Thinking of Poetry Beyond Value: How Heidegger Thinks toward Postmodernism with Nietzsche

Thinking of Poetry Beyond Value: How Heidegger Thinks toward Postmodernism with Nietzsche

“You can’t look at the sky without looking right through it,” – Tim Kinsella, Puddle Splashers

Alternative Title: Poetry toward a Plural Neotheology

Heidegger’s later philosophy is one that often provocatively teeters on the edge between religious advocation and blasphemy, as on the one hand, in his lectures on Nietzsche, he stated “the feast of thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy.” Yet, on the other hand, in his essay “Why Poets?” he wrote, in light of the death of God, that our “world-era has been drawing to its night.” How might we reconcile this view of Heidegger simultaneously rejecting “Christian philosophy” while also warning us of the “midnight” of our Godless age? The answer lies within analyzing our metaphysical understanding of the world and being. Heidegger identifies, with the help of Nietzsche, the nihilism at the core of contemporary metaphysics, though, seeking to think beyond Nietzsche's metaphysics, Heidegger introduces the conception of being as a “fourfold.” This essay will clarify how Heidegger, combating our ontotheology’s reduction of being to “value,” calls for the help of poets in thinking about divinity after the death of God.

We will begin by making sense of Nietzsche’s “terrible statement,” as Heidegger analyzes in “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead.” Heidegger understands Nietzsche as the culmination of modern Western metaphysics; he writes that Western metaphysics “is in all likelihood its final stage,” as Nietzsche recognized the nihilism at its center. This idea may seem strange to someone who has little experience with Heidegger’s Nietzsche, given that Nietzsche’s philosophy is explicitly against the incorporation of the “other-worldly;” for example, Plato’s theory of forms asserts that our souls have access to a world of perfect forms which we reference in identifying their imperfect replications in our own world. So, we know a tree is a tree because we already have knowledge of a general “tree” that all any specific tree with qualities reflects in some way. Nietzsche similarly critiques the “other-wordly” tendencies in Christian thought, as our life now is only a temporary “test” where we prove ourselves worthy for entering heaven, rather than focusing on fulfilling our potential or virtue here on earth. However, Nietzsche’s “inverted” metaphysics is still metaphysical, despite his rejection. Heidegger writes that, for philosophy after Nietzsche, “all that is left to metaphysics is to be inverted into the dire state of its non-essence.” “Metaphysics,” as understood by Heidegger, however, is what establishes things' ability to be things. As Iain Thomson identifies in Heidegger, “to establish an answer to the question ‘What is a being?’, metaphysics makes a claim about what (and how) beings are, and thus about the Being of those beings.” “What” we understand, and how we come to understand it, is contingent to our metaphysical system; what is intelligible is “gathered” by its metaphysics. As Heidegger describes, “all metaphysical thinking is onto-logy, or it is nothing at all.” This is to say that if we can locate the center or essence of Nietzsche’s thought, we can find the metaphysics, or the way things are, of our age.

The idea that “God is dead” is not an attempt by Nietzsche to promote Godless thinking, and especially not one to celebrate his demise. “God is dead” describes our contemporary metaphysical condition: God was here, but now He is absent. Heidegger picks up on this in his reading of The Gay Science under the section titled “the madman.” The section describes a madman who visits the market one morning, and cries out that he is looking for God. The people nearby laugh at him dismissively, though their entertainment is quickly extinguished after the madman declares: “We’ve killed him [God] – you and I. We are all his murderers.”  It is not simply that God is dead, but that He was murdered. Nietzsche isn’t saying that God died naturally, as more and more people became atheist, for example; God died when we “unchained the earth from its sun,” meaning that our world is no longer centrally related to any understanding of God. Without God serving as a unifying source of meaningfulness emanating from all entities, society collectively began to shift toward seeing all entities as fundamentally meaningless. 

