“Holidays” and “Festival” in Hölderlin’s Poetizing
§23. Preliminary hints from citing “passages” in the poetry
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
It is not just any human beings at some habitual hour who meet and reciprocate in greeting. “On holidays.” Why do “holidays” occur to the poet’s thinking? Is it because on holidays the women are especially adorned? However, nothing of that is said here. And why the women? Does the poet think of holidays because he is commemorating the “women thereat,” or is he thinking of the women because he remains mindful of the holidays? Yet what is the point of these almost contrived and awkward questions? Why should the women not indeed be named in a “poetical depiction” of land and peoples? This surely makes the whole thing properly “lyrical” and gives it “atmosphere,” and intensifies the impressions that the poem makes upon the “reader.”
Whoever happens to chance upon this poem and is taken by this strophe may indeed find “poetical” satisfaction in the enjoyment of such impressions. Yet such partial sensibilities and narrow perspectives are irrelevant here, no matter how well intended. Our concern here is simply to know, perhaps in a purely extrinsic way initially, that “the holiday” and “the festival”—which are not the same—are repeatedly named in Hölderlin’s hymnal poetizing.
Hölderlin’s first hymn begins: “As when on a holiday . . .” Yet in interpreting this and other hymns we must first, at some length and frequently, seek to attain what is accessible, so as then, with regard to “holiday” and “festival,” to properly—keep silent. It may thus be necessary to provide remarks on the hymn “As when on a holiday . . .” and at the same time to keep silent regarding the decisive word in the first line. Perhaps at the conclusion of this hymn certain individuals will think back to its beginning and then suddenly hear the word “holiday” differently, and intimate that the first strophe does not in the end seek to describe a mere image.
In our present undertaking with the poem “Remembrance” we must of necessity provide a direct pointer to what is meant by “holiday” and “festival.” This can succeed only in a very questionworthy, because altogether makeshift manner.
We are told of “holidays” in the concluding strophe of the hymn “Germania” (IV, 181ff.):
O nenne Tochter du der heiligen Erd’!
Einmal die Mutter . . .
O name you daughter of the holy Earth!
Once the Mother . . .
(IV, 184)
And we are told of the “festival” in the thirteenth strophe of the hymn “The Rhine” (IV, 172ff.):
Dann feiern das Brautfest Menschen und Götter.
Then humans and gods the bridal festival celebrate.
(IV, 178)
The beginning of the hymn “Mnemosyne” tells of “holiday” and “festival” (IV, 225):
. . . Schön ist
Der Brauttag, bange sind wir aber
Der Ehre wegen. Denn furchtbar gehet
Es ungestalt, wenn Eines uns
Zu gierig genommen.
. . . Beautiful is
The bridal day, yet we are uneasy
For the sake of honor. For it goes frightfully
Amiss, if One has taken
Us too greedily.
These hints are questionworthy and almost embarrassing, because they follow the distasteful procedure of citing “passages” from poems that are here not even heard in their own right, as a word that is on each occasion singular and unified; it remains questionworthy, and even negligent, to “operate” with “passages” at all. Yet dragging in passages in this manner can perhaps arrive at what is most necessary and preliminary: that we now listen differently when in the poem “Remembrance”—which, moreover, comes from a later period than the three aforementioned hymns—we are told of “holidays” and of the “women.”
“Holidays” [Feiertage] are “days of celebration” [Tage des Feierns].
Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance” begins as a greeting: “But go now and greet . . .” The four lines that come first in the introductory strophe are the foreword to the greeting. They name the messenger, the domain, and the path of this greeting. It is not the candidate for the office of priest, who was previously in southern France and for whom things did not work out there in his position as house tutor, who is greeting, but rather Hölderlin the poet. The greeting is a word of his poetizing. That which is greeted is greeted poetically. This is to note that that which is greeted and named in the greeting stands in an essential relation to what is being poetized in Hölderlin’s poetizing during this period. That which is greeted is to be understood only as what is poetized in this poetizing, and that which is poetized here is in turn to be understood only as that which is greeted.
The greeting is by no means exhausted in bringing to mind and addressing the landscape previously seen, the human affairs observed, the human beings encountered there and their way of life. Nor does what is “poetic” in the greeting consist in the fact that what is mentioned in the greeting is “poetically embellished” to give a coherent image. Everything is more a piecemeal naming of almost random things and human beings, rather than a complete description of land and people. The telling that greets merely looks like description, and yet is something different.
What it is, we shall come to know if we ponder what is greeted, and how. Certainly, we shall never grasp that which is greeted by merely listing the things that are greeted. Whatever the greeting may name, that which is named is not told of as though it were simply brought to mind once more through the direction of the poet’s thinking, thus merely through and for the poet himself. The reverse is the case: that which is greeted thinks its way toward the poet. From where remains unsaid. That which comes to be thought itself remains concealed. What if, in this coming to be thought, that which comes to be thought—“Still it thinks its way to me”—were itself greeting, and the poet were not only the one who greets, but already before this the one greeted? What if he were able to say this greeting only because he himself, in a still more originary sense, were struck by a greeting?
The interim word in the greeting, with which the second strophe begins—“Still it thinks its way to me”—makes us attentive to the fact that the way in which what is named in the poet’s greeting is greeted, is unique in kind. Yet what is greeted is also more kept silent by the telling than made known; more kept silent, yet not completely, so that those listening can indeed in the end experience it, if, that is, they hear the greeting from its end in its full completion. The greeting comes to its completion in the second strophe with the lines:
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
Differently from the preceding words of the greeting, the telling is here configured into a singular arc that enigmatically swings back into itself and in this way brings each of the individually named things to shimmer. The first four lines gather themselves with increasing density in the fourth, which consists of just two words: “In March time”; the ensuing four lines are like a relaxed exhalation in which the essence of this time brings itself to its unfolding. Yet what we would seek to point out in order to highlight the beauty of these words is merely the stammering of some external clambering around; one that is, moreover, perhaps premature, since we do not yet know what is said there. Pointers to what is beautiful are perhaps altogether out of order here, because the realm of art and of beauty, and all metaphysics, in which both of these find their exclusive site, is exceeded in Hölderlin’s poetizing for the first time.
Some might also be surprised that these comments on the poem “Remembrance” linger so tediously precisely with the two introductory strophes, which are surely the strophes that are easily understood, because they can be directly intuited. The reason for the tediousness adhered to here is simple; it lies in the necessity of learning to know what is meant by “Remembrance.” Yet only if we come to grasp how the poet in his greeting “thinks of” that which is greeted will we, from out of this “thinking of” [Denken an] that which is greeted, be capable of thinking the essence of “thoughtful remembrance” [An-denken] and thereby the poem as a whole.
The completion of the greeting begins with the line:
An Feiertagen gehn / Die braunen Frauen daselbst
On holidays go / The brown women thereat
“On holidays . . .” Why does Hölderlin, who during the period of his hymnal poetizing allows for no word to occur by chance or as a placeholder, name holidays precisely? Initially it may be sufficient to point to the fact that the first hymn, that is, the one that encompasses all those to come, begins with the words “As when on a holiday . . .” In conclusion we then noted, citing a superficial list of “passages,” that Hölderlin during the period of his hynmal poetizing repeatedly names holidays and the festival.
Why are the “women” named together with the “holidays”?
What kind of days are these, the holidays? “Holidays” are days of celebration. And celebration?
§24. Celebrating as pausing from work and passing over into reflection upon the essential
“Celebration” means in the first instance interrupting our everyday activity and leaving work behind. This leaves us free for other things. For what? That is determined precisely by this “celebrating” itself, provided that all celebrating is not the merely negative act of ceasing work but rather emerges from the strength of its own essence. If, however, celebrating remains only the cessation and interruption of work, then the break that arises must be determined from another source, not from celebration and through it, but only from a relation to work once more. Celebration is, then, reckoned in terms of work, a means of relaxation and recovery by way of entertainment. “Celebrations” are then fundamentally in the service of work, ways of filling in breaks from work.
Strictly speaking, however, celebration, as the leaving behind of work, in fact receives its manner of being solely from out of the original essence of celebrating. We of today are scarcely equal to this essence any more, even though it indeed announces itself already in our routine celebrations. For celebrating, as a pausing from work, is indeed already a keeping to oneself; it is a taking note, a questioning, a reflecting, an awaiting, passing over into the more wakeful intimation of wonder, namely, of the wonder that a world worlds around us at all, that beings are and not rather nothing, that things are and that we ourselves in their midst are, that we ourselves are and yet scarcely know who we are, and scarcely know that we do not know all of this.
As such pausing, celebrating thus already brings us to the threshold of reflection, and thereby into the neighborhood of that which is worthy of question, and thereby once again to a deciding line. For it can now happen that in pausing from work, we indeed come up empty; do not know what to do with ourselves, search for substitutes; and right away our times of celebration have inadvertently become opportunities to take flight from ourselves and occasions for intoxication.
From the necessity of the unconditional priority of “work,” “holidays,” like work itself, then become either instituted or even abolished. “Holidays” are then institutions of human making. The essence of the holiday is in this way everywhere perverted into its opposite. Yet this corrupted essence of celebration only confirms its essence. For celebration is a becoming free from and relieved of the habitual through becoming free for the inhabitual of the day as the time of the festival, as distinct from night. The habitual here means the contexture of things and human beings that we constantly and proximately encounter and which, as a consequence of a well-worn way of doing things, we no longer appropriate anew in their own essence each time. The everyday then stands at our disposal from the perspectives of its utility, and yet in its essence it has not been authentically appropriated by us. The everyday thereby all too readily becomes the in-authentic for us. What is thus inauthentic no longer lays claim to our own essence; the relation between thing and human being becomes stultified in the routine. The world that has not been appropriated, the inauthentic, confirms, reinforces, and intensifies such habitualness. Things and human beings of the everyday world do not necessarily have to have this trait of inauthenticity and of such habitualness; yet they do so for the most part. They have it especially when the authentic dimension of things and of human beings has become inaccessible, when the inhabitual is closed off, when knowledge of it has been lost and care concerning it extinguished. This begins to happen at that moment when we come to understand care now only as worry and distress, as the effort of doing business and as the agitation of machinations, instead of recognizing that care is of another essence altogether, namely, obedience to the preservation of a belonging to what is essential in all beings—that is, to what is authentic, which is always the inhabitual.
The inhabitual, therefore, does not here mean the exception, the sensation, that which has never yet been there, but rather the contrary: The inhabitual is that which constantly prevails, that which is simple and authentic in the essence of beings, by virtue of which they maintain themselves within the measure of their essence and demand of human beings that they keep to such measure. The inhabitual can, therefore, appear and shine most purely within the habitual.
Celebration is a becoming free from the merely habitual through becoming free for the inhabitual. Celebration is an attentive listening to what Adalbert Stifter names the “gentle law,”[6] is awaiting the authentic, is preparing to appropriate what is essential, is waiting for the event [Ereignis] in which the essential manifests itself. The celebration becomes more celebratory not by the intensification or expansion of organized functions, and not by inflated grandiosity and the noise that attends its staging. The celebration is more celebratory when it comes to await more attentively the authentic festival. To the degree that a day is more replete with awaiting in regard to the appearing of the essential, it is, to the same degree, also a holiday.
§25. The radiance of the essential within celebration. Play and dance
To the festive there belongs radiance. Radiance, however, properly arises from the illumination and shining of the essential. Insofar as the essential radiates, every aspect of things and humans enters into the release of its radiance, and this radiance in turn demands of human beings adornment and ornamentation. The latter alone, however, never produce the radiance of celebration. The more festive the holiday, that is, the more it awaits the inhabitual in each case, the more all comportment is released from the habitual. The more released the comportment, the more vibrant and oscillating our stance. Yet the release of the habitual into what is authentically inhabitual is not an unleashed frenzy but rather a being bound to the essential and to the concealed enjoining and rule of beings. Being bound to the rule in free oscillation, and unfolding the wealth of free possibilities of what is rule bound, stemming from such oscillation—that is the essence of play. When the human being himself enters into play in the composed unity of his figure, there arises the dance. To the radiance of celebration belong play and dance.
