"The break is not a break": Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Poesis as abiding love

By setting himself "apart from the pure draft," man opposes himself to "the Open," the term used to designate "the whole draft to which all beings, as ventured beings, are given over," that is, "the great whole of all that is unbounded." The Open "lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn," Heidegger explains, "so that they variously draw together without encountering any bounds." It is a principle of Being and of the gathering, drawing-together, and belonging-together of all beings. "Drawing as so drawn," then, beings thus "fuse with the boundless" itself, with "the infinite." Consequently, the Open is a kind of abiding, by which beings each remain in their own respective natures while, at the same moment, being gathered together in unmediated relation to one another and likewise preserved within the infinite pure draft. "They do not dissolve into void nothingness," Heidegger clarifies, "but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open." In this destitute time, however, humans have turned away from the Open altogether and stand against it, and the technology that acts as panacea is the very "organization of this parting."

As man turns his back on the Open, his infidelity to the pure draft--hence to his own Being as such--is paralleled by a symmetrical unfaithfulness and withdrawal, namely, what Heidegger calls after Holderlin the "default of God." The triumvirate of Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ, according to Holderlin and Heidegger alike, has left the world, plunging the modern era into a twilight declining toward darkness. Everywhere the world suffers under the retreat and abstention of the divinities. "The default of God," Heidegger writes, "means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world's history and man's sojourn in it." What Heidegger ominously names "the world's night"--in which not only has God departed, but also "the divine radiance" itself "has become extinguished in the world's history"--is the coming to pass of Kierkegaard's disparaging scene where God seems "as if he had receded into himself, as if he were absent."

Humanity's betrayal of the Open, then, is mirrored by the defection of the gods, in a reciprocal movement of treachery that Maurice Blanchot, in "Holderlin's Itinerary" (The Space of Literature, 1955), refers to as "the double aversion, the double infidelity of gods and men." Such a condition--in which men, by privileging their own self-assertion, have rejected Being as the venture that holds all beings, including man himself, in the draft, while the gods have equally absconded means that man's nature, according to Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?", enters a realm of "danger that man will lose his selfhood." Without the benevolence of the gods, and devoid of the embrace of the Open, "man, by his self-willing, becomes in an essential sense endangered, that is, in need of protection; but by that same nature he becomes at the same time unshielded." Heidegger details that man is doubly imperiled: his self-assertion puts him in immediate danger, and the fallout of his self-willing may put him forever beyond safety. "But this self-assertion not only places man outside all care or protection," Heidegger notes, but also "the imposition of the objectifying of the world destroys ever more resolutely the very possibility of protection. By building the world up technologically as an object, man deliberately and completely blocks his path, already obstructed, into the Open." The upshot of this technological tyranny, combined with the gods' evacuation, is that "[n]ot only does protection now withhold itself from man, but the integralness of the whole of what is remains now in darkness," as the world "becomes without healing, unholy."