The perception of a vicinity between philosophy and poetry goes back to Antiquity. In the era of German Idealism and romanticism, philosophers like Schelling hailed the arts as an organon of truth of utmost significance to philosophy. In the Twentieth Century, three thinkers - Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Theodor W. Adorno - have renewed this paradigm. They contend that poetry, sharing with philosophy the linguistic character but being sensual at the same time, offers an experience of the world and thereby of truth which is more fundamental and immediate than the sciences' truth claim.
The three have extensively interpreted works of arts. Interestingly enough, all put forward readings of the nowadays almost forgotten poetry of Stefan George. This intersection in their interpretational efforts offers the opportunity to examine and compare their different approaches.
Heidegger reads George's late poem "Das Wort" as a revelation in accordance with his own thoughts about language. His reading verges on the poetic as he re-writes a crucial verse several times and stages the poet's "conversion": his hitherto self-confident and aggressive attitude towards the word is broken in favor of a humble gratefulness for the gift of language. Heidegger delivers a powerful illustration of his idea of naming, but in this endeavor, brushes over details in the poem which don't sustain his reading. He also makes untenable claims about the poet, thereby denying the manifold affinities between George's poetology and his own conception of language and art, their common anti-rationalism and eschatological longings.
By offering the closest reading of George's poetry, the founder of philosophical hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, remains true to his principle that the authority of the text needs to be respected. He is interested in the complex interaction and fusion of sound and sense that constitute the lyrical effect and takes the resulting notion of the work's wholeness as a reference to the totality of the world. Defining secular poetry as a remembrance of myth by means of mythopoetic play, he reads George's controversial late enunciations of a new mythology as being a true expression of modern man's coming to terms with the loss of a former "whole" in mythical society.
By searching for truth-content in George's work, Theodor W. Adorno overcomes his strong reservations against the poet's Weltanschauung. He acknowledges George's aesthetic formalism as being the result of the poet's strong critique of his time (thus as a sociological I'art pour I'art). But he remains very suspicious of any traces of a "positive", i.e. ideological content in George's verse. He attributes value to those poems which reveal tensions between form and content and between the poet's intention and the actual artistic outcome: The truth lies in the failure of the poet's aesthetic project. He also praises George's language for its puristic simplicity whilst seeing it at the same time endangered by the wordsmith's violent formalism.