Diritti in capo agli autori, parte di numero speciale in open peer review a cura di Giacomo Fronzi [revisionato da Giacomo Fronzi e Moira De Iaco, senza aggiungere commenti sui contenuti in quanto tutto ok per i revisori]
Alberto Merzari, Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino
E-mail: alberto.merzari@accademiadiurbino.it
doi: 10.66565/voci.2026.1.NS.aut.05
(https://doi.org/10.66565/voci.2026.1.NS.aut.05)
First online: 30/10/2026
Abstract eng
The article examines Heidegger’s claim in his 1941 note to Winke that thinking is bildlos, or imageless, while images may nevertheless appear as the “emergency anchors” (Notanker) of an unsuccessful attempt at imagelessness. Beginning with the ambiguous status of the Winke themselves and Heidegger’s distinction between thinking and poeticising, the article reconstructs Bildlosigkeit as a fundamental demand of his post-metaphysical thinking [1-2]. It then argues that the metaphor of the Notanker implies that images can protect thinking from a radical danger, namely that of settling into fixed concepts and metaphysical security, and that they achieve this by exposing the limits of philosophical grasp. Thinking must retain its rigour and coldness, but images allow it to remain open, transitional, and responsive to what exceeds every definitive determination [3-5]. The article further distinguishes the images of the thinker from those of the poet [6] and concludes that Heidegger’s position is best understood as iconoclastic rather than aniconic: images must be neither simply rejected nor treated as bearers of truth, but continually confronted and surpassed so that thinking remains open to the inexhaustibility of Being [7].
Keywords: Heidegger; thinking and images; thinking and poetry; imagelessness; conceptual language
Abstract ita
L’articolo tenta di venire in chiaro dell’affermazione formulata da Heidegger in una nota del 1941 a Winke, secondo cui, sebbene “il dire del pensiero pensiero” sia di regola “privo di immagini (bildlos)”, alcune immagini possano comunque emergere in esso come “ancore di salvezza (Notanker) per un’assenza di immagini che viene tentata senza riuscire”. Muovendo dall’ambiguo statuto degli stessi Winke e dalla “zarte aber helle Differenz” heideggeriana tra pensare e poetare, l’articolo evidenzia da un lato come la Bildlosigkeitrappresenti un’esigenza fondamentale del pensiero post-metafisico di Heidegger [1-2], dall’altro come proprio le immagini – in questo senso “ancore di salvezza” – possano proteggere il pensiero da un pericolo radicale e sempre latente: quello di irrigidirsi in concetti definitivi e rifugiarsi in una forma di sicurezza metafisica. Le immagini rendono visibili i limiti del rigore del pensiero permettendogli di restare aperto e ricettivo [3-5]. L’articolo distingue quindi il ricorso alle immagini del pensatore da quello del poeta [6] e conclude che nel rapporto heideggeriano con le immagini vada letta una forma di iconoclastia piuttosto che di aniconismo: le immagini non devono essere semplicemente rifiutate a priori, ma costantemente provocate e oltrepassate, affinché il pensiero rimanga, nella lotta con esse, aperto all’inesauribilità dell’Essere [7].
Keyword: Heidegger; pensiero e immagini; pensiero e poesia; assenza d’immagini; linguaggio concettuale
Heidegger’s conception of the relation between thinking and images – secondary as this topic may prima facie appearin his writings – is in fact crucial for understanding his particular approach to philosophy. Not only because this relation is indirectly connected with that between thinking and poetry, on which much more has been written; also, because the reassessment of the thought-imagenexus – as has been noted – is part and parcel of the so-called “turn” affecting his thinking from the 1930s onwards. Understanding how Heidegger’s writings can at times be so rich in imagery while nevertheless claiming – as we shall see – a duty of Bildlosigkeit means entering perhaps one of the most intricate as well as fascinating paradoxes of his peculiar philosophical voice.
Heidegger seems to be particularly concerned with this topic in the late 1930s and early 1940s – the two main bodies of relevant texts being the writings on Besinnung from 1938-39, collected in volume 66 of the Gesamtausgabe,[1] and those on the Event from 1941-42 (GA 71)[2] – but the question resurfaces also later, in the final phase of his work, most notably in a 1960 seminar on Bild und Wort, of which, however, little more than a programmatic outline survives.[3] In what follows, I shall examine this relation through a relatively neglected passage from a text dating to the same period as the earlier manuscripts, namely, a brief note later published in GA 13 and originally accompanying some of Heidegger’s poetic compositions (Winke).[4] Here, the images to which thought sometimes finds itself compelled to resort are described – in a formulation as eloquent as it is curious – as the “emergency anchor[s] [Notanker] of a ventured yet unsuccessfulimagelessness”. I shall carry out a close reading of this passage, disentangling its various levels of meaning and its less apparent implications, and, on this basis, elucidate the logic that seems to govern the relation between word and image in Heidegger’s thought at least from the 1940s onward. I will call this logic “iconoclastic” – a logic that certainly prescribes an antagonistic engagement with images, but that in no way amounts to a mere distancing from them.
