Die Zeit der Gott-losigkeit enthält das Unentschiedene des erst Sichentscheidenden.
—Martin Heidegger, ‘Andenken’
‘You’ll learn that in this house it’s hard to be a stranger. You’ll also learn that it’s not easy to stop being one.’
—Maurice Blanchot, The Idyll
According to Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s and 1940s, dwelling involves a tensed relation between the unhomely and the homely. The unhomely denotes a future that is without common measure with the present. It is identical neither with one’s death (Chapter 1) nor with the other human being (Chapter 2) but, rather, with being. In this chapter, I show that the gods, the earth and the foreign guest are, in Heidegger’s text, figurations of being in that sense (see Chapter 3). I show that to dwell is to relate to the unhomely as the basis and ground of the homely.
Accordingly, dwelling is a notion that thinks the relation between the human Dasein and being. That relation constitutes a community whose members are entirely dissimilar. Being is other than the totality of entities, including the human Dasein. It is the light that articulates entities in their intelligibility and that is not itself, in turn, an entity. Is a community of absolute dissimilars possible, a community of those who have nothing in common, to borrow the title of Alphonso Lingis’s (1994) book? That is the question I aim to address in this chapter.
Dwelling does not describe a community between two strangers who are members of humanity, as in Levinas or Lingis. It is a community between the human being and what is other than human, indeed, other than the totality of entities, a stranger in a more fundamental sense of the term than in Levinas or Lingis.
As I intend to demonstrate in the course of this chapter, Heidegger presents at least two ways in which such a community can come to pass and one way in which it comes to ruin. It comes to pass in holy mourning (section 5) and guestfriendship (section 7), and it comes to ruin in the figure of Antigone (section 4).
I begin in section 2 by explaining the different senses in which the earth can be considered the unhomely basis of the homely in Heidegger. In section 3, I clarify the senses in which the theme of the retreat of the gods can be read.
Section 4 teases out a paradox in Heidegger’s reading of Antigone in his 1942 Der Ister lecture. The lesson he appears to draw from the text is that to belong to being and death in an authentic way brings about the ruin of the human Dasein, in other words, that authenticity is impossible.
In section 5, I show that that is otherwise with regard to the relation between the human Dasein and the gods. Holy mourning makes possible a community of absolute dissimilars.
In section 6, I explain how a thinking of hospitality arises in Heidegger. In section 7, I explain his notion of hospitality, the greeting and the guest. I argue that like holy mourning, guestfriendship constitutes a community with being that does not bring about the collapse of the human Dasein.
In this section, I lay out the various senses in which the earth can be considered the unhomely basis of the homely by drawing on parts of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s Der Ister and Germania. I return to some of these senses in section 4 where I discuss Antigone and show in what way Antigone’s belonging to death and the law of the earth leads to her ruin.
I return to the notion of the earth in section 5 as well, where I show how the poet relates to it in holy mourning. Far from bringing about his ruin, the earth appears as the futural horizon on which the poet projects a homeland.
* * *
Hölderlin writes in the first and final stanzas of Der Ister:
The images of the river and of the while operate on two levels in Heidegger/Hölderlin.1 They describe the mode of being of the poet as a figure that establishes a discursive relation between the human being and the gods and, as such, a figure that makes possible a historical community. They also describe the dwelling place of the human being. In what follows, I focus on the latter sense of the images in Heidegger’s lecture on Der Ister.
The river is an image of the essence of place. Heidegger describes it in the lecture as the locality of the locale (Ortschaft des Ort). It is also an image of the essence of time, which he describes as an event of migration, wandering or journeying (Wanderschaft) (HH 30).
To paraphrase what Heidegger says of technology, the essence of place is not itself a place, a geographical location. It is not a region on planet earth, a territory, a settlement or a point in Euclidean space. Doubtless, it denotes the dwelling place of man. But it is not as if that dwelling is identifiable in a specific location in distinction from another, as if dwelling takes place here instead of there. No, the dwelling denotes an absolute here, a zero-point that orients the world and gives it structure and meaning.
More precisely, to dwell does not mean, in the first instance, to reside somewhere. As Heidegger uses the word, it means to become at home on the earth. In this becoming-at-home, the human being fulfils its historical vocation. That is why the essence of place is best understood, not as a place, but as a becoming, a journey or migration from the foreign to the proper, as I show in sections 6 and 7.
The river ‘is’ the locality that pervades the abode of human beings upon the earth, determines them to where they belong and where they are homely (heimisch). The river thus brings human beings into what is proper to them (das Eigene) and maintains them in what is their own. Whatever is proper to them is that to which human beings belong and must belong if they are to fulfil whatever is destined to them, and whatever is fitting (Schickliche), as their specific way of being. (HH 21)
What is the historical vocation of the human being? What is proper to him? It is to win ‘the earth as the “ground” of the homely (“Grund” des Heimischen)’ (HH 30). Heidegger says something similar in The Origin of the Work of Art. He writes that upon ‘the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world’ (PLT 46).
What does the earth mean here? In what respect is it the ground or basis of what is homely? Isn’t the earth something uncanny, foreign and difficult to understand?
The dead are laid to rest in it. Or their ashes are scattered over it. As the final resting place, we relate to the earth as a site of mourning. The earth does not here mean a planet in the solar system. Before being conceived as such, it is experienced as a holy sanctum. It is a place of refuge for the dead that remains cloaked in ‘eternal darkness’, as Antigone describes it in Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles, 2009: 132).
Derrida remarks in Of Hospitality that the final resting place situates the ethos, ‘the key habitation for defining home, the city or country where relatives, father, mother, grandparents are at rest’.
[I]t is the place of immobility from which to measure all the journeys and all the distancings. (Derrida, 2000a: 87)
The earth as final resting place constitutes an absolute here, a zero-point in the orientation to the world, tradition and history.
