Poetry and world in early Heidegger’s thought

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and poetry in his habilitation and his first lectures in Freiburg. Although poetry as a particular phenomenon was not yet thematized by Heidegger, philosophy and language developed in its proximity since the habilitation text. Subsequently, a tragic quotation exemplifies the characterization of language as a premundane generality in his first lessons. The article elaborates an interpretation of the implicit relationship between philosophy and poetry based on the pre-mundane language [Vorweltliche] and its critique of neo-Kantianism. This relationship is the phenomenological possibility of letting see through language, especially, the phenomena of world and meaning. Therefore, phenomenology and poetry came up together in Heidegger’s thought, around those two central phenomena of his later ontology.