ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Martin Heidegger's efforts to outline the manner in which "dwelling poetically" promised a new beginning or the end of traditional philosophy. When Heidegger concurred with Holderlin's assessment that "poetically man dwells", he was reviving a claim that he had made earlier in his "Letter on Humanism". The chapter then describes Giambattitista Vico's philological theory of human existence in which the primordial linguistic apprehension of reality was conceived in terms of the poetic. Vico's postulate of a "metaphysics of grammar" sounds especially modern, since it anticipated the twentieth-century preoccupation with the association of linguistic structure and reality. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, which Plato alludes to in Book X, reduces even the achievement of Homer to a kind of game. In Book X of the Republic, Plato crowns his philosophical query into the nature of the state with a grand irony. When philosophy embraces the historical, the foundational role of sensuous creation is also acknowledged.
