METAPHYSICS OF METAPHOR AND ENIGMA OF POETIC WORD: CONCEPT OF POETIC LANGUAGE IN MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

The purpose of this study is to outline the concept of poetical language in Martin Heidegger's philosophy, including review of his critique of metaphor as belonging to the oblivion of Being and his attempt to define the essence of language from within the language itself. The paper reads through a number of Heidegger's essays on language and poetry and compares his views on metaphor and poetic essence of language with those of Aristotle, Herder and Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Heidegger rejects representational thinking and refuses to treat language as an object, defining the initial word of language as nothing of being (nichts Seiendes). Poetry does not speak with the help of metaphors (name transport), since it is itself a naming which does not define beings, but calls for them (ruft ins Wort). The essence of a being (Seiende), its sense, should be understood from its Being (Sein) as something that is present in its presence (Anwesen). However, the presence is not a simple boundary between past and future, since it is itself a transfer, which includes both presence and absence (Anwesen und Abwesen). Thus, the referent of poetical word is a nothing of beings (keine Seienden), since it is the Being (Sein). The essence of poetic word is closely linked to the change in understanding of ontological difference in later Heidegger's works, where the term Unterschied is introduced instead of Differenz in order to show the eventual nature of Being and the eventual nature of the initial word. Poetic word as the word of Being is an event which opens the world and gives way to language as signification. The task of poetry is, therefore, to search for the initial word, which does not produce meanings, but whose sense is in the rhythm of Being.