The radiance of celebration as the radiating of the essential is not bound to the brightness of day; the celebration belonging to holiday can radiate through the night, which is to say: the holiday can not only last into the night but also can illuminate the night itself from the radiance of celebration. Here we are thinking ahead to the end of the fourth strophe of the poem “Remembrance.” There the poet tells of a sojourn:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . wo nicht die Nacht durchglänzen
Die Feiertage der Stadt,
Und Saitenspiel und eingeborener Tanz nicht.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . where there gleam not through the night
The holidays of the town,
Nor the music of strings nor native dance.
It is never through the fact that dance and play take place that holidays arise and are. Rather, where a genuine celebrating is granted and this makes the day into a holiday, what is daily in such a day can swing into dance and play, thereby to maintain even in the habitual its lost radiance.
§26. The essential relation between festival and history. The “bridal festival” of humans and gods
Superficially reckoned, we may say that on holidays “festivals” are celebrated. Here for the most part we understand the “festival” in the sense of an institution corresponding to a sequence of official functions that the human being brings about. For Hölderlin, however, the festival has its own concealed essence. We equate “holidays” and festive days and festivals with one another and classify them within the time sequence of the calendar. The calendar is properly a festival calendar. Festivals are regularly recurring, sequentially instituted occurrences within a course of weeks, months, and seasons of the year that can be charted historiographically.
For Hölderlin, “the festival” is not an occurrence within the framework and on the grounds of history; rather, “the festival” is itself the ground and the essence of history. Therefore as soon as we actually begin to thoughtfully ponder this essence of the festival and of holidays, we stand within the decisive domain of Hölderlin’s poetizing. We cannot evade the manner in which Hölderlin thinks history as soon as we want to grasp the essence of the festival. This opens up for the first time our perspective on an essential connection between festival and history that underlies the poem “Remembrance” and pervasively attunes all its telling. Thinking the essence of history, however, at the same time signifies thinking that history in which this essence of history itself became manifest as a defining truth. Thinking the essence of history means thinking the Occidental in its essence, and thereby thinking it from out of its relation to its first commencement, that is, to the Greek world and to Greece.
The two letters to Hölderlin’s friend Böhlendorff before and after his stay in southern France were initially cited at the beginning of this lecture course merely in a “biographical” respect. Yet what they properly and solely tell of is the transformed essence of history that disclosed itself to the poet around this time. Admittedly, there is no direct or explicit talk of the festival in these two letters; and yet what is being thought of is only “the festival.” A fragment from the period of the hymns gives us a hint of this (fragment 31, IV, 264):
meinest du zum Dämon
Es solle gehen,
Wie damals? Nemlich sie wollten stiften
Ein Reich der Kunst. Dabei ward aber
Das Vaterländische von ihnen
Versäumet und erbärmlich gieng
Das Griechenland, das schönste, zu Grunde.
Wohl hat es andere
Bewandtniss jezt.
Es sollten nemlich die Frommen
und alle Tage wäre
Das Fest.
you say to the demon
Things should go,
As back then? For they wanted to found
A kingdom of art. Yet in so doing
They missed the mark
Of the fatherland and pitifully did
Greece, the most beautiful, perish.
Presumably things
Stand differently now.
For the pious should have
and all days there would be
The festival.
We should not presume to grasp straightaway these fragmentary lines of a hymn. Here a pointer may suffice concerning the inner connection between the will to found a kingdom of art and the decline of the Greek world, between how things “Stand differently now” and the possibility of the festival to come. From this connection in turn, only the following need be explicitly emphasized: namely, that here “the festival” is named in a decided and manifestly singular sense. “The festival”—this word says something unconditional. The festival is not conditioned by the making of humans who by their own initiative “put on” and “stage” “a” festival somewhere at some particular point in time.
It is not through organizing celebrations that “the festival” arises and is; rather, all genuine celebrating prevails in its essence only from out of the festival and has its subsistence in the festival, from which celebration emerges in that it serves the festival. The festival is the ground of celebration.
“The festival” is for Hölderlin, however, essentially “the bridal festival” that “humans and gods” celebrate. “Bridal festival”: the almost hesitant, poetizing word for festival. In this relation the word is already transfigured, and as transfigured is itself further transfigurative. The festival is the event [Ereignis] in which gods and humans come to encounter one another. What is festive in the festival is the ground of this event, which can be neither caused by gods nor made by humans. The festive is the inceptual event that sustains and pervasively attunes all coming to encounter one another in such encountering.[7] The festive is that which inceptually attunes. That which attunes in this manner pervasively attunes and determines everything as a silent voice.[8] It is the voice of an inceptual greeting through which humans and gods themselves first come to be greeted in advance. It is as those who are greeted by the festive, and only as such, that they—gods and humans—are first able, one and the other, the other and the one, to reciprocally also greet each other. What is festive in the festival, that which in each case lets the event of the festival occur, is the inceptual greeting, a greeting on the part of that which, in the first of his hymns—“As when on a holiday . . .”—Hölderlin names “the holy.” The festival as bridal festival is the event of the inceptual greeting.
This inceptual greeting is the concealed essence of history. This inceptual greeting is the event, the commencement. We name this greeting inceptual in the sense of the coming of the holy, because it is first and only in this greeting that the encountering of humans and gods springs forth and has the ground of its source. The festival is the event of the inceptual greeting. Three things, however, belong together at once in this: first, that the holy greets, so that gods and humans come to be greeted; second, that gods and humans are thus those who have been greeted; and finally, that gods and humans, as those who have thus been greeted, ever since then have themselves greeted one another in turn, and in such greeting can hold themselves to one another. This holding and helping is a need. In his hymn “The Titans,” Hölderlin enunciates the ground of this holding themselves to one another with the word (IV, 209, line 46):
. . . Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein.
. . . For no one bears life alone.
(Cf. “Bread and Wine,” line 66)
This word is valid not only for human beings, the “sons of the Earth,” but also for the heavenly ones, the gods. In a draft for the late hymn “Columbus,” we read (IV, 263, lines 37ff.):
Denn einsam kann
Von Himmlischen den Reichtum tragen
Nicht eins;
For of the heavenly
There can bear the wealth in solitude
Not one;
Gods and humans holding themselves to one another is grounded in the essence of the festival, that is, in the festive, which we must think as the greeting coming of the holy.
§27. The festive as origin of attunements. Joy and mournfulness: the epigram “Sophocles”
What is “festive” in the festival is not, therefore, thought here as a supplemental consequence or property, not as the veneer of the festival, but as the ground of its essence. If the festive, as that which inceptually greets, is the holy, then there prevails within the holy the attuning of an attunement that is always more inceptual and more originary than every attunement that pervasively attunes and determines us human beings.
Furthermore, we also find in nature an attunement in each instance. The thinking of modernity that conceives of the human being as “subject” and does so in a psychological and biological manner has fallen prey to the strange opinion, though at the same time understandable to everyone, that attunements found in nature are “naturally” only “imposed empathetically” onto things by human beings. This view is connected to the commonplace conception of attunements or “moods” that grasps them in psychological terms as “emotional states.” However, the essence of attunement is of a different origin. We touch upon it with our pointer to what is festive in the festival. The festive is more inceptual than all attunements otherwise familiar to us and their opposites.
The festive is therefore also more originary than that which is joyful and most joyous, yet also more inceptual than mourning and supreme mournfulness. The festive is the ground of joy and mournfulness, and for this reason the festive is the ground of an inceptual intimacy and belonging together of both, joy and mournfulness. The latter is never merely the severed opposite of the former; rather, both, joy and mournfulness, correspond to one another, so that, thought in the direction of the essential, a joy always speaks within mournfulness and a mournfulness within joy.
Certainly, our thinking will never arrive at these relations so long as we regard mournfulness and joy only as the undulating rise and fall of independent emotional states that occur in human beings, instead of experiencing in a knowing manner the fact that in every fundamental attunement the voice of beyng speaks. Even if Hölderlin did not thoughtfully ponder the essence of attunement in such a way, poetically he knows very well what we have said and has also brought this knowledge poetically into the word, at the same time in relation to the supreme poetizing, that of Greek tragedy [Tragödie]. An “epigram” of Hölderlin’s entitled “Sophocles” contains as it were the inscription in which this poet’s conception of the essence of the mourning plays [Trauerspiele] is encapsulated.[9] The Greek mourning plays are not “theater” in the modern sense. They are celebrations and therefore oriented toward the festival. This now says: they are concerned with the relationship of gods and humans, and they contain and in each instance help to bring about a decision of the order of how a πóλις stands in each case within the truth of such an encountering of humans and gods. Hölderlin’s epigram reads (IV, 3):
SOPHOCLES
Viele versuchten umsonst, das Freudigste freudig zu sagen,
Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus.
Many tried in vain to joyfully say the most joyous,
Here finally it speaks to me, here within mournfulness.
The most joyous within mournfulness? The figure and destiny of Antigone say enough. Yet does the converse also hold: the most mournful within joy? Perhaps it does—if we think, in a sufficiently essential manner, the most mournful in terms of sorrow, and sorrow in terms of the essence of suffering, and if we do not equate joy with mere pleasure and merriness. Yet let us quietly concede that we know scarcely anything of all this. We of today especially are so devoid of knowledge here because despite the deprivations of a second World War, we are still incapable of experiencing the real need, which, however, not yet interpreted, the poet of this epigram suffered in advance.
Here, too, as often in this lecture course, we must forgo pondering Hölderlin’s word in a manner befitting it. We merely draw specific attention to the “finally” in the second line. The “finally” names the fulfillment of something long-sought. And yet we would go astray if we were to think that Hölderlin, following a newly achieved insight into the essence of Greek poetizing, were henceforth intent only on imitating this Greek poet. The opposite is the case. Hölderlin, rather, experiences in the poetizing of Sophocles that which is other, that which once was, and this is why it becomes necessary to translate Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone; this is why he wrests from himself the “Remarks” on the two mourning plays, “Remarks” that also belong to those hard to access treasures of which the Germans know nothing and are unable to know anything so long as they are of the opinion that they can find their own essence through their own invention, instead of apprehending it truly in the word of authentic history. Hölderlin, by contrast, in recognizing that which is other and once was with regard to his own history, and not in just any arbitrary foreign, at the same time catches sight of what is his own and to come. Hölderlin is able to write down the epigram “Sophocles” only because he knows the festive essence of the mourning play and the essence of the festival.
We are seeking the essence of celebration and of the holiday. If the festival is the event of the greeting of the holy, then celebrating has its essence in gathering itself around this event, and in such gathering releasing itself from our voracious and clueless confinement within the accustomed and habitual, so as to become free for the intimation of what is coming. If celebrating is this gathering that is an awaiting, perhaps indeed the radiant gleam of an indestructible, far-reaching forbearance and patience, then the essence of the holiday always consists in its properly being the eve or day before the festival.
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
In March time,
We are asking: what is meant by holiday, and what is festival?
Suspicions and objections have been raised that what is being discussed here with regard to festival and celebration is not to be found there at all. I ask in response: what is to be found there, then? What does it mean that this is to be found there in a text, and that is not? What does the researcher into nature see in the microscope? Maybe something correct, if he undertakes careful observation. But is the correct, which he sees there, already the true—that which lies before us and is to be found there and awaits us? It may thus seem as though here, too, in delimiting the essence of celebration and festival, we have merely proceeded arbitrarily, indeed violently.
To celebrate initially means: not to work. It may thus come about that holidays remain related only to workdays, that they are an interruption of work time, a diversion from the course of work and ultimately a break that we deliberately initiate in the service of work. Mere cessation is a negative kind of comportment. Some other arbitrary activity can be superficially substituted, as it were, to occupy the break, and, as we also say, pass the free time.
1. Celebration as becoming free in belonging to the inhabitual
Celebration as cessation can, however, instead of being a mere discontinuation and interruption, also begin as a pausing that arises not from a mere turning away from work, but from the human being’s keeping to himself. Keeping to oneself is a way of coming to oneself and being a self in which one’s own essence and its unfolding is freed up. Self-reflection and questioning then begin.