1. “Winke“: Thoughts and (Not) Poems
Since the relation between thinking and images, as mentioned, is closely connected with that between thinking and poeticising – so much so that it is only after the fundamental encounter with Hölderlin that it is focussed as a philosophical problem – it should come as no surprise that Heidegger feels compelled to address it in the context of experimenting with a form of writing that at least prima facie resembles that of poetry. This is what happens in the text at stake: a note accompanying a private edition of eighteen “thought ‘poems’” composed by Heidegger and published privately in 1941 with the title Winks [Winke]. I shall first translate the whole note – which has never appeared in English – and subsequently comment it step by step throughout the sections of the present article:
The Winks are not poems. Nor are they a “philosophy” cast into verse and rhyme. The “Winks” are words of a thinking that, in part, requires this mode of saying, but is not fulfilled in it. This thinking has no foothold in beings, for it thinks Beyng. This thinking finds no model [Vorbild] in what has been thought [im Gedachten], for what is thought thinks beings. The saying of thinking, in distinction from the word of poetry, is imageless [bildlos]. And where there appears to be an image, it is neither what is poetised in a poem nor the intuitive content of a “sense,” but only the emergency anchor of the ventured yet unsuccessful imagelessness.
The thinking of Beyng has overcome the end of “philosophy.” Yet its opposition to the “philosophers” does not cast it out of friendship with the thinkers.
The thinking of Beyng never storms truth. Yet it helps its essence. This helping produces no successes, but is help as simple Da-sein. Thinking, obedient to Beyng, seeks the word for it.
But when the language of the human being is in the word, then, and only then, is it plumb [‘im Lot’]. If it stands plumb, the granting (‘die Gewähr’) of hidden sources beckons to it. They are the neighborhoods of the beginning.
The thinking of Beyng is the care for the use of language.[5]
Heidegger begins with an observation about the nature of his compositions: they “are not poems.” The statement is peculiar, as has been noted,[6] for the Winke possess almost everything that poetry has: rhetorical figures, rhymes, line breaks – even certain, admittedly not particularly brilliant, echoes of Hölderlin. What distinguishes the Winke from poetry would seem, at most, to be their content, which remains decidedly philosophical and close to that of Heidegger’s contemporary texts.[7] Heidegger, however, takes care to exclude even a purely content-based distinction: “Nor are they a ‘philosophy’ cast into verse and rhyme.” What they in fact are (or are supposed to be) is clarified immediately after: “The ‘Winks’ are words of a thinking that, in part, requires this mode of saying, but is not fulfilled in it.” As known, Heidegger draws a “delicate yet luminous”[8] line between thinking and poeticising, which he is never willing to cross, and the Winke – he is claiming – still belong decisively to the former of the two poles, as Worte eines Denkens.
If they come close to poetry in any respect, it is not because of the external form they assume, but because of the way in which they relate to language: the Winke “require,” at least “in part,” “the mode of saying” of Dichtung. This is because – like Dichtung – Winke do not find fulfilment in the predicative-apodictic language of the form “S is p,”[9] or – which is strictly connected to it – in the horizon of a rigid conceptuality. They namely do not aim to declare the structure of the world, telling something about something else (legein ti katà tinòs).[10] Rather, as their very name suggests, they are meant to “point to”, “allude [winken].” That is, the Wink is concerned, much as poetry is – although in still two different ways, as we shall see – with hinting at something that cannot be definitively fixed nor defined.[11]
The thinking embodied by the Winke approaches poetry in its power of evocation and in its escape from predicative structure: both reject linearity, univocity, fixity, and transparency. The interesting question, however, is in what respect thinking and poetry must nevertheless diverge, i.e., why such a thinking that – like poetry – is not fulfilled in the predicative language cannot be “fulfilled” in the form of poetry either – and what role the theme of images plays in relation to their zarte aber helle Differenz.
2. Thinking ‘or‘ Poetry: ‘Bildlosigkeit‘
The lines following the ones so far commented, until the end of the first paragraph, come to clarify exactly this point. Heidegger explains indeed the spirit and motivations behind thinking’s specific dissatisfaction with the language of predication – which cannot but result into a dissatisfaction (at least to some extent) with the language of poetry as well:
This thinking has no foothold in beings, for it thinks Beyng. This thinking finds no model [Vorbild] in what has been thought [im Gedachten], for what is thought thinks beings.
The impossibility for the thinker to find satisfaction in the Aussage is grounded in the structure of what Heidegger properly calls “thinking (Denken),” which has the ontological rather than the ontic as its object. Thinking cannot predicate, that is, cannot say the being according to the being (ti katà tinòs), because it cannot find a “foothold in beings” in the first place. This implies that Dichtung, by contrast, does possess such a foothold.
Rather than following directly the ontic/ontologic distinction to elucidate the difference between poetry and thinking – a thread that Heidegger leaves somewhat implicit here[12] – I shall focus on the terrain on which Heidegger wishes to place it here, namely, that of images. The sentence that follows in the text is among the most frequently cited when this issue is discussed, not least because it articulates a particularly vivid antinomy:
The saying of thinking, in distinction from the word of poetry, is imageless [‘bildlos‘].
Heidegger opposes a bildlos saying, proper to thinking, to a bildreich, or at least bildhaft, word, proper to Dichtung. In doing so, he implicitly defends, as has been observed,[13] the ideal of a “coldness” and “rigour of thinking,” which excludes images as a viable option. The first question to be addressed, however, is what precisely are the images from which thinking must abstain, for the notion of “image” has at least an ambivalent status in Heidegger.