In accordance with Antigone’s description of the earth in Oedipus at Colonus, Heidegger thinks it as ‘essentially self-secluding’ (PLT 47) in The Origin of the Work of Art. He means by that at least three things:
(a)The qualitative experience of nature resists quantification, measure or, generally speaking, the understanding. The earth, as Heidegger puts it, is a place of unmeasure (Unmass) or excess (PLT 70).
What is true of the stone in my hand, for instance, is not true of its objective weight. The stone in my hand is heavy. But a stone that weighs 3 kg is in itself not heavier than a stone that weighs 5 kg. Heaviness is, in Locke’s phrase, a secondary quality. It is not an intrinsic quality of the stone. It applies relative to a being whose experience of the world is mediated by its embodiment. The terms we use to describe the stone’s heaviness cannot be translated in the terms we use to describe its weight.
Again, the colour of the sky shines brightly on sunny days. But the wavelengths of which the blue of the sky consists do not shine. The terms we use to describe the shining quality of the sky cannot be translated in the terms we use to describe its wavelengths. ‘Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it’ (PLT 47).
(b)The authentic relation to the earth is affective. Its resistance to the understanding is felt before being understood. Heidegger speaks of the earth at one point as a ‘silent call’ in his description of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes (PLT 34). That is to say that the earth affectively disposes the peasant woman to her world.
(c)The earth is the origin of the clearing. The clearing originates, or expressly comes to light, in an experience of the limit of the understanding (which is coextensive with the limit of history or the world). When language and meaning fail in anxiety, entities press upon the human Dasein in their entirety in their undifferentiated presence. That presence of the whole is the clearing. Heidegger writes:
Beings refuse themselves to us down to that one and seemingly least feature which we touch upon most readily when we can say no more of beings than that they are. Concealment as refusal is not simply and only the limit of knowledge in any given circumstance, but the beginning of the clearing of what is lighted. (PLT 53–4)
Like death, the earth constitutes the limit of what can be understood. It is the basis on which a historical world has always already been projected. More ancient than history, meaning and the idiomatic languages of historical peoples, the earth is a thrown basis that cannot be retrieved in a project. It is manifest in moods, or in the way it attunes a people to its world, as an origin in retreat.
Or what amounts to the same thing from a different angle, the earth denotes that which lies ahead of every project. It is there, like death, as the non-contingent limit and horizon of the possible. It is on the basis of the earth as futural horizon, as I show in section 5, that the decisions and differentiations that found a world are articulated.
One of these decisions concerns the relation between the human being and the gods. In the lecture on Germania, Heidegger writes that the earth is the place where gods are nurtured.
The earth is here experienced in advance in the lucidity of a questioning knowing concerning the historical mission of a people (geschichtliche Sendung eines Volkes). The native earth (heimatliche Erde) here is not a mere space delimited by external borders, a realm of nature, or a locality constituting a possible venue for this or that event to be played out. Die Erde als diese heimatliche für die Götter erzogen. This singular native earth is nurtured for the gods. It first becomes a home (Heimat) through such cultivation, but it can also as such decline and fall back into a mere place of residence (Wohnsitz), which accordingly goes hand in hand with godlessness. (HGR 95)
What is it to nurture the earth for the gods? I doubt it means to build churches or temples.
There are at least two ways of making sense of this. The first is Heidegger’s discussion of daimonia and the gods in his Parmenides lecture. The second is his discussion of the passing away of the last god and of the retreat of the gods in Contributions to Philosophy: From the Event.
The Parmenides lecture (1942–3) was delivered approximately seven years after this passage from the lecture on Germania (1934–5) was written. Nevertheless, this later lecture seems to reflect a developing train of thought concerning the link between the earth, the gods and the human being that can be traced from this lecture on Germania to the Parmenides lecture, passing through the Contributions to Philosophy: From the Event (CP, 1936–8).
I showed in the last section that the earth is the limit of the understanding. In the next section on Antigone, I consider to what extent it is possible to belong to the earth.
In this section, I turn to the Parmenides lecture and the Contributions to Philosophy: From the Event to shed some light on the connection between the earth and the gods that Heidegger first highlights in his Germania lecture. I argue in this section that the gods are, like the earth, figurations of being and time. This means that they are historico-ontological conditions of possibility of the authentic historical existence of a people.
In section 5, I return to this discussion of the gods and the earth to show that, in holy mourning, the poet relates to them as the horizon on which he projects a homeland.
* * *
Like the feminine in Levinas and the absolute arrivant in Derrida (see Chapter 3.3 and 3.4), the gods in Heidegger are figurations of being.
The divine in the Greek sense, to theion, is precisely being itself looking into the ordinary. (P 115)
The role played by the gods in Heidegger’s work in the 1930s and 1940s is reminiscent of the role played by the voice of conscience in Being and Time (see Chapter 2.4).
Heidegger describes the mode of being of the gods by reference to the look and saying (das Blicken und das Sagen). Saying does not mean vocal utterance. The gods have no vocal organs. They speak by staying silent. It is a silence that gives something to be understood through a mood such as respect, grace, awe or mourning. The gods are the attuning ones (die Stimmenden) (P 111).
No doubt, to look does also not mean in this instance what we ordinarily take it to mean, that is, to make something transparent, to cast light on it or to make it present as an object for a subject.
Heidegger tells us that, for Greek thought, the emphasis is on the one who looks rather than on the thing that is being looked at. In looking, the one who looks comes into view. The look is experienced as that in which the other who looks appears and stands in view, as that in which the self awaits the other who looks (entgegenwartende Blicken) (P 103).
