Brady DeHoust -- Heidegger and Lewis Shake Hands

I could not help but notice during this last class the similarities and overlap between Heidegger’s concept of poetry and Lewis’s idea of myth. The overlap is pronounced, particularly in two predominant features, the creation of reality and the use of language, though there are other striking similarities which suggest an element of truth, as is ever the case when two drastically different intellectual giants find agreement or a common theme.

In my understanding, Heidegger conceptualizes poetry as necessary for “dwelling.” This comes from his work titled, intuitively enough, “Poetically Man Dwells.” Dwelling in this instance seems to have to do with having grounding in reality, a certain comfort or belongingness in existence. Such dwelling is a struggle in the contemporary world, he notes, as it is beset by work and the insecurity which accompanies the “need” for gain and success, not to mention “bewitched by entertainment and the recreational industry.” In other words, modern society, in all of its fragmentation, prevents us from dwelling.

Poetry is dwelling “on this earth,” not a lofty, empty escapism or a mere intellectual exercise. It is a means of “measuring,” of finding meaning; it is a medium through which we may glimpse the God which is required for said measuring who yet must remain mysterious (or “cryptic”). It is, in essence, the synthesis of God as necessarily mysterious and manifest.

For Lewis, myth functions in a similar, but slightly more concrete way. He speaks particularly of the “Christian myth,” or the Biblical narrative and subsequent church history and tradition, but makes it clear that he means myth more broadly as well. The Christian myth is just one example, albeit the example of which he is a staunch proponent. All truth, by Lewis’s estimation, is grounded fundamentally in myth. His short essay “Myth Became Fact” was written in response to someone who proposed that modern Christians abandon the “myth” of Christianity while retaining the social benefits. Lewis responds that the myth is the “vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.”

Where Heidegger sees poetry as the synthesis between the mysterious and the manifest in God, Lewis sees myth as the synthesis between the abstract and the concrete in human understanding. In terms of this class, it is the synthesis between analytical knowledge and phenomenological experience. We cannot, according to Lewis, both “know” and “taste” at the same time and in the same way; to know in abstraction is to distance from the experience, and to experience is to obliterate the abstract knowledge. Myth is the partial solution, offering a fluid, living interpretive framework which in part conceptualizes the concrete, and grounds the conceptual.

For both Lewis and Heidegger, then, creative language, in the form of myth or poetry (which, particularly in antiquity, were so much the same), is a means of synthesis between two necessary aspects of humanity, the abstract and the concrete, the mysterious and the manifest. Likewise both are necessary for grounding our existence, whether ontologically as apparently suggested by Heidegger or epistemologically as per Lewis, or, more likely, both. Given the apparent agreement here, perhaps this is a theme worth deeper consideration.