The suspension of work is now no longer the essence and ground of celebration but rather already the consequence of that keeping to oneself that seemingly directs the human being only back toward his “ego,” yet in truth first transports him out into that realm within which his essence is suspended. Astonishment begins, or even a kind of terror. In one way or another, things become spacious, airy around the human being, without his already understanding this space and its expansiveness immediately.
The inhabitual appears. Its appearing does not require the enormous extravagance of the peculiar, or being incited by the unusualness of the latter. Celebration is now a being freed from what is stultified and habitual through becoming free for the inhabitual. The inhabitual, however, has its concealed measure in what is simple and inceptual in all beings. The inhabitual gathers itself in the fact that beings are at all, and not rather nothing.
Celebration as becoming free for the inhabitual is already a belonging to the latter in the manner of expectation. The steadfast insistence of expectation is awaiting. The more filled with such expectation a day is, the more directly it is a holiday. Times whose days are merely eager for the newest thing are without expectation, to which there always belongs reverence, be it only a glimmer. Conversely, expectation of the essential can pervasively attune us without our needing to eagerly count on what is or can be planned.
Holidays are also not what they are through organized events. A genuine celebration cannot be brought about by making, because celebrating, in converse, bestows in advance the radiance into which the play of musical strings and dance ply themselves. From time to time, what is most celebratory in the most improbable celebration is that which, erroneously enough, we name the “echo” of a day in which perhaps “only” something genuinely habitual transpired. All this is brought into the word in a unique manner by the first strophe of Hölderlin’s most beautiful elegy, “Bread and Wine” (IV, 119):
Rings um ruhet die Stadt; still wird die erleuchtete Gasse,
Und, mit Fakeln geschmückt, rauschen die Wagen hinweg.
Satt gehn heim von Freuden des Tags zu ruhen die Menschen,
Und Gewinn und Verlust wäget ein sinniges Haupt
Wohlzufrieden zu Haus; leer steht von Trauben und Blumen,
Und von Werken der Hand ruht der geschäfftige Markt.
Aber das Saitenspiel tönt fern aus Gärten; vielleicht, daß
Dort ein Liebendes spielt oder ein einsamer Mann
Ferner Freunde gedenkt und der Jugendzeit; und die Brunnen
Immerquillend und frisch rauschen an duftendem Beet.
Still in dämmriger Luft ertönen geläutete Glocken,
Und der Stunden gedenk rufet ein Wächter die Zahl.
Jezt auch kommet ein Wehn und regt die Gipfel des Hains auf,
Sieh! und das Schattenbild unserer Erde, der Mond,
Kommet geheim nun auch; die Schwärmerische, die Nacht kommt,
Voll mit Sternen und wohl wenig bekümmert um uns,
Glänzt die Erstaunende dort, die Fremdlingin unter den Menschen
Über Gebirgeshöhn traurig und prächtig herauf.
The town is quiet round about; the lane, lit up, falls silent,
And, decked with torches, the coaches rush away.
Replete with joys of the day, humans go home to rest,
And a pondering head weighs profit and loss
Well content at home; standing empty of grapes and flowers,
And of works of the hand the busy market rests.
Yet the play of musical strings sounds distantly from gardens; perhaps it is
A lover who plays there or a solitary man
Remembers distant friends and the time of youth; and the fountains
Still flowing and fresh cascade by the fragrant flower bed.
Quietly in the twilight air the peal of bells rings out,
And mindful of the hours a watchman calls the number.
And now a breeze comes too and stirs the tree tops of the grove,
Behold! and shadowing our Earth, the moon,
Arrives now stealthily too; the crazy one, the night, comes,
Full of stars and presumably little concerned with us,
The astonished one there gleams, a stranger she among humans
Rising mournful and magnificent over mountain crests.
Holidays are essentially holidays only when they are days of festivity, that is, days that are oriented toward the festival. The festival, however, is for Hölderlin by no means something that can be made or contrived by human beings, nor indeed is it any kind of occurrence that could also be recorded historiographically amid the course of other happenings. “Festival,” for Hölderlin, is always “the festival.” “The festival” is the reciprocal encountering of humans and gods from out of their essential ground. Such encountering does not consist in a mere “meeting,” in which one party runs into the other and they run into one another, and do so within a time-space that is empty and contingent in relation to them both. In the encountering, humans and gods come toward one another from afar; and this afar is in no way something that is left behind them but is rather the space that they bring to one another in their encounter, without having found or opened that space themselves. Encountering is the reciprocal appropriation of their essence over into the essential space that first unfolds in its expansiveness and enters into its configuration.
What is inceptual in such appropriation is the appropriative event [Er-eignis] that already sustains and pervasively attunes, and thus lets happen, all encountering. The event [Ereignis] is history proper. Hölderlin thinks the festival as the essence of history. He does not enunciate this in such a form. Yet his poetizing springs from such thinking. The event is the festiveness of the festival. Here we are not regarding this festiveness as the consequence of the festival but as its ground. The festiveness that grounds the festival is the holy. And correspondingly: the holy in its historical essence is this festiveness.
The holy is beyond humans and “beyond the gods.” Gods and humans, however, need one another. “For no one bears life alone.” Because festiveness has its essence in the holy, festiveness is also more originary than the joyous, and therefore also more inceptual than the contrast between joy and mournfulness. Because both joy and mournfulness are grounded in something more originary—in the holy—they are united and are One within this ground. Because they are One in the sense of essential inseparability, what is most joyous can, and indeed from time to time must, express itself in mournfulness. Wherever such an event occurs is always the festival. Hölderlin says in his epigram “Sophocles”:
Viele versuchten umsonst, das Freudigste freudig zu sagen,
Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus.
Many tried in vain to joyfully say the most joyous,
Here finally it speaks to me, here within mournfulness.
The “mourning plays” of the Greeks are festive celebrations. This means: here decisions are made concerning the encountering of humans and gods, and from out of such encountering. In this way, matters are also decided on each occasion concerning humans and concerning the gods. Festivals are the proper days of history, which is to say, history-forming days. For this reason, earlier festivals do not belong to the past but rather always play a role in preparing the coming decisions. This is why Hölderlin’s predilection for Greece is not reducible to a scholarly or merely historiographically better-informed appreciation of “classical antiquity.” Hölderlin’s relation to the Greek world cannot at all be comprehended as a mere “predilection” that simply regards the Greek world as a model. And this is why, when speaking of Winckelmann and Lessing, of Goethe and Schiller, of Humboldt and Hegel and their relation to “classical antiquity,” we should not name Hölderlin alongside them.
Especially erroneous is the juxtaposition of Hölderlin to Nietzsche that has recently become fashionable, despite the fact that it was actually Nietzsche who, already as a seventeen-year-old student at the gymnasium, recognized Hölderlin and gave him the distinction of being his “favorite poet.” This occurred in the context of a school essay from the year 1861, at a time when Hölderlin was almost completely forgotten among the Germans.1
“Nietzsche and Hölderlin”—an abyss separates them. In abysally different ways, both determine the most proximate and most remote future of the Germans and of the Occident (cf. p. 122).
For Hölderlin, Greece is the Other of the Western world. The one and the other belong within a singular history. The historicality of history resides in what Hölderlin names “the festival.” Holidays, however, are the days before the festival.
“On holidays” there prevails the clear, unshakeable, yet also cautiously hesitant intimation of the festival. Hölderlin keeps silent concerning the essence of the festival, naming the festival the “bridal festival” of humans and gods. Because the poet’s thinking is directed toward the festival, he poetizes in terms of the holidays and tells of the holidays. More appropriately and more cautiously, from our perspective we must grasp this connection as follows: that Hölderlin tells of the holidays indicates that he thinks in terms of the holidays, and that means: thinking the bridal festival. From out of such thinking he greets those who are most directly sustained by the intimation of the festival and are most intimately attuned to preparing themselves for the festival, and who find what is fitting in terms of the holidays and give birth to its radiance: the women.
This name here still carries its early resonance, which refers to a mistress or female ruler and protector, yet now in a singular, essential, and that also always means historical respect. In a poem that dates from shortly before the beginning of the period of his hymns and is part of the transition to that period, Hölderlin himself has said everything that we need to know here. The poem is titled “Song of the Germans.” The eleventh strophe begins (IV, 129ff.):
Den deutschen Frauen danket! sie haben uns
Der Götterbilder freundlichen Geist bewahrt,
Thank the German women! they have preserved
For us the friendly spirit of divine images,
The truth of these lines, still veiled to the poet himself, first comes to light in the hymn “Germania.” The German women rescue the appearing of the gods, so that there remains an event of history, an event whose moment admittedly withdraws from any calculative reckoning of time. The German women rescue the appearing of the gods, bringing it into the gentleness of a friendly light. They remove from this event the terror that always leads us astray into the measureless, whether in the sensuous presentation of the figure and site of the gods, or in the comprehension of their essence. The damming, that is, damning, of the terrifying is, however, not a burying of the abyssal. To the contrary. Preserving the encountering of the gods in their appearing, bringing it into the gentleness of their image and countenance, however this preserving may be configured, plays an essential role in preparing the festival. The women are named because the poet’s thinking is directed toward the festival.
However, in the hymn “Remembrance” it is not the German women who are named, but “the brown women”—this specifically recalls the southern land, where the sun’s light is of intense transparency and its glow is overwhelming. The element of the “heavenly fire” here has a fieryness all its own, and the “exuberant genius” of human beings is here particularly exposed to this elemental power; it therefore needs to be especially regulated and shielded, so as not to be scorched in it. The encountering of gods and humans is different in the southern land. The festival has a different character.
When Hölderlin names “the brown women thereat,” those of southern France, therefore, then they and everything in which they share, that is, everything that is greeted together with them, stand for the Greek world. That means they stand for the festival that once was, “in the land of old,” where now no image of the gods that have fled is still able to shine (“Germania”). The letter to Böhlendorff of December 2, 1802, following Hölderlin’s return from France, clearly attests to this (V, 327):
The athletic character of the southern people, in the ruins of the spirit of antiquity, made me better acquainted with the proper essence of the Greeks; I came to know their nature and their wisdom, their bodies, the manner in which they grew in their climate, and the rules whereby they protected their exuberant genius from the violence of the elements.
It may now already have become clearer what the greeting “But go now and greet . . .” is properly directed to: not to what was encountered in terms of land and people during Hölderlin’s stay in southern France, but to the festival that once was, to the encountering that once was between the gods that once were and the humans from the land of Greece.
Yet can someone greet that which once was? Surely the greeting can reach only that which still “actually” “is.” Surely what is past is that which is no longer actual? Or is this act of greeting of such a kind that it first brings back into being that which seems no longer to be? Is the act of greeting exhausted in the sending and dispatching of a “greeting,” or is the act of greeting properly a retrieval of that which is greeted, and not just any retrieval, but rather an exceptional one, a more inceptual letting arise? (Cf. p. 44 above). In general, is that which once was so definitively only that which is past? Is not that which once was distinguished from everything merely past and evanescent through the fact that, having once been, it still prevails in being? That which once was and has been is that which still prevails in being, albeit remotely.
As though to highlight this remoteness remotely in its presencing, Hölderlin names “the brown women thereat.” “Thereat” [daselbst]—what “inspired” “poet” would venture to use such an unpoetic word as this “prosaic” “thereat,” which for us today borders emphatically on the language of government officials and of business? Yet the poetic aspect of the greeting and telling of the entire strophe is so originary that any hint of the prosaic has melted away. Around this time, moreover, Hölderlin no longer shies away from words that initially come across as unpoetic and thus appear strange within the poetizing; for he has a clear knowledge of the fact that the more purely it resides within its essence, the more the invisible that is inaccessible to the senses also demands that which is altogether foreign to it for its mode of appearing. (Cf. “The Ground for Empedocles. General Ground,” III, 317ff.) Hölderlin has now come to recognize that in a certain mode of poetizing, the “image,” that is, what can be intuited in the presentation must be set over against, indeed separated from, the truth to be presented, in such a way that the presentation even denies that which is to be presented. The “sensation,” that is, the attunement corresponding to the truth, cannot be grasped directly at all in an “image.” Compare also the fragment “What is God? . . .” (Zinkernagel V, 149):
. . . Jemehr ist eines
Unsichtbar / schiket es sich in Fremdes.