The one who looks in a pre-eminent sense is not the human being. It is the gods. The human being is first experienced as a being that is ‘looked upon’ (P 108) by the other.2
As figurations of being, the gods look into the ordinary and come into view as remarkable beings. Heidegger uses Ungeheure (P 104) for my bland remarkable. The gods that come into view are uncanny, monstrous, strange or excessive. That seems to mean at least two things:
•By looking into the ordinary world, and by thus coming into view before the human being, the gods make themselves and the world conspicuous.
The Greek daimonia, which Heidegger translates as Ungeheure, signifies both the uncanny and the divine. The uncanny is not the exception to the rule. It is the revelation of the ordinary. That is what the gods accomplish.
•The gods are not, strictly speaking, identifiable with worldly beings or, what amounts to the same thing, with agencies of a certain kind.
Heidegger is clear, particularly in Contributions to Philosophy: From the Event, that if we are to think of the gods properly, then we must think of them beyond the constraints of ontotheology. That means (among other things) that the gods cannot be thought of as either natural or supernatural causes or as the kind of entities to which existence can apply as a predicate, as in the debate between the theist and the atheist where the first affirms, and the second denies, that existence applies to God.
To speak of ‘the gods’ does of course not mean that a decision has been made here affirming the existence of many gods instead of one; rather, it is meant to indicate the undecidability of the being of the gods, whether one or many. This undecidability carries within it the question of whether something like being can be attributed to gods at all without destroying everything divine. To speak of ‘the gods’ is to name the undecidability as to whether a god, and which god, could arise once again as an extreme distress for which essence of the human being in which way. (CP 345)
Heidegger thinks of the gods neither as charismatic figures that ground community life, as Julian Young (2002: 35) believes, nor as objects of worship, as Benjamin Crowe (2007: 238) insists. As I see it, they are figurations of time – not of chronological time understood as a succession of nows but, rather, of historical time.
The absence that defines the historical future (not-yet) is not a modality of the present. It is not a future that will sooner or later become present. Heidegger describes this future in Contributions to Philosophy: From the Event by reference to the passing away of the last god. Levinas thinks of the relation with the other human being as a relation with the future. In a similar vein, Heidegger thinks of the relation with the last god as a relation with the historical future.
Let me highlight two things about the passing away of the last god:
(a) In the first place, the passing away of the last god is a possibility that articulates, and that opens the human being to, the absolute impossibility of any historical world. It is the counterpart, at the level of historical thinking, of being-toward-death in the existential analytic. In his explanation of the meaning of last in the expression the last god, Heidegger writes that it does not mean stopping or cessation but origin or beginning. He then adds,
If we have such a poor grasp of “death” in its extremity (in seinem Äußersten), then how will we ever measure up to the rare beckoning of the last god? (CP 321)
If death signifies the absolute limit of existence, then the last god must signify the absolute limit of history. But we think of death poorly when we think of it as the cessation of life. So presumably we think of the last god poorly when we think of it as the cessation of history understood as a chronological sequence of events.
Death, the absolute limit of my existence, makes it conspicuous as irreplaceably mine and as something for which I must take responsibility. In that sense, death is a beginning or origin. Presumably, the poet’s encounter with the last god would make conspicuous the history into which a particular humanity had been thrown as its own and as something for which it must take responsibility.
Heidegger describes that encounter as a beckoning. To beckon is to a give a sign to the other. On leaving, for example, I wave my hand in the air to say goodbye to my friend. That sign tokens the proximity that endures between us even as ‘the distance increases’. Conversely, my friend arrives and waves his hand at me. That tokens ‘the distance that still prevails in this felicitous proximity’ (HGR 31).
The relation between the human being and the gods is envisaged in that way too. It is a relation of distance in proximity and of proximity in distance. That relation is accomplished by the poet as remembrance and awaiting. It is the antithesis of the mystical unification of man with the gods (or Nature) yearned for by some of the early Romantics.
(b) What is meant by passing away in the expression the passing away of the last god? In one sense, that phrase suggests that the last god is not something that can be made intelligible in terms of the present and its modalities. The last god is not a worldly entity that could one day arrive like the Messiah or that was once present in some bygone time.
Heidegger cites a sentence from one of Hölderlin’s fragments in his Germania lecture. The sentence reads, ‘Thus everything heavenly passes quickly.’ He then comments:
To pass does not here mean to perish, but rather to pass away, not to remain, not to remain there as something that is constantly present, i.e., thought in terms of the matter, to appear as something that has been (Gewesendes), to appear in a coming that presses upon us (einem kommenden Andrang). (HGR 101)
Like death, the last god is not present in the mode of the present. It is there as either not yet or no longer there. Or better yet, the last god is nothing save the ecstatic movement of historical time. It is the constant return and projection of that which has been as what is to come at any moment.
Put differently, the phrase passing away thinks the gods as figures of absence. That does not mean that the retreat of the gods is a metaphor that refers to a certain number of historical events in the past, such as the demise of the Greek or Roman age, the death of Christ on the cross or the secularism of the modern age. Instead, the absence of the gods is a possibility that can come to light at any moment. It is an absence that hesitates between arrival and flight (Ankunft und Flucht), approach and withdrawal (Anfall und Ausbleib).
Once the modern age is understood by the poet as the age of the retreat of the gods, and this retreat is understood in its ambiguity as signifying their imminent arrival or irreversible withdrawal, a particular humanity faces a crisis with respect to its way of being. Can it continue to live in forgetfulness of their absence? Or can it start living in remembrance of their departure and await their imminent return?
To experience the retreat of the gods in this way is, I think, one of the historico-ontological conditions of possibility for a particular humanity to enter a time of decision. It makes possible a transition to another beginning of history.
