Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the “Turn”

1. “Destitute Times” and the Need for the Poet: Confronting the Metaphysics of Presence and the “Flight of the Gods”

Heidegger’s views on technology and world attunement as presented in Contributions, prefigure “The Question Concerning Technology,” an essay that further expands Heidegger’s view of technology introduced in “Germania” and “The Rhine” (1934–35) and Introduction to Metaphysics (1935/2000). To understand what Heidegger refers to as “destitute times” in relation to the exigent need for “poets,” it is crucial to understand the relationship between “machination” and “lived experience” as introduced in the Contributions in developing a view of technology that Gosetti-Ferencei (2004) labels a form of “fractured poiesis,” an understanding and experience of modern technology emerging from two interwoven occurrences: The “destruction of the earth by technology, and our failure to ask about the philosophical origins of this destruction” (145). These themes ultimately express the “danger” bound up with, as will be related to both Hölderlin and Rilke, the forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), and the loss of the “holy” in the modern epoch, which is predicated on the forgetfulness of Dasein’s relation to the truth of Being in its unfolding, which is at once a loss of Dasein’s relation to the Earth as a space and place of poetic dwelling and building. As a result, Dasein loses its essential relation to language as an originary phenomenon of “naming” (Nennen), and hence, its authentic historical world or space of dwelling is sacrificed. Under the sway of technology’s attunement, related to the oppressive influence of the metaphysics of presence, the earth, world, and human being are revealed through limited modes of dis-closure expressive of the concern for all that is reducible to the mastery and manipulability of the earth’s resources in service of human progress, and this is expressed by Heidegger in terms of “machination” (Machenshaft) and “calculative thinking” (rechnendes Denken).

As stated, the destitution of the world, the time of the flight of the gods and the concomitant loss of the holy is related directly to the forgetfulness or abandonment of Being, which is for Heidegger (1999) “a dis-swaying [Ver-wesung] of Be-ing” when, as articulated earlier, the Earth shows up in terms of a store of untapped resources to be exploited, and what is “ownmost,” or most originary, about the Earth is “disturbed and only as such does it come into truth as the correctness and representing—νοειν, διανοειν, ιδεα” (80–81); that is, there is a covering over and obscuring of the more primordial understanding of truth and self-presencing (aletheia), lost since the “first beginning” of Western metaphysics, which, for Heidegger, “conditions everything” (81). In the “destitute” modern age, an artless age, world-presencing occurs exclusively in terms of calculative modes of disclosure, dominated by a technical or “productionist” mode of revealing, seeing, and hence experiencing and inhabiting the world. It must be noted that for Heidegger, the “calculation” associated with “machination” is not simply a categorization of a way of knowing the world that is reducible to an epistemological register, for “machination” not only names a mode of dis-closure it instantiates a technical mode of human comportment, for machination determines how Being comes-to-presence and how the world and others show up and assume “meaning” for Dasein. In other words, in the modern age machination determines what we call Dasein’s epoch grounding rejoinder to Being.

Thus, machination is inseparable from comportment because it determines or en-frames Dasein’s “lived experience,” which is to say through a “technological” form of attunement, which Heidegger identifies as das Ge-stell/ “En-framing” in 1955, machination holds sway in Dasein’s life, but what is hidden and obscured in the relationship between machination and Dasein’s “lived-world” is the potential of returning to the forgotten originary relationship of Dasein to the truth of Being. Machination, which emerges from the essence of technology, is ultimately a mode of revealing. However, modern “technology” is not synonymous with techne in the ancient Greek sense of an original and facilitated mode of “bringing forth,” or making manifest, as a form of poiesis—the happening of truth as aletheia. Instead, as Heidegger (1977) argues, the manner of revealing common to the essence of modern technology is a “challenging [Herausfordern]” that sets upon nature, revealing the entirety of nature as that which “will supply energy that can be extracted and stand as such [resource/standing reserve]” (14). The attunement of technology (das Ge-stell/ “En-framing”) “blocks the shining forth and holding-sway of truth” (27); for example, it precludes Earth from manifesting as Earth, it reveals the mighty rivers in terms of their potential to power hydroelectric plants, and it reduces majestic mountain ranges to mere sites of mineral deposits for the purpose of mining. Heidegger is clear that the revealing of technology, as a “fractured poiesis,” is an “ordering” of an extremely limited nature and scope, which “drives out every other possibility of revealing,” and ultimately, “[e]nframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance” (27). Poetry is not merely required to inspire modes of world dis-closure that are other than calculative in nature; rather as Gosetti-Ferencei argues, it is also needed in the first instance to “uncover the concealed essence of technology as revealing, and is thus the source for a redirection of thinking as it takes up again the question of nature or earth” (147).

The understanding of the relationship between machination and “lived-experience” as grounded in the truth of Being, with the potential for overcoming the abandonment of Be-ing, is further developed by Heidegger (1977) in “The Question Concerning Technology” in terms of grasping the “saving power” that lies at the center of the essential relationship between technology and Dasein: Where technology holds sway there is danger, the danger that technology might threaten Da-ein with the “possibility that it could be denied to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primordial truth” (28). But Heidegger, drawing inspiration from Hölderlin’s poetry recognizes that the so-called “saving power” resides at the heart of the “danger” of technology. To “save” something, as Heidegger points out, is to “seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin” and bring it back into its original essence in order to “bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing” (28). Technology, he reasons, cannot exact a total obfuscating effect on the revelation of Being’s truth because technology’s “En-framing” effect is grounded in the abyss (Abgrund) of Being’s truth; that is, it manifests because it is already unfolding from out of what is a “lost” or “forgotten” relationship to Being, so technology already harbors “in itself the growth of the saving power” (28), and the “closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways of saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become” (35). The potential for overcoming the metaphysics of presence depends on the poietic revelation of the essence of technology, and it is Hölderlin’s poetry, channeling the “saving power,” intimating the space beyond the abandonment of Being, the epoch of machination and “technicity” and the privileging of calculative modes of world dis-closure, beyond the instrumental attunement of das Ge-stell, which holds the potential to return Dasein to an experience of the Earth as “holy” and facilitate modes of poetic dwelling consistent with a renewed relationship to Being as guardians and caretakers. Seeking to find the way in which to overcome the oblivion of Being, Heidegger embraces Hölderlin’s poetry in a way that is both futural and historical to the highest degree, for it is essential in transcending das Ge-stell to inspire the “crossing” over from first to the other beginning. When the essence of technology is brought to light and to the fore of Dasein’s concern (care) through remembrance, what Heidegger (1999) terms “thinking-mindfulness (as questioning the truth of being and only as this),” it is possible to grasp the “basic thrust of the first beginning” (89–90), and then the history of Western metaphysics, as the abandonment of Being, is revealed as the history of forgetfulness (see Chapter 1 §3).

As stated in Chapter 1, there is no potential for great cultural founding art to arise and facilitate a historical/cultural reawakening in the modern era, which Heidegger (1971) describes, in relation to Hölderlin’s poetry, as a time when the gods have fled; that is, Dasein experiences the flight of the gods, and this phenomenon is traceable to the loss of the sense of the “holy” that determines the gods’ presence, which defines the age of “destitution.” Heidegger employs a variety of phrases to elucidate the phenomenon of the oblivion of Being including and in addition to the flight of the gods, the “loss of the gods,” the “default of God,” the “absence of the holy,” the “absence of the unknown God,” the “world’s night,” and the “loss of the fire from Heaven.” Despite Heidegger (1971) mentioning, in relation to Hölderlin, that “the ‘united three’—Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ—have left the world” (91)—an issue to be further explored in §2 of this chapter—Heidegger is neither concerned with the ancient Greek pantheon nor Christianity, for, as Foti (1992) observes,

Heidegger, disregarding Hölderlin’s understanding of spirit as divinity (theos or daimon) inclined towards the mortal realm, treats spirit as the poetic spirit (dichtender Geist) of mortals. Poetic spirit makes possible a mortal dwelling in the nearness of the heavenly ones.

(49)

Ultimately, for Heidegger, this is the concern with German Dasein’s “spiritual” relation to the truth of Being, a relationship of estrangement due to the metaphysics of presence and the sway of modern technology. Although it is the case that Dasein has forgotten its relationship with Being, the issue of “forgetting” is more complex than something simply “eluding or escaping” Dasein, as if Dasein is “no-longer-thinking-of-something.” For according to Heidegger (2000), there is “still another kind of forgetting, where it is not we who forget something, but rather something forgets us, so that we are the ones forgotten—by destiny” (117). Thus, as a running theme, there are undeniable historical implications bound up with the abandonment of Being, for the

default of the God means that no god any longer gathers men and things to himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebears something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.

(Heidegger 1971, 91)

It must be noted that Heidegger (2000) is not claiming that the so-called return of the gods or God will rectify the bleak situation of modernity, for the problem is deeper than this and is really located, as stated, in the absence of the “holy,” and specifically, as carried over from our reading of the “Origin,” “Germania” and “The Rhine,” and Contributions, Dasein’s estrangement from the experience of the Earth as a wondrous, sublime, and holy place/space of dwelling:

Hölderlin names nature [physis] the holy because she is “older than the ages and above the gods”. Thus, “holiness” is in no way a property borrowed from a determinate god. The holy is not holy because it is divine; rather the divine is divine because in its way it is holy.

(82)

For the gods to be as gods they require consecrated ground, a holy space within which to dwell. In order for the gods’ historical gathering force to acquire its power, the radiance of the holy must first be present as the harbinger for the historical and yet immemorial reunion of the gods and human-kind. Heidegger (1971) is clear that there could never be an “abode fit for a god, if a divine radiance [does] not first begin to shine in everything that is” (92). Yet, as Heidegger observes, and this was intimated earlier, there is a mode of double concealment at work in the modern epoch: First, there is concealment with regard to Dasein’s original relationship to the truth of Being that has been lost (traceable to the “first beginning”—Platonism). Second, the loss itself is concealed from Dasein and so the problem of the loss or oblivion of Being never manifests as a problem; that there is an original relationship to Being from which Da-sein has fallen is concealed from it in the first instance. Importantly, this precludes any thinking on and formulation of the original question of Being qua Being. For this reason, as Heidegger observes, modern history is even “more destitute” because Dasein cannot even begin to “discern the default of God as default” (91), for in the modern age “even the destitution of the destitute state is obscured,” and this is the “time’s absolutely destitute character” (93).

It is the poet who must endure and experience the “abyss of the world” in holy mourning, and while enduring the absence of the gods, poets must search for “traces of the fugitive gods” (93), staying on the “gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning” (94). The poet’s supreme task, or vocation, as Heidegger (2000) understands it through Hölderlin, is to intercept the hints and intimations of the gods “in order to pass them along to his people,” but in the time of the absence of the gods Hölderlin’s task is to first catch sight of what “has been completed,” in terms of a futural and semi-prophetic seeing, and then to poetize “what he has seen… in order to foretell what is not yet fulfilled” (63). In this way, Hölderlin’s poetry establishes and “determines a new time,” which is the time “of the gods who have fled and of the God who is coming,” and this for Heidegger is a time of need because it “stands in a double lack and a double not; in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and the not-yet of the god who is coming” (64). To span the time of the “having-been” and the “not yet” is understood by Heidegger in terms of Hölderlin’s poetic thought, or remembrance, a “thinking of [Denken an] what is yet to come,” which is at once a thinking of “what has been” as opposed to what is “simply past”—that is, the past as an irretrievable moment within a linear model of time and history (Historie). Through the enlightenment of Andenken, Hölderlin grasps “what is still coming into presence from afar” (109), he is awakened to the destining of “historical” Being.

The poet sees and understands more than simply what has been and what will perhaps be, beyond this, his perceptive insight is both diagnostic and prescriptive, for he understands the why of things; for example, he peers down into the hidden essence of technology, sees to the root and origin of the epoch defining forgetfulness of Being, and, according to Heidegger, poetizes the reason for the modern German mood of nihilistic despair, the degeneration of its life, language, and world. Hölderlin does not merely remember the Greek gods who have fled, but rather his thoughts and poetry recall and recapture the reason for the crisis, namely the forgetfulness of the ancient relationship to the holy and the corollary loss of a history-defining and determining ēthos (ηθος), or authentic manner of poetic dwelling in and through a meaningful sense of community. Importantly, to reiterate, Hölderlin seeks the recovery of the sanctified ground in preparation for the time of the gods’ return, the ground upon which the new holy temple can be raised. While Hölderlin’s poetry is certainly not a form of divine prophecy, it undoubtedly intimates a sense of reverential expectation announcing the proximate arrival of Dasein’s destiny heralded by the gods return to a world lit up once again by the divine fire from Heaven.