There is, first, an unequivocally negative, privative, metaphysical sense of image, namely, that at the centre of the essay “The Age of the World Picture”: image as a “fixed” idea or Vorstellung, that crystallises and systematises a world of beings.[14] That thinking must abstain from this kind of temptation seems obvious within Heidegger’s grammar. But there is also another kind of image, to which the application of the Bildlosigkeit-prescription appears less straightforward. When we speak, for example, of the images produced by Hölderlin’s poetry, Bild – as Jean Beaufret notes – is, in truth, a synonym for Erscheinung (“The thing itself, in the epiphany of its presence, in other words, as phenomenon”).[15] Such an image – which corresponds to the ancient sense of eidos – is not inferior to some further ontic order: it is prior and originary. And yet thinking – unlike poetry – must not resort to it either.
The renunciation of both images follows directly from the thinking’s interest in the ontological level. Even images of the second kind remain in fact no more than beings, and Heidegger favours by his own later admission a sharp separation (or at least a “delicate yet luminous difference”) between the “seeing” of beings and that of Being.[16] As he suggests in a passage from his 1941-42 work on the Event, the attunement of Dasein to Being neither takes place on the terrain of the sensible nor must return to it through a Versinnlichung; rather, it occurs through the Stimmung of an imageless (albeit always incompletely imageless) Stimmende, “that makes thinking need nothing from the sensory and from images [was das Denken unbedürftig des Sinnlichen und der Bilder macht].”[17]
One might speculate on the extent to which this position may have been shaped by the influence of a certain apophatic theology to which Heidegger was certainly sympathetic.[18] Nor is it unrelated to this anti-iconic trait that Heidegger would increasingly emphasize the lethic element within the a-letheic polarity in which truth consists. From the standpoint of the morphology of Heideggerian thought, in any case, what remains clear is that Heidegger sees as a demand of the seriousness of thinking not to linger over anything visual: thinking is bildlos, meaning that it neither begins nor ends in the sensible but requires a “leap” into something radically different from images, however the latter may be conceived.
3. ‘Notanker’: Images and Danger
The qualification that follows immediately after the assertion of the thinking’s Bildlosigkeit is arguably the most interesting part of the entire passage. Heidegger appears merely to be forestalling a possible objection, but in fact he indirectly provides new and precise elements for understanding how his conception of the relation between thinking and image is to be properly taken:
And where there appears to be an image, it is neither what is poetised in a poem nor the intuitive content of a “sense,” but only the emergency anchor of the ventured yet unsuccessful imagelessness.
The objection Heidegger seeks to forestall is that of someone who might observe an imaginative component in the Winke he is presenting. While he is advocating for an imageless thinking, his “verses” seem in fact full of images: from the “candle” to the “night,” from the “stars” to the “flower.” Not to mention the many words Heidegger retrieves here from his philosophical vocabulary which, beneath their quasi-conceptual significance, are first and foremost highly figurative words – “Earth”, just to quote one.
Heidegger is arguing that there is no contradiction between the ideal of thinking that he is formulating and the language that he is employing in this experimental philosophical writing. Rather, there is a practical compromise. Thinking ought to be bildlos, but it rarely (if ever) succeeds in being so fully. In his manuscript on the Event, Heidegger admits even more explicitly that imagelessness is “never complete.”[19] Slipping into the image is thus simply the consequence of a practice of thinking that most of the time – if not always – remains at least partially “unsuccessful.”
But Heidegger does not merely say this, or rather, the way he says it is itself significant. The image at stake in thinking (or what appears as such)[20] is neither “what is poetised in a poem [das Gedichtete einer Dichtung]” (though one might then wonder how an image specifically appears when it is poetised in a poem)[21] nor “the intuitive content of a ‘sense’ [das Anschauliche eines ‘Sinnes’]”[22] (once again, the point being the marked distance of thinking from sense). Rather, it is labelled as – and here is the crucial expression – “the emergency anchor of the ventured yet unsuccessful imagelessness [der Notanker der gewagten, aber nicht geglückten Bildlosigkeit].”
The first thing to be noted is that Heidegger distances himself from images by using an image, so that the idea of the Notanker itself apparently comes to work as the Notanker of a gewagten, aber nicht geglückten Bildlosigkeit. But what does the term – a hapax legomenon in Heidegger’s vocabulary – exactly refer to? It belongs to nautical jargon and denotes the reserve anchor used in situations of extreme emergency. From this technical use it comes to mean, idiomatically – as did its Greek equivalents (hierà ankyra, ankyra tas tychas) in a number of literary passages[23] – the last resort, the final possibility or resource.
Unpacking the metaphor, if the image is said to be an “emergency anchor,” it should not be understood as the immediate result of a failure, but as a precise survival strategy in relation to an otherwise insurmountable danger. Thinking discourse folds back into images when it cannot do otherwise, or better still, when doing otherwise would entail – just as failing to cast the anchor into a stormy sea would – a greater, indeed an extreme, danger.