. . . The more something is
Invisible / it sends itself into something foreign.
For this reason, Hölderlin in his poetizing chooses the alienating word, and this “thereat” stands in the midst of pure “poesy.” This dry “thereat,” however, draws together all that has been said into the unity of one world, to that world in which the brown women go “on silken ground” [auf seidnen Boden].
Linguistically, we might expect “upon silken ground” [auf seidnem Boden]. Because the handwritten basis for the poem is preserved only in the case of the final strophe, it cannot be decided whether Hölderlin composed the text just as it now reads, and whether, if this is how he composed it, we are not in fact dealing with a written error. If, as I assume but cannot directly prove, Hölderlin indeed wrote it as we now read it, then the accusative “auf seidnen Boden” instead of the dative highlights the direction. What is named is the ground not simply as foundational support of the going but rather as the emergent realm of the holiday procession, the ground sought out by those who are expectant, the ground over which they proceed, as the one suited to them and to their going.
Does the “silken ground” perhaps name the ground that is simply covered with such materials and carpeting, or is the ground itself “silken,” that is, soft and quietly gleaming like silk, which is to say, precious and bearing within it, and yet bestowing, concealed richness? Does not the silken ground mean, rather, the Earth, out of which, and over which, and back into which there passes the breath of that indeterminate tenderness of the first, just barely indicated emergent stirring in early spring, containing everything at once: veiled indeterminacy and yet already intimate decidedness? The next line, consisting of just two words, relieves us of the answer to such questioning:
Zur Märzenzeit,
In March time,
Which time is that? The time of a transition. What is transition? We usually regard “transitional times” as “provisional,” as “temporary” and thus passing, reckoned, that is, in terms of times that quickly disappear and are surpassed. Thought in this way, transition is merely a passing over; that which passes over is what is fleeting, without subsistence, not final, not decisive, something one must immediately get past as quickly as possible. Such is the calculative view of transition and of the transitory, that of a reckoning that is always in a hurry to put behind it whatever is momentary and to proceed.
Yet is transition just the hurried rush away from one thing that races over to something else and is thus neither the one nor the other but merely a continual “and so forth”? Is not transition also, and in the first instance, a passing over to the other side, in which process the side from which the passage proceeds is not then simply abandoned in the transition but rather brought with us in a peculiar way? Transition as going over and conveying a greeting?
The second strophe of the poem “Remembrance,” in the consummation of its greeting, names the women. They are named because the poet is thinking of the holidays. He is thinking these because he is thinking the festival, the event of the encountering of humans and gods. The festival, thus understood, is the essential ground of history.
In the greeting, however, “the brown women thereat” are named. The southern holidays are meant. The southern land stands for the land of Greece. Greek festival, the encountering of humans and gods that once was, within the Greek world, is greeted. If greeting has its essence in letting that which is greeted be in what it is, then this act of greeting raises the festival that once was, as that which once was, into its essence. Why, and to what end, does this occur? Only to lose oneself in an inappropriate mourning over something past, to take refuge there, and furthermore, to forget the present urgency, and through this very evasion to act counter to and to be opposed to that which is coming? Why and to what end this greeting, directed to what once was?
Instead of pursuing this pressing question right away, we would do well first to see more clearly how the festival that once was is greeted, the festival that indeed is not even spoken of directly at all. We find instead only the depiction, without further “motivation,” of a scenery that one might almost call “Romantic.” So it seems, at least. Yet we may not assign Hölderlin’s poetizing to either “Romanticism” or “Classicism.” We must learn to see that such simplified classifications are perhaps very useful for promoting the business of science and for increasing the number of scholarly controversies, yet in truth remain an erroneous distraction. It then ends up looking as though Hölderlin existed only so that there could be scientific disputes over the relationship between Classicism and Romanticism and their variations and mixtures, and so that science, through such disputes, could maintain its “progress.”
If we ask how that which is greeted is greeted here, then we are not asking about “poetological” forms or “stylistic devices” on the basis of some curiosity about Hölderlin’s poetic workshop. We are asking in what respects that which is greeted becomes manifest in the greeting, and what it is, as that which manifests itself in this way.
That that which is greeted and the greeting are altogether simple in their essence demands a correspondingly simple hearing, as well. Because, however, we who are hearing, and are to learn to hear, have long since been entangled in all sorts of unexamined things, we are unable to apprehend what is simple in a simple and direct manner, without falling victim to essential deceptions through our regarding what happens to be commonly familiar to us as what is in fact simple. This is why the simplest lines demand the most extensive interpretive detours. Yet what is discussed in this process should never be misinterpreted as the attempt to impute some metaphysical system to the poetizing. The task of thinking that we are initially faced with here consists, rather, in thinking our way out of our entanglements in metaphysical ways of explaining. Admittedly, so long as poetizing is a hunting ground for scientific research, the path to the word will often be futile, even as the most extensive detour. For all “science” rests on metaphysics. Nevertheless, we must learn to hear:
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
In March time,
What time is that? Does the naming of this time tell us something about that which is greeted, insofar as the festival that once was is greeted?
March time is a “transitional time.” “Transition” here does not mean that which merely passes by and is fleeting. “Transition” for us here implies going over to the other side, yet in such a way that the side from which the going proceeds is not simply left behind and thrust into oblivion.
§29. Transition as reconciliation and equalization
Transition thus does not mean away from one and off to the other but rather the essential manner in which the one and the other approach each other. Transition is not a passing over but rather a remaining that is gathered into itself, that unites the one and the other, thus letting both go forth from the enduring ground of their essence and letting them remain within that ground from the very first.
“March time” is a time of transition. It entails nothing violent or rushed, nor thrusts anything away. Everything, winter and summer, is as though reconciled within a concealed latency. This hesitant latency, however, is also not standstill but rather a singular arising and veiled emergence: reconciliation of the severity and brittleness of winter with the ease and strength of summer. Reconciliation is an equalizing; but equalization is not simply a making equal in the manner of a leveling out of everything into an empty and undifferentiated sameness. Reconciliation is also not the suppression and elimination of strife but rather a releasing of each of the parties in strife into the legitimacy of their own essence in each instance. True equalization places the parties in strife back into the equality of their essence. Equalization means that each is brought, in an equally inceptual manner, into the stillness of its essence and is sustained there, so that it may receive from this stillness of its essence the strength to acknowledge its counteressence, and in such acknowledgment also first to find itself fully. Finding oneself, however, is never a stubborn insistence on oneself alone but rather a going over from one’s own to the foreign of the other and a going back from this acknowledged foreign into one’s own. Equalization is going over and going back, is transition:
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
Without saying explicitly what is properly meant, all the words here refer to transition and equalization in the essential sense: the time when “night and day are equal.” We usually employ the word order “day and night.” This means: we usually speak from the perspective of the day, as though it were what is “positive” and “night” the “negative.” Hölderlin says: “When night and day are equal,” and he does so not “for the sake of the rhyme,” since this poem, like the hymns, does not know “rhymes.” “Night and day” name the time-spaces of dark and light, of what is closed and what is opened, of the concealed and the unveiled, the far and the near. Yet all this in relation to the encountering of gods and humans, therefore in regard to the festival.
Night, for Hölderlin, is not simply a mere “image” for the absence of the gods, however; rather, night is the time-space of a quite specific relation to the gods and, above all, to that which carries and determines the encountering of gods and humans. Night is the time-space of mournful commemoration, of a thinking that remembers the gods that once were, yet are not past. Night is the time-space of a unique vigilance, one that may indeed be all too readily befallen by slumber and drifting off into sleep, without however being overpowered by the latter. The thinking that remembers those who once were, and who thus still essentially are, is oriented toward a remoteness; yet this remoteness is mysterious, because as remoteness it shelters within it at once that which once was and that which is coming. Each also refers at the same time to the other in each instance, and this especially when no decision has yet been made concerning either the remoteness of what once was or the remoteness of what is to come but where there is only remoteness. What is removed in such remoteness bears night within it; it is by no means something removed in the sense of eliminated, merely gone and away.
Night is not negative in essence. It falls into the semblance of the negative only if we abandon ourselves, without knowledge or reflection alike, to mere day or mere night. In truth, night takes over the evening’s descent into dusk and brings about the rise of the dawn. Descent is not mere disappearance or coming to an end. Only something essential that is capable of entrusting itself to having once been is able to descend or go down in the historical sense. Only that which is great can go down; that which is small never goes down; it either continues on or simply comes to an end. Night takes over the descent and takes it into its safekeeping, for it is the preparing of the dawn. Night nights as night only when it is a receiving of the descent and a preparing of the dawn at the same time, and is thus the essential fullness of transition.
If, in March time, night and day are equal, then this is to say that the night, which precedes the day, has become ready to let the day and the coming of day take precedence in the transition, yet without relinquishing its other aspect, that of preserving for day that which once was. The essential equalization between night and day does not bring about the disappearance of both but rather brings each into its ownmost essence in each case, and brings both reciprocally into the unity of their mutual belonging.
“When night and day are equal” does not refer to some quantitatively determined, astronomical constellation, but is rather the veiling word of supreme, inceptual equalization. In night and day being equal in early spring, night is the purest transition to day, and day stands before the beginning of its ascendent rise. This equality is the summit of the pure granting of essence. This supreme equalization is the characteristic sign of the essence of the festival, of the event of the encountering of gods and humans.
§31. Gods and humans as fitting themselves to what is fitting. That which is fitting and fate
Certainly we are not to represent gods and humans to ourselves as present at hand entities that also crop up alongside others, so as to encounter one another on occasion within an empty time-space disengaged from those gods and humans. Gods and the human being are, but they are in the manner of fitting themselves to whatever is fitting. Here, however, that which is fitting by no means refers to whatever is in keeping with a prescription or rule, or with a custom. Hölderlin uses the phrase “what is fitting” in an essential sense. That which is fitting is, in the first place, that which is right and proper, in the sense of preserving a proper belonging to the essence. That which is fitting is, then, really that which is proper itself. Yet that which is proper not as some prescription inscribed somewhere that merely waits to be followed or not followed. That which is proper, as what is fitting, is that which disposes over whatever is right, ordering it in such a way that all that is to remain within the essence must order itself in compliance with this ordinance.
Fitting oneself into what is fitting is not simply a coming to terms with the inevitable. For that which is fitting is indeed precisely that which can be avoided and is even most often avoided. Fitting oneself to what is fitting means sending oneself out upon the path to one’s own essence and toward finding the space of that essence, sending ahead one’s own potentiality for being and giving it up to the favor or disfavor of finding what is fitting or not. This, however—sending oneself out into the finding or loss of that which is fitting, as fittingly sent and sending itself—this alone is what it means to stand within “fate.”[10]
All too often we call fate “blind,” only because we ourselves are blinded and miscalculate fate in terms of our calculations by regarding it as what is merely incalculable and “inexorable.” It is certainly incalculable. Yet at the same time, incalculability is not an appropriate way of defining fate. If we encounter it merely as the incalculable, then we remain within the calculative attitude, even if we do not use numbers in the process.
Fate is the way in which what is proper, and that means, what properly belongs together, is fittingly sent into accord and equalization or else left in the realm of what is unequalized. Fate is, at the same time, the way in which those who are by way of expressly having sent themselves fittingly into their own essence, find and retain what is fitting, thus leaving to that which is fittingly sent and sending its essence, lending legitimacy to its prevailing, and so first receiving what is right.
Our calculative thinking, yet perhaps in general all Western thinking hitherto since the predominance of Platonic philosophy—metaphysical thinking, that is—keeps to the single track of the sequences of cause and effect. On this track, all beings are lined up as actual–acting–acted upon. Whatever is not an actual effect is a cause, and vice versa.
The metaphysics that is determined by Christianity, and the Christendom that validates itself through metaphysics, think of everything in terms of its relation to a first, supreme cause that providentially determines in advance the course of the world and of nature. Characteristic signs of this calculative, planning thinking belonging to metaphysics are the concepts of predestination and providence. Within the framework of this thinking, fate either is regarded as a kind of cause that acts through providence in an unfathomable way, or the name fate stands for the effect of a cause acting in this way. “Fate” is then regarded by us as a cause shrouded in darkness, through which individual “fates” are effected. Thus, the word “fate” can also be misused to cover thoughtlessness and a flight from reflection, insofar as we content ourselves with registering that such and such is just “fate.” That sounds grandiose, yet is vacuous and trivial beyond measure; it sounds like reverence, yet is perhaps only a helpless nihilism.
The essence of fate, however, does not consist in being an unfathomable cause of surprising effects. “Fate,” thought strictly in Hölderlin’s sense, is that which comes to equalization through the festival, and is therefore not necessarily that which has been equalized, yet nor, however, that which is equalizing. Thinking hitherto is without the adequate concepts and domains in order to adequately ponder Hölderlin’s word “fate.” Hölderlin himself names the essential domain and essential ground of fate when he says the word “intimacy” [Innigkeit].
The festival and fate belong together as one. From this fact alone, we can recognize how superficial our view remains if we indeed acknowledge fate, yet let it appear simply as a mere obscure power at the level of cause-effect relations. In truth this view is based on the idea that the human being is a being that can indeed direct himself and his own affairs within the sphere of a certain “degree of freedom,” but for the rest is delivered over to the force of a sequence of inalterable cause-effect relationships. Within its own perspective, this idea of the human being is correct, yet the perspective itself within which the human being comes to be experienced in general here is woefully inadequate. The fact that metaphysics moves within this perspective and distributes all beings into the dual realms of the lawfulness of nature and freedom of the person (human and divine) must give us pause to think from the moment we perceive that freedom too is here thought only as a kind of causality; the interpretation of beings in terms of cause and effect, however, is, in the metaphysical sense, the technical interpretation.
The boundless domination of modern technicity in every corner of this planet is only the late consequence of a very old, technical interpretation of the world, an interpretation otherwise called metaphysics. The essential origin of modern technicity lies in the beginning of metaphysics with Plato. This modern technicity experiences its last metaphysical justification through that metaphysics that knowingly conceives of itself as the inversion of Platonism: through the metaphysics of the will to power that was thought by Nietzsche. The distinction made between the lawfulness of nature and freedom is in truth a technical one, and that means one in which being itself no longer comes to word from out of its truth.
If, by contrast, we think fate and destiny with a view to the event of the festival, and that means, if we inquire in the direction of that which grants this very event its essence, then fate indeed does not become more “comprehensible” to us in the sense of scientific explanation, but its essence becomes more richly esteemed and mysterious to us. Fitting oneself into fate demands from us something other than merely surrendering oneself to the inevitable workings of unknown causes, against which we—that is to say, our technicity—are powerless. In that fate requires from us something else, that is, something higher, it fittingly sends us ourselves into a more originary vocation and fullness of our essence.
§33. The festival as equalizing the while for fate
The festival is for Hölderlin the ground and essence of history. All standing within fate is historical. The event of the festival, as supreme equalization, brings all fitting of oneself, and everything fitting, and thereby fate, into an accord. The festival is the time-space and the essential configuration of the most intimate equalization, when each thing “is as it is.” When each thing is as it, in its essence, is, then there is the true (“The Titans,” IV, 209f., lines 51ff.; “Mnemosyne,” IV, 225, lines 18f.).
In the festival the event comes to pass of that while in which fate happens for a while, insofar as whatever is fitting, one to the other, has found and fulfilled itself. The passage already cited from the hymn “The Rhine” more completely reads:
Dann feiern das Brautfest Menschen und Götter
Es feiern die Lebenden all,
Und ausgeglichen
Ist eine Weile das Schiksaal.
Then humans and gods the bridal festival celebrate
All the living celebrate,
And fate is
Equalized for a while.
Holidays are the days before the festival, the times before supreme equalization. Holidays are the night watch for fate. For a while, fate is equalized. Otherwise and most of the time, therefore, it is unequalized: humans and gods, and those who in their encountering interpret and prepare the fitting sending and what is fitting, for the most part do not find their way to what is fitting. We are therefore tempted to say: fate is equalized only for a while. The “only” then designates for us the limitation and restriction of duration, a lack of what endures, and thus the incompleteness of everything “actual.” Already we are once again back to calculating and positing our self-serving desires as the measure of the while, of tarrying a while, of duration and remaining. We are all too fond of seeking authentic remaining within a continued enduring that never breaks off. Yet perhaps such endless “and so forth” is the most vulgar form of duration. Perhaps this kind of duration is habitually prioritized amongst everything desirable only because what has continued endurance in this manner demands nothing from us ourselves. Indeed, only what is habitual in the sense of used and employed, yet not appropriated, endures in the manner of an empty “and so forth.” Not so the inhabitual, which is to say, the singular.
The singular also has its singular manner of remaining. It is that while of the festival that entails not restriction or lack, but the overcoming of all bounds of the habitual, and the wealth of the essential. Perhaps we stand before the distant vocation of “re”-thinking from the ground up a long-inculcated thinking that has become a calculating and sees supreme reality in the eternity of duration, and of experiencing the essence of being in terms of inceptual “time” and its while.
Perhaps this other thinking is a transformation, compared to which all “revolutions” sink to the level of the blind helplessness of the unleashed machination of a groundless humankind, because in their revolutionizing they merely go round and round and entangle themselves unconditionally in what has gone before.
Supreme and authentic remaining is not an enduring in a continual “and so forth” but rather the while of the singular. Yet that which is singular is “only” as the inceptual. Every commencement is singular. All continuation scatters into the multiple and leaves behind a multiplicity, and the latter always demands a going into what is scattered. This makes dispersion habitual. Such scattering can be combated, while retaining multiplicity as providing the authoritative measure, only through calculative accounting. What is dispersed and scattered also provides the opportunity, however, always to continue on and thus even to confirm the “and so forth” in its necessity and thereby lend it its singular legitimacy.
The commencement remains in its being for a while in each case, enclosing in such a while the inexhaustibility of the singular. The time of the festival is the while. For this reason, the day before the festival must already correspond to the while. The holiday is a specific whiling, attuned in terms of the festival and only from it. Such whiling is fundamentally different from the mere interruption of work. The time of the whiling is an awaiting, is already a kind of transition, is March time.
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
“And over slow footbridges”—“slow footbridges”—“footbridges.” We were surprised in the first strophe already at the fact that, among the many things that could readily be reported from the human landscape, precisely “the footbridge” and its “crossing” are named. And now we encounter “footbridges” once more, even in such a way that we are told specifically of “footbridges.” Yet are we still surprised about the naming of footbridges, now that we know, or, strictly speaking, perhaps intimate that, and in what way, transition is being poetized here; passing over: “March time”—“equalization” . . . It would be vain and mistaken if we were no longer to be surprised now, instead of giving full sway to our astonishment over the fact that footbridges are named and what they are perhaps saying. “Footbridges” are now presumably no longer things for us that just crop up and happen to be mentioned among others; they are named as belonging to the time of holidays in March time. And this in such a way that they are named as that over which “lulling breezes draw.”
“Breezes”? Did we not already hear of them? Of the wind, harbinger of the greeting? Yet now the “lulling breezes” belong to that which is greeted. Just like the poet who is greeting, that which is greeted is also within the domain of the breezes. Yet now they are “lulling breezes,” not the cutting northeasterly that makes our eyes steadfast. The land being greeted is indeed another land, too, the land of Greece, in fact, where everything, and above all the ground of everything, the festival, is different. How it is, the poet who is greeting tells us, in that, in greeting, he lets that which is greeted be what it is. Yet that which is greeted seems to be such as to now demand a saying that veils rather than simply showing, in an unveiled manner, what is intended.
Once again, an interim remark is required here, so that we do not go astray either in hearing the poem or in its “interpretation.” For we are now approaching the middle of the domain of the poetizing where our “interpreting” can least of all be brought to some result that we could record in a formula or in a proposition, so that, armed with it, we would know definitively about the “view” of the poet:
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
In the case of another “poet,” these lines, if they were even possible there, might count as a “poetic description” of an “ideal landscape.” Not so here, where something greeted becomes manifest through the greeting, so that it at the same time beckons over to the poet who is greeting. This entails: that which is named in the greeting, although it is said regarding the distant land, is nevertheless addressed to the one greeting, albeit in a transformed way.
That which is said has a dual, indeed even threefold, meaning: it refers to the greeted land itself and its history; at the same time, as that which once was, it refers by way of anticipation to the transformed manner of what is to come; and beyond this, and properly, it refers to the transition from what once was into what is to come. All of this is true not only of this part of this poem but also of the whole poem, indeed of the hymnal poetizing.
Yet this part of this poem is nevertheless distinctive. The lines sound like a floating indulgence in pure images and are like the tendrils on a rose that only by chance seem to wrap themselves around the authentic “content.” Yet these lines here indeed enclose the authentic truth of Hölderlin’s poetizing. Their concealed fullness—which is something purely simple and decided for the poet—this concealed fullness of the poetizing and its lucid beauty we may leave intact most readily if, within the bounds of our own capability, we ponder thoughtfully and soberly the individual words. They carry their poetic truth within themselves, moreover, and they do not require the vain attempt of wanting to intensify them via remarks. It is necessary to emphasize this repeatedly, so that we never fail to acknowledge the distance between the comments we are attempting and the poem.
Holidays are the days before the festival, and thus in truth the night watch for the festival. This is why the holidays are named together with “March time, / When night and day are equal.” March time is a time of transition. Transition here refers not to that which merely passes by but rather to a going over to the other side. Going over is not mere departure but the receiving of a greeting. Transition is that in which the two sides that stand over against each other first find themselves in the back and forth and gather themselves in terms of their original unity, so as to receive from this inceptual unity their essential vocation.
Yet even when we think transition in this way, we still often fall prey to the danger of failing to recognize its essence. The reason lies in the fact that our thinking all too readily remains thinglike and takes refuge in the thinglike. For our reified representation of things, transition, as going back and forth, is then only something subsequent that mediates between two sides that lie present at hand, as though these otherwise subsisted beforehand and independently.
Thought essentially, and at the same time stated rather crudely once more, however, the following is true: transition is what comes first and first lets arise, in the process of going over, and from out of such going over, that from which and that to which it is a transition. For this reason, too, the transition does not float in a vacuum but is itself something that springs forth. Here, the bridge is not some thing that is installed from one bank already present before us to another bank that also lies present before us. Rather, at the very same time as it spans the river at a single stroke, “the bridge” arches over it, thereby first making the banks into banks and opening the open realm for a going back and forth. The greater the height from which the bridge arches, the more bridged and closer are the banks. Their distance from one another is measured not by the interval between two sides that lie present before us but in accordance with the height from which the span of the bridge extends.
The relations that hold sway here, and that are initially anathema to calculative, reifying thought, were already touched upon in our hints concerning the essence of greeting. There we said that those who greet can greet one another only if they themselves are already greeted, that is, already admitted beforehand into the bridge’s oscillating back and forth, receiving their provenance from its span. Because Hölderlin thinks transition in such an essential manner, although not in the conceptual articulation attempted here, the transitional has a peculiar and intricate richness for his poetizing.
Transition is the encountering of humans and gods: the festival. Yet transition is also the passing over from the festival that once was to the festival to come. Transition is thus a transition of transitions. Within this realm of the transitional, therefore, what is everywhere essential is in the first instance the “between.” Here are also those who, therefore, assume this “between,” accomplish and sustain it, those first called. They are those who are no longer merely human yet are also not yet gods. Hölderlin names them “demigods.” Their essence is configured differently in different times. Yet everywhere that Hölderlin thinks the realm of the holy, he thinks the demigods first of all and constantly; and he himself announces this in the hymn “The Rhine.” The hinge on which this poetic work turns is the beginning of the tenth strophe, where Hölderlin says (IV, 176f.):
Halbgötter denk’ ich jetzt
Und kennen muss ich die Theuern,
Weil oft ihr Leben so
Die sehnende Brust mir beweget.
