin reveals that this custom has been accomplished. Thus a world-historical and philosophical necessity governs the interweaving of philosophy and poetry in these two figures. That is maybe why, third, we have a tendency to say Nietzsche and Hölderlin collectively (p. 6). But in addition — fourth — the 2 have a particular relationship to the German individuals. The German individuals are “the individuals of poets and thinkers” (p. 12) in that (in line with Heidegger) the German spirit is uniquely decided in its essence by thinkers and poets. Nietzsche and Hölderlin every — and collectively — have a particular function to play within the historic future of the German individuals, and the winter of 1944 is definitely an apt time to think about this. For these causes, we could “substitute the undetermined title ‘Considering and Poetizing’ with the names Nietzsche and Hölderlin” (p. 7), and thru a confrontation with these two figures we are able to query the relation between pondering and poetizing, ponder the completion of Western metaphysics, expertise our homelessness and put together for our important homecoming.
Heidegger begins with Nietzsche, suggesting that within the determine of Zarathustra Nietzsche poetizes his ‘considered ideas’, the everlasting recurrence of the identical (p. 9). However to poetize a thought is to not specific it in poetic language: “We don’t see Nietzsche as a poetizing thinker given that ‘poems’ might be discovered scattered in his texts and notebooks, and since the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra makes the particular impression of a poetic type with its language and kind” (p. 54). What, then, is poetizing? What kind does it soak up Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? And why does the considered the everlasting recurrence demand it? “What is that this poetizing, and what’s it doing in pondering?” (p. 40).
The course concludes abruptly with this query, after solely two classes. The course was cancelled as a result of Heidegger had been known as up for the Volkssturm (Individuals’s Militia) and deployed to Breisach. The textual content on this quantity is a translation of the lectures that got — some forty small pages — together with a handful of fragmentary notes and alternate variations of passages. We discover additionally a copy of two of Heidegger’s lecture bulletins, full with charred edges from the bombing of Freiburg in November.
The interpretation is readable and admirably unobtrusive. Phillip Jacques Braunstein (impartial scholar and entrepreneur) renders Heidegger’s key phrases in recognisable methods. He has a eager sense of when and tips on how to embrace the unique German with a view to reveal translation decisions and Heidegger’s wordplay with out sacrificing the movement of the textual content. The German can be supplied for the 5 poems by Nietzsche that Heidegger (very briefly) discusses.
The warrant for publishing such a severely truncated textual content is presumably to make out there the elements of quantity 50 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe that haven’t to date appeared in English. GA50 was first printed (in German) in 1990, and along with “Introduction to Philosophy — Considering and Poetizing” it comprises the 1940 lecture “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”. The 2 are paired as a result of each talk about Nietzsche and, in line with the editor of GA50 (Petra Jaeger), Heidegger thought that “as a consequence of its brevity, [“Introduction to Philosophy — Thinking and Poetizing”] wouldn’t have sufficed for a single quantity” (Editor’s Afterword, p. 74). “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics” isn’t translated right here, and so this quantity isn’t a translation of GA50, as a result of the textual content is seemingly similar to that printed within the four-volume assortment of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures (Neske, 1961), later to change into GA6 and translated into English within the four-volume Nietzsche (between 1979 and 1987, now out there in a two-volume paperback (HarperCollins, 1991)). Subtracting what has already appeared in English from GA50, we’re left with the 2 classes of “Introduction to Philosophy — Considering and Poetizing” and varied dietary supplements (together with a couple of pages of notes on “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”). This detritus, accurately held to be inadequate by itself, would have been higher suited to a set of essays and dietary supplements than a stand-alone quantity.
In brief, the textual content is a tease. It could have been a most exceptional lecture course, however we now have solely the very starting of it. One accomplishes little in two classes when one is planning to talk for your complete time period, and Heidegger is — as at all times — so cautious to arrange his college students for his type of pondering that he barely has time to start to pose his questions. The beginning that he makes is recognisable from his different lecture programs, particularly these on Nietzsche. Heidegger touches on acquainted subjects in his engagement with Nietzsche and acquainted subjects in his thought extra broadly. He criticises Nietzsche for neglecting the ontological distinction, recapitulates the connection between the need to energy and the everlasting recurrence, briefly sketches his and Nietzsche’s accounts of (German) cultural atrophy within the age of nihilism and expertise, and calls us to carry out the Hölderlinian ‘passage via the overseas’ in a return to the traditional Greeks. Alongside the best way, Heidegger reads 5 of Nietzsche’s poems. These readings are disappointingly transient and comparatively shallow, particularly in comparison with his interpretations of poetry elsewhere. Combining the hints that Heidegger offers us right here with materials from roughly contemporaneous texts, we are able to anticipate how the course may need developed via the interpretation of Nietzsche to the reference to Hölderlin and the questioning of pondering and poetizing. However I don’t see that the textual content contributes a lot of substance to our understanding of those subjects. Heidegger has time to limber up his college students’ minds earlier than the exercise, however can not do greater than announce what sort of exercise it will likely be.