The crucial question, then, becomes what this extreme danger is supposed to be. A question made all the more urgent by the fact that Heidegger’s thinking is surely not intimidated by (and even constructively familiar with) exploration, adventure – even failure.[24] In his view, a certain degree of danger and risk, indeed, fruitfully nourishes philosophical questioning (“Where danger is, grows the saving power also,” as Hölderlin’s repeated motto reads) and, after all, Bildlosigkeit itself is here presented as a path that is dared [gewagte]. Apparently, the extreme danger at stake here must therefore be substantially different from that “fruitful” danger in which Heidegger’s thinking habitually dwells, either in kind or in degree.
The paradox of a risk-taking thinking that claims to be bildlos while nevertheless admitting to resort to images in the face of some “emergency [Not]” can, I suggest, be resolved by interpreting this“emergency” from which the Notanker must save us as the opposite of the constructive risk inhabited by thinking. If Heidegger adventurously proceeds along interrupted paths and leaps, the greatest danger he is referring to here must be, conversely, that of security: the danger of eventually feeling sheltered in what has once and for all been thought. As he writes in a passage of the Black Notebooks from the end of the 1930s:
Every security has the remarkable “tendency” to detach the one who is secure from that against which the security makes secure, and from what it makes secure, and thereby to take the edge off his emptiness. This state then appears to be steadfastness and yet is even less than insecurity.[25]
The greatest danger for thinking, in Heidegger’s terms, is that (metaphysical) security foreclosing the inherent openness of experience, for, after all, security is etymologically a form of carelessness (sine cura), whereby thinking always has to do with “care” – “a care for the use of language,” as he argues here.
Through this lens, the anchor referred to here can clearly be read as an anchor against the very possibility of an anchor; that is, as a tool keeping the voyage adventurous precisely when the thinker may feel tempted to celebrate – to borrow an image elsewhere recalled by Heidegger from Hegel[26] – an arrival on dry land. What this means outside the metaphor – indeed, outside the image – and what implications this has for the relation between thinking and poeticising, however, deserves further elaboration, especially in light of what follows in the Winke-text.
4. A Rigorous Thinking: The Images and the Unsaid
Navigating Bildlosigkeit seems to entail the risk that thinking might at some point feel secure and complete, thus turning into metaphysics – or, which in Heidegger’s peculiar lexicon amounts to the same thing, philosophy. Yet this transfer of thinking into philosophy is precisely what Heidegger wishes to avoid, as he makes clear:
The thinking of Beyng has overcome the end of “philosophy.” Yet its opposition to the “philosophers” does not cast it out of friendship with the thinkers.
Heidegger is attempting to open up the space for a non-philosophical thinking, and it has become apparent that images have a role to play in this attempt, somehow preventing us from philosophising again. To clarify what this role exactly consists in, however, it may be wondered in what sense exactly such thinking should remain thinking – and in what sense, above all, it should no longer be philosophical.
That thinking should remain thinking seems to means, put in the most general terms, that a form of intellectual performance characterised by “rigour” and “coldness” – even by a drive toward “clarity” and “conceptuality,” without fearing that these terms should be immediately claimed by metaphysics – should survive. That it should operate outside metaphysics arguably amounts to claiming that these “rigour,” “coldness,” etc. of thinking should not be achieved at the price of rigidifying it into a fixed structure.[27]
Post-philosophical thinking places itself at the service of Being, without abandoning it into irrationality or vagueness but also without “storming” it and reducing it into a substance. It lets it be while (unceasingly) “seeking the word for it.”
The thinking of Beyng never storms truth. Yet it helps its essence. This helping produces no successes, but is help as simple Da-sein. Thinking, obedient to Beyng, seeks the word for it.
This “firm and delicate [stark und zart]” grasp of thinking on its matter, as Heidegger would later call it,[28] finds one of its most paradigmatic formulations – and one particularly useful for understanding the role that images can play – in the Contributions to Philosophy, where Heidegger presents his own thinking as an übergänglich Begreifen:
To grasp in transitional thinking means to dislodge what is grasped into its impossibility [‘Übergänglich denkerisch begreifen heißt: das Begriffene in seine Unmöglichkeit versetzen‘].[29]
Post-philosophical thinking does not renounce the conceptual dimension altogether, as it is easy to misunderstand.[30] Rather, it keeps the conceptual open, always in transit [übergänglich]. The task of thinking crucially remains that of gaining a “grasp” of things, but also – and it is in this “also” that the passage beyond metaphysics takes place – “to dislodge what is grasped into its impossibility;” that is, to recognise that endless character of what is to be grasped that makes every grasp ultimately “impossible.”[31] To put it briefly: thinking must attempt to give truth the word, even to put this truth into concepts, but it must also keep in mind how far every word and concept remain behind the infinite depth of the sayable. Not forgetting this latter limit is precisely what marks the difference between philosophical and post-philosophical thinking.
Crucially, it is against the all-too easy forgetfulness of such boundary that images can work as Notanker. Naturally, Heidegger is thinking here of images in their ontologically constructive sense, as Bilder–Erscheinungen. This kind of images, in their resistance to being univocally determined, brings us to that inexhaustible richness and singularity of manifestation which conceptual thinking – no matter how delicate – cannot resolve. To borrow Richard Capobianco’s beautiful phrasing, they remind us that “there is more, always more, to manifestation – a richness of showing, a reserve of appearing, that can never be fully tapped,”[32] and thus anchor our conceptual thinking against the danger of closing on itself and becoming an image in the sense of a fixed representation.
