the role of literature and art in heidegger

The simplest and most believable lesson, from Heidegger's "Language," is that language can exist without a speaker. Certain poems in undergrad anthologies are heavily, heavily footnoted to explain that the poet made revisions, often some years after writing the poem, but what is published in the anthology is the original; this is, the words themselves have become stronger than their original speaker. There are games of speculation that can be played about what inventions "would have been invented anyway" -- the handiest example is Mark Zuckerberg's acknowledgment that someone else would have "invented Facebook" if he hadn't -- and the same speculation is quite possible about works of literature. Ubiquitous novels like 1984 and The Great Gatsby, for instance, seem just a bit too appropriate for the contexts in which they rose to ubiquity; very possibly, some other authoritarian dystopia or some other loser-who-has-everything could be teaching the same lessons to the same public with the same success, in the absence of those aforementioned Penguin Classics.

Heidegger clearly believes that ideas are not from thinkers; ideas are from the universe, and the job of thinkers is not to create ideas, but to discover them. The function of speaking, as in Heidegger's example of "A Winter Evening," is that it "invites things in" (991), it makes present these possibilities that, in Heidegger, were already real in the realm of language. When the new arrivals, such as house and table, "unfold world" by their thinging, it suggests that their existence is far beyond the explicit limits of what is spoken. The sheer ideas of house and table carry a multitude of other facts with them, for instance, the existence of humans. Heidegger's point, here, is mostly clearly expressed in the saying that to make an apple pie from scratch, we must first invent the universe. "Winter Evening," when it summons a house and table, is invoking the universe.

Heidegger has contradicted himself a bit by saying how poetry makes truth, but for his views on calling and summoning (instead of creating) and on the fourfold, we must choose to believe that poetry is somehow representative. Poetry cannot just be representing narrow forms, as Plato restricted it all, but we can say it represents possibilities among infinite possibilities; certainly Heidegger's description of the threshold enlists poetry to represent something he already believed. So if poetry is a maker of truth, then, we should think of "poetry" as what we would normally call the poem's content, which, to Heidegger, certainly does create and multiple more truth. The poem itself is a piece of speech, while the truth is a piece of language. The great mass of unsaid truths, then, is simply encoded in unknown language and unknown poetry.

In his other writing, Heidegger has made a point of explaining the context-based difference between a thing (for using) and an object (for studying). The distinction of the two presentations is difficult with our examples of 1984 and The Great Gatsby, which are texts for studying, but whose study serves a kind of social function in spreading specific sets of truths and ideas; this is, they exist not just for the simple accumulation of wisdom and experience, but for directed employment and education, they are both object and thing. The quote from Hamann, "Language is thought" (986), and the accompanying invocation of the word "logos" go some way to explaining this contradiction. If we equate thought, the realization of pure truths, with language, the great mass of truths which exist, we define all truths by their being knowable. Truth can sometimes get packaged and commodified and used as a tool, because truth is meant for acquisition and exchange. Perhaps we can say that there is a sort of threshold or dif-ference between knowledge and education, wherein the spread of truth is made possible by the near proximity of learning a truth to possessing it -- after all, any complete remembrance or employment of an idea traces its proper course and asks us to learn it anew.