Thus, in the time of the oblivion of Being and the loss of the gods, the poet prepares the holy “ground” for the possibility of the return of the gods/God by recovering, and through the “Word,” communicating and inspiring others to experience traces of the holy that remain from the ages when the gods were present by allowing the “holy” to manifest in the poetry. This grounds and founds a people’s historical destiny (Ereignis/enowning event), which is attuned by the fundamental mood or Grundstimmung of the holy “festival” (das Festliche). Heidegger (1971) envisions this festival, which is also experienced as a holiday, as the “site of the wedding feast of men and gods” (93) that occurs on the newly consecrated ground, amid the presencing of the Earth as Earth, where, through the festival attunement, Dasein is brought face to face with the rising of “holy” Earth and Dasein “stands out” and apart from everyday ways of inhabiting the world, which are grounded in and limited to instrumental concerns driven by technicity and machination. When things show up in ways that transcend technological seeing and understanding, through the ek-static attunement of das Festliche, Young (2002) reasons that a sense of “thankfulness” and “gratitude” colors and permeates Dasein’s experience of the world. Instead of obsessing about things in light of technological manipulation (machination), Dasein displays an authentic (Eigentlichkeit) concern or deep sense of care (Sorge) for protecting, guarding, and preserving the Earth, which shows up essentially as a “holy,” “wondrous,” and “mysterious” phenomenon beyond Da-sein’s control and complete understanding.

2. Hölderlin: The “Poet of Poets”: Language, Destiny, and the Holy Attunement of “The Festival” (das Festliche)

The notion of destiny pervades the Hölderlin lectures and essays, where Heidegger (2000) reads Hölderlin as expressing the essence of human dwelling in relation to the founding event of historical Being as the “event” of language, or “the primal event (Ereignis), which disposes the highest possibility of Man’s being” (56). According to Heidegger, the essence of poetry is the “founding of being in the word” (59), and language is the event that opens and attunes Dasein to its historical Being and prepares it for a poetic form of dwelling (ηθος) and building (bauen), which is linked with the historical revelation and appropriation of its destiny in a way where a demand is placed on Dasein to respond creatively and in a unique manner to the address or the call of Being. Hölderlin’s poetry holds the potential to determine the manner in which Dasein appropriates its historical “essence” and enacts its destiny, which first manifests as authentic possibility in the Ereignis, as Dasein’s historical relation to Being is first “spoken” and inaugurated through the language of poetry. Much can be revealed about Dasein’s destiny through the examination of the spiritual and historical power of Hölderlin’s poetizing by focusing on Hölderlin’s “vocation” and role as demigod, as one who exists in the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) and dangerous realm between heaven and earth, the gods and humankind. The poetic dwelling of Hölderlin results from the thoughtful remembrance (Andenken) of not only the gods who have fled but also of Dasein’s lost or fallen (Verfallenheit) relationship to “essential” language as it is bound up with the historical enactment of its life as the authentic unfolding of poetic building and dwelling on the Earth, grounded in the ever-renewed process of measure-taking, that is, the fateful meeting of the human condition, defined as it is by radical limits and finitude, against the sublime and incalculable powers of the Earth in order to first approach the proper “measure” and breath of an authentic historical life and destiny.

In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” Heidegger (2000) lays the groundwork for understanding the communal selfhood of Dasein as it historizes through the confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Being as inspired by Hölderlin’s poetry, which ultimately testifies to Dasein’s “belonging to the earth” (54). Heidegger’s extensive engagement with Hölderlin includes an in-depth analysis of the nature of language as the “event” that is co-original with the inaugural time (Temporalität/Augenblick) of Hölderlin’s poetry, which first disposes, by drawing Dasein into the sway and oscillation of his poetry (which is one with the sway and oscillation [the draft] of Being in its unfolding), opening and readying Dasein for the potential appropriation of its destiny. Through Hölderlin’s poetizing, Dasein’s destiny is first revealed through its relation to both the Earth and the gods, which inspire Dasein’s concerted efforts to ecumenically locate and raise its historical dwelling, and this dwelling acquires meaning only in relation to the understanding of Ereignis that Hölderlin’s poetry imparts. Dasein’s “authentic fulfillment” comes by way of the “freedom of decision,” and the reader will recall from our discussion of “decision” in both the “Origin” and Contributions, that this is not an instance, as in Being and Time, of Dasein’s “choosing to choose itself” through the potential willful mastery of knowledge drawn from the attunement Angst, which allows Dasein to make and remake its world in terms of appropriating and enacting its “owned” possibilities as Being-toward-death. Instead, the “decision” of which Heidegger speaks of in relation to Hölderlin highlights Dasein’s “receptivity,” its resolute openness, to the ontological “call of Being” to the inaugural Time poetized by Hölderlin, and it is the sway and oscillation of the poetry and the attuned participation within this “movement/moment” that first transports Dasein within an ek-static grounding attunement (Grundstimmung) into the historical truth of Being’s destining.

When Heidegger (2000a) approaches the question of the relationship between Being and history in Introduction to Metaphysics, he states unequivocally that the fate of language hangs in the balance. The overcoming of the oblivion or forgetfulness of Being, the move beyond the metaphysics of presence, requires the understanding of Hölderlin’s poetry in terms of the original nature of language, Dichtung in the essential sense, which is both the origin (Ursprung) of Dasein as historical and the poietic origin of language itself. What is Heidegger’s conception of language as it relates to Hölderlin’s poetizing of Being as historical phenomenon? How does the event of language occur and in what manner does Hölderlin poetize Dasein’s destiny? In “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger (1993) writes the following regarding language, and this should be understood in terms of Hölderlin’s poetry and the essence of language:

Language is the house of Being. In its home man [poetically] dwells [and builds]. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.

(217)

It is not the case that Dasein “speaks”; rather, it is language that speaks, for language is not the possession, expression, or instrumental tool or medium that Dasein wields and controls. We have already discussed language as a poietic phenomenon in terms of the “bringing forth” of phenomena in the light of their self-showing, as related to the Greek understanding of δεικνυμι (deiknumi), and in relation to Hölderlin we must now understand this “bringing forth” (as poiesis inspired by Dichtung) in terms of the poet’s “saying” or “naming” (Nennen), which, as Heidegger (1971) claims, is a “saying” (as pointing) and a “calling” that “brings closer what it calls”; the poet’s calling “brings the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness” (198).1 The essence of language, as poetized by Hölderlin, does not merely bring what is unknown or concealed into the light of truth “in order to set it down in closest proximity to what is present”; rather, naming allows that which is called to manifest its presencing while at once retaining its “remoteness” (98); that is, certain aspects of what is brought to presence recede from full disclosure, and so poetic language shelters and preserves an originary sense of what is absent as primordial concealment. As Heidegger claims, poetic “naming” reveals and brings forth, as attuned to the truth of Being, “imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar” and Hölderlin’s “poetic saying [naming] of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of what is alien” (226). As a response to the address or call of Being, language is not understood in terms of what is primarily “spoken,” for Heidegger stresses the importance of “listening” for the call of language—the call of Being—for Da-sein “first speaks when, and only when, [it] responds to language by listening to its appeal” (216). Thus, language is not merely an oral phenomenon; it is also, and more primordially, an aural event, and it is Dasein’s ontological predisposition to listen for and “hear” the call of Being that facilitates the epoch grounding rejoinder to the call and demand of Hölderlin’s poetry, which places Dasein in the moment (Augenblick) of its “decision,” opening it to the supreme possibility of appropriating its authentic self-hood, history, and destiny (Ereignis).

As contended throughout, the metaphysics of presence and the oblivion of Being are ineluctably bound up with the Dasein’s falling (Verfallenheit) from its essential relationship with the truth of Being, which is at once a falling away from essential language. In §1 above we introduced the understanding of the flight of the gods, in the essay”… Poetically Man Dwells…” Heidegger refers to the loss of the holy as the plight of Dasein’s dwelling, its state of foundering. This, as related to our earlier analysis regarding overcoming the oblivion of Being, is not merely about “building” in terms of erecting new religious temples, cathedrals, or churches, similarly, the “plight of dwelling does not lie merely in the lack of houses” (161); instead, it is about the loss of holy ground. In this “destitute” state/era, Dasein fails to experience the supreme “good” of language, and this fallenness from essential language is, for Heidegger (2000), one manifestation of the inevitable and inherent “dangers” that language harbors, in terms of what represents a tragic double bind, for language is described by Heidegger as “the most dangerous good” (55). Through the misinterpretation and misuse of language, there emerges the “threat that beings pose to being itself” (55), and as Heidegger (2014) points out, that which language reveals also holds the potential for deception, and beyond this, it “first exposes humans to the realm of being and thereby of non-being, and so the possible threatening of loss of being” (75), as is the case with the forgetfulness of Being. This is because language “by its very essence… bears decline within it, whether into a mere reciting or reporting of what has been said, or the decline that falls into idle talk” (76). While it is certainly the case that language facilitates Dasein’s understanding of the world, the communication of such understanding, according to Heidegger, does not represent the very essence of language, which for Heidegger, in his reading of Hölderlin, is to be found within its more primordial manifestation, which holds the supreme “good for the fact that man can be as historical” (56) in and through the revelatory power of language.

Hölderlin poetizes the primal event (Ereignis) of language, which is the gathering and appropriation of Dasein’s historical destiny that occurs at the moment of the original “naming” of the gods and all things, which reveals to Dasein its proper historical “vocation” and brings its new, epoch-founding world to stand in the word. When Dasein, attuned and resolute, partakes in the inaugural moment of Being’s coming-to-presence, which is the poetic “commemoration” of the moment when “time arose and was brought to stand” in the word, it enters into the originary historical conversation or “dialogue” that is one with history’s originary beginning. Heidegger draws the understanding of Dasein’s “historical” dialogue from Hölderlin’s poem that begins “Conciliator, you who never believed…”:

Much has man experienced.
Named many of the heavenly ones,
Since we have been a dialogue
And able to hear from one another.

(57)

Hölderlin commemorates and poetizes the primal historical event as the time (Augenblick-Ereignis) that humanity became “One” historical dialogue (“Since we have been a dialogue”). This is crucial for our purposes, in that through Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin during the 1930s, a renewed vision of Dasein and its authentic potential for historical-communal “dialogue” that is radically other than Dasein’s internal monologue as solus ispse (“existential solipsism”) in the grip of Angst’s attunement emerges. Although Heidegger (1962) stresses in Being and Time that “existential solipsism” is “far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring” (233/188), as stated earlier, Heidegger later recognizes the latent subjectivity present to his fundamental ontology of Dasein that hinders the authentic possibility of Mitsein, or authentic communal interrelations (Being-with-others). Through the encounter with Hölderlin, Heidegger abandons all traces of subjectivism to offer instead a vision of Dasein that is already turned outward, stretched out to the condition of the event (Ereignis) of its historical/communal dialogue that, as we have shown in Chapter 1 §2, indicates that Dasein is beholden to others, world, and Earth, given over in advance to that which binds and determines the Dasein of a people. For recall that in “Germania” and “The Rhine” Heidegger claims that the truth of Being, the essential coming-to-presence of the Earth within in its primordial mode of concealment, determines every individual by exceeding them. Indeed, the historical enactment of Dasein’s fateful dialogue/conversation presupposes the need and demand that Dasein listens in advance to the call of the other, made possible by the listening and responding to the address, most important, of the language of Hölderlin’s poetry. Heidegger expresses the crucial notion of the historical “dialogue” inspired by Hölderlin, which the historical Dasein is and has been, when claiming that dialogue relates to the moment (Augenblick) when we first “partake” in the dialogue, when we “decide in favor of that which historically we can be” (71). Through Hölderlin’s poetry Dasein enters into and stands within the “decision” to become a “temporally determined, historical arising dialogue” (72).