* * *
I started this discussion on the gods after citing a passage from Heidegger’s Germania lecture in the last section. The passage says that the native earth is nurtured for the gods. Given what I have shown in this section, I think that we can safely assume what that passage means. Exposing himself to and poetizing the retreat of the gods – that is, their imminent arrival or irreversible flight – the poet articulates the undecidability that constitutes the historical future.
At bottom, I think, the earth is this abyssal future from which there originates a destiny or history for a people or, more precisely, in the horizon of which a people can draw a homeland for the first time.
The great, pivotal times of the peoples (Wendezeiten der Völker) always emerge from the abyss, and, in each case, in accordance with the extent to which a people reaches into it – which is to say, into its earth – and possess homeland (Heimat besitzt).3
Heidegger adds that the gods are ‘earthly’. He explains:
‘Earthly’ does not mean created by a creator-god, but rather an uncreated abyss within which all emergent happening (heraufkommende Geschehen) trembles and remains preserved. (HGR 97)
In section 5, I show that what makes the Hesperian poet unique is the fact that his poetry enacts the retreat of the gods. It remembers their flight and awaits their imminent return in holy mourning.
I showed in the last section that, for Heidegger, a people posits a home in the horizon of its native earth. My aim in this section is to show that, by his 1942 Der Ister lecture, he seems to have acquired a more tragic and pessimistic outlook on the matter. In a sense, his reading of Antigone suggests that an authentic community between the human Dasein and the earth (being) is impossible.
The drama of Antigone begins the day after the end of the civil war between Eteocles and Polyneices. Polyneices has led a foreign force to attack Thebes. The attackers were defeated and, in the fray, the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices killed each other.
Creon, the ruler of Thebes, decrees that no fallen enemy of the city shall be mourned and given the customary burial rites. It is Antigone’s duty, however, as Polyneices and Eteocles’s sister, to look after their burial and perform the proper rites. She tells her sister, Ismene:
She defies Creon’s rule and buries Polyneices. Her punishment is to be entombed alive.
When Creon tells her, towards the end of the drama, that she knowingly defied his rule, she justifies her action by appealing to a different kind of law than divine justice and the laws that mortals decree for themselves to live together in cities.
The tragic conflict between Antigone and Creon is not the conflict between the divine and human law, as Hegel (1977: 266) insists. Antigone says that the law that governs her action transcends the upper and lower gods, Zeus and Justice. In one respect, her law issues from beyond the divine sphere. In another, however, it is part of the ‘unwritten, immutable laws of the gods’.
Moreover, Creon decrees his law before the gods (Sophocles, 2009: 149). That makes it a part of the divine sphere. But that does not exclude that it is also part of the human sphere.
Oudemans and Lardinois’s (1987: 129) interpretation of Antigone in Tragic Ambiguity is close to Heidegger’s reading of the text in his Der Ister lecture. Like Heidegger, they claim that the whole drama is concentrated in the little word deinos that appears several times in Antigone and, most importantly, in the first stasimon, the choral Ode to Man. It is, they say, ‘the key word of the tragedy’.
The chorus in the first stasimon refers to man’s daring (tolma). That daring is ambiguous in the extreme. The human being subdues the forces of nature and establishes order thanks to his passion (orge), cunning and skill. But the same passion also drives him to transgress limits, to confuse justice with injustice and to commit hubris. That is what is terrible and awe-inspiring (deinos) about the human being. The passion that drives him to found civilization changes into wrath, and causes civilization to founder. According to Oudemans and Lardinois (1987: 129–30), the tragic structure that constitutes the human being as to deinon is such that he will never be able to harmonize order and excessive power.
Heidegger agrees that the daring that the chorus refers to in the Ode to Man is ambiguous. But that daring is not the passion that drives the human being to establish order and transgress limits. It is a daring or risk that consists in having to choose and distinguish between two ways of being, two antithetical modalities of the essence of the human being defined as deinon.
[T]he risk of distinguishing and deciding between that being unhomely proper to the human being and a being unhomely that is inappropriate. Antigone herself is this supreme risk [or daring, tolma] within the realm of the deinon. To be this risk is her essence. (HH 117)
The tragic conflict for Heidegger is between two ways of being unhomely, remembrance and forgetfulness of the hearth, belonging and not belonging to being, represented by Antigone and Creon respectively.
Heidegger justifies his interpretation by connecting the first two sentences of the choral ode that describe the essence of the human being as to deinon with the final three lines. His translation of the beginning of the choral ode reads:
His translation of the final three lines reads:
Heidegger makes explicit the connection between the first and final sentences by translating to deinon as das Unheimliche, the uncanny, and by interpreting the latter as das Unheimische, the unhomely. That interpretation brings into play the contrast and tension with the hearth and home that the chorus refers to in the final three sentences. That is the tension that Heidegger sees in the drama – the tension, namely, between being unhomely and being homely.
In the first lines of the ode, the chorus is not merely making a comparative statement to the effect that some things are more uncanny than others and that the human being is highest in the order of uncanny things, as if uncanniness was an extrinsic quality of the human being. The chorus thinks of the human being as a being that is in its essence uncanny. It is on that basis that it can speak comparatively of things, including of the power of nature, as being more or less uncanny than other things.
In the final lines of the ode, the chorus excludes someone from the hearth or home. The chorus prays that it will not have to share its knowledge with the delusion of this unhomely being. Who is the chorus excluding from the home? Who is the unhomely one?
The chorus excludes from the hearth those who, having acted rashly, are without city. Those who upset the order of the city are also barred from the domestic hearth. It is clearly not the human being spoken of in the first lines – that is, the human being defined in its essence as the unhomely one – who is excluded. The chorus rejects a particular way of being unhomely. It excludes those who are forgetful of the hearth, notably Creon.
