Heidegger delivered this lecture in 1946, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death. In the introduction, Heidegger takes up the fundamental question raised by Friedrich Hölderlin in his elegy Bread and Wine: what are poets for in a destitute time? A destitute time is the time of the world’s night, which is determined by the absence of the gods. It is the darkness of nihilism that spreads itself all over the world. This destitution is a destiny of being. In this darkness Hölderlin still found traces of the fugitive gods. Dionysus, the wine god, guards in the vine and the fruit, the belonging together of earth and sky, of divinities and mortals. The fourfold is the site where traces of the fugitive gods still remain for godless human beings.
Poets remain in the trace of the fugitive gods and trace the way toward the turning in the history of being. The turning can only come in the holy, and Hölderlin therefore names the holy in his poetry. The world’s night is at the same time the holy night. Heidegger shows that the destituteness of what is destitute in time is the extreme forgottenness of being. In a dialogue with poetry, thinking can discover what remained unsaid. To which poet should thinking turn in order to experience the mystery? Could Rilke be a poet in destitute times?
The main part of this lecture is a meditation on the place of Rilke’s poetry within the history of being. For Heidegger, Rilke is the poet par excellence of metaphysics in its consummation, since he expressed in his poetry the being of entities as a universal will whose nature is simply to be itself as will. Rilke uses “nature” in the sense of the natura of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The will comes to presence as a will to willing. In his poetry, Rilke tries to overcome this will, and that makes him a poet for our destitute time.
For Rilke, being is a sort of gravitational force that draws all entities into their true selves and gives them weight as entities. At the same time, it gathers all entities into a single sphere. For Rilke, the metaphor of the sphere suggests the many-sidedness of being as a conglomerate whole. For Heidegger, on the other hand, being is a sphere in the sense of the One of Parmenides, which he interprets as the clearing that reveals entities in their being and wherein they become present in their presence.
Rilke’s most significant word for being is the “open.” Being is the open insofar as it admits of no enclosures within itself. Being, conceived as the open, is another form of being as universal will. For Heidegger, the open has another meaning. It is that which renders entities open, hence accessible one to another and capable of encountering each other.
According to Rilke, human beings are different from other entities because they are self-conscious. This power of consciousness if founded on the principle of René Descartes that the essential structure of consciousness is representation. Entities can only have a presence when represented to and for consciousness. The being of entities and human beings is thus reduced to standing-reserve for calculative thinking. This implies also that human beings depart from the open and close it off.
Rilke’s attempt to overcome nihilism contains a basic difficulty. On the one hand, human beings must overcome the subject-object dichotomy which is the ground of technology; on the other hand, they cannot abandon their conscious nature, and that implies also representation. Rilke suggests a reversal of our departure from the open as an antidote to technology and nihilism. In this reversal, consciousness should recollect the immanence of the objects of representation into a presence within the realm of the heart. This is a renewal of Blaise Pascal’s logic, and, as such, an alternative to the method of Descartes. Rilke attempts to accomplish this reversal by means of language. In the language of the heart, language yields to what is to be said. The poet must receive what is to be said as coming from the fullness. According to Heidegger, Rilke still conceives of language as a tool of human beings. In this respect, he remained locked in subjectivity. The nature of language resides for Heidegger in its possessing human beings before human beings “have” language or are possessive of speech. Language speaks, and human beings can speak only if they hear the saying of language.
Rilke recognized the danger of technology. His attempt to overcome the danger of technology as the unholy implies that he is at least under way toward a naming of the holy. In this sense, he is a poet for our destitute time.
Translated in Poetry Language Thought and Off The Beaten Track.