WHY POETS?
thoughts about language. By thinking in terms of the temple of being, we can imagine what it is they risk, the ones who risk more than the being of beings. They risk the precinct of being. They risk language. All beings, the objects of consciousness and the things of the heart, the self-asserting men and the men who risk more, all creatures, each in its own way, are (as beings) in the precinct of language. That is why only in this precinct, if anywhere, can the reversal from the region of objects and their representation into the innermost of the heart's space be realized.
For Rilke's poetry, the being of beings is determined metaphysically as worldly presence, a presence which remains attracted to representation in consciousness, whether this has the character of the immanence of calculating representation or that of inwardly turning to the open made accessible by the heart.
The entire sphere of presence is present in saying. The objectiveness of production is found in the expression of calculating propositions and theorems of reason that proceed from proposition to proposition. The realm of self-assertive defenselessness is dominated by reason. Not only has reason set up a special system of rules for its saying, for the λόγος as explanatory predicates, but also the logic of reason itself organizes the domination of deliberate self-assertion within the objective. In the reversal of objective representation, the logic of the heart corresponds to the saying of memory. In both realms, which are metaphysically determined, logic prevails because memory, making inward, is to fashion a safebeing from defenselessness itself and outside of all defense. This bringing to safety concerns man as the creature that has language. Within being that has been stamped metaphysically, this is how man has [hat] language: he takes it in advance and only as a possession [Habe] and thus as a handle [Handhabe] for representation and behavior. That is why the λόγος, saying as organon, is in need of organization by logic. Only within metaphysics is there logic.
Now when, however, at the fashioning of safebeing man is touched by the law of the entire world inner space, he is himself touched in his essence by the fact that he, as the one who wills himself, is the one who is already saying. Nonetheless, in that the fashioning of a safebeing comes from the ones who risk more, they must risk it with language. The ones who risk more are the ones who risk saying. Yet if this precinct of risking, language, belongs to being in the unique way that beyond and outside it nothing else of its nature can exist, where is that which is supposed to be said spoken by those who must say? Their saying concerns the remembering (making inward) reversal of consciousness which turns our defenselessness into the
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