An Ontological Analysis of Poetry as a Real Language in the Philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur

The philosophy of language has become one of the key areas of modern philosophical research beginning with the linguistic turn of the 20th century. This fact has specified the thoroughness in considering the place of language in the world and its relationship with being. Heidegger laid the foundation for the ideas of language as a guarantor of human being-in-the-world in modern philosophy. According to him, it is pure language in the form of poetry that allows man to lift the veil of being and, through the language, enter into the "house of being". Despite the social functions of language, Heidegger excludes the perception of language as a communicative tool and denies the utilitarian approach to it. This position becomes more clearly seen after the "poetic turn" in Heidegger's philosophizing, when he brings the "narrative" as a practical pronunciation of language to a fundamentally new level: pure language. The "purity" of poetry as an original language does not depend on the personal qualities of the poet; it is the ability of the language to call things into being and ensure their presence in the world that determines its purity. Heidegger's disciple Gadamer reinterprets ideas about poetic language and transforms them into a new notion: pure poetry. Gadamer denies the qualitative differentiation of linguistic levels, but he recognizes the obvious difference between everyday and poetic languages. The philosopher places a special emphasis on the self-worth of the poetic word that possesses a symbolized significance unlike the word of everyday language. The highest form of poetry, according to Gadamer, is a lyric poem. This form of language, because of its closeness, is able to preserve the semantic unity of the poetic text and ensure the invariance of the value of the poetic word. Ricoeur's notion of a living metaphor and its relationship with poetic discourse is in line with Gada-mer's ideas. According to Ricoeur, the metaphor remains living until it goes beyond the literal reading of the text. An important role in the creation of metaphors in poetic discourse belongs to a productive imagination. Ricoeur emphasizes that the basis of poetic discourse is interaction between the metaphorical way of an utterance and the violation of commonly used meanings of words.

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