For Heidegger, the obscurity of thought is not a defect of expression. This is not an excuse for vagueness, and not a right to write in any manner one likes. Rather, obscurity appears where thought touches what does not give itself over to immediate intelligibility.
In the lectures on Heraclitus, Heidegger directly remarks that every genuine thinker easily gains the reputation of being unclear and obscure: jeder Denker, der wahrhaft ein Denker ist easily and often falls under the rumor of Unklarheit and Dunkelheit. And then he adds something almost psychologically precise: the masses gladly agree with this accusation, because whatever they do not understand immediately is felt as an insult, and they return to the thinker the label “unclear.”
Here the remark about Schopenhauer also appears. Heidegger writes that Schopenhauer, through his “immeasurable abuse” of Schelling and Hegel and their obscurity, proved precisely that he was not a thinker. He may be an important writer, but not a thinker.
This is an important point. For Heidegger, the accusation of obscurity proves nothing in itself. Sometimes it speaks not of the weakness of thought, but of the weakness of an understanding that demands thought should immediately become convenient.
That is why Heraclitus, for Heidegger, is not merely accidentally “obscure.” In the table of contents of this lecture, the formulas appear directly: “the obscurity of the thinker Heraclitus,” and then even more strongly, “the obscurity of essential thinking.” And Heidegger immediately clarifies where this obscurity comes from: it is wesenhafte Sichverbergen des Zu-denkenden, the essential self-concealment of what is to be thought — that is, of being.
In other words, thought is obscure not because it deliberately hides itself. It is obscure because what it approaches hides itself. Thought does not simply illuminate an object. It enters a region where the old light no longer works.
But here one can take the next step. If, for Heidegger, thought is obscure because it touches the concealed, then genuine thought is also risky because it attacks an already established order of clarity. It does not merely add a new explanation to the old world. It destroys the previous regime of visibility.
Poetry can be taken as an example here. The best poetry gives aesthetic pleasure precisely at the point where risk and danger appear. Poetry opens unstable connections in language through rhythm, through the external resemblance of words, and creates connections where, it would seem, there should be none.
The force of poetry lies precisely in the fact that the poet’s thought cannot be defended in advance. At the same time, new connections and new meanings, which are always hierarchical, begin to attack the old ones. This creates a kind of ontological tension, or an ontological crack.
In the essay To Please a Shadow, Brodsky tells how, in the North, near the Arctic Circle, he accidentally opened an English anthology not at Eliot, whom he had intended to read, but at Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats. There he was struck by several lines:
Time, that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
…
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.
Brodsky recalls:
“I remember sitting in that small hut and looking through a square window, the size of a porthole, at a wet, marshy road where chickens wandered, half believing what I had just read, half suspecting that my knowledge of the language had played a cruel joke on me. I had there a huge brick of an English-Russian dictionary, and I kept leafing through it again and again, checking every word, every shade of meaning, hoping that it could rid me of the meaning that was looking at me from the page.”
In effect, Brodsky refused to believe that already in 1939 an English poet had said: “Time… worships language,” and that the world around him had remained the same.
Interestingly, Auden later removed these stanzas. I think he did this precisely because the thought was too risky. And for the same reason it shook Brodsky.
This is how Heidegger and poetry can be connected. For Heidegger, thought is obscure because it touches the concealed. In poetry, thought is risky because it creates a connection that cannot be defended in advance. But in both cases, genuine thought is not a calm explanation of what is already visible. It enters a dark region and attacks the previous order of clarity.
Here the connection with Heidegger is not external. For Heidegger, the poet does not merely decorate language and does not merely express private experience. The poet stands closer to the place where language ceases to be an instrument of communication and becomes a way in which the world is disclosed.
In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger writes that language is the house of being, and that those who think and create with words are the guardians of this house. Therefore, poetry for him is not an aesthetic supplement to philosophy, but one of the ways in which being comes to language.
In The Origin of the Work of Art, this thought becomes even sharper: a work of art does not depict an already finished world, but opens a world. In the work, truth is not communicated as a thesis; it happens. That is why a poetic line can be an event: it creates a new measure of the visible and rearranges the connections in which the world had previously been gathered.
This is why poetry is so important for thinking about risk. In the essay What Are Poets For?, Heidegger speaks of poets in a destitute time, when the traces of the gods have almost disappeared. The poet must hold to this trace, although it is barely distinguishable. His speech arises not where meaning is already guaranteed, but where meaning may still open — or fail.
That is why the poet’s thought cannot be defended in advance. It either truly opens a new measure of the world, or collapses into empty prettiness.