For Heidegger (2000), as stated earlier, this historical “dialogue” is the Ereignis, the moment of Temporality (Augenblick) when Dasein’s world happens through poetic naming in essential language. Language, as an originary event of naming, gathers and brings the world, the gods, and beings to stand as that which endures, initiating the singular dialogue that humanity has been since the moment of “torrential time,” since time temporalized, and “has been broken up (torn) into present, past, and future” (59), and so the event of origi-nary language, which expresses the historical Being of humanity, is at once an originary event of Temporality (Temporalität). Thus, in Heidegger’s (2014) reading of Hölderlin, the Ereignis is understood in terms of an original event of poetizing, an event of language in relation to the time and truth of Being, which makes possible Dasein’s entrance into its proper and uniquely destined and appointed historical time. However, it must be noted that the language of Hölderlin’s poetry is never simply the renaming anew of all the things already in existence; it does not “name” the unfolding of Dasein’s current historical situation, events in terms of their chronological unfolding as in a view to historiography (Historie). Instead, the dialogue is originary in that it does not arise within the unfolding of history as one occurrence or event among many; rather, there is “history” in the first instance based on the opening of this “dialogue” poetized by Hölderlin, “for ever since such dialogue has been occurring, there first is and has been time and history at all” (72).

When Heidegger speaks of entering into the “decision” to stand within the attunement and moment of the poetry, he is indicating that Dasein simultaneously becomes a participant in and preserver (“partaker”) of Hölderlin’s poetry, this paves Dasein’s entryway, and as it is transported into the “dialogue,” it is then poised to take a stance with others with regard to a collective destiny. This occurs, according to Heidegger, when the gods who address us, in the presence of the “holy” Earth, place us under their claims by “bringing us to language with respect to whether and how we are, how we respond, by committing our Beyng to them or by way of a telling refusal” (72). This we have referred to as Dasein’s epoch grounding rejoinder to Being, and this, for Heidegger (2000), in relation to Hölderlin’s poetizing of the Ereignis, “springs from the responsibility of a destiny,” and when brought to a response, brought to language, we are at once brought to the realm of decision “as to our historical fate” (58). How Dasein responds to the gods, or the “unknown God,” historically determines its previously indeterminate mode of dwelling and building on the Earth, which, as we explain below, is in essence wholly contingent on Dasein’s initial “measuring” itself against the “holy,” that is, what Heidegger (1971) refers to as “the authentic gauging of the dimension of [authentic/poetic] dwelling” (227).

We have said that Hölderlin resides within the space of the in-between, that is, between the gods and humanity and, as stated, Heidegger traces the poet’s profound intuitive understanding of divine-human relations to his perilous existence as demigod, and such an existence reveals the “dangerous” vocation of the poet. Just as poetic language harbors an ever-present sense of danger, so, too, does the poet’s precarious existence by nature flirt with potential disaster. As Heidegger (2000) observes, although poetry might appear “the most innocent of occupations,” it is instead “the most dangerous work” (61), for when attempting to capture the god’s fiery rays, the poet exposes himself to imminent “madness” and “blindness.” Indeed, Hölderlin slipped into the dark abyss of insanity because he was driven by the task to stand firm amid the “excessive brightness” of the gods’ presence for the sake of the German people (instantiating the role of demigod). In the following passage, Heidegger (2014) describes the “danger” of Hölderlin’s task in terms related to his vocation, the exigency of his poetizing:

The poet seduces the lightning flash of the God, forcing it into word, and places this word charged with lightning into the language of his people. The poet does not process the lived experiences of his psyche, but stands “under the God’s thunderstorms”—“with naked head,” exposed without protection and delivered from himself.

(31)

From this understanding of the “dangerous” existence of the demigod, who in Greek myth defies description in either divine or mortal terms, Heidegger claims that Hölderlin is both of the people’s time and of his own time and existence. The time of Hölderlin’s poetry is the new or inaugural time of Dasein’s historical destiny, the potential of which manifests in the gods’ “first signs,” as Hölderlin, through Andenken, catches glimpses of what has already been completed (the first beginning) while at once poetizing what the implication of these hints and intimations are for what has not yet come to pass, what is still on the approach, namely, another beginning or new historical origin. In relation to our thoughts regarding Andenken, Foti (1992) asserts that Andenken is a “commemorative thinking” which is always mindful of “the origin, the source, or ‘homeland,” and yet to first approach the understanding of origin immanent within Hölderlin’s poetry, in line with our interpretation of the poetizing of both the poet and the thinker, Andenken “must relinquish the metaphysical ideal of the origin’s self-sufficiency and impassive purity” (45), that is, transcend the traditional metaphysical notion of origin as immutable, eternal essence (substantia). The poetic thinking (Andenken) of Hölderlin first inspires poetizing of the “dialogue” and the type of thinking that recovers the concealed ground on which the past relation to the gods depends, and it is Hölderlin’s destiny (vocation) to locate, reopen, and find this consecrated ground and Time anew. For poetry, as Heidegger (2000) reasons, is at once a founding and grounding of Dasein’s historical existence in the word: “[P]oetry is not only foundational in the sense of free bestowal,” which is a founding, “but also in the sense of the firm grounding of human existence on its ground” (59). However, in relation to Heidegger’s thoughts of the Turn, we must stress that this ground, this origin (Ursprung) of Dasein’s historical world, is never determined in advance for Dasein.

Although Young (2001) offers an insightful reading of Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin, we question the move establishing a sharp division between “early” and “late” interpretations of Heidegger’s collected Hölderlin writings: the so-called early Hölderlin essays/courses spanning the period of 1934 through 1939 and the later writings on Hölderlin, which can be chronicled from approximately 1940 to 1955. Young’s claim is that the “early Hölderlin texts treat Hölderlin as a thinker rather than a poet—as someone whose work, though formally speaking that of a poet, is, when it comes to content, indistinguishable from that of the (philosophical) thinker” (72), who thinks ultimately on the essence of poetry. These early texts also think on the issue of Dasein’s “destitution” or its “spiritual distress,” and this is the issue we refer to as the flight of the gods based on the loss of holy or consecrated ground, which is related intimately to the potential for Dasein’s appropriation of its authentic historical destiny. The problem confronted in the early texts, according to Young, is that of Dasein forgetting its heritage, its authentic gods, the gods of ancient Greece, and this requires the “poet’s ‘reminding’ [Dasein] of [its] Greek heritage—followed by the propagation of [its] ‘remembrance’ throughout the culture by the machinery of the state” (90). In the later text, as Young claims, “the ground of the ‘default of God’ is something ‘even grimmer’—the fact that the divine radiance… in which alone gods are gods ‘has become extinguished’” (90).

We agree with many aspects of Young’s overall interpretation, however, we claim, and this deviates from Young’s reading, that it is possible to interpret the late essay, “… Poetically Man Dwells…”, written in 1951, in terms of Heidegger thoughtfully reflecting on and at once further enhancing and developing themes from—and not moving beyond—his earlier lectures on Hölderlin. For example, although Heidegger brings into play the notion of the “unknown God” in 1951, this concept is most certainly not the attempt to anthropomorphize the holy in terms of a single, omnipotent deity but, rather, to highlight the notion of divinity or the holy in terms of a self-secluding presence. The concept of the “unknown divinity” appears wholly consistent with Heidegger’s understanding of the overarching sense of the holy, which has been linked with the Earth, primordial concealment, and the perennial enigma of Being, or the superlative power of beying, as present to the earlier Hölderlin lectures (1934–35). It is also consistent with the understanding of mystery and primordial concealment already at work in the first version of the “Origin” (1935). In addition, we point out that in the 1943 essay, “Remembrance” it is blatantly evident that Heidegger undoubtedly conceives Hölderlin as a “thinker,” whose poetry is informed and its powers heightened by the thought or mode of dis-closure we have introduced as Andenken, and this understanding runs contrary to Young’s conclusion that it is only within the “early” Hölderlin readings (1934–1939) that Heidegger approaches the poet as a “thinker.” It is true that the later Hölderlin essays represent the continued development of Heidegger’s thought; for example, Heidegger rethinks the interpretation of the choral ode of Sophocles’s Antigone as he moves from Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935 to The Ister in 1942; however, it is not necessarily the case that a definitive line can be drawn establishing a division that marks out “Heidegger I and Heidegger II” as related to the distinctive interpretive approaches to so-called earlier and later readings of Hölderlin.

Turning to analyze the 1951 essay, “… Poetically Man Dwells…,” we move to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s, “In Beautiful Blue,” a poem that speaks of the historical dwelling of both the poet and futural Dasein. As Heidegger (1971) understands it, the enactment of Dasein’s authentic destiny, through understanding its ultimate potential in relation to “the unknown god” or the powers of the holy Earth, occurs by way of the ever renewed, ever continued process referred to above as “measure-taking.” Heidegger reasons that this poem poetizes the manner in which Dasein becomes historical through the enactment of its destiny in terms of its reattuned mode of dwelling and building:

May, if life is sheer toil, a man
Lift his eyes and sat: so
I too wish to be? Yes. As long as Kindness,
The Pure, still stays with his heart, man
Not unhappily measures himself
Against the godhead. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest like the sky? I’d sooner
Believe the latter. It’s the measure of man.
Full of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth. But no purer
Is the shade of the starry night,
If I might put it so, than
Man, who is called an image of the godhead.
Is there a measure on earth? There is
None.

(219–220)

Standing in the presence of the gods does not take Hölderlin beyond the Earth or human condition, for poetry, as Heidegger states, “does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it” (216); instead, it is the most authentic form of earthly dwelling, a dwelling that is “poetic” in nature, consisting of “measure-taking,” in which the poet, firmly grounded on the Earth, casts his glance upward to the sky, spanning the “dimension” that separates humanity from the gods. “Poetry,” claims Heidegger, “is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, this brings him into dwelling” (218). Since no authentic measure exists in the world or on the earth, Dasein arrives at the poetic essence of its historical dwelling only by way of measuring itself against the divine, against that which is without measure. Hence, the “measure-taking” required is not a common measure, a quantitative (Cartesian) calculating of some distance in space, consisting of points and coordinates, but rather, it is an essential ontological form of measuring in which Dasein first comes into its authentic temporal-historical dwelling by gauging itself against the awesome and incalculable powers of the Earth (or the unknown God) while holding itself in the “dimension”—between heaven and earth, between the sky and the ground that bears up Dasein’s dwelling—and meting its earthly life against the primordial source of its Being-in-the-world, the emergence of “holy” Earth.

In order for Dasein to come into its authentic historical dwelling, it must locate, establish, and continually reestablish its ties to the divine, for “man does not undertake this spanning [measure-taking] just now and then; rather, man is man at all in this spanning” (221). The potential for Dasein’s destiny is first revealed through Hölderlin’s poetry (as a measure-taking) in the founding of Dasein’s historical world in language as “dialogue” and event (Ereignis). Hölderlin, standing in the presence of the gods, intercepts their signs, and poetizes the intimate belonging-together of humans and gods in the presence of the holy as manifest in the dimension of the sky. Just as Hölderlin’s poetic task is to mete out his existence against the divine, so, too, is it Dasein’s vocation to seek the measurement for its own unique historical earthly dwelling by turning to the Earth and listening for its “reticent” call. With vision and spirit, Hölderlin takes measure of the distance, and what his poetry commemorates is that the enactment of Dasein’s destiny, occurring through the process of upward looking measuring, which might be understood in terms of “negation” (via negativa); that is, Dasein learns what it is in terms of its so-called historical essence by measuring itself against all that it is not, against all that is beyond Dasein, namely, the sublime, infinite power of Being, of the Earth.

Thus, it is from the sacred and “holy” Earth that Dasein receives the proper gauge for assessing its potential historical “vocation,” its potential way of building, thinking, and dwelling poetically that is wholly unique to it and its historical epoch. Humanity and the forces of the divine are viewed as counter-striving, complementary phenomena, united within the familiar realm of the “lighted sky,” and Hölderlin shows that each belongs to the other, representing the strife between the unconealment and concealment of Being’s primordial unfolding (the truth of Being), and this “spanning” on Earth and beneath the sky is the “dimension”—the between—or distance that both Hölderlin and eventually Dasein, through the attuned participation in Hölderlin’s poetry, must traverse in order to dwell poetically, in order to exist in an authentic historical manner. As Hölderlin’s measuring glance travels the vast expanse between heaven and earth, working to capture traces of the divine, he stands under the lighted sky beneath the god’s lightning flashes. In doing so, as Heidegger claims, he is at once delivering himself over to himself, appropriating his Being, and testifying to and fulfilling his calling or vocation as a poet by exposing himself to the sublime powers of Being. The poet’s vocation, to reiterate, is to intercept divine intimations, and through the language charged with the originary power of the gods’ signs, communicate these messages to Dasein, and Heidegger (2000) locates Hölderlin’s poetic vocation in the poem, “As When on Holiday…”, from 1939 and claims that it expresses, most purely, the essence of poetry as Dichtung:

Yet us it behooves, you poets, to stand
Bare-headed beneath God’s thunderstorms,
To grasp the father’s ray, itself, with our own hands
And to offer to the people
The heavenly gift wrapped in song.

