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words? Celan renews the question.
If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like
Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.
His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence
on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus
to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought
a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic
tendency of the modern world. He believed that humanity
had become separate from its harmony with the
rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s
Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise
of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato.
Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger
argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things
(objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a
non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are presented,
where they actually become things. And rather
than this being an argument for solipsism (the world
as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of
the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness.
Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the
‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to
regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from
‘the real world’.
This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition
that has dominated Western thought for the last four
centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and
linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimen-
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
sions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language
and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such
categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for
control, and so the thing disappears from view. We
become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what
is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a
necessary tendency but one that can and must be counteracted
by the function of the clearing.
Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by
pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to
characterise our everyday existence. We spend most
of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says
we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’,
as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid
facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in
anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologocally-advanced
modern world opens a rift between
the public self – the one in which we have in order
to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and
the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger
says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up
our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world
in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French
existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme
from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was
foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune
with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up
the condition for the present era:
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