Take the section “On the Pale Criminal,” for example, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the story tells of a criminal who commits a murder during a robbery. Some defend him saying that he never intended to murder anyone, only to steal, though Zarathustra calls him out, as “his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife.” This murderer is none other than Kant, who supplants God as a relevant (or even knowable) variable in ethics with the “categorical imperative,” an ethical system based on “reason.” Kant showed philosophy that God was not something we can ever know for certain, thus any moral system contingent on God would be fundamentally baseless; Kant secretly wanted to kill God, under the guise of establishing a concrete ethics. In the past, God was a beacon of truth and morality, yet Nietzsche notices that the modern world has substituted where God was once present with reason, logic, or, most importantly for us, “value.” “Value” is essentially any quantifiable or measurable “matter” that something can be assigned to represent its “objective” nature and importance; for instance, a vintage car has a value of 200 thousand dollars, while a loaf of bread is valued at 2 and a half dollars. Further, that loaf also has a caloric value, and even a use value for making lunch. Value here presupposes an objective materiality which can be mastered, totalized, and exploited, given that the material itself is fundamentally meaningless (in the midnight after God’s death).

Nietzsche does not hesitate to critique reason and logic for being inferior to poetry. Yet, via the will to power, as sheer force and overcoming, he leaves space for “value” as a constant and always-redefinable metaphysical denominator across all entities. This is part of what strands Nietzsche in a metaphysical nihilism, rather than a perfect rejection or inversion, like he thought he was doing. Modern thought has the tendency to reduce any things’ meaning to “value,” and Heidegger diagnoses this as in accordance with the greater underlying metaphysics of the time, that being, Nietzsche’s ontotheology of the eternal return of the will to power. 

Ontotheology is the term Heidegger gives the modern metaphysical encapsulation of the being of entities. As Heidegger understands “metaphysics” to be the light of the world which lets us see those entities, and as “ontology” is that fundamental being itself, ontotheology then captures both, and claims its double perspective to be the ultimate truth of the being of entities. This encapsulation is embodied by modern philosophy, to which Nietzsche fulfills. Heidegger recognizes the historical context which led to Nietzsche’s philosophy, and clarifies that it is not one that was thought up in a vacuum, but one that results from careful observation of the philosophy and science of the time. Heidegger writes that “Nietzsche himself interprets the course of Western History metaphysically, namely as the advent and development of nihilism.” By the time Nietzsche was 15, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and greatly influenced biology with his theory of evolution has a fundamentally guiding force in all organisms. Nietzsche was also well versed in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, specifically his concept of the will to life. Schopenhauer thought that life was in an essential struggle to survive and perpetuate themselves for as long and as easily as possible. Nietzsche, however, argued that life did not merely survive, and that Darwin and Schopenhauer each missed the mark in their failure to recognize power as the driving ontological force. Survival as a goal alone eventually “plateaus” once its needs are met, while power must fundamentally grow lest it be surpassed by something more powerful.

But how does Heidegger extrapolate value as the defining metaphysical quantifier in today's age from Nietzsche’s thought specifically? Many Nietzscheans would argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is not metaphysical, as the will to power is a constantly changing process, inherently manifesting out of a clash between materiality and the will to lie. It is specifically this constant change, eternally recurring, that makes Nietzsche metaphysical, and places a privilege on “value.” Heidegger writes that “value is the twofold condition of the will to power itself, the condition set in the will to power for the will to power.” Many Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham had some conception of an ultimate enduring value that precedes all objects in their philosophy, whether it be from labor, economics, or pleasure. Granted, these things are all different, and cannot translate seamlessly across each other’s philosophies despite still being value. But it is specifically in their difference from one another that we can see the will to power functioning as the common thread that allows for any “value” to be asserted as the ultimate value in the first place. Maybe Adam Smith’s conception of value in economics was wrong, and alternatively Marx is correct in his critique of capital and use and exchange value (proposing his own theory of labor value). Either way, this is Nietzsche’s will to power at work, as this fundamental force (value, as an objective quantifier) is constantly redefined (in the metaphysics of the eternal return) in whichever way best serves the will to power itself. Nietzsche believes that our way of structuring reality is a type of “lie” (which he fittingly calls the “will to lie”), as our words only grasp at any object’s current and temporary state of being, ignoring that they have a materiality that precedes and succeeds our lives (as any “chair” was once a tree, and will someday break down into dirt, and so on). This is to say that value has an objective certainty in itself, given that it is the objective quantification of being, redefined however and wherever deemed fit. For Heidegger, our words for things aren’t “lies,” but rather disclose something real about that entity, while not totally exhausting the ways that entity could be disclosed or understood. Value, then, is valid, in that we cannot deny the effectiveness nor the quantifiability of what value captures, though to assume that any quantification is final or complete is a misrepresentation of the entity and our phenomenology of it.