Demigods now I think
And the dear ones I must know,
For often does their life
So move my longing breast.
In a variation that does justice to the essence of Hölderlin’s saying “everything is intimate,” we could also say: Everything is transition.
Transition is reconciliation, and reconciliation is that equalization which does not reduce things to being equal at the level of being without difference but rather imparts to each something equal, namely, whatever is its own in accordance with equal measures of its own essence in each case. With this elucidation of the essence of transition, if we regard everything formally and fail to ponder also that which is itself transitioning and its realm, we arrive in the proximity of the metaphysics of Hegel. The statement “Everything is transition” could be taken as a paraphrase of the fundamental proposition of Hegel’s metaphysics. All being and every actuality is becoming—a proposition that recurs in Nietzsche’s metaphysics, admittedly with a quite different meaning, and yet in the closest connection to the metaphysics of German Idealism. The attempt has indeed also been made to ground Hölderlin’s poetizing upon Hegel’s thinking, an attempt that immediately suggests itself when we consider that the two friends were close to one another in their thought and their will, not only while they were students but also in the decisive period of their maturity, during their Frankfurt years. Nevertheless, the same proposition “Everything is transition” has a fundamentally different meaning for Hegel than it does for Hölderlin; the difference does not simply concern two fundamental metaphysical positions; rather, the difference lies in the fact that Hegel’s fundamental position is still metaphysical, whereas Hölderlin’s is no longer metaphysical. The future appropriation of Hölderlin’s poetizing depends upon correct insight into these connections, which has nothing to do with historiographical comparison.
2. What is fitting for humans and gods is the holy. The fitting of the jointure as letting-be
At the point where our thoughtful reflection now dwells, we must initially think the transition, in the sense of the encountering of humans and gods. Transition and equalization, together with the “holidays,” refer to what is prepared by the latter: the encountering of humans and gods, which is to say, the festival. Those encountering one another in the festival neither lose themselves in a blending that is devoid of essence, nor do they remain set in the rigidity of a mere opposition; rather, exceeding the encountering participants, they reciprocally impart to themselves their own essence in each case. This occurs in this manner, however, because neither humans nor gods are allowed to pursue or are able to effect the encountering of their own accord. Both are called to their encountering in advance, and indeed in a different way each time, by the holy, which fittingly sends humans and gods into their essential station. As that which fittingly sends in this manner, the holy is, for gods and humans, that which is fitting. Such fitting configures the relations of the holy to humans and to gods, the relations of gods and of humans to the holy, the relations of humans and gods to one another, and the relations of this very “to one another” to the holy.
The unity and simplicity of these original relations is the jointure that configures everything and determines all that is order. The jointure we call beyng, in which everything that is prevails in its essence. The configuring of the jointure is a releasing into the essence yet at the same time unleashing into the possibility of the corruption of essence. Setting free is an admitting of disorder.
Fitting and sending are not effecting, and if we think them in that way, we are not grasping their essence. Yet let us quietly concede that we everywhere and always have difficulty in knowing being itself, instead of always only explaining beings in terms of beings along the lines of the cause-effect relation. We are always tempted to drag being as well into the reins of such commonplace explanation. While no longer knowing it, since the centuries when modernity began, the human being has been proceeding—and since the most recent times has been raging—through the world in a twofold entanglement as the supposed ruler of beings. One knot shackles our comportment and opining in the sense that we are focused only on beings and are estranged from being itself. The other knot entangles those who are thus entangled still further, insofar as the human being lets those beings, which he alone esteems, count as beings only if they are actual, that is, something actually effected or effecting, something that can be effected by him or at least explainable in terms of an effecting.
How should the human being here, entangled in this way, apprehend with a free mind and open eye the fact that something can be without it effecting or being something effected, that other things also are-with [mitist], without being effected by something else and, in being thus effected, exhausting being? How, given such entanglement, should the human being reflect on the fact that all being and being-with [Mitsein] is a being fitted into the order of one’s assigned essence? That such order does not do anything, and does not occupy itself with beings, but that fitting happens in letting beings be? This letting and leaving provides the sign of the mystery that prevails here, the fact that fitting does not consist in effecting. Only if we ponder beyng slowly and at length is a light occasionally shed upon these relations. Yet much of this we can already recognize at favorable moments within the sphere of our daily undertakings and its little things. Sometimes we ourselves say that something is having an effect simply by its “being there” [Dasein]. Yet we still speak erroneously when we talk of “having an effect” here; the more essential point is that such simply being there is precisely no longer having an effect, and that in such no longer having an effect, being proper consists, in whose truth our being-with all beings resides, and from which it arises.
In the first commencement of Western thinking, still prior to metaphysics, which first begins with Plato, thinkers recognized something essential. It became clear to them that pure appearing and emergence is the true; and something still further, that even not emerging forth into appearance is capable of something higher within being than immediate appearing. Heraclitus, in a saying that is numbered 54 among his fragments, says the following:
ἁρμονίη ἀφανής φαν∊ρῆς κρ∊ίσσων.
The fitting of accord that does not release itself into
appearing is capable of something higher than the
fitting that appears.
We are thus led to take seriously the thought that self-withdrawal and concealing themselves let beings be more in being than does the activity of any causal effecting. In the letting be that goes away, the true becomes manifest. In the first version of his poetic work The Death of Empedocles, Hölderlin expressed this for the particular realm of being human. Hölderlin has Empedocles say this word (III, 149):
Am Scheidetage weissagt unser Geist
Und wahres reden, die nicht wiederkehren.
Prophetic is our spirit on the day of departure
And the true is said by those who do not return.
Within the sphere of the two-thousand-year dominance of metaphysics that has yet to be broken anywhere it must seem fantastical to think being otherwise than in terms of the guiding thread of cause and effect. We must attempt it, nevertheless, if we want to think ahead in the wake of what Hölderlin intimates under the names fate and sending.
3. Fitting as releasing into the search for essence and the loss of essence. Errancy and evil
Fitting is not causal intervention; it is not setting about the effective altering of what is actual. Fitting is rather the self-withdrawal and self-concealing that as such first lets beings be yet thereby also releases them into the discord of finding their essence and of losing their essence. Often human beings, while appearing to will themselves, roam around amid the loss of their essence. Often the gods show outrage toward the holy; often there is strife between gods and humans; often relations between the two are disturbed. Most of the time, indeed, everything wavers in its essence and is not in order; then beings get out of joint in their more extreme regions too. Everything out of joint brings confusion, confusion creates errancy, and errancy is the openness for maliciousness. With that which is out of joint, malice is set free. Evil is not that which is merely morally bad, it is not at all a shortcoming or lack in beings, but rather being itself as disorder and maliciousness. If order does not prevail, the fundamental ways of being, the elements, do not oscillate within the freedom of their essence. The ancient laws have become unhinged; they are no longer rightly plumb and level—that is, they are unright. This is why Hölderlin, in a late poem that has a concealed relation to “Remembrance,” and that, left without a title, begins “Ripe, bathed in fire . . .” says the following (IV, 71):
Aber bös sind
Die Pfade. Nemlich unrecht,
Wie Rosse, gehn die gefangenen
Element’ und alten
Geseze der Erd. Und immer
Ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht . . .
Yet evil are
The paths. Unright namely,
Like steeds, go the imprisoned
Elements and ancient
Laws of the Earth. And always
Into the unbound goes a longing . . .
Yet if this is how things stand, and so long as things stand thus, the holy will still remain veiled, even in its concealment. Then fitting into one’s essence remains absent. Then there is no equalization.
4. The temporal character of the “while,” and the metaphysical concept of time
When the festival is, however, then fate is equalized for a while. To that thinking which reckons on effects and measures their actuality only in terms of their duration, the while appears as a brief duration. The while is reckoned as that which is merely temporary; it is disregarded as what is fleeting and without subsistence, in favor of that which lasts and endures. Yet the while of equalization is the time of the festival. This while cannot be measured by the clock. The whiling and remaining that is proper to this while is other in kind. We seek endurance in the habitual sense in the mere continuation of the “and so forth,” which even considers its permanence to be attained only when it has renounced both beginning and end. Duration without beginning or end thus counts as the purest kind of remaining. From here, the two metaphysical concepts of eternity, sempiternitas and aeternitas, receive their hallmark. Yet just as “fate” in Hölderlin’s sense cannot be interpreted by recourse to the cause-effect relationship, so too the essence of the “while” does not allow itself to be grasped in terms of the metaphysical concept of time prevalent since Aristotle.
That which is singular has in the while its appropriate kind of remaining, from out of the singularity of its inceptual essence. That which, within the perspective of reckoning, endures briefly, can indeed endure beyond every “and so forth” of mere continuation, namely, in the manner of an inceptual remaining that prevails in its essence from out of the commencement and back into it. The singularity of this one while has no need of recurrence, because as having once been, it is hostile to any repetition. The while of that which is singular, however, also cannot be surpassed, because it shines into and toward all that is to come, so that everything coming has its arrival only in the while of the singularity of what once was.
The festival is the while of fate that has been equalized. Holidays are the days before the festival, expectations thereof, and therefore already attuned by that while into a transition that tarries a while and is unhurried:
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
Perhaps we now intimate why the poet must name the “slow footbridges”—the unhurried, simple transitions relating to the while, transitions that are not present at hand in some empty vacuum; for over them draw lulling breezes.
“Lulling breezes draw.” To differentiate one domain, a sphere of tasks or a situation, from others, we speak of the fact that there or here a different wind blows. The different wind that blows here or there in each case tells us how things are there, the kinds of demands that are made on the human being, the stance that the human being must maintain there in order to survive and to do justice to beings; how he must receive beings and contribute something of himself or show restraint. The “blowing wind” thus names the different claims being made upon a particular humankind, and thereby also the distinction between what is assigned that humankind and what it brings with it. The wind thus names at once the distinction in the relationship between what is assigned and what we bring with us, and thereby the nature of what is given to a humankind as the task of its historical essence and as the manner of its festiveness.
Two different things are now named “breezes” in the poem: the northeasterly and lulling breezes. “Lulling breezes draw”—their draw and the direction of their draw belong to the land being greeted and determine what is proper to its humankind. They are “lulling” but not “putting to sleep” or even subduing in the manner of an oblivious sleep that forgets everything. The lulling indeed expresses the fact that here the human being is not putting himself forward and maneuvering within the realm of his own design. He is being traversed and carried by something originary, and thus brought into and maintained within that restfulness upon which his essence rests. Here, to lull is not to numb or in any way to deceive. To lull [Einwiegen] is to shelter in the cradle [Wiege] and keep sheltered there; it is letting be in the origin. The origin is for humans and gods their ownmost, that which they bring with them as their essence. Yet this ownmost is, at the same time, also that which is least of all and most seldom appropriated. Thus, it comes about that the human being is initially for a long time alienated precisely from his ownmost, and above all, helpless in the task of corresponding purely to the law of that which is his own. Hölderlin says in his letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801: “The free use of one’s own [is] what is most difficult.”
What, for the human beings in Greece, is their ownmost? Which wind blows there? “Lulling breezes, heavy with golden dreams.”
Von goldenen Träumen schwer
Heavy with golden dreams
That which is heavy weighs upon us and is a burden. Whatever is burdened becomes ponderous and even sluggish on account of its burden. Yet “heavy” cannot be meant in this way here. The lulling breezes, light, floating, enchanting, and playful, are heavy not in the sense of something sluggish but in the sense of something weighty, fulfilled, and full of promise. The breezes are called heavy because they are richly laden with golden dreams. Yet perhaps an excessive fullness and excessive weight of golden dreams is not even required; perhaps the latter are in themselves already that which is heavy, weighty, precious, and therefore that which can scarcely be mastered. The breezes that are heavy in this way are the distinctive sign of the wind that blows in that land at the time before the festival. These breezes carry with them the golden dreams in which the human beings of that land being greeted have what is their own, in which their essence is cradled, and in which it rests.