(63)

Anticipating the god’s messages, Hölderlin stands in-between two realms and locates himself near the source of the “holy,” in the presence of the God, in order to capture his veiled message and communicate it through his poetizing. However, there is the understanding that the Heavenly Father must, by his nature, remain concealed even in the lighted sky, the mediating context between Heaven and Earth. According to Heidegger (1971), the enigmatic God, the sublime and mysterious Earth, must remain as enigmatic source or origin of the poet’s inspiration, and the God’s “hints” must remain as “hints,” for the God must show “himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown” (222). The god’s presence is always self-concealing, and even in the bright, familiar sky, defies full disclosure—and this self-concealing presence for Heidegger is importantly the measure for the poet, and, as stated, ultimately the force that Da-sein must measure itself against in order to be historical. Indeed, Hölderlin’s poetry is a poetic measuring only because it “says the sights of heaven in such a way that he submits to its appearances as to the alien elements to which the unknown god has ‘yielded’” (225), indicating that Hölderlin gives himself over to the primal mystery, the self-concealing natures of both the unknown god and the “holy” Earth. As related to the “Origin,” Contributions, and “Germania” and “The Rhine,” Hölderlin understands the importance of allowing the Earth to presence as Earth and does not forcibly attempt to wrest it completely from concealment and so protects and shelters that which is concealed in its most primordial presencing as self-concealing. This Foti (1992) refers to as resisting the urge to subject Being to the “absolutizing grasp” of reason, which “mandates the practice of releasement [Gelassenheit]” (48). In other words, Hölderlin respectfully, out of thankfulness and gratitude, allows the Earth to reveal its authentic nature as a self-concealing and “holy” phenomenon, thus allowing the Earth to retain its mystery and wonder. Hölderlin’s poetry captures and poetizes the god’s hints along with the self-concealed and reticent address of the holy Earth in what Heidegger (1971) calls a “concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that [always] remains a listening” (223).

Heidegger links Hölderlin’s poetizing of human destiny with the ancient festivals of Greece, and the essence of Hölderlin’s poetry, expressed through the originary power of poietic language, holds power over the historical participants in the poetry, inspiring their encounter with the holy, which occurs as an “event”—the reunion of gods and humankind—because his poetry inspires what Heidegger calls the grounding attunement of das Festliche (“The Festival”), the most primordial form of human attunement that Heidegger identifies. In relation to Heidegger’s move beyond fundamental ontology of Being and Time, the attunement of das Festliche is more primor-dial than the “holy” mourning Heidegger writes of in “Germania and The Rhine,” and beyond this, McNeill (2006) reveals that the Grundstimmung of Hölderlin’s poetry, as related to human dwelling, “is not simply that of Angst in the face of death,” for the attunement of Angst, when conceived in relation to the Hölderlin lectures and essays, “is itself pervaded by a more primordial attunement: that of… das Festliche” (150).2 Whereas Angst reveals world as world, the overarching system of relations (world), world acquires authentic historical ground and meaning only when Earth rises up through the world to authenticate it. The Festival mood reveals world in its authentic relation to the truth of Being, wherein participants are transported in a state of ek-static rapture outside of their everyday ways of being, as a profound sense of wonder and gratitude permeates their lives. The Ereignis is the paradigmatic temporal moment (Augenblick) when the holy Earth rises to engulf and transform the everyday world of Dasein. Hölderlin’s poetry not only inspires this festive mood, it is also born of it, for The Festival is the mood “from which there issues the birth of those [poets] who stand between men and gods and endure this ‘between’” (150).

In addition, Heidegger, drawing from Hölderlin, refers to The Festival as the celebratory wedding feast between the gods and humans, marking the return of the god(s) because the ground has, once again, been consecrated with the “holy” and transfigured manifestation of Earth as Earth. However, it must be noted that the gods do not return as the saviors of Dasein, rescuing it from the forgetfulness of Being. Instead their manifestation, and hence the idea of the “Festival” mood marking out the reuniting of the gods and humans in the presence of the holy, offers only the possibility or potential for the overcoming of the metaphysics of presence, for it is in the presence of the gods that have returned that the possibility first opens for the historical and divine “measure-taking” that Heidegger claims is required for the inspiration of Dasein’s poetic dwelling and building on the Earth. Thus, it is possible to understand the Festival attunement in a way that is in line with the reading of Dasein’s “measure-taking” of the divine as related to its potential poetic building and dwelling, the raising of its historical abode, but only if, as Heidegger (1971) declares, we listen intently and pay heed to Hölderlin’s poetic words. For the potential for Dasein’s authentic historical life is opened and appropriated within the event of language and Time (Ereignis), as a form of upward looking measure-taking, only as “long as Kindness/The Pure, still stays with [its] heart” (228). Kindness, according to Heidegger’s understanding, is more than an empathetic emotional response or quality of caring for divinity, world, and others. In light of Heidegger’s reading, which at first appears to be a tautological definition of “kindness,” citing as he does, Sophocles’s words, “Χαρις χαριν γαρ εστιν ‘ε τικτους αει—For kindness it is that ever calls forth kindness” (229), it is possible, because it is in line with a Heideggerian understanding of attunement, to understand kindness in terms of a “guiding attunement” emerging from the Grundstim-mung of das Festliche that colors Dasein’s entire Being-in-the-world, from out of which there is an awakening to several crucial aspects of Dasein’s renewed vision and enactment of its inspired “measure-taking” and poetic dwelling and building:

In the “Festival” mood there is a “standing out” from not only everyday ways of inhabiting the world; there is also a movement away from—as related to the oblivion of Being—instrumental ways of engaging the world, which indicates that Dasein transcends its “unpoetic dwelling,” highlighted by the “incapacity to take the [authentic] measure,” which “derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating” (228), as an effect of technology’s “En-Framing”;

The “Festival” mood opens Dasein to the poetic understanding that in the presence of the holy Earth and the god(s) it is at once in the presence of that “which in its very self-disclosure manifests the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself” (225), and so calls Dasein to submit or release itself over to their unique ways of Being and presencing. Thus, within the “measure-taking” of a poetic dwelling there occurs a “disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness,” and, rather, calls us to respectfully and with kindness, guard and preserve the concealed in its unconcealment, and so, for example, the unknown god appears as unknown, in other words, as that which is beyond human measure, without measure, and this is the authentic “measure against which man measures himself” (223). This separates poetic “measure-taking” from technical notions of measure, for here we are guided not by rigid metric standards but, rather, by an address or call, intimations, hints, and “gestures befitting the measure to be taken,” drawn in through the “concentrated perception” that begins and grows as an attuned form of listening in advance for the call of the gods and the holy Earth; and

Attuned in the mood of das Festliche, Dasein understands that its historical dwelling, if it is to be both authentically historical and poetic, consists in repeated and ever-renewed “measure-taking,” for indeed, it is only in the continuing process of “measure-taking” that Dasein comes into its nature, for only insofar as “man takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his nature,” and this life of poetic measure-taking is precisely, for Heidegger, “what is poetic in dwelling.”

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Festival, as the reawakening of the pervasive sense of the holy, bears directly on the potential of Germany (in the mid-1930s into the 1940s) overcoming its modern spiritual crisis (Gosetti-Ferencei 2002; Young 2001, 2002; Caputo 1999; Foti 1992; Zimmerman 1990). We conclude this section by examining the cultural and historical scope and influence of Dichtung in relation to German Dasein’s authentic heritage/destiny as conceived by Heidegger. What does Hölderlin indicate about the scope of Dichtung, which influences Heidegger’s expanding conception of Dasein’s historical destiny in terms of the future, in terms of an indeterminate historical event? What does the encounter with Hölderlin say about the authentic heritage of the Greeks, which Heidegger insists must be experienced and retrieved in order for Germany to enact its own authentic destiny? To imagine Germany’s Greek heritage exclusively in terms of the “classical paradigm” of art is perhaps a bit misleading. It is possible and indeed legitimate to read Heidegger in terms of expressing a distinction between two historical Greek responses to Being in the Hölderlin lectures: the classical response and the Archaic response, respectively. However, as opposed to highlighting the distinction between the classical and archaic responses to Being, we are more interested in examining the notion of “Greek” heritage from the perspective of both cultural epochs, in terms of “origins.”

By examining the phenomenon that grounds and inspires the overarching ancient Greek response to Being, the phenomenon that prefigures the emergence of both the classical and archaic epochs, we can understand Greek heritage as relating at once to the Greeks of both classical and archaic ages, who share, in an important sense, a single (primordial) heritage born of their unique spiritual relationship to the divine forces of the Earth—the primor-dial fire from Heaven. It is not so much their “origins” that differs, as it is the unique epochal grounding rejoinder to the call and address of Being of each cultural age to the presencing of the fire from Heaven, which resulted in two distinct historical moments. For in the Hölderlin lectures (most specifically, The Ister), Heidegger contemplates a people’s receptivity to their history in the presence of the holy and their subsequent form-giving responses to this moment, and so both cultures, both moments in Greek antiquity, are essential to understanding the historical Greek heritage. Inspired by Hölderlin, Heidegger appears to be embracing the older, darker, and more primordial forces that simultaneously inspired both the archaic poets and the festivals, competitions, politics, architecture, and poetry of the classical age.3

It is not the return to the classical Greek paradigm of art or the return of the Olympian pantheon that Heidegger seeks for Germany. To reiterate, he is not interested in a classical Greek renaissance, a representation of ancient Greece in modern dress, in the form of a decadent, neoclassicism, or aesthetic model that produces an inauthentic facade of genuine culture. Such a flawed ideal formed the basis of his developing and ongoing criticism of National Socialism in the mid-1930s and beyond (Caputo 1999; Zimmerman 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe 1990).4 Rather, Heidegger works toward a deeper understanding of their primordial encounter with Being as a sacred event, which represents Germany’s true link to the Greeks (in addition to language) with the potential for the “other” (German) beginning. This is because he seeks a retrieval and beginning (Ursprung-Anfang) that is always unique, new, and singular, in that it is related specifically to the authentic possibilities of a historical people in their own unique relation to Being. Presumably, we can locate the greatness of the classical Greeks in their ability to successfully appropriate the heritage poetized by Homer, who first brought the Olympians gods to form and word in response to the archaic Greeks’ heritage (the fire from Heaven), and this notion of authentic Greek heritage appears to be what Heidegger insists is entirely lacking in the spiritually deprived milieu of modern Europe (the age of “destitution”), obsessed with technology and calculative modes of world dis-closure. If Germany’s destiny is to be an authentic world/cultural-founding occurrence, the Germans must be opened, via Hölderlin’s poetry, to the sense of the holy to motivate and authenticate their gift for giving form to their world through the clarity of presentation.

The classical Greek paradigm, as envisioned by Heidegger, is representative of a historical response to Being that appears to strike a perfect “Nietzschean” balance between the openness to Be-ing as the fire from Heaven (the Dionysian) and the clarity of presentation (the Apollonian) required by a culture in order to bring its understanding and experience of Being to stand momentarily in great works, exalted moments of form-giving creative activity, which express that culture’s true ecumenical spirit, which always manifests itself and is granted through their resolute dedication and gratitude toward and thankfulness for Being (Young 2001). However, what has been said is not intended to discount or deny outright the possibility of the return of the gods of ancient Greece in new forms. For as stated, the way in which the gods manifest (return) is contingent on the status of the holy and Dasein’s relationship to the divine; for example, Zeus, the Heavenly father, and Apollo, the brilliant sun-god, are for Heidegger temporary forms, cultural embodiments, and unique instantiations of the pervasive, originary manifestation of the holy. The possibility of the gods’ return—and this possibility remains alive for Heidegger throughout his philosophical engagement with Hölderlin—hinges on Dasein’s authentic reawakening to the source of all divinity, Earth, Being, or the fire from Heaven, which (while formless itself) takes on specific forms and attributes unique to the historicality of the culture or civilization, within which the gods are embodied manifestations of the people’s authentic relationship to the holy (Young 2001; Bambach 2003).

