Heidegger on Poetic Thinking

Explores Heidegger's new form of 'poetic thinking' as a way out of the cul-de-sac of modern calculative thinking.

Charles Bambach (Author)

9781009570572, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 January 2025

82 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.1 cm, 0.27 kg

One of the striking features of Heidegger's philosophical engagement concerns his privileging of poetry and poetic thinking. In this understanding of language as fundamentally poetic, Heidegger puts forward a different way to do philosophy. In this Element, the author places Heidegger's poetic thinking in conversation with Sophocles and Hölderlin as a way to situate his critique of global technology and instrumental thinking in the postwar years. This Element also offers a critique of Heidegger's efforts to arrogate poetic thinking to his own aim of a destinal form of German national self-assertion through poetry. Overall, the aim here is to show how crucial poetic thinking is to the way Heidegger understands philosophy as a radical engagement with language.

Introduction
1. Hölderlin Between the First and the Other Beginning
2. Hölderlin and the Task of Poetic Thinking
3. Sophocles' Antigone: An Ethics of the Uncanny
4. The Later Heidegger on Poetic Dwelling
Concluding.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF]