Environmental education, Heidegger and the significance of poetics

Abstract

For Heidegger, poetics is not merely a genteel pastime, extraneous to the real work of finding shelter, food and clothing as suggested by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Poetry has a more ‘essential’ role in human endeavour, bringing understanding of ‘Being' from concealment and introducing it in original and originating ways into language. Language is, for Heidegger, the ‘house’ of Being. Heidegger regards poetics as a crucial means of rediscovering the appropriate relationship between ourselves and Being. In his early writings he tries to annihilate the ancient separation of the subject from the object which divorces humans as individuals from each other and from the earth. In the 1930s he discusses the ways that humanity becomes merely one object amongst all objects because of the technological enframing of everything as a consumable resource. In the light of reducing all beings to objects, nothing can be the subject of knowledge, and he acknowledges that there is some degree of significance to the age old separation of subjectivity. Poetics avoids the reduction of all knowledge to the objectification of technological enframing. Instead of constantly typifying all interaction, events, and objects as potentially consumable resources, poetics re-engages us with the task of what it is to be human – relating to beings as a whole. This paper explores the significance of poetics both in terms of the traditions of philosophical nominalism and in Heidegger’s schema of onto-theo-logy.