Despite Homer’s poetizing the fate and historicality of the West, Heidegger claims that the archaic Greeks lacked what the classical Greeks possessed in abundance, namely, the gift for the clarity of presentation, for example, the inspired, creative activity that brought Being to shine in their works of architecture, poetry, and politics. In The Ister, Heidegger (1996) emphasizes the foreignness of the Greeks to the Germans (and vice versa), stressing that the Germans must become homely in a different manner than either the classical or archaic Greeks. “Hölderlin,” Heidegger argues, “recognizes that the historicality of those two humankinds is intrinsically different” (124), and so just as the Greeks became homely in a unique way, so, too, must the Germans become homely in a way that is unique to their culture. However, in order to appropriate what is rightfully the tradition and authentic heritage of both cultures, “the Germans must be struck by the fire from the Heavens” (136), which is the ancient heritage they share with the Greeks, the relationship to the holy that has been lost and covered over. For only if the ancient holy fire strikes the Germans will they move toward “the correct appropriation of their own gift for presentation” (136). Heidegger links the incessant modern drive for technological mastery of the world with the German’s alienation from their proper relationship to the Earth, and thus, they require a poet such as Hölderlin to reawaken the spiritual sense of the holy, to reconnect the culture with the holy fire that once burned so brightly in the ancient skies above Homer and Hesiod. Hölderlin’s poetry attempts to reawaken the sense of the holy, the awe and wonder in the presence of the divine Earth, and it is only through his poetry that the law of history manifests itself, and this law manifests itself only to the poet.

Thus, it is Hölderlin’s poetry that holds within it the fate of Germany and the West. However, as Heidegger writes in “Germania” and “The Rhine,” a pressing concern, which is reiterated by Heidegger in 1942, Hölderlin’s poetry has not yet been understood, primarily because the proper heirs and preservers of his poetry have not yet arrived, and so Germany of the mid-1930s and 1940s fails to benefit from the power of his word. Heidegger (2014) observes in 1934–35, as his mounting dissatisfaction with National Socialism grows and is documented, “Hölderlin’s poems become more inexhaustible, greater, stranger from year to year—and cannot be classified anywhere in an ultimate sense, they still lack their genuine historical and spiritual realm” (25). Hölderlin, in the later lectures, undoubtedly assumes the role of poet of the future, of the new futural paradigm of art that will be inaugurated by a genuine historical response to his poetry. Gadamer (1992, 1999), interpreting Hölderlin as a futural poet, reasons that Hölderlin belongs to neither an idealistic, bygone age nor the immediate present of Heidegger’s Germany; rather, Hölderlin as a poet belongs “to a future which could usher in an overcoming of metaphysics and the present forgetfulness of Being” (Gadamer 1999, 147). Thus, Heidegger expands the scope of Dichtung and the potential for Da-sein’s destiny in the 1940s, pointing toward, as Bambach (2010) observes, a “transition to an ‘other’ beginning” that is not limited to the German Volk but extends “through the history of the West” (105). This indicates that Hölderlin holds the potential to inspire future poets to found and ground a people’s destiny through the recovery or reestablishment of a respectful, awe-inspiring relationship to Being that has been forgotten by Germany and the West in modern times (a phenomenon traceable to the “first” beginning).

3. From Hölderlin to Rilke: A “Futural” Poet Who Poetizes the Essential Truth of Being?

Moving from Hölderlin, we now consider a related issue, asking, “What type of poets other than Hölderlin might be up to the supreme task of poetizing Dasein’s historical transcendence beyond the metaphysics of presence?” What Heidegger (1971) seeks, as addressed, is the poet for “destitute times” and what is necessary is the presence of those who “attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods” (94), those who poetize the truth of Being as this truth stands beyond the metaphysics of presence for the potential appropriation and enactment of the type of authentic historical dwelling we have discussed throughout. Although Heidegger engages the poetic works of Trakl, George, Meyer, Celan, we are concerned with Heidegger’s readings of Rilke, specifically readings that appear in the Parmenides lecture (1941–42) and the 1946 essay “What Are Poet’s For?” Although Heidegger is critical of Rilke in the Parmenides and The Ister, in the later essay, Heidegger finds greater value in Rilke’s poetry. Importantly, here we return to Heidegger’s (1971) concern with language, for the way in which humanity responds to language determines its new historical beginning and dwelling, which is dependent on the way Dasein “listens to the appeal of language” as this language emerges and “speaks in the element of poetry” (216). As Heidegger provides the criteria required for great poetry to attune those who would “listen” to the poetizing, it is clear, as we have introduced earlier, that Heidegger’s understanding of the great poets, those futural poets who might hold hope for inaugurating “another beginning,” stands beyond the register of “aesthetic” criticism, and thus beyond any reading weighed down by metaphysics (see Chapter 4 §2). Here, as in our reading of Hölderlin, to consider Rilke a poet of substantial “ontological” value, there must be an attuned stance taken with respect to the divine to the holy to all that is enigmatic at the heart of the Being event, and his poetic language must address in a reverential manner what is given as a “gift” and, as Heidegger stresses, the “more poetic a poet is—the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying—the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an even more painstaking listening” (216).

Already, in 1927 (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology), referencing Rilke, Heidegger understands the power of poetry to reveal the “world” of Dasein as Being-in-the-world 5. However, in the Parmenides (1941–42) and “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger considers whether or not Rilke is a poet for “destitute” times, a concern that that grounds the remainder of our analysis. Although Heidegger reconsiders the power of Rilke’s poetry in 1946 when he returns to interpret Rilke (“What Are Poets For?”), in the Parmenides course, Heidegger (1992) concludes that because Rilke’s thought and poetry (Eighth Duino Elegy) remains locked in the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics, he remains blind or oblivious to the deep “mystery of the historical being,” and so his “poetic words never attain the mountain height of a historically foundational decision” (160), and as stresses throughout it is the “historical decision,” or epoch grounding rejoinder to the call of Being, that inspires a peoples’ attuned appropriation of their destiny, ushering in “another beginning.”⁶ Although Rilke “relates to contemporary man with much seriousness and care,” there remains a certain “confusion, thoughtlessness, and flight” (161) associated with his work, and so Rilke, according to Heidegger’s reading in the Parmenides (§8e), is not a poet for destitute times because he fails to think and hence poetize the truth of the Being event, or as Heidegger refers to it in the Parmenides, the origi-nary and historical phenomenon of “αληθεια” (aletheia). Contrarily, Rilke’s poetry reveals the endless or unrestrained progression of beings, which for Rilke is associated with Being and also encompasses the phenomenon of the “Open.” We explain Rilke’s understanding of the Open as it emerges from Heidegger’s reading below, but to begin, we listen, along with Heidegger, to the beginning of the Eighth Duino Elegy:

With all eyes the creature [animal] sees
the open. Only our [human] eyes are
reversed and placed wholly around creatures
as traps, around their free exit.
What is outside we know from the animal’s
visage alone…

(153)⁷

Here, Rilke introduces the Open, which is possible to grasp in terms of a vista into a transcendent realm of metaphysical truths that defy human reason. In addition, in these opening lines, Rilke also sets up the crucial distinction and irreconcilable opposition between the human being and the animal, between what is rational and irrational, between what is grounded in consciousness and what emerges through the unconscious, associated with the emotions as opposed to reason (ratio). For Rilke, it is the animal and not the human being that “sees” and experiences the Open, and so the animal is in this sense privileged over the human with regard to its freedom toward the Open, for Rilke’s prioritizing of “the unconscious over consciousness corresponds to the priority of the free animal over the imprisoned essence of man” (158).

Thus, as opposed to elevating the human being’s power of reason above the “a-rational creature,” Rilke “inverts the relationship of the power of man and of ‘creatures’ (i.e., animals and plants),” and indeed, as Heidegger claims, this hierarchical “inversion is what is precisely expressed by the elegy” (154). Despite the appearance of rejecting a view to scientific naturalism, in the move to grant the animal and not the human privileged access to the Open, Rilke smuggles in a traditional metaphysical understanding of both animals and human beings. Importantly, Rilke retains the metaphysical definition of the human as the animal rationale—rational “subject” set off and against “objects” (an endless progression of beings)—that “calculates, plans, turns to beings as objects, represents what is objective and orders it,” and in doing so the human comports itself by means of machination “everywhere to objects and in that way secures them… as something mastered, as his possession” (156). Taking this definition of the human as rational animal as the starting point, it follows that “animality,” as stated earlier, is understood in and through the comparison with rationality, and it is understood as that which is “irrational and without reason” (160), and beyond this, there is a “hominization of the animal, by which the animal, with respect to the original experience of beings as a whole [the Open], is even raised above man and becomes in a certain way a “super-man’” (161). This, according to Foti (1992), is Rilke’s failure, for “as opposed to rebellion against metaphysical hierarchy,” which would be indicative of Heidegger’s project, Rilke “privileges the figure of the animal and of unreflective ‘creation’ over human subjectivity by granting it immediate and perhaps exclusive access to the Open” (30). Thus, Rilke’s poetry retains the binary and hierarchical model of the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics, now privileging the irrational (the unconscious) above the rational (consciousness), and so Rilke still poetizes from out of a view that is attuned by the metaphysics of presence.

In relation to the binary oppositional linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics introduced earlier, we draw the reader’s attention to two crucial elements of Heidegger’s critique of traditional Western philosophy in the Parmenides; one is intimated and the other remains “unsaid.” First, Heidegger (1992), in his analysis of the human as “το ζωον λογον εχον,” points out that in relation to rationality and the power of speech, as related to the revelation of truth (το αποφαινεσθαι), which is expressed by Plato and Aristotle as “το δηλουν, the revealing of the open… man, and he alone, is the being that looks into the open and sees the open in the sense of αληθες” (155). It is from the time of the “first beginning” that the human has assumed a privileged access to Being because of the power of reason, which, as Heidegger’s critique runs, has in the history of Western philosophy led humans to hypostatize Being, to turn it into an abstract principle or “object” of the subject’s intellectual thematization. Second, for Rilke to even invoke the notions of consciousness and the unconscious in his poetry, as Heidegger claims, is to already poetize in the “spirit of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, mediated by Nietzsche and the doctrines of psychoanalysis” (158). This is problematic for Heidegger (although he does not explicitly formulate the following critique in the Parmenides, as stated, it remains “unsaid”) because conscious/unconscious states, emotional states, psychological states, do not, as we have already pointed out, represent for Heidegger the most primordial modes of world dis-closure because they are derived from and dependent on states of deep attunement achieved through the transformative power of moods (Stimmungen). Thus, whereas Hölderlin is poetically aware of the essential necessity and ek-static potential of moods for transfiguring Dasein’s understanding of the world and others (das Festliche), Rilke, in the Eighth Duino Elegy, appears oblivious to the phenomenon of human attunement, and so, as a shortcoming, his poetry and thought remain grounded in the understanding of the world and human being espoused, as Heidegger observes, by modern psychology.

As related to Rilke’s understanding of the animal’s privileged access to the Open, we bring attention to the fact that in the 1929–30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger (1995) provides an analysis of animals that is radically at odds with the modern understanding of animals found in Descartes. Although refusing to reduce animals to mere “machines,” Heidegger claims that as opposed to humans, because they are world-forming, animals experience life in terms of “worldlessness, of poverty of world” (178), for animals are unable to open and project a world in the same manner as the attuned Dasein. On Heidegger’s (1992) reading, Rilke clearly links the Open with the animal’s ability to see its environment and life in a way that frees the animal from the fear of its impending death, and it is in this blindness-toward-death, we will call it, that the animal finds a freedom that the human lacks:

the free animal
has its perishing constantly behind itself,
and in front of itself God, and when it moves it moves
in eternity, just as wells do.