“Golden dreams.” What is that—the dream? We are familiar with “dreams” and nevertheless have recognized little of their essence. The response to the question concerning the essence of the dream that we shall appeal to in what follows may not satisfy the demands of scientific, that is, physiological-psychological and psychopathological explanation of dream phenomena. We shall content ourselves with considerations of another kind, considerations that remain closer to the poetic telling of dreams.
However, we want to insert a brief interim remark that concerns not only the question of the dream but also every kind of scientific explanation.
§36. Interim remark concerning scientific explanations of dreams
Psychology and psychopathology provide definitions of the dream. Countless phenomena can be classified using these definitions. One can say, for example, that the dream is an altered state of consciousness. This statement may even be correct, although it would have to be asked what consciousness means here, and why the dream is classified under states of consciousness; why, and to what extent, the state of consciousness is decisive for the essence of the human being. Whether the interpretation of the human essence in terms of consciousness does not correspond to a quite specific self-experience on the part of the human being, namely, that of the human being of modernity, and this alone; whether one can in general explain the dream in terms of the workings of the human soul, or whether, conversely, it is not the dream that is instead conducive to first providing a view of the essence of the human being.
Simply listing these questions may be enough to let us note that the question concerning the essence of the dream is complicated and that the scientific explanation of the dream phenomenon is only ever of very limited help to us, because such explanations already rest upon propositions concerning consciousness, the human, the essence of the human, the essentiality of essence, and so on.
Must we, then, renounce the correct explanation of this line of poetry that speaks of dreams? Indeed, if we are of the opinion that the correct explanation is here and everywhere the psychological one, and in general the scientific one. Excluding the scientific explanation, however, is not a demotion of science, but only the acknowledgment of its limits.
Yet surely excluding the scientific explanation amounts to affirming an unscientific manner of proceeding? Certainly—if unscientific means nonscientific. Yet proceeding nonscientifically does not immediately imply an arbitrary and nonfactual mode of comportment within the realm of knowing. The nonscientific way of proceeding can, on the contrary, stand directly under higher laws than all science, even though it may often seem that, by contrast with the tools of scientific research, one is here appealing merely to direct human experience, or even only to the peculiar wisdom of language. The latter indeed help us more to find the path to what is authentic.
Those who take pleasure in such questions may try to figure out which is easier: to be trained in the secure apparatus of a science and to continue working within it, or to listen to the truth of the heart and to simply say it. The second is what is essentially more difficult.
In addition, we should ponder the fact that authentic scientific discoveries, that is, those that on each occasion bring about a transformation of science, do not consist in scientific observations, but have their essence in the fact that within a science, the courage to ask philosophical questions dares to arise. Where indeed the human being himself, not as a scientific specimen, but as being-there, is to be made the “object” of questioning, which is what “psychology” and “anthropology” claim to do, the kind of research that has been blinded by its own apparatus can indeed always provide a sack of results, yet without giving rise to any insight.
It may be permitted to cite a word here with which Stifter prefaced a tale from his Studies. It is found in a preliminary remark to the story Brigitta and reads:
Psychology has shed light upon and explained many things, yet much has remained obscure and very remote from it. We therefore believe that it is not too much if we say that there still remains for us a cheerful, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits wander. Often, in moments of rapture, the soul soars over it, from time to time the poetic art breathes life into it in child-like unconsciousness; but science with its hammer and spirit level stands frequently only at the edge, and in many cases may not even have once laid hands on it yet.1
This was written around the year 1843; the position taken toward science is notable, because the conviction belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century is announced in it, namely, that “science” will indeed solve the puzzles, even though it stands only at the edge and has “not yet” laid hands on matters. From this still cautious “belief” in the key power of science there then arose very quickly, in the course of the following decades, that peculiar monstrosity that calls itself the “scientific worldview,” the opinion that a worldview is only properly a worldview if it is scientifically grounded, which here always means in the first instance grounded in the manner of natural science and biology.
Following this interim remark we now return to “dreams,” the essential definition of which seemed to demand of us psychological explanations.
§37. The dream. That which is dreamlike as the unreal or nonexistent
To recognize what the dream is, let us ponder that which is dreamlike. The latter becomes clear to us through two distinctions that diverge, yet are not entirely independent of one another. On the one hand, what is dreamlike counts as that which is unreal, without subsistence, and therefore null. Something is then a “mere dream.” “Dreams are froth,”[11] something that floats fleetingly over the surface of what is real, something ungraspable and quickly dissipating. Here we are measuring the dream and whatever is dreamt in terms of the real.[12] Immediately the question stands before us once more: What is the real? We take it to be that which effects and is efficacious, accessible to us in its actual efficacy and ability to be effected, that which is graspable and at our disposal, namely, within the sphere of our own wakeful and calculative preoccupation with things and demands upon human beings.
Yet what is effecting and that which effects? What is “effect”? Is effect to be found only wherever we see a consequence, that is, something that follows whatever we have posited beforehand as that which brings about an effect and is effecting? Or are there also effects that are not consequences and do not require consequence? If the very boundary between one kind of effecting and another is fluid, then where does the unreal begin? And does everything unreal have to be already dreamlike?
We cannot offer a ready-made answer here. And yet the realm within which whatever is dreamlike may be thought makes itself known: The realm of beings and nonbeings. Admittedly, beings and nonbeings have been thought in different ways in the course of Western thinking. The fact that for a long time that which is in any sense effecting-effective-effected, that which is in effect real, is taken to be that which authentically is a being—this equating of beings with real effect—is itself one, and only one, among the Western interpretations of beings, yet it is the one that is predominant today.
§38. Greek thought on the dream. Pindar
In former times, and in the land whose history and festival Hölderlin greets, beings were thought otherwise, and nonbeings were therefore thought otherwise, too. Granted that the dreamlike refers to nonbeings as distinct from beings, and granted that in the poem the golden dreams are named in an essential relation to Greece, then it may seem appropriate to seek some advice from the Greeks themselves concerning how they thought the dream.
We shall undertake this, and do so on what is perhaps now the more appropriate path of asking not the thinkers of Greece, nor even doctors or those concerned with knowledge of nature, but rather one of its poets, and not just any, moreover, but that poet whose word became essential for a second time for Hölderlin during his hymnal period, and in a different way than on the occasion of his first encounter. For the purposes of illuminating the essential domain of the dream, we shall follow a word of Pindar’s. It is found at the end of one of his late odes, the eighth Pythian Ode, 135ff.:
ἐπάμ∊ροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ’οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ’ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπ∊στιν ἀνδρῶν
καὶ μ∊ίλιχος αἰών.2
Hölderlin himself translated this ode. We may initially adopt his rendition (V, 71):
Creatures of day. Yet what is one? yet what is one not? Shadows’ dream are human beings.
Pindar names human beings “creatures of day,” and here he means creatures who are transitory and fleeting like the passing of a day: one-day creatures. Yet it is not immediately clear what the word ἐπάμ∊ροι (Doric: ἐφήμ∊ροι) means. Does it just mean that humans are “one-day creatures,” of short duration? The creature of the day a fleeting creature. What does this mean, and what does it mean when thought in a Greek way? Inasmuch as the creature of the day is only something passing like the day, it still is in a certain way, and yet has also at the same time always already ceased to “be.” One scarcely is, and already he is no longer, he is not. Whence the question: τί δέ τις; τί δ’οὔ τις: what is one, and what is one not?
Such a creature must be, yet at the same time also not be, it is a being and a nonbeing [Nichtseiendes]; yet if the human being essentially is also a non-being, then, as a being, he must also already be determined by nonbeing [Nichtsein]. Even that which is in being in him is not something that subsists on its own grounds or has steadfastness that resides within itself. Already that which is in being in him is not something arising of its own accord and set upon itself. Already that which is in being in the human being is not like that which emerges from out of itself, the light of the sun, but rather that which is no longer light, yet in such “no longer” still remains related to the light and proceeds from it, bestowed as a gift from the light. Already that which is in being in the human being is not a figure standing within itself and standing from out of itself, but only a derivative and descendant of that figure in the light—something deriving from the figure in the light and cast off from it, that which is cast by the figure in the light—a shadow (σκιά).
Lulling breezes, heavy with golden dreams, draw over slow footbridges. It seems to be almost trivial if we take the blowing wind on each occasion as a sign for the situation and stance of a particular humankind, for the demands it has to satisfy. Yet for Hölderlin, “the breezes” are something else. Initially we shall keep to the distinction between the “northeasterly” and the “lulling breezes” of the land being greeted. This distinction is often named around this period of Hölderlin’s poetizing, indeed even in the elegies already, which directly prepare for the hymns. The distinction is that between the “fire of the south” and the “barren north.” Yet the issue is not one of descriptively highlighting different landscapes but rather of a transition from one time of festivity and history to another—thus, of a “journey.” This “journey” is, for the poet, the “return home.” The return home from the foreign and from “colony” entails the task of an appropriation; indeed, in the first instance, of a finding of one’s own by contrast with the foreign. However, “the free use of one’s own is what is most difficult.” One’s own we readily and in advance take immediately to be something secure; from such security there stems the haste with which we use and abuse what is our own. This semblance of possessing what is our own easily makes a fool of us and drives us around on the superficies of what is our own and prevents our appropriating it by the insidious ruse of letting such appropriation appear as something already accomplished. The foreign helps against this; according to a word of Hölderlin’s, genuine spirit even “loves colony” (cf. the draft of “Bread and Wine,” concluding strophe).
Being well traveled and experienced in the foreign has made the poet more experienced for what is his own. For this reason, the foreign is for him never something merely cast aside, it remains that which is greeted; indeed, in being greeted, it has the remaining appropriate to it.
At the time of festival and on holidays one’s own, the ground of history itself, comes purely to appear; yet here, that which appears is not an object of contemplation. Appearing is a shining, in the sense in which, as we say, the sun shines. The breezes are lulling, rocking back and sheltering in the cradle, the origin. The origin and what is its own for the southern land have their essence in what is said regarding the lulling breezes. They are heavy with golden dreams. Heavy, that means here, fulfilled and rich with them, so that the “golden dreams” are, as it were, the center of gravity in which everything essential concerning this land, that is, its history, that is, the encountering of its gods and human beings, rests. The essential ground of its own for the land of Greece are “dreams.”
What the dream is, we are attempting to clarify from what is dreamlike, in two respects. “The dreamlike” is, on the one hand, the unreal by contrast to the real. Pindar also seems to be thinking in this direction when he says of the human being that he is a shadow—indeed, a dream of a shadow. Pindar says this of the human being in response to the question of what the human being is, namely, as a “creature of day.” Already the kind of question concerning this essence of the human being has caught sight of the essence itself; the question is already in itself of a unique kind, like every question that has genuinely arisen, as emerging from a relation to what is being interrogated.
Pindar asks: what is one, what is one not? This question by no means seeks to establish what the human being is in order then to supplement this with everything he is not; for there are many and various things that the human being is “not,” and to enumerate all these would be meaningless and inconsequential. The double question means: In what does the being [Sein] of the human consist, and in what the nonbeing [Nichtsein] that is proper to him? In the double question there already lies the answer: to the being of the human being, there belongs a nonbeing.
To the question asking in what does the being, that is, in Greek terms, the presence of the human being consist, Pindar answers: In his being a shadow. A shadow is always cast, yet as this, it is also in turn something that sets in relief, that itself still gives a kind of view and thus shows how a thing looks: ∊ἶδος. However, this “look” already no longer lets the being itself emerge, and for this reason the Greeks call the kind of view that shadows offer, and that they themselves are, ∊ἴδωλον (“idol”).
§39. The dream as shadowlike appearing of vanishing into the lightless. Presencing and absencing
Pindar does not simply say: the human being is a shadow. If that were the case, the human being would remain directly related only to the light. Pindar says: the human being is a shadow’s dream. He says this of the human being insofar as he is regarded as a creature of the day. It would be equally erroneous, however, to assert straightforwardly that the human being is a dream. He is neither merely a shadow, nor merely a dream, nor merely both: shadow plus dream added together. The emphasis is indeed placed on the latter: ὄναρ, dream, but the dream is a shadow’s dream. As something that sets into relief, a shadow is already no longer that which illuminates, nor indeed the light itself, but is already a kind of absencing on the part of that which illuminates and of that which itself properly appears. The human being: not that which itself illuminates, yet also not that which itself sets into relief, but a dream of that which sets into relief here.