Heidegger is clear in drawing a line: “Images do not provide the truth.”[33] Yet they enable us to measure the distance separating every word offered to truth from the richness of truth itself, and thus to regenerate the movement of thinking. In a way, when confronting poetic images – such as those produced by Hölderlin – we realise that conceptual rigour and clarity cannot “succeed” once and for all, and that the only way to take thinking seriously is to always value what it leaves unsaid at least as much as what it can actually say.
5. An Iconoclastic Thinking: Images, There and Back Again
As we have seen, the justification that Heidegger seems to be implying for thinking’s retreat into imagery – a retreat that is enacted in the very justification itself – is arguably that images make thinking stumble upon its own limits. A further step requires us now to consider how this confrontation with images effectively unfolds.
To start, it must be noted that thinking encounters images in essentially two ways: either through an active engagement with poetry (and poiesis more broadly), which in contrast to thinking is seen by Heidegger as naturally implied in image-making,[34] or – and this is what Heidegger is specifically discussing in the Winke-text – through its own failure, when thinking fails to fulfil its imperative of Bildlosigkeit and cannot properly grasp – or “surround,”[35] as he prefers – its matter. The two cases are in truth slightly different, as we shall see in the next paragraph, but what they have in common is that images – whatever their source – do not represent for the thinker a point of arrival.
Thinking must pass through images in its attempt to be bildlos. But once the “impossibility of what is grasped” has been recognised the thinker should find resources for going (back) to imagelessness.[36] In this perspective, Heidegger’s metaphor of the Anker in the text that we are examining may be unpacked a little bit further – indeed, “thought:” what should be done with the “emergency anchor” once it has been cast? It should be “lifted” again – which is exactly what we expect to do after the storm has passed.
Den Anker lichten, “to lift the anchor.” As a matter of fact, with this expression – the only other one involving an “anchor” in his writings – Heidegger would repeatedly paraphrase, especially in the 1960s, the fundamental idea from which his concept (or image?) of Lichtung should be understood.[37] Lichtung, as he observes, for example, in the seminar on Heraclitus with Fink in 1966-67, should not be conceived on the basis of the idea of “light” (Licht), as one would assume, but precisely of that of lichten, that is, of “clearing,” within which both light and darkness, manifestation and concealment, aletheia and lethe, can find their place. The Lichtung is not the space of clarity, but first and foremost the cleared space within which the clarification of what is dark can take place incessantly.
In order to be “clear” – if the wordplay may be allowed – thinking needs to “clear,” that is, also, to lift its anchors, and it is precisely within this frame that Heidegger conceives the relation between thinking and images: task of thinkers is to restlessly grasp those images that remind them the impossibility of what it has been grasped.[38] This play constantly returns upon itself, but in a productive manner. Each time, the image declares the impossibility of something that thinkers might have considered grasped, so that, in turn, thinkers may gain their hold on something that may otherwise have been considered untranslatable outside the image. Thinking that insidiously comes to rest is always called to reactivate itself when a new image resurfaces; conversely, images that presume themselves untranslatable evocations of truth are each time – at least to a certain extent – resolved and clarified.
In the second part of the 1941 note, another image pops up that almost imperceptibly recalls that of the anchor, albeit apparently belonging to another sphere:
But when the language of the human being is in the word, then, and only then, is it plumb [im Lot]. If it stands plumb, the granting of hidden sources beckons to it. They are the neighborhoods of the beginning.
The plumb line is, like the anchor, a suspended weight. Unlike the anchor, however, it does not serve to stop things from moving, but to build – or rather, to verify that one is building “rightly.” Heidegger warns us that building well requires the word to be granted by the “hidden sources.”
Whether and to what extent this granting is still taking place when we speak as thinkers, and when we attempt to expose and connect (legein) what is, is told to us by images, which call us back to a world of beings that remains to be seen. There is still something there, and therefore we have not yet finished saying either that Es that gives (gibt) them: the image is the distance between a thought that presumes itself to be the Truth of things and things that remain “impossible” to think within that truth. What the succession of these two “weights” is implicitly telling us, is that the Notanker of images must be conceived as a plumb line for thinking.
