The Poetic Way of Thinking

Abstract

Heidegger repeatedly performs the encounter of thinking and poetry, explicitly for the sake of inaugurating a non-metaphysical way of thinking. This transformed thinking is to be poetic and non-conceptual, eschewing the comfort of transparent meaning, the grasping power of concepts, the presentational force of images, or the self-evident correctness of propositional statements. The need for such a non-metaphysical thinking arises historically, at the endpoint of the epoch of the completion of metaphysics, when it comes to roost in the Gestell, the technological essencing of being, which pervades and (over)powers all that is in being: all beings, entities and occurrences. Poetic thinking responds to the modern drive to maximum availablity and dispose-ability of being and beings, freeing up the possibility of a path alternative to the dominion of calculative thought and its technological metrics.