Oudemans and Lardinois’s (1987: 127) interpretation of the oxymoron upsipolis apolis in the choral ode supports this reading. They contend that this phrase suggests that the ruler and the outcast, the person who is high in the city (upsipolis) and the person who is without city (apolis) might exchange places or even become one and the same.4
Those whom the chorus excludes from the hearth are those who live in forgetfulness of being, inasmuch as being is the hearth, Das Sein ist der Herd (HH 112). Heidegger’s interpretation of the hearth as being does not seem to me to be entirely outlandish, as Dennis Schmidt (2001: 259) claims in On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life when he remarks that Heidegger ‘ontologizes beyond the limits of ontology’.
True, the chorus and the characters nowhere speak of being in Antigone. However, the law to which Antigone appeals to justify her action in defiance of Creon’s decree is the law of the hearth and that law transcends in some respect both the divine and human spheres. It is a sacred law that prevails always. Its origin is unknown. No amount of human cunning and intelligence can defeat it. It is, like death, the impossible, that against which nothing can avail (tamechana) (Sophocles, 2009: 90).
The law of the hearth is the law of being insofar as it does not derive from entities. In particular, it is not reducible to the laws of kinship and blood relation.
We must think beyond the cult of the dead and blood-relatedness and retain the word of Antigone as it is said. We can then recognize that, thought in a Greek sense, she names being itself. This is the ground of being homely, the hearth. (HH 118)
Since the law that Antigone cites in defence of her action is not relative to and does not vary with historical worlds, we can say that it is a law of the earth, of what is trans-historical and self-secluding.
Heidegger cites the Pythagorean thinker Philolaos in support of his interpretation. Philolaos describes the hearth as the one (to en) that unifies what there is. He then contextualizes Philaloas’s talk within the pre-Socratic thinking of phusis.
For the essence of being for the Greeks is phusis – that illumination that emerges of its own accord and is mediated by nothing else, but is itself the middle. (HH 112)
Heidegger does not dispute that the Greek for hearth typically refers to the goddess Estia that presides at the centre of the household and at the communal hearth of the city. He wants to say that, in addition to referring to entities in the world, the word invariably signifies being.
In that sense, the hearth is the light that permeates entities in their entirety. It illuminates them through a play of contrast and difference. Entities detach themselves from the background with which they were initially fused and come to stand in relief against each other. Being is that light that makes entities intelligible through this movement of differentiation (Aus-einander-setzung) (see EHP 76).5
That light is, however, difficult to grasp, because it has no outline or shape by which it could be described, let alone identified, against a backdrop. Exposure to that light, if that were possible, would be exposure to nothingness, loss of orientation, loss of self, anxiety. That is why that light hides itself in beings, namely, so that the human Dasein can engage with others in discourse and talk about things. The ground of the intelligibility of entities, or of a particular historical world, is a light that veils itself in the midst of entities. That self-veiling light is the earth.
That is what makes Antigone supremely uncanny. She chooses to belong to what is other than entities at the cost of her life.
Perhaps that is the sense of the tragic that Heidegger intends to convey in his Der Ister lecture. There is no belonging to being that does not, at the same time, bring the human being to ruin, insofar as such belonging takes place in a transgression and exceeding of limits. To transgress entities in the direction of their being is to risk losing one’s self. It is to explicitly open oneself to nothingness and death.
In the last section, I showed that Heidegger seems to suggest in his Der Ister lecture that to belong to the earth does not happen without bringing about the collapse of the human Dasein.
In this section, I return to the conclusion I arrived at in section 3 with regard to the retreat of the gods and argue that holy mourning presents a way of belonging that does not lead to the ruin of the human Dasein.
* * *
Heidegger compares holy mourning with mourning one’s beloved in his Germania lecture.
No longer being allowed to call upon the gods (Götter) of old, this will to acquiesce in abandonment, what else is it? – it is nothing else than the sole possible, resolute readiness for awaiting the divine (Göttlichen); for the gods as such can be relinquished in such abandonment only if they are retained in their divinity ... Where the most beloved (das Liebste) has left, love (die Liebe) remains behind, for otherwise the former could not have left at all. (HGR 85–6)
The argument turns on the difference between what the concrete and the abstract noun signify, das Liebste and die Liebe, der Götter and das Göttlichen. The abstract noun – love and the divine – does not designate an abstract entity, a universal.
What remains when my beloved has abandoned me? To properly mourn her consists of renouncing her and in letting her go. What remains when I am so constrained to let her go? Nothing save love as an unfilled and empty possibility. Mourning my beloved, I find myself face-to-face with love as a failed possibility. I find myself awaiting its fulfilment.
To be sure, in a sense, I await the impossible. My beloved is irrevocably gone, and there is no other who could conceivably replace her. To mourn my beloved is, in a sense, to endure and suffer the impossible fulfilment of love.
I don’t think that holy mourning is different from mourning one’s beloved. To mourn the absence of the gods is to renounce them and let them go. It is to stand face-to-face with the divine as an unfilled and empty possibility. It is to suffer its impossible fulfilment. ‘Holy names are lacking’, Hölderlin writes in Homecoming. ‘That the gods have fled does not mean that divinity (Göttlichkeit) too has vanished from the Dasein of human beings. Here it means that such divinity precisely prevails, yet as something no longer fulfilled, as becoming dark and overcast, yet still powerful’ (HGR 86). The divine as an unfilled historical possibility makes conspicuous the absence of the gods. As I remarked in section 3, that absence is intrinsically ambiguous. It can signify their imminent arrival or irreversible withdrawal. In neither of these cases, however, should we think that what is at stake is a modality of the present, as if the gods will one day be present to man as worldly beings or as if they were once present to him as such in the past.
Heidegger remarks that holy mourning does not only mean that the poet, in his poetry, renounces the gods that have flown, it also means that the poet unconditionally awaits (unbedingte Erharren) their return and imminent arrival (HGR 106). What I take Heidegger to be saying is something similar to what Derrida has in mind with the unconditional hospitality of the absolute arrivant (see Chapter 3.4).
