Poetically dwelling on the earth

Abstract

The work examines Heidegger's reflection on man, the world and the meaning of dwelling on the earth in texts produced between 1935 and 1961. It takes as its starting point Hölderlin's line "poetically man dwells upon the earth" and follows Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, the Letter on Humanism, The Pathway, Introduction to Metaphysics and Building, Dwelling, Thinking, articulating aesthetic, ontological, anthropological and ethical perspectives. It addresses the characterisation of the present as a time of destitution, marked by the age of technology and the flight of the gods; the formulation that ethics thinks the abode of man; the notion of the Fourfold, the totality that joins earth and sky, divinities and mortals; and the distinction between building and dwelling, noting that not every construction is a dwelling and that the housing crisis is not reducible to a shortage of lodgings. It examines the bridge and the Greek temple as things that gather the Fourfold and institute a place and a world. It holds that instituting, founding, building and offering constitute the essence of the work of art, of poiesis, the task through which man discloses the truth of being and makes the earth a world.