As Heidegger says in Being and Time (§490), angst constitutes the opening of being-there to its existence as being thrown for its own end; agreed, and the (grammatical) subject of this thrown being is the Dasein. But then why is it said immediately afterward that «because of it [angst], being opens to being-there» and «the being of being-there is totally at stake» ? The being of being-there is pure tautology. Being-there cannot be based on something, given that it is «thrown» (why? because it is). Whence comes this das Sein that opens itself to being-there, if the being-there that opens itself is an entity among the entities?
When Heidegger says that the problem of the founding of metaphysics is rooted in man’s questioning of being, or, better, in its most intimate foundation «the understanding of being as really existing finiteness» (Heidegger 1973: 198), the Sein is none other than the existential understanding of our finite way of being assigned to the horizon of the entities. The Sein is nothing, except our understanding that we are finite entities.
And so it could be said that, at most, being’s experience of beingthere is an efficacious metaphor for the obscure sphere in which an ethical decision is formed: to assume genuinely our destiny to be for death, and at this point silently to sacrifice what metaphysics would have said—at length—about the legion of entities over which it has established its illusory dominion.
But then comes (a philosophically influential event) the Kehre, or Turning Point. And in the Turning Point this so intensionally slippery being becomes a massive subject, albeit in the form of an obscure borborygmus wandering about in the bowels of the entities. It wants to speak, and reveal itself. If it speaks, it will speak through us, given that, like Sein, it emerges only in its connection with Dasein. It is necessary therefore, as was the case with the ontic/ ontological duplication by which being was divorced from itself, to have language also divorced from itself. On the one hand, there will be the language of metaphysics, which by this time has had its day, senescent in its stubborn forgetfulness of being, anxious to deal with objects, and, on the other hand, a language capable—shall we say—of giving «un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.» With the result that, rather than conceal being, it reveals it.
An immense power is therefore conferred upon language, and some maintain that there is a form of language so strong, so consubstantial with the very foundations of being, that it «shows» us being (that is, the indissoluble plexus of being-language) so that the self-revelation of being is actuated within the language. The last verse of Hoderlin’s Andenken is emblematic of this: «But what remains will be intuited by the poets.»
1.7 The Questioning of the Poets
The idea is an ancient one and manifests itself in all its glory in the Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Given a divine One—which is neither body, figure, nor form; which has no quantity or quality or weight; which is in no place; does not see or hear; is neither soul, nor intelligence, nor number, order, or size; is neither substance, nor eternity, nor time; is not shadow and is not light; nor error nor truth (Theologia mistica), because no definition may circumscribe it—it can be named only with an oxymoron such as «most luminous soot,» or by other obscure dissimilarities, such as Lightning, Jealousy, Bear, or Panther, precisely to underline its ineffability (De coelesti hierarchia). This so-called symbolic way—which is abundantly metaphorical in point of fact, and which was to have an influence upon the Thomist and post-Thomist concepts of analogy—is an example of how being can be talked of only through poetry.
So it is the most ancient mystical tradition that has given to the modern world the idea that there exists, on the one hand, a discourse capable of naming the entities univocally, and, on the other, a discourse of negative theology that allows us to talk of the unknowable. This leaves the way clear for the persuasion that the only people who can talk of the unknowable are the poets, the masters of metaphor (which always talks of something else) and of oxymoron (which always talks of the presence of opposites)—an idea to the liking of poets and mystics but even more to that of positivist scientists, prepared to rationalize about prudent limits of knowledge by day and to organize spiritualist’séances by night.
This solution could find a place within a highly complex relation with the definitions provided over the course of centuries by poetic—and, generally speaking, artistic—discourse. But let us employ Poetry and Poet as synecdoches for Art and Artist. From Plato to Baumgarten, we have a sort of devaluation of artistic as opposed to theoretical knowledge, from the idea of imitation of an imitation to the idea of a gnoseologia inferior. With this, having equated the perfection of knowledge with an understanding of the universal, we reduce poetic knowledge to a kind of halfway house between the perfection of a generalizing knowledge, revealed through the discovery of laws, and the perfection of a knowledge that was predominantly individualizing: the poet conveys to us the nuances of color in a leaf, but he doesn’t tell us what Color is. Now, in historical terms, it was precisely with the advent of an era of science, from the Age of Enlightenment to the Century of Positivism, that scientific knowledge and its limits were put to the test. As the validity of this knowledge was gradually questioned, and limited to highly circumscribed universes of discourse, there gradually emerged the possibility of an area of certainty that would definitely come very close to the Universal but through a quasi-numinous revelation of the particular (which is none other than the modern notion of epiphany).
In this way the gnoseologia inferior becomes the instrument of privileged knowledge. But faute de mieux. The revelatory power attributed to the Poets is not so much the effect of a reevaluation of Poetry as a slump affecting Philosophy. The Poets have not won; the Philosophers have surrendered.
Now, even granted that the Poets speak to us of the otherwise unknowable, before we entrust to them the exclusive task of speaking about being, we must accept as a postulate that the unknowable exists. But this is precisely one of the «four incapacities» listed by Peirce in his Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, in which it is argued, in order, that (i) we have no power of introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts; (ii) we have no power of intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions; (iii) we have no power of thinking without signs; (iv) we have no conception of the absolutely incognizable.
It is not necessary to agree with the first three propositions in order to accept the fourth. Peirce’s argument strikes me as beyond criticism:
Every unidealistic philosophy supposes some absolutely inexplicable, unanalyzable ultimate; in short, something resulting from mediation itself not susceptible of mediation. Now that anything is that inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from signs. But the only justification of an inference from signs is that the conclusion explains the fact. To suppose the fact absolutely inexplicable is not to explain it, and hence this supposition is never allowable. (WR2: 213)
By this Peirce does not mean to say that we can or must exclude a priori that the incognizable exists; he says that in order to state this, it is necessary to have tried to know it through chains of inferences. Therefore, if philosophical questioning is to be kept open, we ought not to presuppose or postulate the incognizable from the start. By way of a conclusion (ours), if this presupposition is not allowed, right from the outset we ought not to delegate the power of speaking about the incognizable to those who do not intend to follow the path of hypothesis but go straight for the path of revelation.
What do the Poets reveal to us? It is not that they say Being, they are simply trying to emulate it: ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione. The Poets assume as their own task the substantial ambiguity of language, and try to exploit it to extract a surplus of interpretation from it rather than a surplus of being. The substantial polyvocity of being usually obliges us to make an effort to
