Ueda and Heidegger: Playing in Hollowness, Abiding in Actuality and the Risk of Poetic Language

Ueda and Heidegger share a concern regarding existential dangers they associate with the representational understanding and use of language. Both develop theories of poetic language in hopes of averting these dangers and take very seriously the writings of several well-known poets as affording a less destructive way with language, and thus, a healthier way of being in the world. Rilke, Hölderlin, and Angelus Silesius are among the well-known poets these philosophers invoke. Appealing to these renowned artists raises important questions regarding philosophy’s relation to poetry: A complication that is augmented by one of Ueda’s poet-exemplars. In his “language in a two-fold world,” he engages the writings of an unnamed Japanese child who submitted a poem to a Kyoto magazine. The anonymity of the poet and the idiom of his/her writing invokes issues regarding the self and language that demand consideration within a study of Ueda and Heidegger on poetic language. I thus place the two philosophers in dialogue, assessing their theories of language regarding how they avoid the perils of representational language. What is common between the two, I propose, is that both understand the poet as speaking of things in the world as neither fully posited nor negated. Yet, the discrepancy that arises from their choice of poets complicates the comparison regarding the type of poetic enactment that best overcomes the dangers of representation.