6. Two Imaginations? The Images of the Thinker and the Poet
An essential question has yet been left aside, namely what relation the Notanker-imagesof the thinker, emerging out of a process that ultimately aims to get rid of them, bear to the images purportedly created by poets. Francisco J. Gonzalez raises en passant precisely this question, placing the 1941 note alongside a passage from the manuscript Besinnung (1938-39) in which – in an indeed rather convergent manner – poeticising is defined as a “Nothilfe” for thinking. “The question is whether,” Gonzalez writes, “the ‘Notanker’ Heidegger describes is not precisely the ‘Nothilfe’ of poetry.”[39]
The very passage from Besinnung to which Gonzalez refers arguably helps clarify this point:
Because philosophy says be-ing and is, therefore, only as word in word, and because its word never merely means or designates what is to be said but precisely in saying is be-ing itself, philosophy might hurriedly try to cross directly over into ‘poetry’ as help in need [‘Nothilfe’] and especially as receptacle [‘Gefäß’]. And yet this always remains an entanglement at the roots of what is of equal rank to philosophy and which on account of its most ownmost sways by itself, and from time immemorial incessantly avoids the thinking of be-ing. For, the ownmost of poetry also grounds history but differently; poetry’s “times” do not coincide with those of thinking. Approximation of philosophy to poetry and consequently to art endangers thinking knowing-awareness not because on account of this approximation thinking relinquishes the rigor of “scientificality,” which indeed is inceptually inappropriate to thinking. Seeking refuge in poetry means fleeing from the keen boldness of the question of being, which always shatters machination of beings and its denial of be-ing and must persevere in the unease and cleft of a breakage so that thinking of be-ing never dares to come to rest in a “work.” To philosophy belongs the serenity of the mastery of imageless knowing-awareness.[40]
The image of the thinker is the residue of a “shattering” and “denial:”[41] it is therefore a remainder, a purely negative mark, or, even better, the indication of a work in progress. In this sense, it is not even an image in its fullest meaning: it only appears to be one (“where there appears to be an image [wo ein Bild zu sein scheint]”). Such an image still proceeds from an aspiration – albeit a frustrated one – beyond vision, and thus does not ultimately make anything new visible: it does not constitute itself as a “work” that – as the celebrated essay on the “work of art” has it – provides a site for truth and gathers its tension into the “rest” of a form.
The poet who imagines, by contrast, does all of this. He reaches into something primordial, making visible something never before seen. His image does not primarily attest to the difficulty of “shattering” but contributes to manifestation; that is, it says something for the first time. The poet does not fail in thinking but succeeds in disclosing something that awaits thought.
Confronted with both kinds of images the thinker is called upon to undertake the same exercise: that of cold and bold questioning, that is, of Begreifen, provided that it is and remains an übergängliches Begreifen. In this sense, there is no reason to regard the dialectical pursuit of imagelessness in the relation between thinking and images as fundamentally different, whether the image is das Gedichtete einer Dichtung or the outcome of a “ventured yet unsuccessful Bildlosigkeit.” But the poet’s imagination offers further assistance.
While the image of the thinkers merely says that thought has not thought enough, the poets already point toward what remains to be thought. The indication of new trajectories remains their exclusive province. For this reason, the same thinkers who are, on the one hand, unbedürftig der Bilder, in the sense that they must learn precisely to dispense with images, are on the other hand, as a passage from the Black Notebooks puts it, in need both of images – which must be dispensed with – and of poets – who create the images that they cannot shape on their own:
Thinking is the most unsettling form of poetizing, because it ‘needs’ images; yet it cannot shape them on its own, but must receive them from an excess.[42]
When they think successfully – that is, when they err – as well as when they fail – that is, when they succeed, and thereby produce images –, thinkers inscribe themselves within what poets have (already) instituted, thinking or attempting to think images that have first been poetised. It is no coincidence that, where Heidegger “fails,” he falls back upon Hölderlin’s simplest – and therefore most unavoidable – images: Anfang, Erde, Gespräch, Gefahr, Nähe, Maß…
7. Conclusion: An Iconoclastic Thinking
Heidegger’s 1941 text invites to reflect on the relation between thinking and image, which – in parallel to that between thinking and poetry – appears much less dichotomous than its most frequently quoted formulation (“Das Sagen des Denkens ist im Unterschied zum Wort der Dichtung bildlos.”) would superficially suggest. It has been inquired how it is possible that a thinking programmatically declaring itself bildlos can, or indeed must, at times resign itself to retreating into images, and how, moreover, this circumstance can be connected with the prevention of a danger, given that Heidegger consistently insists on the necessity for thinking of dwelling fruitfully within Gefahr. It has been argued that the danger at stake is paradoxically the danger of security, that is, the danger that thinking may close itself within the stability of fixed concepts. The image offers to thinking the sanction of its own incompleteness, and thus the obstacle against which it must renew its attempt at grasping. The Notanker of the image – so to speak – is there to be lifted.
From this perspective, against a subtle but in fact profound misunderstanding, Heidegger’s thinking should properly be viewed as iconoclastic rather than merely as aniconic. Far from removing any dialogue with images from the outset, Heidegger finds in them the spur toward the continually renewed clearing that post-philosophical thinking shall pursue. Within the “internal” dialectics of thinking failures, as well as within the “external” dialectic between thinking and poetry – which, as said, is also the fundamental and originary one – thinking confronts the inexhaustibility of the same “hidden sources:” the Being that one endlessly attempts to grasp is a Being that continues, always and again, to give itself in images.
“To tell what it really is would be a matter for utterly divine and long discourse but it is within human power to describe it briefly in a figure; let us therefore speak in that way,”[43] Socrates remarks in the Phaedrus, shortly before introducing the myth of the winged chariot. Plato stands here – as elsewhere – in a somewhat unexpected proximity to Heidegger: like him, he knows how to distrust images and to draw a sharp distinction between the path of thought and that of poetry; but like him, he is also aware of the finitude of human discourse, and of the way in which images both arise from and bear witness to this finitude.