The awaiting that Heidegger speaks of is not conditioned in its content by the gods or God that human beings have worshipped in the past or that they claim for themselves in the present. To await the return of the gods is not to await some entity in the world. It is to accomplish a relation with the earth as the horizon in which a homeland or world is posited for the first time.
Why is the earth that horizon? The earth is the ground on which a particular historical humanity has always already been thrown. It can always return, therefore, in the projection of the poet, as a possibility against which that humanity can draw a home for itself.
Like death, however, the earth is not a possibility like some other. It is singular and self-secluding. It is already there or yet to come. It eludes identification and the present. The earth is the temporality of being as history or destiny.
I showed in section 2 that the image of the river in the Der Ister lecture describes a journey from the foreign to the proper, a becoming at home on the earth. What was said in the last section about holy mourning, that it consists of projecting the earth as the horizon from which a homeland can be drawn for a people, is one way of cashing out that becoming at home on the earth.
In the next section, I argue that guestfriendship is another way of cashing out that becoming at home. In this section, I explain how a thinking of hospitality arises in Heidegger and what distinguishes his reading of the relation between the foreign and the proper in Hölderlin’s letter to Böhlendorff from the usual reading.
* * *
Heidegger deepens his notion of becoming at home in the undelivered Part III of the Der Ister lecture. It recalls some of the motifs of his lecture on Hölderlin’s Andenken of the previous year in 1941/2.
That is no accident. Hölderlin wrote Andenken and Der Ister on the same page probably at about the same time in 1803/4. Heidegger claims that the former tells us something about the apparent backward flow of the Ister, its return to its origin in the East (EHP 107).
Part III of the Der Ister lecture and the lecture on Andenken raise the notion of dwelling to a new level of interpretation. The central insight of both lectures is that the greeting of the foreigner, in both the subjective and the objective genitive, sets the poet on his journey from the Orient to the Occident. What makes possible dwelling in this instance is not the relation to the earth in holy mourning but, rather, the hospitality of the foreigner.
How does a thinking of hospitality arise in Heidegger? It arises largely owing to his use of Hölderlin’s letter to Böhlendorff from 4 December 1801 in his reading of Der Ister and Andenken. That letter introduces a thinking of alterity in his reflections on dwelling.
The alterity of being in relation to beings appears in the guise of the alterity of the foreign or strange (das Fremde) in relation to the proper (das Eigene). The idea is that the Hesperian poet learns to dwell in what is proper to him, he appropriates what is natural to him as his appointed task, to the extent that the foreigner, the Greek poet of the heavenly fire, greets him in his dwelling. The foreigner is the unhomely one in the home. He does not simply point the Hesperian poet in the direction of the homely. In greeting the Hesperian poet, the foreigner calls him to his vocation as the sayer of the holy.
Hölderlin’s first letter to Böhlendorff is usually read as giving an account of the difference between Greek and modern art against Winckelmann’s neo-classicism and, more generally, against the way the issue is framed in the so-called quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Should modern art imitate the superior and inimitable art of the Greeks and Romans? Is that the best the modern artist can hope for? Or has modern art far surpassed the art of the Classical Age?
Hölderlin displaces that entire debate by contesting its basic premises. He argues that the Greeks and moderns have nothing in common except for the ‘living relationship and destiny’ (Hölderlin, 1988: 150). The law of destiny is the formal principle that any culture or people, any community of language and memory that wants to appropriate what is proper to it must also learn what is foreign to it: it must be expropriated. Aside from that, the Greeks and moderns have nothing in common. Their art and culture (clarity of presentation) is a response to a nature (the holy pathos) that is foreign to ours, just as our art and culture (holy pathos) is a response to a nature (clarity of presentation) that is foreign to theirs. This invites the thought that history, far from being causal or linear, has a chiasmic structure (see Warminski, 1987 and Lacoue-Labarthe, 1989).
Heidegger is not unaware of Hölderlin’s unique relation to the Greeks. He recognizes that, for Hölderlin, the Greek world is neither a model that we moderns ought to imitate – say, the model of a naivety and innocence, of a proximity to nature, as Schiller claims in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, that we should yearn for or aspire to return to – nor is it of the same essence and historical determination as ours. Hölderlin’s relation to the Greeks, Heidegger writes, is ‘neither classical, nor romantic, nor metaphysical’ (HH 54).
However, Heidegger’s use of the letter in his reading of Hölderlin’s later hymns departs from the usual reading in at least two ways. As I mentioned above, the letter is usually read as Hölderlin’s mature account of the difference between Greek and modern art. Heidegger sees it as a reflection on the content of what is poetized in the later hymns. That is the becoming homely of Hesperia (HH 124).
More significantly for my purpose here, Heidegger departs from the usual reading of the foreign of Hesperia, the ‘heavenly fire’ or ‘holy pathos’. Paul de Man (2012) suggests that what is foreign to Hesperia is the nostalgic longing for the mystical unification with Nature that is characteristic of early Romanticism and that the narrator of Hyperion expresses in the opening letters of the novel, what Lacoue-Labarthe calls the ‘transgression of finitude’. On that reading, Hölderlin says in his letter to Böhlendorff that a confrontation with that longing for unity is necessary if we are to learn to make a free use of what is proper to us, the clarity of presentation, and, as a result, if we are to produce a properly Hesperian art.
On Heidegger’s reading, the foreign element that makes possible the free use of what is properly Hesperian (the clarity of presentation) is being. He refers to the latter with various expressions in the Der Ister lecture, ‘the overwhelming’, ‘the uncanny’, ‘the ungraspable’.