(158)

The animal’s freedom for Being, or the Open, is indeed granted because death is not and cannot be an issue, ontological or otherwise, for the animal. To call the animal world-poor, or we might say, Dasein poor, in an important way, indicates that on Heidegger’s reading the deep concern for death separates Dasein from the animal. Death must be an issue for Dasein in order to project its authentic freedom in the first instance, and for Heidegger (1995) this is because the animal cannot “care” (Sorge) about its death and the implication of it for its existence; that is, its Being cannot be an issue for concern, for the animal does not “possess the possibility of attending either to that being that itself is or to beings other than itself” (248). This is because the animal’s life is structured by a highly restrictive and myopic scope of concern that Heidegger calls “captivation.” The animal is “directed in its manifold instinctual activities on the basis of its captivation and of the totality of its capacities” (248). Heidegger, in terms relatable to both the Parmenides and The Ister, observes that animals do not “stand within a manifestation [the Open] of beings,” and neither is the animal nor its environment “manifest as beings” (248). According to Heidegger (1992), the animal does not “see” or experience the Open, “not with a single one of all its eyes” (155), and as is the concern with his analysis of Rilke’s poetry, the animal does not participate in because it remains excluded from the essential unfolding of and strife between unconcealment and concealment (the truth of Being). The primary reason for the animal’s exclusion from this realm is that it does not have language, it is αλογος, and thus, it cannot “say” or “name” Being and henceforth appropriate its life or world in a historical manner.

To conclude the Parmenides, providing a brief summation, we consider why and how it is that Heidegger comes to identify Rilke’s conception of the Open with the endless procession or unfolding of beings. For it is no doubt puzzling to say that Rilke poetizes the Open in terms of the “constant progression by beings themselves from beings to beings within beings” (152). As stated, Rilke’s poetry is attuned by the metaphysics of presence, and as a “consequence of his alienation from αληθεια,” Heidegger claims that Being “flows away from [Rilke] into the indeterminate totality of beings” (151). The Open, then, is limited to a realm where what moves into the Open does so strictly in terms of its status as an object, entity, or being, brought to stand within a “technical” mode of dis-closure as that which is present-at-hand. To understand the implications of this analysis, we must recall Heidegger’s critique of technology and take into account the mode of “seeing” that is attuned by the metaphysics of presence, through which all things show up as what is “present” before us as they are located in Cartesian space. Thus, much like the tradition in Western metaphysics, there is the concern for beings over Being, on that which is present as opposed to the primal mystery of how what is present comes-to-presence in the first instance, and so the concern for the truth of Being and primordial unconcealment are ignored and so the Being event remains in “oblivion.” Rilke’s poetry cannot on this reading point beyond the metaphysics of presence and so it perpetuates the “destitution” of the age. To the point, Rilke, in relation to the truth of Being, according to Heidegger, “talks thoughtlessly about the ‘open’ and does not question what the significance might be for the openness of the open” (161).

However, the oblivion of Being is not the end of the story for Dasein, for according to Heidegger, despite this state of “destitution,” the hidden relationship to Being, from whose bestowal man cannot withdraw persists and is waiting to be rediscovered by great poets. As Heidegger’s critical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Rilke evolves in the later essay, “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger (1971) reassesses Rilke’s potential value as a great poet, concluding that Rilke’s poetry is “valid,” although remaining “in the shadow of a tempered Nietzschean metaphysics” (108). Phillips (2010), in overly optimistic terms, claims that in 1946, “Heidegger ranks Rilke alongside Hölderlin as a poet who heeds the task of poetry in the time of the indigence of nihilism” (347). Foti (1992) argues, in terms more consistent with our understanding, that in the Parmenides Rilke fails to intimate the Open in terms that relate to Heidegger’s understanding of Being, in that Rilke poetizes the hierarchy of polar oppositions consistent with the linguistic-conceptual schema of Western metaphysics. In Foti’s reading of “What Are Poets For?” a “labored and difficult essay,” it is concluded that Rilke achieves a “partial overcoming” of the metaphysics of presence, and yet despite this poetic accomplishment, Foti contends that “the later essay achieves resolution neither concerning Rilke’s role as a poet in a destitute time” nor on the issue concerning Rilke’s relationship with what “one can call Hölderlin’s ‘unsurpassable prescript’” (32).

Turning to Heidegger (1971) we learn that although deeming Rilke’s poetry “valid,” it does not in Heidegger’s estimation rise to “Hölderlin’s in its rank and position in the course of the history of Being” (96). Rilke is thus a poet with certain impressive powers, but they are unequal and inadequate to those of Hölderlin, in terms required to found and ground a new beginning for historical Dasein in “destitute times.” Since, our interpretation unfolds hermeneutically in terms consistent with the analysis in Chapter 1 of the “Origin,” Contributions, and certain aspects of the Hölderlin lectures/essays, we steer a middle course between Phillips and Foti and claim that it is possible, if remaining true to our interpretation of the Heideggerian concepts, themes, and language developed and related to poetry, authentic destiny, and the Being event, Rilke might be thought of, in a positive manner—perhaps in contrast to Heidegger’s conclusion, or lack thereof—as intimating a way beyond, by providing a fleeting glimpse into, a view of Being and Dasein that transcends the linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics. With Rilke’s thought of the Open, as a vast expanse or region of Being, he gestures toward a non-objective and hence non-metaphysical view of Being, and thus, in light of our reading, Rilke might be said, although in no way equaling Hölderlin, to rise to the level of a potential “futural poet” for “destitute times.”

Since there are many ways to approach “What Are Poets For?” we focus on developing several key concepts that set this reading apart from the critique of Rilke in the Parmenides: The Open, as the vast expanse of Being and Dasein as the one who “ventures” forth from out of the primordial essence of Being—the Abgrund—for these two concerns relate to authentic dwelling, Being-toward-death, and the attunement (conversion) of Dasein’s world beyond the metaphysics of presence. To poetize in “destitute” times, the poet must have both the courage and insight to locate, reach into, and abide by standing firm within the “abyss,” or Abgrund, in order to poetize the origin of the Being event. Ground for Heidegger (1971), as we have seen, is not just related to the earth’s soil beneath our feet, it is also, in connection with the work of art and Hölderlin’s poetry, the founding “holy” ground on which, in relation to the rising of the “holy” Earth, a historical people open a new world and time in order to raise their dwelling in a poetic manner. Indeed, the authentic potential for Dasein’s unique and singular response and appropriation of its destiny “hangs in the abyss” (92). As shown in Chapter 1, the abyss, or absence of ground (Abgrund), harbors the potential for Dasein’s destiny, which is held and sent forth, and it is the abyss, the ground-less ground of Being, which “holds and remarks everything” (93). To reiterate, “absence” or the “nothing” in this instance is never “no-thing-ness”; rather, it is the hidden plentitude of Being. Here, we note that αληθεια as referenced in Heidegger’s reading of Rilke in the Parmenides can now be read in this later essay of 1946 in terms that point to Rilke’s non-metaphysical understanding of “truth,” that is, not in terms of what is purely present—the endless procession of beings before us—but, instead, an intimated concern for primordial “hiddenness” (lethe), the original concealment that lies behind all instances of “truth-happening.”

In Rilke’s, “improvised verses,” it is possible to encounter a non-metaphysical understanding of Dasein’s attuned relation to world and Earth, which gestures beyond the ontological difference: Reading Rilke, Heidegger elucidates the concepts of Nature, Venture, and the Open. Nature and the Venture in Rilke might be linked to Being or the Open (Lichtung des Seins), or the essential truth of Being in the event of its unfolding. With the concept of Nature, Rilke is no longer concerned with the division between the human and animal, and rather, as Heidegger observes, Nature is the “ground of beings,” and as poetized by Rilke, Nature is not to be equated with the subject studied by the natural sciences, instead it is “the ground for history and art and nature in the narrower sense” (101). Nature, for Rilke, is “the vis primitiva active” (100), the most primitive active force, which holds the originary power of what the Greeks termed physis, which must be understood in the infinitival mode in terms of the event or active process of the “bringing forth” a phenomenon in its unfolding, its coming into the Open, its revelation as “that which arises” (101). Nature in Rilke, we might say, is best grasped in terms that are beyond Heidegger’s (1962) description of nature in Being and Time, as a phenomenon that “‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape” (100/70), and instead, in terms of Heidegger’s more mature interpretation of the Earth in the “Origin” and Hölderlin lectures, the presence of which the poet’s word holds the power to call forth.

For Rilke, Nature is the “Urgrund,” the originary ground of beings determining the manner in which they come-to-presence. Heidegger states that humans, animals, and plants share the ground of Nature. Yet there is a crucial difference with respect to the relationship that each shares with Nature as originary ground, and here we recall Heidegger’s (1971) differentiation between animal and Dasein in the face of Being, which can be understood in terms of the manner in which “Being each time ‘gives’ particular beings ‘over to venture,’” that is, when Being frees Dasein for the precarious, unpredictable and dangerous pursuit of its destiny, which is “daring” in nature. However, as Heidegger points out, “man reaches more deeply into the ground of beings than do other beings” (101), and this pertains to Dasein’s unique relationship to the truth of Being. Venturing in this reading is relatable to a process or event of release and return, or as Heidegger names it, a “flinging loose” (102) or letting “beings loose into the daring venture” (101) in anticipation of their return, which might be understood in terms of Being releasing Dasein into the Open of unconcealment while at once drawing it back into the essential nature (Abgrund) from which it arises, that is, the abyssal ground, primordial concealment, or finitude. This is consistent with our reading of Contributions, where Heidegger describes the movement and process of the Being event in terms of Entruckung and Beruckung, where the former is associated with the recess of Being into finitude and the latter refers to what comes-to-presence in the withdrawal of Being as Entrückung. This is the twofold counter-striving movement at the center, or Abgrund, of Being, and what is generated through this counter-striving activity is the “draft” (the pulling-force) amid the “sway” of Being’s unfolding. Drawing from a late poem by Rilke, “The Force of Gravity,” Heidegger finds this concept poetized, “the venture,” Heidegger observes, is “the drawing and all-mediating center of beings—is the power that lends weight, a gravity to the ventured beings” (104). To lend weight and gravity indicates that as beings are released or flung into “the venture” of unconcealment, they are at once drawn back into the center, they are held fast in the sway of Being, this Heidegger calls the “balance” (105), and

Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings toward itself—toward itself as the center. Being, as the venture, holds all beings, as being ventured, in this draft. But this center [Abgrund] of the attracting drawing withdraws at the same time from all beings.

(105)

Although Heidegger does not make this comparison with respect to this movement, the event itself, in relation to beings and unconcealment/concealment, the Being event unfolding through the moments/movements of Entruckung and Berückung, might be related to his reading of the Greek understanding of arche, as in the 1939 essay, “On the Essence of the Concept of Φυσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I.” From Heidegger’s unique etymology of arche we get the sense of the movement out from and return to a sheltering center, where what is released or “let loose” is under a controlling power, which in addition to a guiding force also serves as the origin of that which emerges from it. Normally, we translate arche in terms of beginning or original principle of order, but on Heidegger’s (1998) reading arche is a bit more nuanced:

On the one hand arche means that from which something has its origin and beginning; on the other hand it means that which, as this origin and beginning, like-wise keeps reign over, i.e., restrains and therefore dominates, something else that emerges from it. “Arche” means, at once and the same time, beginning and control… origin and ordering. In order to express the unity that oscillates between the two, we can translate arche as originating ordering and as ordering origin.

(189)

Heidegger is clear that what comes-to-presence, although emerging from and so connected to that source, is not sheltered in such a way as to be kept wholly safe from potential danger, which is why Heidegger refers to the venture as the “daring venture.” Indeed, as Heidegger (1971) states, “[i]f that which has been flung were to remain out of danger, it would not have been ventured” (102). Yet within danger, or “unshieldedness,” there is a sense of safety that is linked with Dasein’s relationship to the Open, or what might be understood as the truth of the Being event, which we address below in relation to the Open and the concept of Being-toward-death. Although plant, animal, and Dasein are ventured, because of the differences in the way their existence unfolds, there is a difference in both the level of danger they face and the protection they are afforded. Because Dasein is the being that is “spoken” by language, with the potential to open and found a world and historical age, it is, as addressed in §2 of this chapter, opened to the danger of non-Being, and since Dasein is the only being that cares (Sorge) for its Being and death (mortality), there is a more intense and radical sense of unprotectedness that haunts its Being-in-the-world. There is also the danger, as Young (2001) observes, to which Rilke himself fell victim on Heidegger’s reading in the Parmenides, that humans will “become completely insensible to the ‘Open’ and its ‘pull,’ cut off,’ by the metaphysics of naturalism” (144). As a running theme within our reading, Heidegger (1971) warns that technology intensifies and “extends the realm of danger that man will lose his selfhood to unconditional production,” and through the “imposition of the objectifying of the world” Dasein “completely blocks [its] path, already obscured,” as a result of the oblivion of Being, “into the Open” (115–116).

