Nick DeHoust: Poiēsis

In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger quotes Plato in defining the Greek word poiēsis. “Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiēsis, bringing-forth” (317). “Bringing-forth,” he explains, “brings out of concealment into unconcealment. Bringing-forth propriates only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing. The Greeks have the word alētheia for revealing. … We say ‘truth’” (317-318). Thus, for Heidegger, poiēsis is one way that truth is brought out of concealment and into presence in a dynamic event of alētheia. At the end of the essy, he writes that the “poetical brings the true into the splendor of … that which shines forth most purely” (340). Elsewhere, in another of his essays called “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger says that “[p]oetry is the saying of the unconcealment of beings” (198). As such, the “essence of poetry … is the founding of truth” (199). I think this is a good way to help us understand the profoundly complex nature of mythopoesis, and Heidegger’s words frame our semester-long discussion elegantly. Bearing in mind Heidegger’s criticism of the modern concept of truth as “correctness of representation” (remember, Heidegger thinks of truth as an event of unconcealment;  alētheia), I think these passages resonate closely with Lewis’s observation that “[w]hat flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level” (The Question Concerning Technology 318, Myth Became Fact 3). Mythopoeia participates in poiēsis, which opens a clearing for the event of alētheia, or the unconcealment of true reality.