Reflections on poetic work: Heidegger and Ricoeur

In this essay I analyze Ricoeur’s philosophy of cultural objects as an alternative to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the onto-poetic origin of art that explicitly remains reserved in accepting a starting point based on the distinction between subject and object. After introducing Heidegger’s poetics of Being – that I will call onto-poetics – as presented in The Origin of the Work of Art, I explicate how Ricoeur proposes a mytho-poetic approach that rests on the notion of objectivity. The concept of poetic work remains the focus of this article, examined first from Heidegger’s angle and then from its Ricoeurian rival. The essay concludes that Ricoeur’s proposal of a poetico-speculative disclosure of what is retains a firm connection to the notion of objectivity as well as that of work, whereas Heidegger’s analysis gradually shifts from ergon to energeia, thus replacing the notion of work by that of alethic strife.