What is thus ‘inborn’ cannot properly become what is their own for the Germans so long as this ability to grasp (Fassenkönnen) has not been made to confront the necessity of grasping the ungraspable (das Unfassliche zu fassen) and of grasping themselves in the face of what is ungraspable. (HH 136)
Thought flourishes, it learns to dwell in its element, when it is made to confront the limit of thought. That is the light that illuminates entities but that cannot in turn be grasped as an entity.
That encounter with what is foreign to thought is the necessary condition of possibility for a particular Hesperian humanity, ‘the Germans’ – a word whose nominal unity Heidegger does not take for granted, I believe, inasmuch as it denotes not the Germans of 1942 but a non-extant people, a community to come – to appropriate what is ‘inborn’ to it as its historical vocation.
How is the encounter between the proper and the foreign to be understood? Der Ister describes it as a relation of hospitality and friendship, of guestfriendship.
Who or what is a guest? Heidegger explains:
Gast ist derjenige Fremde, der in einem ihm fremden Heimischen zeitweise heimisch wird und damit selbst sein Heimisches in das fremde Heimische bringt und von diesem aufgenommen wird.
A guest is that foreigner who for a time becomes homely in a foreign home and who brings what is homely for him in the foreign home and who is received in the foreign home. (HH 140–1)
The guest is a foreigner who brings what is proper to her in the home that has given her hospitality. Heidegger continues:
In dieser Gastlichkeit der Ister liegt die Bereitschaft der Anerkennung des Fremden und seiner Fremde ... In this hospitality on the part of the Ister there lies the readiness to acknowledge the foreigner and his foreignness, that is, the fire from heaven that the Germans lack. In der Gastfreundschaft liegt aber zugleich die Entschiedenheit, das Eigene als das Eigene nicht mit der Fremde zu mischen, sondern den Fremden sein zu lassen, der er ist. But in guestfriendship there also lies the resolve not to mix the proper qua proper with the foreign but to let the foreigner be such as he is. Only so is a learning possible in guestfriendship, namely a learning of what the calling and essence of the German poet is. (HH 141)
Let me recall that these sentences, which emphatically stress the priority of the foreigner and her foreignness over the proper and the homely – indeed, as the very condition of possibility of the revelation of the proper of the ‘Germans’ – were written in 1942, at the time when the extermination camps in Poland had just opened. Of course, the foreigner who is invited as guest by the Hesperian poet is not the expelled, the converted, the assimilated or the exterminated. It is the Greek poet of the heavenly fire. As Judith Butler (2009) says in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, some lives are just not grievable. Their loss goes unrecognized.
In what sense, however, is the foreigner foreign or strange? Is the stranger a foreigner on the ground that her nationality, gender or race is other than that of the Hesperian poet? That is doubtless not what Heidegger has in mind. The poet of the heavenly fire is not foreign to the Hesperian poet because the first is Greek and the second, German.
Heidegger casts being, the foreign fire, and the holy in the figure of the foreign guest and stranger in the Der Ister lecture. Now what is proper to that stranger?
That stranger does not bear strangeness as an extrinsic quality. It defines her very content or essence. That means that such a stranger is not identifiable as an entity, whether as a person or thing, a who or what, as if we could know in advance what she is or where she is. Singular in the extreme, already there and yet to come, she defies classification and localization.
Already there as guest in my world, the stranger constitutes its absolute limit, the limit of the becoming-mine of Dasein. Isn’t that why the stranger introduces the possibility of frenzy and madness, of an absolute disorientation and loss of self in one’s home or nation?
Perhaps that is why the stranger sometimes passes for a god or monster, and why a sacrificial logic is most often deployed against her, the logic of the scapegoat, as Richard Kearney explains it in Strangers, Gods and Monsters.6
It is, in any case, what authorizes Jean-François Lyotard to ask how Heidegger’s thought, ‘a thought so devoted to remembering that a forgetting (of Being) takes place in all thought’, could possibly ‘have ignored the thought of “the jews,” which, in a certain sense, thinks, tries to think, nothing but that very fact’ (Lyotard, 1997: 4).
In der Gastfreundschaft liegt aber zugleich die Entschiedenheit, das Eigene als das Eigene nicht mit der Fremde zu mischen, sondern den Fremden sein zu lassen, der er ist. In guestfriendship, the host seeks neither to protect what is proper to him nor to appropriate the property of the foreigner. To be hospitable is to be open to the foreigner in her foreignness without reservation and without conditions imposed on her, such as that she declare her name, show her papers, speak the local language, and so on. It is be resolutely open to the distance that separates the self and the other in her alterity.
The relation to the foreigner, Heidegger adds, is never a mere taking-over, an assumption or appropriation of the other (bloße Übernehmen des Anderen). The relation to the proper is never a self-assured affirmation of the so-called natural or organic (selbstsichere Bejahung des sogenannten ‘Natürlichen’ und ‘Organischen’) (HH 143). To be hospitable is to let the stranger be as she is in her strangeness in one’s home. It resembles the greeting Heidegger describes in his lecture on Hölderlin’s Andenken.
Solches Wesenlassen eines Wesenden in seinem Wesen ist das ursprüngliche Grüßen. This letting-be of a being in its being is the originary greeting. (EHP 128)
Heidegger remarks in the Der Ister lecture that the guest is the presence of the unhomely in the home (die Gegenwart des Unheimischen im Heimischen) and that she turns the thinking of the homely into a steadfast remembrance (ständigen Andenken) of the journey to the foreign. Die Aneignung des Eigenen ist nur als die Auseinandersetzung und gastliche Zwiesprache mit dem Fremden. The appropriation of the proper is only as the encounter and guest-like conversation with the foreign. (HH 142) The foreigner does not cease to be foreign in this conversation, as if she was becoming less and less strange to the Hesperian poet in the course of it. Nor does this conversation reach a terminus ad quem, as if, having appropriated what is proper to him, the Hesperian poet could now dispense with and forget about his foreign guest, expel her from his home.
