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1 Repeat The Experience of Poetic Language At the end we say: Being is the most said. For it is said in every word of language , and nevertheless discourse and writing talk for the most part only about beings. This comes to articulation. Even where we actually say the “is” and thus name being, we say the “is” only to assert a being about a being. Beings are said. Being is kept silent about. But not by us and on purpose. For we are unable to discover any trace of an intention not to say being. Hence, the keeping silent must indeed come from being itself. Hence, being is a keeping silent about itself, and this is certainly the ground of the possibility of keeping silent and the origin of silence. In this realm of silence, the word first arises each time. —Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 1941 On the last day of his final seminar at Zähringen in September 1973, in the closing minutes after reading and discussing a paper on Parmenides, Heidegger made the following announcement: “I name the thinking here in question tautological thinking. It is the original meaning of phenomenology . Further, this kind of thinking is before any possible distinction between theory and praxis” (S: 399/80). To understand this extraordinary statement we need to return to the very beginning of Heidegger’s thinking ; as he indicates himself, here at the end of his career, our task is as always to go back and start again. The obscurity and even eccentricity of a “tautological thinking” is only to be made sense of if we can perceive its relation to phenomenology, and this is what I shall proceed with here, for in tautology we find the deepest roots of Heidegger’s poetic thinking. 25 Heidegger’s first investigations of phenomenology centered on the attempt to find a language that could respond to the dual problems of intuition and expression; how are we able to access the world without reducing it and how can we bring it to language without objectifying it? These questions had originally been raised by Paul Natorp in response to Husserl’s phenomenology and as Husserl’s assistant, Heidegger devoted much energy in his first courses after the war to trying to answer them (ZBP: 99–109/83–92). In these courses Heidegger developed his own form of phenomenology by grounding it in an inquiry into the nature of logic that had first arisen in his habilitation of 1915. Here, his study of the relation between the categories and the meanings of being in medieval scholasticism was conducted by way of his readings of the neo-Kantian Lask.1 The influence of Lask on Heidegger’s early work is considerable for Lask interpreted Husserl’s work on categorial intuition—by which we are prereflectively absorbed in a world of categories—to mean that this intuition would itself give rise to its own reflexive categories, thus implying that our factical experience was not formless but already meaningful and thereby pregnant with its own logic as a primal surplus, in the form of its “formal indication.” Lask’s response was thus to advocate a dedication (Hingabe) to this factical experience, from which a generalized reflexive category of “there being something experienced” arises within language as a simple “there is” (es gibt) of presence. Logic, as the relation between the factical and the reflexive, has thus been grounded in experience rather than in value, but an experience that gives rise to form by way of its material categories. Within his first postwar course in the spring of 1919, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” Heidegger moves on from the theoretical position of this earlier reading by addressing the implications of this factical dedication , for if we are immersed in the experience of a “world” rather than of data, then this is a world whose logic already expresses itself by way of our intentional engagements, such that experience is already a prereflective interpretation (ZBP: 70–76/59–64). The language of philosophy needs to come out of this factical logic of phenomena, and to do so this phenomeno -logy needs to be revealed by way of a hermeneutics of facticity, that is, an interpretation that is a repetition of the interpretation already present in the formal indications of what is. This interpretation, which is thus a logic of logic, is only proposed here and still needs to be worked out, but already Heidegger has, by his...

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