“To tell what really is” – that is, to think – is the highest task of all; but it is a long and arduous path, one that, if not altogether unreachable, is infinitely to be reached. Without presuming ourselves capable of divine tasks, we must strive to become – according to another expression that Heidegger borrows from Plato – “interpreters of the gods”[44] and of their superhuman truth. Within the circle of such hermeneia, words and images “seek one another.” [45] And this is not despite the fact that images are the stumbling block of the thinker, but precisely because they are. For if thinkers must obstinately try to be bildlos, they must even more obstinately refrain from presuming that they have ever completed the Bildung of thought. To continue to lift the anchor of images is, in the end, a way of “taking care for the use of language.”
References
- Appelhans, Jörg. Martin Heideggers ungeschriebene Poetologie. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002.
- Ardovino, Adriano, and Giampiero Moretti. “Heidegger, Hölderlin, il Gedicht.” Itinerari 64 (2025): 353-80.
- Ardovino, Adriano, and Giampiero Moretti. “Heidegger, Hölderlin, il Dichten.” Forthcoming.
- Beaufret, Jean. Dialogue avec Heidegger. III. Approche de Heidegger. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974.
- Capobianco, Richard. Engaging Heidegger. Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
- Capobianco, Richard. Heidegger’s Way of Being. Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
- Cattaneo, F. “‘Sulle più remote montagne’: Pensare e poetare in Heidegger.” Estetica. Studi e ricerche 12 (2022): 67-87.
- Coriando, Paola-Ludovika. “Sprachen des Heiligen. Heidegger und Hölderlin.” In Heidegger und die Christliche Tradition. Annährung an ein schwieriges Thema. Hamburg: Meiner, 2007,207-18.
- Erasmus von Rotterdam. Adagia / Sprichwörter. Edited by Claude-Eric Descœudres. Basel: Schwabe, 2021.
- Gonzalez, Francisco J. Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009.
- Heidegger, Martin. “The Nature of Language.” In On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 57-108.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Winke.” In Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983, 23-33.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” In Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 86-156.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Seminar in Zähringen 1973.” In Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2003, 64-81
- Heidegger, Martin. “A Dialogue on Language.” In On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art. Translated by Adam Knowles. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, 1-54.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Image and Word.” In On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art, 137-9.
- Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2012.
- Heidegger, Martin. The Event. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013.
- Heidegger, Martin. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. 2nd ed. London: Athlone, 2016.
- Heidegger, Martin. Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938-1939. Translated by R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2017.
- Heidegger, Martin. “Notturno I.” In Vigiliae und Notturno (Schwarze Hefte 1952/53 bis 1957). Edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2020,199-291.
- Heidegger, Martin. Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger’s Verse. Translated by Eoghan Walls. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
- Hermann (von), Friedrich W. “Nachbarschaft von Denken und Dichten als Wesensnähe und Wesensdifferenz.” In Jahresgabe der M.-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (1998): 37-63.
- Park, Suh-Hyun. “Language of the Ineffable: Poetry and Imageless Thought in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy.” Kritike 16, no. 3 (2023): 180-92.
- Petzet, Heinrich W. Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
- Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925.
- Plato. Ion. Translated by Walter R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
- Travers, Martin. “‘Die Blume des Mundes’: The Poetry of Martin Heidegger.” Oxford German Studies 41, no. 1 (2012): 82-102.
- Vallega-Neu, Daniela. “Heidegger’s Imageless Saying of the Event.” Continental Philosophy Review 47, no. 3-4 (2014): 315-33.
- Wilharm, Heiner. “Weltbild und Ursprung. Für eine Wiederbelebung der Künste des öffentlichen Raums. Zu Heideggers Bildauffassung der 30er Jahre.” IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 18 (2013): 97-135.
- Wolfson, Elliot R. Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2019.
- Ziarek, Krzysztof. “The Poetic Way of Thinking.” Research in Phenomenology 52, no. 1 (2022): 68-83.
[1] See Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, 2nd ed. (London: Athlone, 2016), esp. 38-52. Here and throughout, references to Heidegger are to the English translations where available, otherwise, to the German Gesamtausgabe. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, both of Heidegger’s texts and of other sources, are my own.
[2] See Martin Heidegger, The Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013), passim.
[3] See Martin Heidegger, “Image and Word,” in On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art, trans. Adam Knowles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 137-9. On the circumstances of this seminar, see Heinrich W. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58-60.
[4] See Martin Heidegger, “Winke,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983), GA 13, 33.
[5] Heidegger, “Winke,” 33.
[6] See Martin Travers, “‘Die Blume des Mundes’: The Poetry of Martin Heidegger,” in Oxford German Studies 41, no. 1 (2012), 82-102; Heidegger himself admits it, see Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger’s Verse, trans. Eoghan Walls (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 566.
[7] See again Travers, “‘Die Blume des Mundes’.
[8] Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 90.
[9] See Suh-Hyun Park, “Language of the Ineffable: Poetry and Imageless Thought in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy,” Kritike 16, no. 3 (2023), 180-92.
[10] On this distinction, and for the reference to Heidegger’s texts, see Francisco J. Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009), 269-80, who in this overcoming of the logic of the Aussage sees the possibility of a dialogue between Heidegger and Plato. We ourselves shall indirectly endorse this view in our conclusion, see below, §7.
[11] The proximity of (imageless) thinking and poetry in this regard is underlined by Park, “Language of the Ineffable.”
