Abstract

Heidegger's history of philosophy is the history of the remembrance of Being with the early Greek thinkers, and Being's fall into forgottenness soon thereafter. Heidegger's entire enterprise is to overcome this forgottenness, beginning of course with Being and Time which, according to Heidegger himself, did not succeed because of its language. Heidegger's famous "turning" is fundamentally a poetic turning to the language of the early Greeks and to poetry proper. In undertaking this study, I trace out the following distinctive points: The relation of poetizing and the early Greeks to Being and Time; The importance of truth, art, and poetizing; The necessity of the retrieve of the early Greeks and their poetic thinking; The importance of the poet Holderlin and the principles of Heidegger's approach to poetry; The relation of Heidegger to literary criticism; A detailed study of the meaning and structure of Heidegger's Elucidations to Holderlin's Poetry; How and why the turning takes place and its fundamental relation to "The Question of Technology"; The significance of Heidegger's thinking the world as the fourfold unity of earth and heaven, gods and mortals; The limits of the relation of thinking and poetizing, in particular, whether Heidegger's emphasis on poetry means that he has himself become a poet; and Heidegger's repetition of the poetic thinking of the early Greeks as the possible arrival of another beginning. ;I conclude that Heidegger remains a thinker, and not a poet, although, to be sure, he is a poetic thinker like Heraclitus and Parmenides. However, Heidegger's task as a thinker is different from the poet's task, and in Heidegger's thinking that he is able to retrieve the poetic thinking of the early Greeks in the first beginning does indeed herald another beginning even in the midst of the extreme danger of the essence of technology. Heidegger does see this danger, through the help of the poet, and thus points to the signs of another poetic beginning