Heidegger writes that “being has shrunk down to a value in metaphysics.” This is the demarcation of entities’ meaningfulness in being in late-modern thought. Interestingly, this reduction does not mean that things, in their valuation, are brought to an infinitesimally small point where meaning has no room to operate, as even the “highest” value is a type of reduction, despite being “highest” or “greatest.” Heidegger writes that “the final blow against God … consists in reducing god, the beingness of all [entities], to the highest value.” He attributes this “harshest blow” not to non-believers, but to the “faithful and their theologians,” as they fail to think about the inexhaustibility of being as such, and hence fail to grasp God. God is not “merely” the highest value, as it instantly relates him in some way to the things of lower value, to which he is not relatable. Heidegger’s description of God as the “beingness of all entities” is quite enlightening, as God is not an entity or relatable to one, but is the “sun” that both centers and illuminates entities. Heidegger writes, in reference to Plato’s parable, that “the sun forms and delimits the field of vision in which [entities] show themselves as [entities].” God, apophatically, is stronger than strength, wiser than wisdom, and more loving than love; to place God in a value system makes the insights from this negative theology meaningless, as God’s strength is limited by being the “highest” strength and value. God is unlimited, but after his death, we are left with an empty and dead center as the “beingness” of entities. We must not totally confound a traditional negative theology with Heidegger’s thinking, however, as Heidegger is not suggesting that we turn back toward an orthodox conception of God, but rather for us to pick up on the shift in conceptualizing being as such from something that overflows our understanding, to something that is encompassed by it. In his essay “Why Poets” (or “What are Poets For in the Times of the World-night?”), Heidegger proposes that we must rekindle or rethink a relationship to divinity in our conception of being as such, which will help us think toward a polysemic conception of being.

Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche ends with his realization that we must go beyond Nietzsche in order to escape late-modern nihilism. If we wish to escape late-modernity, and its ontotheological framework, we must be open to the irreducibility of being. Heidegger frequently refers to our current age as “midnight,” to mean that our metaphysical nihilism has pervaded our understanding so deeply, that there is no longer a sun providing light for which to see the world (in the sense that the sun represents an age's metaphysics). He writes that “the world’s night [spreads out] its darkness. The age is determined by God’s keeping himself afar,” by his absence [Den Fehlgottes]. The escape from our desolate time “can only come if the world turns radically around… if it turns from the abyss.” There is no way out of our nihilist metaphysics of enframing if we continue to operate within that metaphysics. The “greatest danger” for us, perhaps, is that:

In the midnight of this night, the desolation of the time is the greatest. The destitute time is then no longer able even to experience its own distress.