[12] On this aspect in particular, as well as on the different relation of thinking and poetry to the panta and to the hen, see F. Cattaneo, “‘Sulle più remote montagne’: Pensare e poetare in Heidegger,” Estetica. Studi e ricerche 12 (2022), 67-87.
[13] See Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger, 298, n. 3, as well as J. Appelhans, Martin Heideggers ungeschriebene Poetologie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 129-31.
[14] This metaphysical sense of image, and the way it is distinct from that of poetry, is pointed out by Heiner, Wilharm, “Weltbild und Ursprung. Für eine Wiederbelebung der Künste des öffentlichen Raums. Zu Heideggers Bildauffassung der 30er Jahre,” IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 18 (2013), 97-135.
[15] Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger. III. Approche de Heidegger (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974), 17.
[16] Heidegger makes this point in the 1973 Zāhringen seminar to criticise – while simoultaneously declaring himself indebted to – Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition, see Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul(Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2003), 66-67.
[17] Heidegger, The Event, 189 [translation slightly modified].
[18] Or even by a possible “unthought debt” to Judaism; see Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2019), 299-302, which puts passages of this kind from Heidegger’s writings into direct relation to the kabbalistic tradition.
[19] Heidegger, The Event, 189.
[20] On this seeming image-character of the images involved in thinking (“wo ein Bild zu sein scheint”), see below, §6.
[21] Also on this, see below, §6.
[22] Heidegger, The Event, 189.
[23] See Erasmus von Rotterdam, Adagia / Sprichwörter, ed. by Claude-Eric Descœudres (Basel: Schwabe, 2021), 82.
[24] I have dealt with this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking in xxxxx.
[25] Martin Heidegger, Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938-1939, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2017), 12-3 [trans. modified].
[26] The image I am referring to is the one quoted from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy by Heidegger in his reflection on Hegel’s concept of the experience: “It is only now [i.e., after Baco and Böhme] that we do in fact arrive at the philosophy of the modern world, and we begin it with Descartes. With him we actually enter upon an autonomous philosophy, one that knows that its autonomy comes from reason and that self-consciousness is the essential moment of truth. Here, we can say, we are at home, and like the mariner after a long voyage on stormy seas, we can shout, ‘Land ho!.’ The principle in this new period is thinking, thinking which proceeds from itself.” Heidegger comments: “Thinking seeks in the unshakeable certainty of what it has thought the fundamentum absolutum for itself. The land in which philosophy has subsequently made itself at home is the unconditional self-certainty of knowing” (Martin Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002], 96-7). This representation of the sea is arguably to be put in relation with Heidegger’s mariner metaphor in his almost contemporaneous note to the Winke.
[27] On this delicate balance, see Friedrich W. Hermann, “Nachbarschaft von Denken und Dichten als Wesensnähe und Wesensdifferenz,” in Jahresgabe der M.-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (1998), 37-63, esp. 59-63; Paola-Ludovika Coriando, “Sprachen des Heiligen. Heidegger und Hölderlin,” in Heidegger und die Christliche Tradition. Annährung an ein schwieriges Thema (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), 210-1. In this sense, without a clear distinction between a metaphysical and a non-metaphysical sense of “concept,” Krzysztof Ziarek’s claim that the language of the later Heidegger aims to be “non-conceptual” appears a bit overly strong; see “The Poetic Way of Thinking,” Research in Phenomenology 52, no. 1 (2022), 68-83.
[28] See Heidegger, “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” 81.
[29] See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2012), 135-6.
[30] See above, n. 28.
[31] On the experience of Übermaß, see Richard Capobianco, Heidegger’s Way of Being (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 44 ff. I also allow myself to refer the reader to my xxxx.
[32] Capobianco, Heidegger’s Way of Being, 64.
[33] Heidegger, On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art, 88.
[34] This is possibly the only or at least the most essential difference between thinking and poeticising, as underlined by Daniela Vallega-Neu, see “Heidegger’s Imageless Saying of the Event,” Continental Philosophy Review 47, no. 3-4 (2014), 326-7.
[35] Heidegger, “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” 81.
[36] This struggle for Bildlosigkeit is well described by Vallega-Neu, see “Heidegger’s Imageless Saying of the Event.”
[37] As has been noted by Capobianco, who also makes precise references to Heidegger’s texts; see Engaging Heidegger (Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2010), passim and esp. 102-3,
[38] Which in turn entails the risk of “reabsorbing, normalizing, or theorising” (Adriano Ardovino and Giampiero Moretti, “Heidegger, Hölderlin, il Gedicht,” Itinerari 64 [2025], 379) the image.” In a similar vein as the one proposed here, Ardovino and Moretti interestingly frame Heidegger’s understanding of poeticising and thinking through the antagonistic yet complementary gestures of stiften and ent-stiften, see “Heidegger, Hölderlin, il Dichten,” forthcoming.
[39] Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger, 298, n. 3.
[40] Heidegger, Mindfulness, 39-40.
[41] We may say, of an “Ent-stiften,” see above n. 39.
[42] Martin Heidegger, “Notturno I,” in Vigiliae und Notturno (Schwarze Hefte 1952/53 bis 1957), ed. by Peter Trawny (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2020),221.
[43] Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925), 469 (Phaedr. 246a).
[44] See Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art, 29. See also Plato, Ion, trans. Walter R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 425 (Ion 534e).
[45] Heidegger, On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art, 88.