As a result of the actual philosophical work of the course isn’t carried out, it’s laborious to think about who may profit from this textual content. These new to Heidegger may need benefitted from a partial lecture course like this, utilizing it as a quick and readable propadeutic to Heidegger or to Heidegger’s Nietzsche. But the trajectory of the textual content is simply too abbreviated to serve on this approach. Students eager about Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche, or in his accounts of pondering, poetizing or our modern homelessness, could discover formulations, phrases or fragments which are of some curiosity (though, after all, these are already out there within the Gesamtausgabe version). One instance is that this strikingly lovely description of philosophy as correct but alien to us, which employs Heidegger’s recurring lighting metaphor:
Philosophy is round people day and night time just like the sky and the earth, nearly even nearer than they’re, just like the brightness that rests between them, which people nearly at all times overlook since they’re solely busy with what seems to them inside the brightness. Typically, every time it darkens, people change into particularly attentive to the brightness round them. However even then, people don’t pay nearer consideration to it, as a result of they’re accustomed to the truth that the brightness returns. (p. 11)
We additionally discover a uncommon definition of ‘house’ (Heimat): “the circumference that’s traditionally enclosed and nourishing, that fuels all braveness and releases all capacities, that surrounds the place the place people belong within the important that means of a claimed listening” (p. 24). The subjects of house, homelessness and turning into homely are central for Heidegger on this interval (arguably throughout his complete profession), however the idea of ‘house’ in his writings has the maddening tendency of slipping surreptitiously between associations with the acquainted, the right, the origin, the start line and the vacation spot. Having a way of what Heidegger means by the ‘house’ is beneficial, however after all we don’t see him doing a lot with it right here and it isn’t clear that the definition might be carried over to different texts.
To my thoughts, the primary contribution of the textual content lies in Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s poems “The Free Spirit” (additionally recognized by its first line, “Die Krähen schrei’n“) and “Reply”. Heidegger reads Nietzsche as rejecting a nostalgic homesickness (mere “craving for one thing previous”) and calling for a homesickness that’s “a willing-forward into a brand new house” (p. 28). This new house is itself characterised by homelessness (p. 35); it’s the age of nihilism, the completion of Western metaphysics. Keen-forward into this new ‘house’ is what’s poetized within the determine of Zarathustra. Though we discover some fragmentary clues within the dietary supplements, Heidegger doesn’t have an opportunity to discover this concept. Presumably, such willing-forward, and the poetizing of it, is the duty of the thinker. For as Heidegger says elsewhere, “The thinker thinks towards what’s un-homelike, what isn’t like house, and for him this isn’t a transitional part; quite, that is his being at house“.[1] Insofar as being at house, or dwelling, is itself achieved poetically, the thinker’s willing-forward to a brand new house might be artistic, and particularly poetic. This presumably opens the best way for the poet’s pondering, which we already know to be “a commemorative questioning that places the homelike itself into poetry” (ibid.). So it might have been within the elaboration of this curious idea of ‘willing-forward’ that Heidegger would have discovered the pivot on which the Nietzsche-Hölderlin connection turns, and so the interior relation of pondering and poetizing. This elaboration, nonetheless, is left to the reader.
The final piece of writing that we now have from Heidegger’s hand is a message to Bernhard Welte. Heidegger writes: “For there may be want for contemplation whether or not and the way, within the age of a uniform technological world civilization, there can nonetheless be such a factor as house”.[2] That is the query that Heidegger begins to lift on this lecture course, and at stake in it’s nothing lower than our means to be what we’re — our means to inhabit our essence. But when this query strikes us, if we too discover this contemplation needful, then we should look to texts apart from Introduction to Philosophy — Considering and Poetizing with a view to perceive and stick with it the Heideggerian mission.