What Heidegger means here is that we are so entrenched within our ontotheology that we do not even have the tools to “experience” (if we hear that phenomenologically, rather than subjectively) our own suffering vis-à-vis the abyss, or at the very least, we are not attuned enough yet with being to think and articulate ourselves out of nihilism. This is reminiscent of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, where any system cannot account for the truth of its own logic on its own (or that to do so, one would need a meta-system), as for Heidegger, the metaphysics of late-modernity alone cannot even produce the possibility of intelligibility beyond value thinking (such as how an economic theory of value cannot properly account for the worth of things that we deem “invaluable,” such as a childhood toy, or an old pair of shoes that carried someone through a marathon). He adds that “the distress is fully eclipsed because it now appears only as a need to be satisfied.” It is too dark without the sun to see that our ontotheology is what is making us suffer, and instead we affirm our own nihilism by continuing to follow the metaphysics. Heidegger’s solution is one that Nietzsche was close to grasping himself: as Heidegger notes Nietzsche’s “thesis” in The Gay Science, “Art is [more valuable] than truth.” What Nietzsche misses, however, is that art is truth. More straightforwardly, art reveals truth in our encounter with it by disclosing entities as entities, and art’s ability to be continually reinterpreted and how it thus inexhaustibly makes meaning is its truth. This is why Heidegger calls for the poets to write in this “desolate time,” as it is through their poetry (and unique attunement with the divine) that we can begin to think outside of nihilism. 

Heidegger makes many attempts to describe “being” throughout his oeuvre, such as firstly with 1927’s Being and Time as “fundamental ontology,” then with the concepts of the “earth” and “world” (and their intersection) in his 1935 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and later with the “fourfold.” The fourfold understanding of being is Heidegger’s attempt to rekindle a method for understanding being as overflowing, beyond reductive quantifying. Let us explore Heidegger’s analogy of the grapevine to understand this: the grapevine grows from the earth toward the sky. The vine also bears grapes, which are used to make wine; wine was a gift from Dionysus to the Greek people, and helped them not just get drunk, but deeper, change their relationship with dance and culture, for instance, and experience itself. Heidegger explains: 

For the god of the vine [Dionysus] preserves in [the grapevine] and in its fruit the essential mutuality of the earth and sky [Himmel] as the site of the nuptials[Braufestes] of men and gods.

The fourfold of being, then, has the earth and mortals, on one side, and the sky and divinities (gods) on the other: the “earth” serves as the ground or base of our world and intelligibility, as it is from the soil that the grapevine first sprouts. The “sky” represents our openness to being, such as the vast possibility of artistic creation someone has before them. The grapevine grows skyward, and is the link between the gods (in this case, Dionysus) and the earth. Mortals are those who can die. This is incredibly obvious, but its “obviousness” conceals a deeper truth that Heidegger points out: “mortals scarcely know or are capable even of their own mortality.” There is nothing outside our age’s ontotheology, as even the unknown, like death, is an object of mastery and reduction. Sigmund Freud, for example, thought that our impending demise was not the root of our fear of death, since we have never experienced death before (and that the unconscious understands itself to be immortal). And perhaps death itself now exists in our age as a type of value, akin to Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics or Jacques Derrida’s idea that animals are “born dead.” For the former, Mbembe argues (building off of Foucault’s “biopolitics,” the total control of life) that death is something that neocolonial or economic bodies regulate and disperse to demonstrate their power. For Derrida, he argues in his book The Animal That Therefore I Am that society has formed such an effective system of “manufacturing” meat and animal products, that the animals’ being has been reduced to their end product, their deaths. In each instance, death is not something we relate to phenomenologically (that is, as something we know we will encounter or witness), but rather a quantifiable and objective state to be mastered and regulated. Heidegger’s point in reminding us of our mortality is to present the fourfold as an existential space for “dwelling,” that is, deliberation concerning our encountering of entities, and how those encounters appear in their polysemic nature to us. We are limited in our time here, but the sky of possibility is limitless, and we must existentially ponder over what the limitless possibility of “presencing” (or “means in our relationship to our lives and world.