The Hesperian poet comes to appropriate his vocation in and through the continued dialogue with the foreign guest. The guest is not a means for the Hesperian poet to arrive at what is proper to him. The stranger is already there at the source as a guest (schon an der Quelle das Fremde zu Gast und gegenwärtig ist) (HH 146). She is the origin of the proper. To receive the stranger’s greeting and thus enter in conversation with her is what constitutes the free use of the proper of the Hesperian poet. The Hesperian poet does not first have a home in which to greet the stranger. The stranger’s greeting is what first sets the Hesperian poet on the way home.
What are we to make of this greeting? In what sense does the greeting of the foreigner come first?
And yet, have we not in a sense always already been greeted in the irreplaceability of one’s existence? Is that not why the first gesture of thought is not to question but to respond with thanks for this ‘highest and most lasting gift given to us’ (WCT 142)?
There is a certain semantic affinity between remembrance and greeting in the ordinary use of Andenken current in Hölderlin’s time. Dieter Henrich explains:
The word Andenken was commonly used in the sense of abiding thoughts and warm regards for a person or an event, though this sense soon became archaic. In letters one assured friends of one’s remembrance and entrusted oneself to theirs in greetings and best wishes. (Henrich, 1997: 213)
Ordinarily, we greet someone whom we don’t know or haven’t seen in a while and in whose presence we are now standing. We are rejoiced at seeing them or at seeing them again. We also send our greetings and best wishes, as we do in an email, to someone in whose presence we are no longer or not yet standing. We entrust ourselves to them as their friend.
A greeting in that sense is a token of affection that is sent and received between friends. It highlights the distance that separates the sender and receiver. It also preserves their proximity or nearness in this distance. It does not, however, annul the distance.
A greeting breeds neither familiarity nor ingratiation (Anbiederung). Der echt Gruß schenkt dem Gegrüßten den Anklang seines Wesens (EHP 120). As the recipient of a greeting, I have been charged with the responsibility to respond. Since that responsibility is non-transferable, the greeting singles me out in the irreplaceability of my existence. What is the proper response to a greeting? To return the greeting as someone greeted and welcomed in his essence.
The greeting is a remembrance or thinking-of (An-denken) whose mysterious strength shelters again (zurückbirgt) the recipient and sender of the greeting in the distance of their proper essence (das Gegrüßte und den Grüßenden in die Ferne ihres eigenen Wesens). (EHP 120)
A true greeting is a pure gift. It is a disinterested gesture that wants nothing for itself. Der Gruß will nichts für sich. It is a relation to the other in her alterity or uniqueness.
The friendship instituted by the greeting is not a relation between individuals who are contemporaries or familiar with each other. It is a relation between the Hesperian poet and the foreign guest (the holy). The foreigner is present to the poet in her greeting to him or, what amounts to the same thing, in his remembrance of his journey abroad.7
However, the foreigner becomes a destiny for the poet insofar as the distance that separates them is not annulled. He must maintain a sober relation with her. Instead of a mystical unification with the foreigner, the poet must view her as a possibility to come. To appropriate his vocation, he must project that which has been as what is futural in the extreme. He must open Hesperian humanity to the possibility of the coming of the stranger, or the coming of the holy. That is ‘sobriety for the sublime’ (EHP 142).
What is the holy for Heidegger?
I don’t think it refers to the unity of the most extreme opposites, as it apparently does for Hölderlin, the unity that heals the rupture and separation between man and the god, the finite and the infinite. Nor does it mean the demonic, that is, the confusion of the limits between the animal, the human and the gods, as it does for Jan Patočka (see Derrida, 1996: 2).
It doubtless has a plurality of senses in Heidegger’s reflections between his first lecture on Hölderlin in 1934 and his thought in the 1950s on the fourfold. In the context of the lectures studied in this chapter, however, the holy is the correlate of holy mourning. It refers to the collapse of the divine as a historical possibility. That collapse is the experience of the retreat of the gods.
Acknowledging the distance that separates the human being and the gods, the poet preserves a proximity to them. Their greeting, stored in his remembrance, affects the poet as a silent voice, die lautlose Stimme des Grußes (EHP 146). It welcomes the poet into his poet-hood and calls him to his vocation as the sayer of the holy. That greeting summons the poet to build a house (Haus), that is, a poem, for the heavenly ones who are to come as guests (Gast).
For only when this third element, the guesthouse (das Gasthaus), stands between the heavenly ones and men, is there a place of mortal preparedness for the nearness of the heavenly ones, so that the heavenly ones can be for us the ones who they are. (EHP 142)
The poet founds a home in which he will be able to recollect his journey abroad under the foreign fire on his way to his proper vocation. That home is the guesthouse for the gods, the modern or Hesperian poem.
As I argued in section 3, the gods to which the poet extends his hospitality do not denote a who or a what, a person or thing. They are not objects of worship and belief, of devotion and prayer, of a religious institution, cult or dogma. They are figurations of historical time, of a future that is through and through undecidable (des Unentscheidbaren) (CP 30).
In the end, we have to ask ourselves whether, instead of thinking of the gods as guests of a particular kind, Heidegger is rethinking the notion of the guest. If the guest is a stranger in my home who has something of the uncanny about him, if he is the index of an arrival and departure, of the limit that opens my home to the outside, then he is someone who belongs and does not belong to the home. He is both inside and outside, already there at the source and yet to come. The foreign guest, a figure of passage and transition, of passing away, both familiar and foreign, near and remote, the very figure of the threshold: he is the presence of the uncanny in the at-home of the host.