When interpreting the Open in Rilke, Heidegger states emphatically that it is not to be confused with “openness in the sense of the unconcealedness of beings that lets beings as such be present” (106), for such a reading places emphasis on both “unconcealment” and that which manifests in the light of Being in terms of its present-at-hand reality. To adopt such a view—a view that is similar to Rilke’s understanding of the Open as the endless progression of beings—would be much like focusing on the “globe of Being,” or a celestial body such as the moon, and taking the lighted side, the side present to our view, for the complete picture. Thus, we overlook and, in doing so, obscure both the “sphericity” of the moon and all that is hidden from view, and this limited view is at odds with Rilke’s poetizing in Heidegger’s later essay, which he labels the “thought of the Open in the sense of essentially more primal lightening of Being” (108); that is, in terms already discussed, Rilke intimates a concern for the primordial force, or Being’s essential recession into fintude, which facilitates and makes possible the phenomenon of unconcealment in the first instance. This might be said to demonstrate the richness of Rilke’s thinking and poetizing. The Open might be said to be the “whole draft” of the unbounded unfolding of the Being event that holds within it the potential lighting and concealing of “beings as a whole,” and Dasein’s authentic relationship to the Open is instantiated in the ever-renewed process of “venturing” out from and subsequently being returned to or pulled back in order to “fit into the unlightened whole of the drawings of the pure draft,” for the Open, much like Heidegger’s rendering of the truth of Being in Contributions, has the “character of an including attraction [the “draft”], in the manner of the gravity of the pure forces” (107). One of the crucial aspects of Rilke’s poetizing of the Open is that it remains nonobjectified, it resists the reduction to a hypostatized entity or essence (as substance—substantia), and so Rilke’s poetizing points beyond a view of Being constrained and distorted by the “object-character of technological dominion” (114).

As we have shown, bound up with the revelation of the relatedness of Dasein to Being is Dasein’s potential for the appropriation of its destiny, and although Heidegger neither mentions historicality or Geschick with respect to the Open, and although incorporating what can be read as strange and arcane terms, what he draws from Rilke poetry is expressive of, in ways familiar to the reader, the opening of a world, a beginning, a new time and historical age—the birth and establishment of an originary community. Here, as related to the work of art and the Hölderlin lectures, this communal gathering of Dasein is beholden to that which exceeds them, and because of this they are united, for the Open, “lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn, so that they variously draw on one another and draw together” and “they fuse with the boundless, the infinite,” or the groundless Abgrund of Being, and yet they do not “dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open” (106). It is to the “boundless” and “infinite, the Open in all of its expanse, that Dasein’s authentic Being-in-the-world, with its Being-toward-death, belongs, which relates to the “danger” of venturing forth, Dasein’s “unshieldedness,” as discussed earlier.

We spoke earlier of the sense of safety and protection that Dasein unshieldedness harbors, which is known only to Dasein when attuned (converted) to the Open, for the safety, the shelter, lies in the “seeing” that facilitates a “turning” (Kehre) back toward an originary relationship to the Open, which is the precise relationship to the Open that has been covered over, forgotten in the age of destitution, for it is the metaphysics of presence that “threatens our nature with the loss of belonging to the Open” (122). This “turning” occurs as a “conversion” or reattunement that Heidegger calls a “having seen” that which was previously lost and it might be said to be the thinking-and-poetizing that begins in the return (“turns”) to the experience of the oblivion of Being, as Heidegger writes in “Letter on Humanism.” The manner in which Dasein takes on the burden of its unshieldedness is crucial to determining its relationship to the Being event, the manner in which it responds to the address of Being, and this includes, importantly, how Dasein relates to death. The fear of death leads to the “negation of death” through “technical objectification” (125), where death is viewed as something “negative,” and so there is a fleeing-in-the-face of its impending certainty (see Chapter 1 §3). Although never overcoming or outstripping death, when attuned in and through the poet’s images and words, we understand death as belonging to Being and so it is something we share collectively with all Dasein in terms of a belonging to the Open. Heidegger states, “[d]eath is what touches mortals in their nature” (126), and just as we have seen in Contributions, Being-toward-death is the essence of Dasein’s nature, and it connects or “sets” Dasein on its “way to the other side of life,” that is, beyond the realm and mode of pure presence and into the concealed nature and the plentitude of the mystery, “into the whole of the pure draft” (126), into the truth and sway of Being’s primordial unfolding. Heidegger claims, in this 1946 essay, that death is a gathering force, and it is the Law that establishes the “place within the widest orbit into which we can admit the converted unshieldedness positively into the whole of what is” (126). To find shelter, safety, and resolve in unshieldedness as related to the Open, is to be-at-home in terms of “what is,” that is, to dwell within the authentic understanding that Dasein ultimately resides, as one who is ventured, “outside all protection” (126) that might come by means of the forces of human machination or technical mastery; for example, death cannot be outstripped by any form of scientific or technical intervention. To find this authentic shelter in the safety of unshieldedness, in terms of the nature of Dasein, might be understood as a form of “homeliness” (Heimische) within the more primordial mode of not-being-at-home (Unheimlichkeit) in the world, a theme developed in considerable detail by Heidegger in The Ister.

The authentic Being-toward-death comes by way of a “conversion” (attunement-Stimmung), which Heidegger identifies as a turning within/to the “heart’s space,” the turn toward “what is inward and invisible” (129). This movement or Kehre from outer to inner should not be conceived as the subjective closing off or interiorizing of Dasein, a retreat into an inner, impenetrable sanctuary of the mind, it is also not to be thought of in terms of the metaphysical understanding Dasein’s “existential solipsism” (solus ipse) of Being and Time. Rather, the “turning” from modes of dis-closure that objectify the world and Dasein’s existence to a more reflective (meditative) and poetic “saying” of existence assumes the form of a “singing,” which “converts that [technological] nature of ours which merely wills to impose, together with its objects, into the innermost invisible region of the heart’s space” (130). To be attuned to the invisible region of the heart, to the primal mysteries of existence, is indicative of a renewed relation to Being, which might be understood in terms of returning to and allowing ourselves to dwell in close proximity to the Abgrund of Being, which, as previously stated, despite its invisibility, despite its ineffable nature, is not to be equated with “nothing,” for it is rather the center or seat of Dasein’s futural potential, located within the great expanse (the Open), from which Dasein is pushed (thrown) out and pulled back by the gravitational force generated by the unfolding, or in terms of Dasein’s authentic historical “enowning” (Ereignis), the destining of Being in the truth of its “swaying” or unfolding.

With this in mind, we ask, “Does Rilke’s poetry poetize this event for Dasein?” Does he indicate that the human being can yet achieve such a mode of existence in relation to the holy? We find Heidegger responding to the first query in the affirmative; Rilke does poetize this event, albeit through a “tempered” view of metaphysics. To the second query, it would appear that Heidegger responds in a somewhat ambiguous manner, and this we claim is because of Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s “Angel” as a prophetic “metaphysical” figure of futural hope. Citing a letter that Rilke wrote (November 13, 1925), Heidegger quotes, “The Angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transmutation of the visible into the invisible, which we [might hope to] achieve, seems already accomplished” (134). The Angel appears as the paradigmatic being (or “bodiless” presence) that has reached the state of conversion in advance of the human, and Heidegger makes the observation that the Angel, “despite all difference in content, is metaphysically the same as the figure of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra” (134).8 In this view, the Angel is separated from the human being in that it lives “the stilled repose of the balanced oneness of the two realms within the world’s inner space,” whereas the human continually remains blind to the truth of the Open, and “the balance of danger is in essence unstilled” (135). However, it is possible to imagine the attunement of Rilke’s poetry as first initiating the “conversion” of Dasein, in light of the Angel’s presencing as related to the “holy,” or beyond this, as a manifestation of the “holy” itself as poetized by Rilke, and not merely a symbolic or imaginatively poetic re-presentation of the holy. The presence of the Angel, we suggest, is for Rilke, the event or accomplishment of the transmutation of the “visible into the invisible,” the historical transformation of Dasein’s metaphysical seeing and thinking into to an authentic poetic dwelling on the Earth in relation to the “holy.” Indeed, Heidegger’s words suggest such a reading, for it is in the “invisible of the world’s inner space” revealed by the poet that the Angel first appears, and at this attuned moment “the haleness of worldly beings becomes visible” (141); that is, they are transformed and transfigured (converted-attuned) in the light and presence of the “holy,” the ground is once again consecrated, and the gods that have fled are returning. Just as the holy ground must be prepared and readied for the gods, Rilke’s poetry must attune and transform Dasein in readiness for the appearance of the Angel, the presence of the “holy’ necessary for the gods’ return.

Since the Angel is revealed in and through the poet’s “song,” poets are needed, those who fearlessly venture forth, those who are most “venturesome” who do not merely “say,” that is, speak about Being, but rather those who “venture Being itself” in poetic language, who are “saying to a greater degree,” that is, those who dare to encounter Being and poetically speak of it.

The most daring poets hold the power to attune us, and because the poets “convert the parting against the Open and inwardly recall its unholiness into a sound whole,” they “sing the healing when in the midst of the unholy” (140) as they poetize from out of the oblivion of Being in the age of the loss of the holy, in order to catch sight of what “has been” lost and what might potentially be recaptured and returned, and it is their song that turns our “unprotected being into the Open” (140), returning us to our lost relationship with the truth of Being. The poet’s singing, inspiring our conversion, is grounded in the experience of being attuned to the “unholy as unholy,” and the poet’s song “beckons to the holy, calling it,” and in doing so, “draws the god near” (141). In order for the poet’s song to “hail” the “integrity of the globe of Being,” or the truth of Being in all of its mystery and fullness, inspiring the manifestation of the holy and the return of the gods in a time of destitution, the poet must in the most extreme and insightful manner take on—as a practice of “down-going” (der Untergang)—the experience of supreme unshieldedness in the midst of the unholy, that is, the absence of the holy and return courageously to and emerge triumphantly from the experience of the oblivion of Being. For it is only in this moment, context, and space, that the poet might capture in his saying, in order to pass along to the people, the barely perceptible murmurs of the voices and faint traces of the lingering and shadowy memories of the fugitive gods who have fled in the epochal abandonment of Dasein.

1 We address the notion of the essence of poetic language as Dichtung in the introduction, and it is related to the essential manner in which Heidegger (1993) claims that language functions in an originary manner, namely, language as “saying,” or Sagan, indicates “to show, to let something appear, let it be seen and heard” (408–409) and “what unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing” (410). However, as we have stated, originary language does not function as a sign or a system of signs (e.g., signifiers and the signified) but, rather, in terms of first opening the context from out of which “all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs” (410). It is within such essays as “The Way to Language” (Basic Writings) and “Language” (Poetry, Thought, Language) that the move away from the ontological difference is perhaps most clearly evident, and this is the difference between the ontic manifestation of language as “speech” (Sprache), which is enabled by the ontological mode or structure of Being-in, “discourse” (Rede).

2 Heidegger (2014) describes this phenomenon of Dasein’s awakening in “Germania” and The Rhine in relation to the “preliminary” attunement of “holy mourning.” However, an even more primordial form of attunement pervades it called, “the Festival” (das Festliche). In mourning the loss of the gods, Dasein “knows” deeply and authentically that although the gods have fled, it must remain with the gods in spirit, in the sense that Dasein remains with “their divinity as a divinity that is no longer fulfilled,” and instead of a dismal sense of despair, there is an attuned mood where Dasein is inspired and “displaced” into maintaining itself “purely within the realm of the possible new encounter with the gods” (97). Again, this expresses the temporal interplay between past (“having-been”), present, and the future (“not-yet-fulfilled”). To be attuned within the state of “holy mourning” is to at once “await” the coming-into-presence” of the holy as a distressed “readiness” for Dasein’s appointed destiny (104). However, this awaiting as readiness does not indicate that Dasein’s passively waits for something resembling a determinate “fate” that is handed over to it. Instead, as McNeill (2006) points out, what is “given” to Dasein as destiny “first arises from having-been (the flight of the gods) and future (to be founded in poetizing), and as such, is nothing given,” in the sense of determinate or completed historical meanings, “but an identity that must first be attained in and through struggle” (15). For struggle is ultimately what is required of people to transform what is “given” by Being as their endowment in order to make it their own (Ereignis), in terms of their historical “task” or “vocation.” This struggle, and we address this in our reading of Hölderlin, as is highlighted by Bernasconi (2013), is an historical beginning (another beginning) that is specifically “German, not Greek,” but the Germans must first learn “who they might become in struggle (Kampf) or confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the Greeks” (156).