What emerges from all this for the essence of the dream being thought here? Is the dream only an intensification of what is shadowlike, thus the shadow of a shadow, and thereby what is most fleeting of everything fleeting; a nothing, and therefore that which is wholly and utterly unreal? If we were to conclude this, we would miss the point of the Greek, for in naming the relation of shadow to dream, Pindar wants to say that the dream is the way in which whatever is itself in a certain way already lightless, absences: the dream as the most extreme absencing into the lightless, and yet nevertheless not nothing, but in this way too still an appearing: this vanishing itself still an appearing, the appearing of a passing away into that which is altogether devoid of radiance, which no longer illuminates. The shadow’s dream is the fading presence of that which is faded, lightless; by no means a nothing; to the contrary, perhaps even that which is real—that which alone is admitted as real where the human being is stuck only with that which is constantly vanishing, the daily aspect of the everyday, insofar as the latter counts as the only thing that life knows as proximate and real. In the human being’s keeping only to the mere daily aspect of things, to this disappearing appearing of that which vanishes, he himself vanishes in his appearing, which is without its own illumination: a shadow’s dream. Such is the human being as a “creature of day,” who merely follows the whirl of daily events.
However, Pindar says not only this: the human being is a creature of the day, that is, of the everyday, and thus a dream of a shadow; Pindar says this word only as a prelude to another word:
ἀλλ’ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ
Yet when the radiance, bestowed by God, arrives,
Illuminating light is there with men
καὶ μ∊ίλιχος αἰών
Hölderlin translates: “and delightful life” [und liebliches Leben]. More appropriately we must say, “and the world-time of gentleness,” the while of equalization, that is, the festival.
Yet with this juxtaposing of the words concerning the human essence it only becomes still clearer that the dream and what is dreamlike, as altogether lightless, here stand opposite the radiance of the festival. The dreamlike is thus here, too, that which is not authentically real, in contrast to what is authentically real. What is the point, then, of this reference to Pindar? Is it meant only to give us a long-winded confirmation of what we too already claim to know when we say, “Dreams are froth”? Are we merely trying to provide ourselves with evidence that with the Greeks, too, what is dreamlike, as nonbeing, is measured according to beings? With this reference to Pindar’s word, we fail to shed any light on the essence of the dream that could serve our understanding of Hölderlin’s line. To the contrary, here we are, after all, told of “golden dreams”; dreams are here something that radiates, and this, moreover, is at the same time meant to characterize for Greek humankind what is their own. Instead of clarification, we merely create confusion. So it seems, if we only clutch at “real” results and definitions instead of recognizing possible paths of reflection and taking them.
What is dreamlike is supposed to be characterized according to two respects. On the one hand, in its relation to the real, that is, as that which is measured by the real. This characterization has now been achieved by us. At the same time, it appears to be superfluous. But we have not yet achieved it at all. For despite everything, we have overlooked what is essential in Pindar’s word. What is dreamlike cannot be crudely [globig3] and mistakenly notched up to what is merely unreal, or to the erosion of the real into nullity. The dreamlike and the dream are a vanishing of the light and radiance that itself is already absencing, of that which presences of its own accord and appears in shining (illuminating). The absencing, as the absencing of such vanishing, is also still a presencing. The relation to this presencing remains what is decisive in the dream, not the fact that it is a mere nullity.
Thinking in modern terms, therefore, we generally also think the Greek underworld, the realm of shadows, only as the realm of the unreal and null. In doing so, we fail to recognize the essence of appearing and presencing that prevails even here. The “shades” here are not a thinning out of something actual, but rather the independent manner of presencing of something that prevails in its essence.
Just as in the absencing of the dream there appears something that presences, so, too, conversely, there always prevails within that which presences an absencing. And so it is that what the human being is, as presencing in the manner of a shadow, he is not in the manner of mere presence and cropping up. There is nothing like that at all; rather, all presencing is in itself at the same time absencing. That which presences stretches itself as such—and not merely subsequently or incidentally, for instance, but in accordance with its essence—into absencing.
Thinking that is no longer Greek, and, above all, modern thinking, regards beings as the real. In the language of such thinking, what we have just thought through then sounds like this: the real essentially stretches into the unreal. There is no such thing as “the real” taken by itself at all. Yet the real is also by no means simply surrounded by the nonreal, as though the latter stood or lay merely next to it like an outer shell or sphere, just like the halo that the moon has around it. The nonreal is either the no-longer-real or the not-yet-real. The nonreal is in this way, and indeed in a different sense each time, the possible for what is actually real. The possible is in this instance never that which is merely null, or pure nonbeing; it is rather more a “state” between being and nonbeing.
How is this deliberation meant to help us in shedding light on the essence of the dream? To begin with, we can learn to heed the fact that wherever we measure what is dreamlike, as the unreal, according to the real, and in so doing judge it to be less real, we are already thinking erroneously; “the” so-called real itself already juts into the unreal, and actual reality is this jutting into the unreal. Conversely, the latter cannot be the mere negative correlate of the former. The possible reigns within the actual and real itself. Indeed, from time to time the possible is even more in being than the actual and real.
Let us for once measure—if indeed we have to measure—in other terms. Let us assess the dream not in terms of the real, which leads us to something null. If we assess the dream in terms of the unreal, and if we think the unreal as the possible that belongs to the actual and real, what do we then arrive at with regard to the essence of the dream?
Let us first think briefly of Pindar’s word once more. According to Pindar’s word, the dream is the appearing of a vanishing. However, that which has vanished is itself only one way in which that which is possible presences, that which can no longer be. Another way in which the possible appears, thus the unreal, as the dream was characterized, is the appearing of an arrival, of something making itself known in advance, coming toward us. This appearing is also presencing. If we once again think in modern terms, in the concepts of the metaphysics of modernity that were in currency for Hölderlin too; if we thus put actuality in place of being and nonactuality in place of nonbeing, then that which is arriving is neither something actual as yet, nor something merely nonactual. The possible as something arriving is a “state between beyng and nonbeyng.”
Yet what is the point of all these deliberations for the task of clarifying the single word “dream”? In the interim you will also already have said to yourselves and asked yourselves: What, then, does this “abstract” differentiating and conjoining of the most general conceptual terms, what does this playing on the soundless strings of the emptiest representations have to do with Hölderlin and his poetizing? Answer: quite a lot, even everything, indeed.
A short treatise of the poet’s has been preserved from the period when Hölderlin’s hymnal poetizing was in preparation; in von Hellingrath’s edition, it comprises just seven pages (III, 309–316).
At the definite risk that all of us will scarcely understand anything of the treatise, I would like to read the opening of these few pages, and do so initially only with the sole intent of giving you an opportunity to learn to intimate from Hölderlin’s thinking itself the realm in which his poetizing moves and from which its word arises.
If you come to see, on the basis of what is read out, that the interpretation being attempted here is by no means philosophizing too much, but rather in truth much too little and merely tentatively, insufficiently, then the point of this insight is not to make you agree more with the approach of this lecture course, but rather to make you more thoughtful concerning the concealed commencement of this most German of all German poetry.
Whoever is more acquainted with the conceptual language of the metaphysics of German Idealism, with the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, may be able to find their way more readily within this treatise. Yet that does not yet guarantee a knowledge of what Hölderlin is thinking here. His conceptual language, too, is indeed not simply an outer shell but the appropriate articulation of his still metaphysical thinking. Hölderlin still thinks metaphysically. Yet he poetizes otherwise. This is also why a world separates him from Schiller’s Philosophical Poems.
The treatise is titled “Becoming in Dissolution.” It contains a reflection on the declining fatherland and on the essential grounds and concealed truth of this event. The treatise as it stands is a fragment, indeed the fragment of an immediate recording of the initial reception of the thoughts expressed therein, not yet given final form, yet on the other hand also conveying that confusing, unassuming freshness of what is manifest for the first time.
The fragment begins:
The fatherland in decline, nature and humans, insofar as they stand in a particular reciprocal influence, constitute a particular world and connection of things that has become ideal, and dissolve themselves so that from out of them and out of the generation that remains and the forces of nature that remain, which are the other real principle, a new world, a new, yet also particular reciprocal influence may form itself, just as that decline emerged from a pure, yet particular world. . . . Thus in recollection of the dissolution, this dissolution, because its two ends are established, comes to be entirely the secure, unstoppable bold act that it properly is.
In what follows, there then stands the sentence that gave rise to our pointer concerning this fragment. It reads (III, 311):
[in] the state between beyng and nonbeyng, however, the possible everywhere becomes real, and the actual ideal, and this, in the free imitation of art, is a terrifying, yet divine dream.
It would be presumptuous to want to understand this sentence taken out of context, if only because no one should imagine himself to adequately understand this treatise. Nevertheless, we can take from this isolated sentence a broad hint that may be of help for what we are attempting.
The becoming real of the possible in the becoming ideal of the actual is a terrifying, yet divine dream, and this in the free imitation of art. We recall Hölderlin’s word regarding the Greeks that was mentioned earlier: “Namely they wanted to found / A kingdom of art” (IV, 264). Their history was to be grounded in art. In the said treatise, Hölderlin thinks the ways in which, within history, the world of all worlds comes to be presented, “set forth.” In this setting forth there lies a constant corresponding to language, and that means, to the word proper, to poetizing, and to art in general.
In the free imitation of art, which is to say, in the founding that is accomplished by art, there is something like a terrifying, yet divine dream. What is the role of the dreamlike here, where the issue is the founding of a kingdom, the grounding of history? The dreamlike cannot here refer to the unreal in the sense of mere vanishing and nonbeing; to the contrary: the dreamlike concerns the becoming real of the possible in the becoming ideal of the actual. The actual recedes into recollection as the possible, namely, as that which is coming, binds our expectation. This taken as one, wherever art founds history, is a dream. The dream brings the not yet appropriated fullness of the possible and preserves the transfigured recollection of the actual.
In the poem, the dreams are called golden—that is, heavy from the integrity of the essential; golden—that is, radiating from the preciousness of the approaching gift; golden—that is, noble from the purity of what is here decided. These dreams that sustain art are terrifying, yet divine. Terrifying, because they arise out of humankind like something foreign and disconcerting and yet as one’s ownmost, filling the ether (the air) in which humankind finds its essence; yet at the same time divine—because they call humankind into an encountering with the gods and show that which is one’s own and terrifying to be neither something that merely grows from a nature proliferating in isolation and simply present at hand, nor indeed a product of, or something made by, human beings.
That which is one’s own, coming from birth and laid in the cradle, is protected by the lulling breezes, heavy with golden dreams. The dreams here are not that which is vanishing and unreal in relation to the real; they themselves, if we are to think in terms of this distinction for the moment, are what is real, that which is more in being and more filled with being than whatever is merely picked up and consumable, in use without art. Such things, which are exhausted and worn out in being readily available for exploitation, while yet remaining recalcitrant, are the unreal. That which is “dreamlike” now signifies the opposite; dreams are not now “froth,” but rather the wave itself, the ocean itself—the very element. The golden dreams—the radiance of their fiery glow—fill the element, the ether, the breezes in which the Greek people’s ownmost “life” breathes. The fire and the fiery is their ownmost, the free use of which was once what was most difficult for that humankind.
That which radiates in the glow of these dreams, the poet does not say. Almost as though it were enough for the fire of the golden dreams to glow and radiate and serve to attune the vocation of art.
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abt. Werke Bd. 2, Jugendschriften 1861–1864, edited by Hans Joachim Mette (Munich 1934), 1–5, cf. 430.
1 Adalbert Stifter, Gesammelte Werke in 5 Bänden, Band 2: “Studien” (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923), 174.
2 Pindari Carmina recensuit Otto Schroeder, fifth edition (Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner, 1923), 245.
3 globig: a spelling of klobig taken from Alemannic dialect. (Editor’s note.)