Reading Fuzûlî with Heidegger: Poetic Language between Being and Nothingness

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to examine the link between the idea of language, being and nothingness by comparing 16th century Turkish-Azeri poet Fuzûlî’s poetry and 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s philosophy departing from the latter’s thinking of being. There are similarities between Heidegger and Fuzûlî’s respective thoughts concerning the role of the human being’s relation to finitude which grounds the relationship between being and nothingness. The article consists of three sections. The first section makes sense of Heidegger’s early and late thought in terms of its ontological unity, explaining the ways in which being and nothingness topologically co-determine one another in poetic language. The second section focuses on clarifying the sources that nourish Fuzûlî’s poetry, such as Sufism and the literary style of “Rind” as observed in classical Ottoman poetry, elucidating how these influences underpin the philosophical foundations of Fuzûlî’s poetry. The third section offers a philosophical interpretation of Fuzûlî’s lyric poems by illustrating how and why being and nothingness are not to be thought as mere opposites, pointing out their ontological belonging together. In the concluding section, it is argued that a poetic mode of existence necessitates an authentic experience of human finitude both for Heidegger and Fuzûlî. Although Fuzûlî’s poetry involves onto-theological influences from Sufism, Fuzûli manages to form an original idea of poetic existence, emphasizing that the poetic agent needs to take a step back from the mundane world of multitudes in order to unify with Being itself. As for Heidegger, it is doubtful whether there is such a mystical idea of being. Nonetheless, for both figures the more originary experience of finite human existence lies in the poetic interplay between being and nothingness. The poetic meaning of being comes to manifest itself in the process of one’s existential annihilation, which takes place in the movement of being-towards-death. Accordingly, exploring how the meaning of being requires the poetic experience of nothingness and how such an experience appears through language in Fuzûlî’s lyric poems provides a more comprehensive account of his thinking.