3 Hoeller (2000), contributing his thoughts on the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking on historical dwelling during the Turn, claims that Heidegger’s turning back to the ancients in order to understand the Greek’s fundamental saying of truth, involves a “second turning,” a turning from the Greeks “in the direction of the poet Hölderlin in order to retrieve for us the fundamental truth of Being” (11). Hoeller indicates that this “two-fold turning,” which points backward and forward, is ultimately singular in nature, is “one-fold; that is, it is in both instances a poetic turning, for it is the poetic language of the early Greeks that enabled them to say the truth of Being” (11). However, access to the Greeks’ heritage, which holds the potential for modern Germany’s authentic destiny, comes only through the modern encounter with Hölderlin, for his poetry alone inspires the radicalization of the “truth” of Be-ing that the Pre-Socratic Greeks could only intimate, and which, was ultimately lost to history because of the epoch defining rejoinder to Being as expressed through Platonism, ushering in the “first beginning” of the West.

4 The issue of Heidegger’s undeniable involvement with National Socialism is something that cannot be dismissed, left to pass over in silence, even in readings that lean more toward “formal” exegesis than “contextual” interpretation (see Epilogue §2). It is common understanding that Heidegger, after his enthusiastic embrace of what he deemed the positive “hidden” potential and “inner greatness” of National Socialism, became disenchanted with the direction of the political movement, viewing it at early as 1934 as yet another technical driven manifestation of will-to-power grounded in a view to a production-ist metaphysics. It is also well known that in such courses as Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), “Germania” and “The Rhine” (1934–35), and The Ister (1942) Heidegger formulated critiques against National Socialism (Safranski 1998). However, in the “Origin” (1935–36), it can be argued that Heidegger was still pondering the power that art held to inspire the historical grounding of a peoples’ life, including “state founding” activities as one essential way in which to respond to Being’s destining, its call and address as manifest within the truth-happening (“work-Being”) of great work of art. This notion of what could be read as “political” state founding vanishes as Heidegger begins to read Hölderlin and, as Caputo (1999) and Foti (1999) observe, a more originary notion of “politics” emerges as related to Heidegger’s understanding of the Greek “polis” as the site of Being and Geschichte. This notion of the originary polis is given special attention by Heidegger in the 1942 lecture course, The Ister.

5 Indeed, turning to Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Lourids Brigge, Heidegger quotes a passage that vividly describes walls and rooms that remain within a decaying house whose façade has crumbled to expose the desolate interior of the building that once teemed with life. However, as Rilke observes, the “tenacious life of those rooms refuse to let itself be trampled down,” and from out of this the “breath of this life stood out, the tough, sluggish, musty breath which no wind had yet dispersed” (Rilke quoted in Heidegger 1988, 172). In his analysis, Heidegger focuses on the phenomenological description of the revelation of the system of relations that make up the world of the tenants who once occupied the flats, for through the poet’s description, “the world, being-in-the-world—Rilke calls it—leaps toward us from the things,” which is revealed through our “natural comportmental relationship” to the rooms of the house” (172). The poet “sees” and communicates the “original world” of Dasein in terms that are beyond normal descriptive terms, for the “lived space” poetized by Rilke is an experience that lives beyond the dimensions of Cartesian space. Phillips (2011) states that in Basic Problems, Heidegger, “prior to the commentaries of the mid-1930s, delineating a new beginning in the ontological mission of Hölderlin’s so-called hymns, the poet [Rilke] is already in advance of the philosopher. Philosophy has to catch up” (347). We extend this observation by stating that in Rilke’s poetic description of the crumbling building and Heidegger’s subsequent interpretation thereof, the understanding of art as a mode of “truth-happening” is already prefigured. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, as it relates to our reading, through the poetic word truth happens in the most originary manner due to the revelatory power of language as essential Dichtung which, as argued earlier, grants art the ability to bring Dasein “into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own essence itself to take a stand in the truth of beings,” and it is the case that building/architecture and all forms of plastic creation, occur only “in the open region of poetic saying and naming” (Heidegger 1993, 167).

6 Phillip’s (2011) offers a critique of Heidegger’s reading of Rilke in the Parmenides, elements of which are inconsistent with our interpretation of Heidegger’s renewed project during the Turn. For example, there are concerns relating to the presentation of Heidegger’s view of language of the 1930s, and, especially the 1940s, because it is during this time that Heidegger engages Rilke’s poetry with two distinct interpretations emerging of the potential benefit of Rilke for challenging the reign of technology and the metaphysics of presence. Phillips acknowledges the difference between the language of Being and Time and that of the Turn—despite the Turn not being explicitly named—but views it in a critical and pejorative light, for example, identifying the writings of the Turn “protracted, impenetrable and lumbering reflections on the coming of the gods” (354). Yet, when approaching Heidegger’s essential problem with Rilke’s poetry in the Parmenides, Phillips’ reading is grounded the transcendental analysis (fundamental ontology) of Being in Time. Phillips is correct to point out the problem with Rilke’s naturalism and the poetizing of the “open,” as the “metaphysics lying at the foundation of the biologism of the nineteenth century of psychoanalysis, namely, the metaphysics of the complete oblivion of Being” (Heidegger 1992, 152). However, when Phillips (2010) identifies Rilke’s “mistake,” the poetry’s “deficiency,” he points to the poet’s failure to articulate “the ontological difference” (349). Phillips plainly states that Rilke’s poetry, emerging from Heidegger’s critique in the Parmenides, conveys the “fleshless intellectualism of modern metaphysics, with which Heidegger’s analysis of Being-in-the-world is in conflict in Being and Time” (350). Even if Rilke would have intimated the difference between the realms of the ontic and ontological, which he does not, considering his explicit concern with finding Being in beings, he would have still fallen short of Heidegger’s understanding of great and historical founding poetry in “destitute times.” As our reading demonstrates, it is not the understanding or poetizing of the ontological difference that separates great art and poetry from their opposite, that is, separating Hölderlin and Rilke from other lesser poets in Heidegger’s reading in the Parmenides. Rather, as Heidegger (1992) makes clear, it is the fact that Rilke makes reference to “personal lived experiences and impressions, which is implied in the appeal to the poet himself as the ultimate source of the validity of his word,” and this for Heidegger, “is too little,” for what is required for poets in desperate or “needy times,” is nothing less than the appeal to the experience and understanding of αληθεια, the “essence and the truth of being and nonbeing themselves” (159). Beyond the ontological difference as understood metaphysically, it is the poet failing to “open,” and thus found and ground the truth of Being in the word that is “at stake” (159).

7 As related to the Parmenides reading, in the 1942 lecture course The Ister, Heidegger (1996) remarks that the Open in Rilke differs radically from his own notion despite, as Heidegger laments, the “thoughtless lumping together” of his thought with Rilke’s, as if they were interchangeable (91, fn. 1). This is a view that is supported by Graff (1961) in his reading of Heidegger and Rilke: “[I]t would be easy to show that Heideggerian terminology can be applied to Rilke only by a transference of meaning from one universe of discourse in which it is genuine to another where it is out of focus. It cannot be done without doing injustice to Heidegger or to Rilke or to both. Rilke must be understood and interpreted in which are in tune with the vibrations of his own poetical symbols. There is no other way of protecting these from contamination, and of safeguarding their truth” (172). It is possible because he adopts a “literary,” and hence metaphorical and symbolic approach to interpretation—Heidegger would say, “metaphysical”—that Graff’s reading fails to understand Heidegger’s later project. In addition, Graff’s entire analysis is carried out from the perspective of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time, a move that we have already claimed is inconsistent with approaching Heidegger during the Turn, especially considering the most fecund encounters with Rilke’s poetry were occurring in the 1940s.

8 To compare Rilke’s Angel to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra from a metaphysical perspective relates to Heidegger’s (1979) “metaphysical” reading(s) of Nietzsche during the 1930s. Zarathustra the prophet stands at the end of metaphysics and foresees a future human being (Übermensch) who will be superior to the “herd animal” and even the “last man,” and so, much like Rilke’s Angel, Zarathustra points the way to a futural transcendence that is beyond Platonism (Western metaphysics). The Angel in Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke has already experienced the authentic relationship to Being that is foreign and unknown to the Dasein of the “destitute” age, and serves, in a prophetic manner, as an inspiration for the overcoming of the metaphysics of presence. The notion of “venturing forth” and returning, finding “safety” in the human’s lot as the most unshielded of beings, amidst the unfolding of Being (as belonging to the Open), resembles thematically Heidegger’s analysis and interpretation of Zarathustra’s relationship to Being and the “Overman.” The Overman’s authentic philosophical-creative activity emerges from out of the fundamental attunement (the not-at-home) elicited by the most burdensome thought of the eternal return. Attuned fundamentally in the mood of das Unheimlichkeit, the Overman is driven by the urge to be at home everywhere, and at all times, and this concept reflects Zarathustra’s existential movement, which is indeed what Heidegger reads as the authentic way in which the Overman shall inherit, appropriate, and enact his existence through “down-going” (der Untergang) and “transition” (der Ubergang). With these terms and concepts, Heidegger emphasizes the oscillation and movement of human existence (“becoming finite”), which is always either in the process of being directed out from its “solitude” toward beings as a whole (world), or in the process of returning to its solitude, which Heidegger (1995) calls the “resting in a gravity that drives us downward” (6). Nietzsche’s philosophy, on Heidegger’s reading, never succeeds in transcending metaphysics, and much like Zarathustra, he stands at the culmination of metaphysics, and so although prophesized in the figure of the Overman, Nietzsche’s thought, as radical as it is, fails to usher in the “other beginning”—which for Nietzsche represented the overturning of Platonism and the trans-valuation of values.

References

Bambach, C. (2010). Heidegger, national socialism and the german people. In: B. W. Davis (Ed.) Martin Heidegger key concepts. Durham: Acumen Publishing, 102–110.

Bambach, C. (2003). Heidegger’s roots: Nietzsche, national socialism and the greeks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bernasconi, R. (2013). Poets as prophets and as painters: Heidegger’s turn to language and the Hölderlinian turn in context. In: J. Powell (Ed.) Heidegger and language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 146–162.

Caputo, J. (1999). Heidegger’s revolution: An introduction to an introduction to metaphysics. In: J. Risser (Ed.) Heidegger toward the turn: Essays on the work of the 1930s. Albany: Sate University Press, 53–74.

Foti, V. (1999). Heidegger, Holderlin, and Sophoclean tragedy. In: J. Risser (Ed.) Heidegger toward the turn: Essays on the work of the 1930s. Albany: SUNY Press, 145–162.

3
Heidegger’s Critical Confrontation with Hölderlin and Rilke

Introduction

1. “Destitute Times” and the Need for the Poet: Confronting the Metaphysics of Presence and the “Flight of the Gods”

2. Hölderlin: The “Poet of Poets”: Language, Destiny, and the Holy Attunement of “The Festival” (das Festliche)

3. From Hölderlin to Rilke: A “Futural” Poet Who Poetizes the Essential Truth of Being?

Concluding Remarks: Preparing for the Heideggerian Readings

Notes

References

3Heidegger’s Critical Confrontation with Hölderlin and Rilke

Introduction

1. “Destitute Times” and the Need for the Poet: Confronting the Metaphysics of Presence and the “Flight of the Gods”

2. Hölderlin: The “Poet of Poets”: Language, Destiny, and the Holy Attunement of “The Festival” (das Festliche)

3. From Hölderlin to Rilke: A “Futural” Poet Who Poetizes the Essential Truth of Being?

Concluding Remarks: Preparing for the Heideggerian Readings

Notes

References

3
Heidegger’s Critical Confrontation with Hölderlin and Rilke