This is a collection of Heidegger’s lectures circling around the themes of art, aesthetics, and language. He begins with the origins of art, “The thingly element in the art work is like the substructure into and upon which the other, authentic element is built…. These three modes of defining thingness conceive of the thing as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, as formed matter…. It is precisely in great art—and only such art is under consideration here—that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work…. To be a work means to set up a world…. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being…. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld…. A work, by being a work, makes space for the spaciousness…. The work as work sets up a world…. Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth…. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual…. If all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy…. But poesy is only one mode of the lighting projection of truth, i.e., of poetic composition in this wider sense. Nevertheless, the linguistic work, the poem in the narrower sense, has a privileged position in the domain of the arts…. Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time…. Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance.”
Heidegger, in another lecture, deals with poets more directly. “Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning…. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy…. What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects…. What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possibly arise…. Who are we? We are those who will, who set up the world as object by way of intentional self-assertion…. Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for him to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come…. But the interior of uncustomary consciousness remains the inner space in which everything is for us beyond the arithmetic of calculation, and, free of such boundaries, can overflow into the unbounded whole of the Open…. The interiority of the world’s inner space unbars the Open for us. Only what we thus retain in our heart (par coeur), only that do we truly know by heart. Within this interior we are free, outside of the relation to the objects set around us that only seem to give protection…. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?”
The lectures end by returning explicitly to the theme of language. Heidegger concludes, “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man…. For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal…. Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end, toward a thing’s nature.”
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