Poetically Man Dwells

In a brief essay by Heidegger that is occasioned by the death of a German musician, Heidegger makes a profound distinction between the the calculative and the meditative. These are two modes of being in truth - the scientific and the poetic. Heidegger, in a large way following Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, believes the scientific has become too seductive, making us let the poetic lay hidden, buried.

The scientific is seductive because it feels true. Of course, "feeling" is usually associated with the emotional, the body, the poetic. For example, it's appealing to assume the clock tells us the reality about time and our experience of time is just subjective nonsense. This is, of course, backwards. Man is the being who is caught up in time. And this being caught up is always poetic.

When I approach a good poem, it always resists me. A good poem dances with the interpreter - it refuses a final reading. Poems are not meant to be "summed" up. However, essays, at least the way an essay is thought of today, not an attempt, but a defended thesis, try to eliminate the poetic. The scientific paper purports to "tell things like they really are."

Heidegger suggests that "man dwells poetically," i.e., man's relationship to the world is one that is constantly in flux, never capable of being grasped in its totality. The poetic thinker never attempts to escape his environment in order to think; rather, the poetic thinker locates himself in the muck.

Even great scientific thinkers - Heisenberg, Einstein - are most profound and revolutionary because they locate themselves in the muck, never above or beyond it. They don't transcend; they descend - they wallow; they are poets.

The poetic always has the element of the sacred. The poetic is always in conversation with the gods. The scientific destroys the gods. Thus Nietzsche finds God dead at the alter exactly because the Apollonian has become the dominant mode of thinking. This comes in many form - mind over body, reason over emotion, Western thought over Eastern, and so forth.

In the absence of the poetic we are left with a world of marketing. In the scientific, calculative world I live in all traditional sectors of meaning have become barren - the church, the family, the government - and what is left is a population that feels hollow, bored in a way that is unrecognizable, sad in a way that is incomparable. This creates a longing for meaning and that longing is bought and sold, traded on Madison Avenue - my sadness is a commodity that is sold back to me by everyone from Apple to Zoloft.

The poetic, the meditative, the ability to sit quietly and be with the world is not a cure all. I'm not suggesting an easy way out. What I'm suggesting is the poetic allows for the profound; it creates the space for a kind of thinking that dances, plays, but is not wallowing in irony. We need thinkers like Emerson, poets like Whitman, musicians like Coltrane. As a final note, Coltrane's immaculately poetic album A Love Supreme is described by him as his love letter to God. I challenge anyone to listen to that album and not recognize the sacred, the poetic, the meditative.