Excerpts extracted from 

A REFRESHING AND RETHINKING RETRIEVAL OF GREEK THINKING 

by Kenneth Maly

From “Suggestions, Guidelines,” pages xi-xiii:

Experience. We cannot come to know what is at the heart of this writing project without experience. And experience is never totally definable. Experience cannot be measured or calculated. Heidegger insists on experience as primary in his pursuit. Here are a few examples of how Heidegger sees the need for experience (what is in bold here is mine): For both languages (the original and the translation) the translator is “intrinsically bound to the language and the experience of its deep sway [das Wesen]” (GA 5, 328).

With that, what is meant by Unverborgenheit … what we are to think with the name αληθεια is not yet experienced, let alone held fast in a rigorous thinking.
(GA 54, 16-17)

In Fragment I, 28, the goddess says: “but it is necessary for you to experience everything.”
(GA 15:406) 

The awakening to Ereignis/enowning must be experienced, it cannot be proven. The question came with a certain contradiction, lying in the fact that thinking is supposed to be the experiencing of the matter itself … insofar as experiencing is nothing mystical, not an act of spiritual enlightenment, but rather the entry into dwelling in Ereignis/enowning.  … the awakening to Ereignis/enowning remains something that must be experienced … 
(GA 14, 63-64)

It is about lived experience, direct and concrete experience. And could lead to a transformation in our thinking.

Using everyday language, we can say that philosophy is generally thought of as an intellectual exercise with a certain kind of vocabulary. A university degree becomes the qualification for this kind of work. We tend to busy ourselves in finding cogent arguments in a kind of book knowledge. Heidegger calls this “scholarship,” which he then distinguishes from thinking. It is as if we take a philosophy book off the shelf, enjoy reading it and activating the intellect, and then put the book back on the shelf and “return to living our lives.” To experience is something else.

*Poi-etic language. Whatever the thrust of this writing is, it is to a great extent elusive and poi-etic. If we seek a summary of what Heidegger finally means in the form of propositional sentences, we will be frustrated, and perhaps disappointed. Poi-etic saying is nonconceptual and calls for doing thinking, along the way. Having an experience with the thinking-saying.

David Bohm says that we are “often able to overcome this tendency toward fragmentation by using language in a freer, more informal, and ‘poetic’ way.” I call this poi-etic language. 

What is the reason for the hyphen? The word comes from the Greek poiesis (ποίησις), which in turn stems from the verb poieo (ποιέω). The words ποίησις-ποιέω-ποιητικός do indeed refer to the art of poetry and what we mean to say with the word poetic, e.g., “that is poetic language.” But ποιέω also says: I do, make, gather, create, celebrate, produce or bring about. So ποίησις has two meanings: One, poetry, poem. Two, creating, making, bringing forth. The hyphen (a) keeps fresh our understanding that what is going on here is more than “poetic” and (b) gives our thinking-saying a space for staying open to what the word says-shows in the second sense.

Aristotle has a powerful example of how the word poi-etic is a fitting coinage of a word. In De Anima (III, 5, 430a 15-17) he speaks of a mind (νοῦς, nous) that makes-gathers-brings about all things (πάντα ποιεῖν, panta poiein), aka “poi-etic mind” (nous poi-etikos, νοῦς ποιητικός). It is obvious that this use of the word ποιητικός cannot simply be called “poetic” in our language! In order to say what the Greek word says-shows, the “new” word poi-etic fits very well.

How can we do this on a practical level? It is virtually impossible to avoid the usual subject-verb-object structure, but we can allow our saying to break free of this structure in small ways. Sometimes we write as if it is poetry. Less static and closed, more dynamic and opening. Verbal forms rather than nouns. The most important way to move into poi-etic saying is to constantly remind ourselves that our saying is dynamic.  

Language, then, is a poi-etic saying – rather than logical-propositional. Connotation rather than denotation. Dynamic rather than static. Inexhaustible rather than definite. Open-ended rather than defining. And saying is a showing. To summarize, our usual language explains and defines, whereas poi-etic language says and in saying shows.