What we must dwell over, however, is poetry, and this is the most pressing task for poets. With the death of God, we have lost touch with divinity as something encountered in being. This is not to say that divinity is no longer here, however, as the role of poets is to find encounters with the divine, and the job of “thinkers” to translate the excessively meaningful essence of poets’ works into postmodern thought. This is why Heidegger writes that “‘poets in a desolate time’ must specifically speak the essence of poetry in their poems.” What Heidegger means here is that the only way out of our nihilistic worldview is for poets to continue to redefine this totality of “poetry” by continually gathering a new understanding of what a poem is. Heidegger doesn’t mean that the poetry needed to escape our age’s midnight must be a meta-commentary on what a poem can be (not to say that poetry that speaks the essence of poetry could not be that, either), but by making new art to establish the art as a piece of art to be seriously considered we can escape our age’s midnight. 

Heidegger does not say that poets must “capture” or “contain” the essence of poetry, but to speak it. This implies a much more proactive and present relationship between the poem and the poet, and poetry as a whole. E. E. Cummings, for instance, “speaks” the essence of poetry in his work, such as with anyone lived in a pretty how town. The poem uses bizarre language, such as “anyone” and “noone” as characters. One line reads: “he sang his didn’t he danced his did.” All the while, it incorporates rhyming quatrains and alliteration throughout. Many people vehemently oppose this “style” of poetry, but this poem had to be first written and spoken to someone as a poem, simultaneously speaking poetry’s essence, and pushing back on the limits of what “counts” as poetry (if not at least sparking the conversation, negatively speaking poetry’s essence apophatically). This ties into a hierarchy Heidegger proposes for rethinking what it means to have a new, “living god” after his death. At the top, there is God, like the fountainhead, that is being as such. God, as the sun around which our world orbits, shines light upon the world—Poets can catch glimpses of this shining (being’s overflowing meaningfulness), which is the second layer. Poets disclose what is “holy,” that is, the overflowing meaningfulness that sits on the horizon where the sun and the earth meet. When the thinkers read poetry, they can designate the intelligible “whole,” that is, the totality of what is to be considered in any respect (for example, as before calculus, neither differentiation nor integration were things to be studied, thus were not part of the whole). Ontotheology, as a system that encompasses everything, is “whole” in a similar sense, in that it necessarily has nothing it does not account for (and as for what is not yet accounted for, it will account as revaluation through the eternal return of the will to power). But, for Heidegger, we have lost touch with the whole, as we’ve focused more and more only on this total and objective, complete side of the whole. Heidegger writes that 

The unwhole, as the unwhole, traces for us what is whole. What is whole beckons and calls to the holy. The holy binds the divine. 

The whole of the earth is delimited by the “nothing” that is “outside” this whole totality, “the unwhole,” and is illuminated by the shining of God’s divinity. The “unwhole” is the whole’s openness, open for truth (such as art) to be disclosed and gathered within the whole. When the poets look toward the horizon, where the sun crosses above and beneath the earth, they disclose, as poetry, the holy. The holy contains hints or winks, which the thinkers then meaningfully disclose as truth within the whole. Poets and thinkers, through a phenomenology that is open to the “nothing” that traces the boundaries of “everything,” can push the boundaries of what “is” to escape nihilism through embracing meaning as the common denominator across all entities, and not value fundamentally.

Heidegger’s initial statement that we are in “all likelihood” metaphysic’s final stage, means that it is not necessarily the case. There is a possibility that value thinking continues to persist through the eternal return of the will to power as the “final stage,” but perhaps there is a system that can replace our current ontotheology. If this Nietzschean ontotheology truly is our last, then perhaps we can finally escape metaphysics. Whatever the case, it is up to the poets to seek to disclose the glimpses of divinity in the world, and further, up to us as thinkers to reinterpret God in a way that discloses and disseminates the inexhaustibility within being as such.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two, trans. David F. Krell, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’” from Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Heidegger, Martin, “Why Poets?” from Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from The Portable Nietzsche, Trans. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1977.

Thomson, Iain, “Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Taylor and Francis Ltd, 2000.