From “Preamble: Telling the Story of This Book,” pages xxvii-xxviii:

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Can you say more about these three ways and how they motivate your work?

Yes. The intermeshing of Buddhism, Daoism and quantum physics intrigues me. And finding a similar view and way of thinking in Greek philosophy (a) makes me happy and (b) is somehow useful. You could say the goal of this writing includes completing the triad: Asian thinking (especially Buddhism and Daoism), some key aspects of today’s science, especially quantum physics with entanglement that is core to it, and early Greek thinking!

Let me explain: Towards the end of the nineteenth century, physics opened up a road that led to new and fresh insights, changing our understanding of the way things are and of the world, including our own place within this new dynamic. Its name is quantum physics.

In the process of reflecting on these new ways of seeing, scientists as well as thinkers noticed that these new Western ideas and awarenesses somehow matched with “old” Eastern ways of thinking and seeing the way things are in the world.

This for me enriching and exciting project is to show how these same fresh ideas, which we find in contemporary physics and in Buddhism and Daoism, are in the writings of Greek thinkers. It is my sense that uncovering these fresh ideas of Greek thinking – bringing them out of hiding – will be useful and beneficial to us today. Finding these words and thoughts – (a) within our own historical unfolding and (b) expressed by Western thinkers at roughly the same time as Buddhism – sheds light on how things “started” in the early days of Western thinking. This light was first shed by Nietzsche and became more pronounced in Heidegger’s turning to the early Greeks. Heidegger’s work opens up the possibility that I, after Heidegger, can engage in this writing project. This light provides a fresh and radiant way of seeing the world and of living-well. From Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” at the front of this book:

Else this stone … would not be bursting at the seams
like a star: for there is there no pose
that does not see you.
You must change your life.

From “The Greek Words That Say Beyng as Radiant Emptiness,” page 175:

The primary Greek words that we will focus on are words that say this radiant emptiness that belongs to the question of being. The nondual, no-form dynamic of movement, becoming, change – within beyng as radiant emptiness.

These key Greek words say beyng as radiant emptiness – what is no-thing whatsoever but emerges, what is no-thing whatsoever even as it is at work, what is no-thing whatsoever even as we can experience it:

ἄπειρον, ἀλήθεια, ἐόν, φύσις, λόγος, ψύχη, νόος-νοῦς.

We will look at each one of these Greek words, following the three steps outlined above: the traditional-inherited ways versus the refreshing and retrieving ways, Heidegger’s reading and  my own gathering. We will show how Heidegger’s reading of these Greek words, in their originary saying and showing, takes us from the traditional and inherited ways of thinking and saying to the refreshing and retrieving possibilities in the words and their saying. Then we see what we can learn and open up to after – following along with – Heidegger.

From “Saying Consciousness to Saying Awareness,” page 298-9:

Clarifying the view. Since what I write here about awareness stems from how I see things at this point in my life of thinking – and is quite unusual for a “work of philosophy” – it behooves me to explain the “clearing” in which I do this reading. Thus I will now offer some comments and ruminations – including some repetition – on what I have just worked through. This highlights the key dimensions of the dynamic awareness. 

1. Central to the awareness dynamic is how it shows the one-ing of human awareness and the all-pervading “beyond human” awareness.
2. This one-ing, no-thing and no-form dynamic of timeless awareness is also found and said in the field of energy in quantum physics, the dao and the buddha min
3. Awareness is nondual and no-thing radiant openness.
4. Our human awareness in time is nondually a part of – or inherently belonging to – the timeless, formless awareness of radiant emptiness reaching beyond humans, aka beyng or dao or buddha mind.
5. We who are in time can experience and think and say this timeless awareness. This simultaneous knowing awareness of the awareness of radiant emptiness is freeing, enriching, opening, full awareness-emptiness (cf. GA 65:221-4). It is the “dynamic unfilledness” as an “open expanse of possibility” (GA 7, 170). To quote Heidegger:

The “empty,” not as what comes with a lack and its distress, but rather the distress of being-reserved, which in itself is the throwing open that is a breaking open and starting of something – the grounding-attuning of the originary belonging-together.
(GA 65, 381-382)

This emptiness is above all awareness.